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Melitta said dryly, “I wondered where you got such a beauty.”

Storn’s own thoughts ran bitter counterpoint.
 
Valdir’s foster son pledged himself with a knife
 
—
 
butit was to the Earthling, Barron. He knows nothing of me and has no friendship for me. And nowthat road is closed, too. What now
? He said at last, “We are far kin to the House of Aldaran. I haveheard that they, too, are a rallying-point for the people of the mountains. Perhaps they can help us. If theycannot help us for old kinship’s sake, perhaps they will know where we can find mercenaries. We will goto Aldaran.”

Melitta, reflecting that meant recrossing the Kadarin and turning back into the mountains, wished theyhad gone there first; but then she remembered that Storn—Barron—had come all the way from the valleylands far to the other side of the foothills. Carthon had been the best intermediary place they could locate,and furthermore Storn had had every reason to believe they could find help at Carthon. It was thestrangest thing; when she did not look at him, it was easy to believe she rode with her brother Storn; thevoice, unfamiliar in timbre and tone, had still her brother’s familiar mannerisms and speech rhythms, as if itcame filtered through distance. But when her eyes alighted on the strange figure which rode so easily onthe great black horse—tall, dark, sullenly alien—the unease overtook her again. What would happen if Storn withdrew and she was left alone with this stranger, this off-worlder, this unbelievably alien man? Melitta had thought, after her terrible trek through the mountains, that she had little left to fear. Shediscovered that there were fears she had never thought of before this, the unknown hazards of an alienman, an alien mind.

She told herself, grimly,
Even if he
 
—
 
gets out
—
 
he couldn’t be worse than Brynat’s gang oftoughs. I doubt if he’d want to murder me, or rape me
. Surreptitiously she studied the strange face,masked in her brother’s familiar presence, and thought,
 
I wonder what he’s really like? He seems adecent sort of man
 
—
 
no lines of cruelty, or dissipation
—
 
sad, if anything, and a little lonely. Iwonder if I’ll ever know
?

The third evening out of Carthon, they discovered that they were being followed.

Melitta sensed it first, with senses abnormally sharpened by the tension and fear of the journey; as if, shewas to say later, “I’d gotten in the habit of riding looking over my shoulder.” She also suspected that shewas developing, perhaps from contact with Storn or from some other stimulus, from a latent telepath intoan actual one. She could not at first tell whether it was by the impact on her mind, or through somesubliminal stimulation of her five sharpened senses—sounds too faint to be normally heard, shapes toodistant to see—in any case it made little or no difference. When they found shelter in an abandonedherdsman’s hut on a hill pasture, she finally told Storn of her suspicions, half afraid he would laugh.

Nothing was further from his mind than laughter. His mouth pinched tight—Melitta knew the gesture if

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not the mouth—and he said, “I thought so, last night; but I thought I listened only to my own fear.”

“But who could be following us? Certainly none of Brynat’s men, at such a distance! Men from

Carthon?”

“That’s not impossible,” Storn said. “The House of Rannath might not mind seeing another of the old mountain families disappear—but then, sooner or later he might have to deal with Brynat’s raiders himself. Raiding parties have been known to come as far as Carthon, and I dare say he would find us more towardly neighbors than the Scarface—he might not help us, but I doubt if he would hinder. No, what I fear is worse than that.”

“Bandits? A raiding nonhuman band?”

Somberly, Storn shook his head. Then, seeing Melitta’s fear, he tried to smile. “I’m no doubt imaginingthings,
 
breda
 
, and in any case we are armed.”

He did not say what he most feared: that Larry, through sworn friendship and fear for Barron, mighthave set Valdir on his track. He had not meant any harm—quite the opposite. But Barron had twice—orwas it three times—asked questions about Carthon. It would have been simple enough to trail him there. And if no Terran had come there—well, Valdir at least would know what he had done and why Barronthe Earthling had vanished. From what little Storn knew of the Comyn, once on the track of such anoffense against the ancient laws of Darkover, they would make little of chasing him over half a world.

And when they caught him—what then?

With the uncanny habit she was developing, of reading his thoughts (Had he done well, to waken
 
laran
in the girl?) Melitta asked, “Storn, just what
 
are
 
the Comyn?”

“That’s like asking what the mountains are. Originally there were seven Great Houses on Darkover, or Domains, each with a particular telepathic gift. If I ever knew which House had which Gift, I have forgotten, and in any case, generations of inbreeding and intermarriage have blurred them so that nobody knows any more. When men spoke of the Comyn, they usually meant Comyn Council—a hierarchy of gifted telepaths from every House, who were responsible, first, for surveillance over the use of the old powers and gifts of the mind—and later, they gained temporal power, too. You’ve heard the ballads—originally the seven houses were descended from the sons of Hastur and Cassilda, so they say. It might even be true, for all I know, but that’s beside the point. Just now, they’re the givers of law—such law as there has been since the Compact—all over this part of Darkover. Their writ doesn’t run in the Dry Towns, or in trailman country, and the mountain people are pretty much out of their orbit—you know as well as I do that we mountain people live under our own customs and ways.”

“They rule? Doesn’t the King rule in the lowlands?”

“Oh, yes, there is a King in Thendara, ruling under the Comyn Council. The kingship used to rest with the Hasturs, but they gave it up, a few generations ago, in favor of another Comyn family, the Elhalyns, who are so intermarried with the Hasturs that it doesn’t make much difference. You know all this, damn it, I remember telling you when you were a child, as well as about the Aldarans.”

“I’m sorry, it all seemed very faraway.” They sat on blankets and furs inside the dark hut, crouched close to the fire, although to anyone accustomed to the fierce cold of the mountains it was not really cold. Outside, sleety rain whispered thickly along the slats of the hut. “What about the Aldarans? Surely they’re Comyn too?”

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“They used to be; they may have some Comyn powers. But they were kicked out of Comyn Council generations ago; the story goes that they did something so horrible nobody knows or remembers what it was. Personally I suspect it was the usual sort of political dogfight, but I can’t say. No one alive knows, except maybe the Lords of Comyn Council.” He fell silent again. It was not Comyn he feared, but Valdir, specifically, and that too-knowing, all-reading gaze.

Storn did not have to be told how Melitta felt about what he had done. He felt the same way himself. He, too, had been brought up in the reverence of this Darkovan law against interfering with anotherhuman mind. Yet he justified himself fiercely, with the desperation of the law-abiding and peaceful manturned renegade.
 
I don’t care what laws I have broken, it was my sister and my young brother inthe hands of those men, and the village folk who have served my family for generations. Let mesee them free and I don’t care if they hang me! What good is an invalid’s life, anyhow? I’ve neverbeen more than half alive, before this
 
!

He was intensely aware of Melitta, half-kneeling before the low fire, close to him on the blankets. Isolated by the conditions of his life, as he had been till now, there had been few women, and none of hisown caste, about whom he could care personally. To a developing telepath that had meant much. Habitand low vitality had made him indifferent to this deprivation; but the strange and newly vigorous body, inwhich he now felt quite at home, was more than marginally aware of the closeness of the girl.

It crossed his mind that Melitta was extraordinarily beautiful, even in the worn and stained riding clothesshe had resumed when they left Carthon. She had loosened her hair and removed the outer cloak andtunic; under it was a loose rough linen shift. Some small ornament gleamed at her throat and her feet werebare. Storn, weary from days of riding, was still conscious of the reflex physical stir of awareness anddesire. He let himself play at random with the thought, perhaps because all his other thoughts were toodisturbing. Sexual liaisons between even full siblings in the mountains were not prohibited, althoughchildren born to such couples were thought unfortunate—the isolated mountain people were too aware ofthe dangers of inbreeding. With the grimmest humor he had yet felt, Storn thought,
 
In a stranger’s bodyeven that would not be anything to fear
 
!

Then he felt a sudden revulsion. The stranger’s body was that of an alien, an Earthling, a stranger on theirworld—and he had been thinking of letting such a one share the body of his sister, a Lady of Storn? Heset his jaw roughly, reached out and covered the fire.

“It’s late,” he said. “We have far to travel tomorrow. You’d better go to sleep.”

Melitta obeyed without a word, rolling herself in her fur cloak and turning away from him. She wasaware of what he was thinking, and intensely sorry for him, but she dared not offer him overt sympathy. Her brother would have rejected it as he had done all her life, and she was still a little afraid of thestranger. It was not the low-keyed throb of his desire, which Melitta could feel almost as a physicalpresence, which disturbed her, of course. She did not care about that. As with any mountain girl of hercaste, she knew that, travelling alone with any man, such a problem would in all probability arise. With Storn’s own person she might not have thought of it, but she was much more aware of the stranger than Storn realized. She had been forced to think about this eventuality and to make up her mind about it. Shefelt no particular attraction to the stranger, although if his presence had been uncomplicated by the eerieuncanniness of knowing that he was also her brother, she might have found him intriguing; certainly hewas handsome, and seemed gentle and from the tones of his voice, likable. But if she had eveninadvertently roused desire in him, common decency, by the code of women of her caste, demanded thatshe give it some release; to refuse this would have been wrong and cruelly whorish. If she had beenunalterably opposed to this possibility, she would not have agreed to travel entirely alone with him; no

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mountain girl would have done so. It would not have been impossible to find a travelling companion in

Carthon.

In any case, it seemed that at the moment the matter was not imminent, and Melitta was relieved. Itmight have been entirely too uncanny;
 
like lying with a ghost
 
, she thought, and slept.

It was still dark when Storn’s hand on her shoulder roused her, and when they saddled their horses andbegan to ride down the dark mountain path, they rode through still-heavy sleet which only after an houror more of riding turned into the light rain which presaged dawn at this latitude and season. Melitta, coldand shivering, and even a little resentful, did not protest; she simply wrapped her cloak over her face asthey rode. Storn turned into an inordinately steep and forsaken path, dismounted and led her horse alongthe slippery path through the trees until it was safe to ride again. She was thinking,
 
If it is Comyn on ourtrail, we may not be able to lose them. But if not, perhaps we can shake off our followers
 
.

“And we may gain two or three days ride on them this way, if they are not accustomed to the mountain

roads—they or their horses,” Storn said, out of nothing, and Melitta understood.

All that day and the next they rode through steeper and steeper mountain paths, with storms gatheringover the heights, and at night they were too exhausted to do more than swallow a few mouthfuls of foodand roll, half asleep already, into their blankets. On the morning of the third day after they had first sensedthat they were followed, Melitta woke without any uneasy sense of a presence overshadowing theirmoves, and sensed that they had lost their followers, at least for the moment.

“We should reach Aldaran today,” said Storn, as they saddled, “and if what I’ve heard is true, perhaps even the Comyn don’t care to come this far into the hills. They may be sacrosanct in the lowlands, but not here.”

As soon as the mist cleared they sighted the castle from a peak, a gray and craggy height enfolded andhalf invisible in the hills; but it took them the rest of the day to approach the foot of the mountain on whichit stood, and as they turned into the road— well-travelled and strongly surfaced—which led upward tothe castle, they were intercepted by two cloaked men. They were asked their business with the utmostcourtesy but nevertheless entreated to remain until the Lord of Aldaran knew of their coming, with somuch insistence that neither Storn nor Melitta wanted to protest.

“Inform the Lord of Aldaran,” said Storn, his voice sounding gray with weariness, “that his far kinsmen of Storn, at High Windward, seek shelter, counsel and hospitality. We have ridden far and are weary and call on him in the name of kin to give us rest here.”