Leonie had not been surprised when she was offered the job. She had known she would get it; she had a trace of the old Aldaran gift of precognition, and she had known the moment she entered the interview room that she and Hilda Annersley were, in some ways, very similar.

Now, after a week at the Chalet School, she knew that there were also significant differences. Hilda Annersley, for all the power Leonie could see she held within the School, was an innately humble woman. Leonie, as she admitted to herself, was not. At least here on Terra, being Comyn and Hastur meant nothing and less than nothing. Perhaps, she thought a little sardonically, it was time to cultivate a little humility.

More than that, Hilda Annersley had a very real kindness about her that Leonie knew was singularly lacking in herself. Or to put it another way, Leonie was capable of kindness- but it was an essentially a detached kindness, well in keeping with her role. A Keeper was rarely kind. She could not afford to be. Her job was to be above emotion, and that, she sometimes thought, was why empaths made such poor Keepers. Only - Damon Ridenow, himself an empath, was now Keeper of the Forbidden Tower, rather than Callista, who had been Keeper-trained... On the other hand, there was the famous Varzil of Neskaya, historically one of the greatest Keepers Darkover had ever known. He, too, had been Ridenow...

All the same, kindness, or empathy, or whatever you wanted to call it, would be of supreme use to her now. She had seen Miss Annersley place a hand on a pupil's shoulder, and her grasp at that interview had been firm. Leonie, who had been Keeper so long that the conditioning and training had become ingrained in her very being, still found it almost impossible to touch others, or permit touch herself. That too, was something she must remedy. It would be difficult, but not impossible. Callista had managed it, and what her once- pupil could do, she, Leonie of Arilinn, could do also.