Free Rediscovery by Marion Zimmer Bradley Page A

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    love music for its own sake, and then I practiced enough to please her—though I never even finished the first sampler she set me. I suppose it is still in my work basket, if the moths have not gotten to it.”
    “Yes,” said Fiora, “I suppose that it would be very hard to make you do anything you did not want to do. Perhaps we should be glad that you want this training so much.”
    Leonie raised her chin haughtily. “That was always a foregone conclusion,” said
    Leonie. “Ever since I was a little girl I have known that, soon or late, I would come to a Tower. I have powerful laran. It must be trained; it was only a question of to which Tower I would go.”
    She had made it sound almost as if she had been the one making the choice, not the Keepers of the still-functioning Towers. As if the Tower were being honored by her presence, and not as if she were the one honored by being accepted. Fiora hesitated. It was a new experience for her to feel small and unremarkable; but she supposed that with a daughter of the Hasturs in her charge she would have to get used to that. Finally, telling herself that as Keeper of Dalereuth she need not feel inferior to anyone, and certainly not to this proud daughter of Comyn, she asked, “Did you never think—as so many girls do—of marriage?”
    “Never,” said Leonie firmly. “Not even when I was very small. I always knew I
    could marry anyone I chose, but there was no one I wished to marry. There was for me no one who could equal my own twin brother in any way; so whomever I chose, if I chose, would of course be someone below me in rank. I did not want to marry someone I could never think equal to myself, so I came here.” She did not speak of the King’s proposal; while rank had never entered into her decision in his case, there were other considerations which had. Personal ones, and to those Fiora hardly needed to be privy.
    “I suppose,” Fiora murmured, with only a little irony, “we here are the lucky ones, then.” In an odd way, she meant this; if Leonie had chosen otherwise, a very powerful telepath might have gone untrained, and one of the oldest proverbs in the Domains was that an untrained telepath was a menace to herself and everyone about her. Dorilys the Stormqueen was only one of a hundred examples of how easily that proverb could be proven true.
    Leonie chose to misunderstand. “I suppose I am fortunate you could make a place
    for me here,” she said, her own inflection of irony a great deal heavier than Fiora’s. “I had intended at first to go to Arilinn—where the daughters of the Comyn mostly go.”
    There was no mistaking her meaning; she should have gone to Arilinn. She still resented the fact that she had been denied a place there. It was obvious that Dalereuth was a poor second by comparison.
    “Yes,” said Fiora, after a moment, “when we heard of you, and that you were to
    be trained as a leronis, we had expected that you would choose to go to Arilinn.” She saw at once how that could be misunderstood—as Leonie seemed to be willfully intent on doing—and continued quickly.
    “I do not mean,” she said, tilting her head a little to the side, “that we are not glad to have you here. But—there were two of you to train. It is different, when there are siblings who need training at the same time.”
    She hesitated. It was traditional to separate those in training from their families, but Fiora did not think that Leonie could be separated successfully from anyone she did not choose to be divided from. Certainly the bond with her twin would be difficult to shut out, even with Leonie’s full cooperation— which they wouldn’t likely have, and the great physical distance between here and Arilinn. Training her was going to be a major problem, one way or another, with difficulty being added by the girl’s own arrogance.
    Yet the proper training of this haughty child would be a considerable credit to Fiora—or to any Keeper who could