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had of the Aldaran Gift of
    foreseeing, if such a thing had been possible. She had never wanted laran, and she still
    did not. It was something to which she had had to resign herself, and it gave her little
    pleasure, even though she had made some progress.
    Margaret rubbed her forehead with her right hand, trying to erase the pain in her skull.
    Her left hand, gloved in layers of spider silk, rested on her lap. Restlessly, she flexed
    the fingers of her gloved hand, sensing the lines of power etched into her skin, trying
    not to remember how she had gotten them while wresting a keystone from a Tower of
    Mirrors in the overworld. The months since she had battled the long dead Keeper,
    Ashara Alton, for her life, and her soul, had blurred the memories a little, but they were
    still vivid enough that when she thought about it, she grew chilled and frightened.
    The mitten of silk helped. She had begun by using any glove that came to hand, until,
    in Thendara just before Midsummer, she had found that a silk glove worked better than
    a leather one. But only for a short time. After three or four days, the silk itself began to
    deteriorate, as if the lines on her flesh were fraying the fibers.
    Liriel Lanart-Hastur, her cousin and perhaps her best friend, had suggested soon after
    she arrived at Arilinn that perhaps the gloves needed to be more than one layer thick.
    Neither of them had much skill with a needle and thread— they agreed that sewing
    was an intolerable bore—but Liriel had been persistent. She had experimented until
    she found that four layers of silk would withstand the constant outflow of energy from
    Margaret's shadow matrix. Her efforts had produced a clumsily sewn object that was
    bulky and uncomfortable to wear, covering the palm and going over the wrist bone, but
    leaving the fingers free.
    Then Liriel had sent a pattern from Margaret's hand to a master glover in Thendara,
    with detailed instructions.     finely graded, despite the several layers, that they were quite comfortable to wear. The
    glover now sent a new batch every few weeks, and had started adding embellishments,
    so that, in addition to her plain ones, Margaret now had gloves with fine embroidery
    around the cuff, and one pair that was encrusted with tiny pearls below the knuckles.
    She wore gloves on both hands most of the time, since this attracted less attention than
    only using one.
    The breeze shifted, ruffling Margaret's fine hair, and making it tickle her throbbing
    brow. She shifted on the stone bench, which was cool against her legs despite the
    fineness of the day, and chewed her lower lip. There was something about this
    particular headache, something she should know, that she could not quite make herself
    grasp.
    Then, in a flash, Margaret realized that this was the sort of headache she had had the
    day that Ivor died so suddenly. She was cursed with just enough of the Aldaran Gift of
    foretelling that she got hints of things to come—not enough to be useful, only
    terrifying and infuriating.
    She felt sick. Margaret's first thought was of Dio, that something terrible was about to
    happen. What if, somehow, the stasis stopped, or if it was not enough to keep her
    stepmother alive? She could not stand that. Dio had to live, to get better!
    In her alarm, Margaret rose from the bench, and turned to go into the main body of
    Arilinn Tower. She took three steps, then stopped. Rushing into the stasis chamber in
    her current state was stupid. She would only make herself sick. Or make Dio worse.
    Where was Liriel? Her cousin had been a technician at Tramontana Tower when
    Margaret came to Darkover, but she had settled at Arilinn to be near Margaret while
    she began her arduous studies of matrix science and the Alton Gift. Margaret had not
    wanted td come to Arilinn at all, but would have preferred to go to Neskaya where
    Istvana Ridenow was Keeper, and study with her. She still was