In low tones, he and Lisa talked with the heavy-faced leader, and they talked for a long time.
"If it were not for the boys—" Blair murmured finally.
"The boys will be safe with us," Lisa answered. She looked at them, and they were sleeping, hardly looking the part now of young warriors of broadsword and mace. "We will teach them a different way...."
He was silent for long moments. Then: "I cannot understand. I cannot, Lisa. That I have always believed as I have—and he, as we know he did. Yet that we should both have mortal hatred for the same men; he to the point of doing what I did not have courage to do. And now, regardless of what I believe, my own kind are hunting me down."
"They would have, had you had the courage of which you speak—the courage of that conviction. And was it, Douglas, simply a conviction about a single man?"
"I—I don't know." He looked through a port; it was night, and they were speeding silently westward. Then he was looking back to her, and deep into her eyes. He had never felt lost, alone, hunted before. There was something very wrong.
"With us, Douglas ... will you try? To understand—with us?"
"Not because I am hunted."
"No. No. But now is the time for that wanting courage. Another man, too, hated a Tayne, and killed him. Can you help us kill the things that all Taynes stood for? In our way?"
Great mountains were looming before them, and the 'copter was beginning to lower into their darkened maw. And suddenly he felt a new strength in him from depths of his being that were opening to him for the first time. Another man had killed Tayne. And could he—