Who knew you could borrow an MZB Darkover duology ebook from NYPL? I don't know if it was Overdrive or what, but I couldn't get the typeface larger than about 10pts, so it wasn't easy to read. Since the type was so tiny it was supposedly only 177 pages long, but it took me over a week to read this sucker. In print it must have been at least double that. The DAW edition was 364 pages, which isn't crazy long. It may have seemed longer than it was because the plot was so plodding and repetitive, maybe the most so of the Darkover series so far (#11), in the order they were published.
It's told more or less in three voices, maybe four, but with the fourth, Ellemir's, the least prominent. Ellemir is the "lesser" twin to a high priestess (in Darkover parlance a Keeper) who throws over her Tower calling for a dude, and a Terran (earthman from the Empire) at that. That's Callista, who through her Keeper training was psychically neutered, but for the Terran Andrew's sake, we hope not irreversibly. The last in the quartet is Damon, Ellemir's squeeze. He's older than the rest and was kicked out of a tower for being too "sensitive."
If you read all over MZB through the lens of believing that the incest allegations are correct, stories like this one may have you nodding your head. There's some consensual four-way action involving the twins and their husbands, but at the same time the biggest taboo among their kind is one person psychically forcing themself on another. It's the same as rape. Worse. Confusing!
I bookmarked a dozen things I wanted to comment on, but I can't face that tiny type again.