Marion Zimmer Bradley - Darkover 02 by Stormqueen!

Author:Stormqueen!
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-11-23T22:25:51+00:00

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

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Renata, too, heard the muttering of the summer thunder, without thinking too much about it, as she moved through the castle halls on her way to Dorilys’s apartments for their daily late-afternoon lesson.

Because Dorilys was younger than the novice workers in any Tower—and also because Dorilys had not, as they did, sought out this training of her own free will, pledging herself to endure uncomplaining all the discomforts and difficulties of the work—Renata had tried to make the teaching easy and pleasant, to devise games and amusements which would develop the girl’s use of laran without tedious exercises to tire or bore her. Dorilys was still too young to be tested formally for telepathy which rarely developed much in advance of puberty, but other forms of laran were earlier to arise, and Renata judged that Dorilys had a considerable amount of clairvoyance and, probably, some telekinetic power in addition to her formidable gift of generating or controlling lightnings. So she had taught her with simple games: hiding sweets and toys and letting her find them with her laran, blindfolding her and having her find her way among intricate obstacle courses of furniture or unfamiliar parts of the castle; having her pick her own possessions, blindfolded, out of a jumble of similar ones, by the “feel” of her own magnetism attached to them. She was a quick pupil, and enjoyed the lessons so much that on two or three occasions Margali had actually controlled her rebellious young charge by threatening to deprive her of them, as she did with her music lessons, unless she satisfactorily finished the other tasks of which she was not so fond.

As far as Renata could tell, Dorilys was wholly without the two gifts which would have made her a trainable Tower worker: telepathy, defined as the ability to read or pick up deliberate thought; and empathy, or the ability to feel another’s emotions or physical sensations in her own mind and body. But either might develop at adolescence—they often did—and if, at that time, she had some control of her own energy currents and flows, there would be less danger of the dreaded threshold sickness.

If it could only develop earlier—or later! It was the scourge of all the families with laran that these troubling facilities should develop at the same time the child was going through the physical and emotional upheavals of puberty. So many of those who bore these gifts found that the sudden onset of psi powers, developing sexuality, and the hormonal and temperamental liability of these times were an overload on body and brain. They developed enormous upheavals; sometimes crisis, convulsions, and even death followed. Renata herself had lost a brother to threshold sickness; no laran family survived unscathed.

Dorilys carried Aldaran blood on her father’s side, not the relatively stable Delleray, which was akin to the Hastur. What Renata knew of the Aldaran and Rockraven lines did not make her entirely hopeful, but the more Dorilys knew of

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