Free City of Sorcery by Marion Zimmer Bradley Page A

most of the evening with Camilla and Mother Lauria, and found herself agreeing how very young the new Renunciates appeared. It seemed that the woman who had taken the Oath tonight, and her friends who had witnessed the Oath, were just children. Had she and Jaelle ever been as young as that? Apart from the Oath-mother, an older woman was always chosen to witness the ceremony, and it seemed incredible to see Doria, whom Magda remembered as a girl of fifteen sharing her own housebound time, described as an older woman.
Rafaella was there, and spent much of the latter part of the evening talking with Jaelle; Magda did not begrudge Jaelle the company of her old friend and partner, but, watching Rafi drinking heavily of the pale wine from the mountain vineyards, she hoped Jaelle would not be led into drinking. It was late before they could get away to the room they shared - but that was just as well. The atmosphere was quieter at night, with most people sleeping; much matrix work, in the Towers and outside them, was done between sunset and sunrise.
“What was Rafi talking about?”
“Some new project from Mapping and Exploring - a survey in the mountains. She wanted me to promise I’d come.” Jaelle looked regretful as she pulled off her low indoor boots and untied the laces of her tunic. Magda sat on the bed to remove her own.
“Did you promise?”
“How could I? I told her I would have to consult you, and also the folk in the Tower. I do not think she knows we have sworn oath as freemates, and I had no opportunity to tell her.”
“Perhaps it is as well not to tell her.”
“You told Camilla.”
“But Camilla is not jealous. Rafaella and I have worked out a pact for mutual co-existence - we even manage to like each other most of the time - but she is jealous of our closeness, Jaelle.”
“Rafi and I were never lovers, Margali. At least, not since I was a little girl. She was really not much more. And now, at least, Rafaella is certainly a lover of men. What may have been between us when we were young girls does not seem that important to me, and I cannot believe it is important to her.” Jaelle shivered, standing barefoot on the icy floor, and quickly pulled her nightgown over her head.
“That is not what she is jealous of.” Magda wondered why Jaelle could not see it. “What she envies is that we work together, that we share laran . And that is closer than any other bond.” She hurried into her warm nightgown and warmer robe, for the Guild-house was not well-heated at night. “Will you monitor, Jaelle, or do you want me to do it?”
“I will. That’s about my level of skill.” Jaelle had no illusions about her competence working with laran . She had spent half a lifetime blocking away her psychic gift, submitting to the training only when the laran could not be excluded from her consciousness. Now, she knew, she could achieve only the minimal level of training: sufficient to keep her from being, in the phrase so often used about untrained telepaths, a menace to herself and everyone around her.
Jaelle was, and was glad to be, an integral part of the group of telepaths and psi workers, loosely allied, who worked outside the ordinary structure of matrix workers on Darkover, and in defiance called themselves the Forbidden Tower. But she would never achieve sufficient competence to call herself matrix mechanic or technician. Sometimes when she watched Magda, born a Terran, and now the most skillful of technicians, she was painfully aware that she had cast away that birthright, and could now never recover it.
They were both wearing warm, fur-lined robes, fur-lined slippers. Magda wrapped herself in an extra blanket. Psychic work withdrew heat from the body. If the worker stayed out too long on the astral planes known collectively as the overworld, it could result in painful chill.
Jaelle took her matrix, from the tiny leather bag around her neck, and carefully stripped away the protecting silks. The blue stone, no