The Forbidden Circle by Marion Zimmer Bradley Page B

had said to him, he told of how she had saved him from trying to reenter the plane a moment before it crashed down into the bottom of the ravine.
    “Do you suppose you could find the place again?” Ellemir asked.
    “I don’t know. The mountains are bewildering, when you’re not used to them. I suppose I could try, though the trip was bad enough one way.”
    “I see no reason why it’s necessary,” Damon said. “Go on. When did she next appear to you?”
    “After the snow began. In fact, just about the time it was working up to blizzard proportions, and I was ready to give up and decide it was all completely hopeless, and the best thing to do was to pick out a comfortable spot to lie down and die.”
    Damon thought that over a moment. He said, “Then the link between you is two-way. Possibly her need established a link with you, the first time. But your need and danger brought her to you that time, at least.”
    “But if Callista is free in the overworld,” Ellemir cried out, “why could she not come to you there, Damon? Why could Leonie not reach her? It makes no sense!”
    She looked so distressed, so frantic, that Carr could not endure it. It was too much like Callista’s weeping. “She told me she did not know where she was—that she was being kept in darkness. If it is any comfort to you, Ellemir, she came to me only because she had tried, and failed, to reach you.” He tried to reconstruct her exact words. It wasn’t easy, and he was beginning to suspect that Callista had reached his mind directly without too much need for words. “She said something like—I think—it was as if the minds of her kinsfolk and friends had all been erased from the surfaces of this world, and that she had wandered around a long time in the dark looking for you, until she had found herself in communication with me. And then she said that she kept coming back to me because she was frightened and alone”—he heard his own voice thicken and catch—“and because a stranger was better than no one at all. She said she thought she was being kept in a part of that level—overworld you call it?—where her people’s minds could not reach.”
    “But how? Why?” Ellemir demanded.
    “I’m sorry,” Carr said humbly. “I don’t know a thing about it. Your sister had a dreadful time trying to explain even that much to me, and I’m still not sure I’ve got it straight. If what I say isn’t accurate, it’s not because I’m lying, it’s because I just don’t have the language to put it in. I seemed to understand it when Callista was telling me about it, but it’s something else to try to tell it in your language.”
    Ellemir’s face softened a little. “I don’t think you’re lying, Ann’dra,” she said, again mispronouncing his name in that strange soft way. “If you’d come here with some evil purpose, I’m sure you could tell much better lies than those. But anything you can tell us about Callista, please try to say it somehow. Has she been hurt, did she seem to be in pain, had she been ill-treated? Did you actually see her, and how did she look? Oh, yes, you must have seen her if you recognized me.”
    Andrew said, “She did not seem to be injured, although there was a bruise on her cheek. She was wearing a thin blue dress, it looked like a nightgown; no one in her right senses would have worn it out-of-doors. It had—” He closed his eyes, the better to visualize her. “It had some kind of embroidery around the hem, in green and gold, but it was torn and I could not see the design.”
    Ellemir shivered faintly. “I know the gown. I have one like it. Callista wore it to bed the night we were—raided. Tell me more, quickly!”
    “Proof of the truth of his tale,” Damon said. “I saw her, only for an instant, in the overworld. She still wore that nightdress. Which tells me two things. He has in fact seen Callista. And—a little more ominous—she cannot, for some reason, although she walks in the