In which Er Thom and Anne meet again.
This chapter contains the situation in a nutshell: Er Thom and Anne love each other, thrive when together and struggle when separated; all that’s keeping them apart is the entire weight of social convention and expectation on both sides. Easy.
(Communication on the internet has its advantages, but there are times when I miss the ability to convey facial expression and tone of voice.)
It appears my memory let me down again: the Liaden face-touching taboo is explained in this novel. (Of course it is; it’s an important detail. I’m not sure now why I thought otherwise. I expect I was thinking of other stories where it is just an incidental.)
The idea of Anne and Er Thom “thriving” together did not communicate to me. Even though, looking back, I can see the authors tried, the healthy “thriving” as you put it so succinctly, was completely eclipsed by all the uncontrolled passion they stirred in each other. Not that there is anything outright wrong about that, but only that it is not necessarily a good indicator of long-term enjoyment of eachother’s presence, and can exist quite well in relationships that are otherwise shallow, or dysfunctional, or even destructive. In fact, the obsession with each other struck me as unhealthy, even though now I see that the authors were trying to communicate the lifemate bond that neither could escape even had they wanted to.
If he *had* gone to the healers, would a healer have been sensitive enough to identify that “tenuous bridge” in his pattern and refused to “heal” his memories of a living lifemate?
Answering myself from a year and a half ago, from what we’ve seen of certain healers in other books, I would say that yes, a healer might have recognized the tenuous bridge, known it for what it is, and declined to destroy or try to obfuscate it, at least until certain pointed questions had been asked about the budding relationship.