Free Sharra's Exile by Marion Zimmer Bradley Page B

the sky, growing larger and larger; spiraling down, then landing on the saddle blocks where they sat patiently, awaiting their hoods. “Their instinct for freedom has been burnt out.”
    “They are like some men I know,” said Lew, slipping the hood on his bird. Dio followed suit, but neither of them moved to mount. Dio hesitated, then decided he had probably had far too much of politely averted eyes and pretenses of courteous unawareness.
    “Do you need help to mount? Can I help you, or shall I fetch someone who can?”
    “Thank you, but I can manage, though it looks awkward.” Again, suddenly, he smiled and his ugly scarred face seemed handsome again to her. “How did you know it would do me good to hear that?”
    “I have never been really hurt,” she said, “but one year I had a fever, and lost all my hair, and it did not grow in for half a year; and I felt so ugly you couldn’t imagine. And the one thing that bothered me worse was when everyone would say how nice I looked, tell me how pretty my dress or sash or
    kerchief looked, and pretend nothing at all was wrong with me. So I felt so bad about how miserable I was, as if I was making a dreadful fuss about nothing at all. So if I was—was really lamed or crippled, I think I would hate it if people made me go on acting as if nothing at all was wrong and there was nothing the matter with me. Please don’t ever think you have to pretend with me”
    He drew a deep breath. “Father flies into a rage if anyone seems to notice him limping, and once or twice when I have tried to offer him my arm, he has nearly knocked me down.”
    Yet , Dio thought, Kennard used his lameness, last night, to manipulate me into dancing with Lew. Why ?
    She said, “That is the way he manages his life and his lameness. You are not your father.”
    Suddenly he started shaking. He said, “Sometimes—sometimes it is hard to be sure of that,” and she remembered that the Alton gift was forced rapport. Kennard’s intense closeness to his son, his deep ambition for him, was well-known on Darkover; that closeness must become torture sometimes, make it hard for Lew to distinguish his own feelings and emotions. “It must be difficult for you; he is such a powerful telepath—”
    “In all fairness,” said Lew, “it must be difficult for him too; to share everything I have lived through in these years, and there was a time when my barriers were not as strong as they are now. It must have been hell for him. But that does not make it less difficult for me.”
    And if Kennard will not accept any weakness in Lew … but Dio did not pursue that. “I’m not trying to pry. If you don’t want to answer, just say so, but… Geremy lost three fingers in a duel. The Terran medics regrew them for him, as good as new. Why did they not try to do that with your hand?”
    “They did,” he said. “Twice.” His voice was flat, emotionless. “Then I could bear no more. Somehow, the pattern of the cells—you are not a matrix technician, are you? It would be easier to explain this if you knew something about cell division. I wonder if you can understand—the pattern of the cells, the knowledge in the cells, that makes a hand a hand, and not an eye, or a toenail, or a wing, or a hoof, had been damaged beyond renewing. What grew at the end of my wrist was—” he drew a deep breath and she saw the horror in his eyes. “It was not a hand,” he said flatly, “I am not sure just what it was, and I do not want to know. They made a mistake with the drugs, once, and I woke and saw it. They tell me I screamed my throat raw. I do not remember. My voice has never been right since. For half a year I could not speak above a whisper.” His harsh voice was completely emotionless. “I was not myself for years. I can live with it now, because— because I must. I can face the knowledge that I am—am
    maimed. What I cannot face,” he said, with sudden violence, “is my father’s need to pretend that I