Her mouth tightened. He didn’t care, nobody cared. The wind picked up, whistling through the glade, making her dew-dampened clothes cling to her skin in icy folds. She turned away from him and rubbed her hands over her wet sleeves, shivering.
Kevisson unfolded himself slowly, as though he’d aged twenty years overnight, then draped the smelly ummit blanket around her shoulders. “Why don’t you start the fire while I fetch some water for tea?” Without waiting for an answer, he crunched off through the underbrush with a water bag slung over his shoulder.
She stared angrily after him, then kicked at the pile of dead wood they’d gathered the night before. Didn’t he understand? She wasn’t able to start the fire, just as she couldn’t shield and couldn’t read people anymore. Somehow, she had lost everything that last terrible night at Tal’ayn.
When he returned some minutes later, Kevisson lifted an eyebrow at her. “What, no fire? I thought you were cold.”
“If you want one, you’ll have to start it yourself!” She poked at the dead ashes with a stick.
He poured water into the tiny camp kettle, then paused, his golden-brown eyes thoughtful. “So you’ve lost that skill too?”
She didn’t answer.
“I could show you again.” He set the kettle aside and came over to stand next to her.
She looked away from his compelling dark-gold eyes, her heart hammering. This was so stupid, she was cold and hungry and dirty and—
And what? she asked herself.
Cold and hungry and dirty and—frightened.
“I was trained at Shael’donn,” he said. “I do this all the time.”
Shael’donn, she thought, old Yernan, her tutor, had been from there. “They never take girls at Shael’donn, do they?”
“No.” He crouched in the wet grass beside her.
She stared miserably at her white-knuckled hands. Could she really learn to spark a fire again and if so, would it make any difference? What was done, was done, wasn’t it? There could be no going back—ever.
“You did know how to do this at one time, I take it?”
“Of course!” She glanced up indignantly. “My father—” Terrible images from that night whispered in the back of her mind and she could not finish the sentence.
“Never mind.” Kevisson’s long fingers brushed the nape of her neck, seeking the sensitive contact points. “Close your eyes and we’ll give it a try.”
She stiffened, then complied.
“Fire is one aspect of the Light.” His low voice spoke the ancient litany just behind her ear. “Respect and tend it as you would the Lord of Light, himself.”
The familiar words relaxed her slightly. She could almost hear Yernan’s creaky voice reciting the same passage from The Book of Light.
“Build the image of Fire in your mind. Feel the heat . . . see its brightness . . . hear the crackle . . . smell the smoke.”
She began to construct the image just as she had once been taught, then suddenly panicked when she felt the warm bright circle of his mind draw close to hers. She bolted onto her feet, fighting the sick swirl of fear.
He stepped back. “Take a moment to relax, then we’ll try again.”
Knotting her hands together to keep them from shaking, she tried to get her breath. “I don’t think I can stand it.” Her forehead was damp with sweat, even though the morning air was crisp.
He moved around until he could see her face. “You do want to learn?”
She pressed her hands over her eyes, then took a deep breath and nodded.
“I’ll help you more this time.” He slipped behind her and rested his fingers lightly on her neck.
Trembling like a cornered tree barret, she closed her eyes.
“Fire is one aspect of the Light, itself.” His other hand reached around to touch her lightly on the left temple. She felt his mind approaching hers again and tried not to stiffen as her fear threatened to engulf her.
“Respect and . . .” A sense of calm overcame her, drowning the fear with a drowsy feeling of well-being. “. . . tend it as you would the Lord of Light, himself.” Her head nodded now as the tight neck muscles relaxed.
“Build the image of Fire in your mind. Feel the heat . . .”
She felt the comforting warmth radiated against her chilled face.
“. . . see its brightness . . .”
The flickering, weaving yellow-orange of flames danced before her inner vision, beautiful, beguiling.
“. . . hear the crackle . . .”
She heard the sizzle of dry wood feeding a hungry fire, the pop and hiss of flames.
“. . . smell the smoke.”
The woody, smoky aroma curled through the air as Fire now burned vividly in her imagination.
“Now take the spark—and Light the Fire.”
Haemas reached for the flames in her mind and—froze. Her guilty fear escaped again, howling at her, yammering that she had lost the right to all of this! She could never—
Kevisson’s strong, quiet voice commanded her again. “Take the spark!”
It was so close! She made herself reach out, cringing as she touched the living flame.
“Light the Fire!”
The skin-shriveling fire burned into and through her. She tried to direct it outward to the wood shavings, but it eluded her and blazed out of control. Kevisson pushed her somehow in the right direction. Still caught in the relentless, scorching heat, she poured the spark out into the rock-circled fireplace.
Inside her head, though, a seamless wall of flames raged, rising up on every side until she, herself, was nothing but red-yellow-orange fire. Flamelets that had been her hair burned brightly around her red coal eyes.
And everywhere she turned, her father’s angry face scowled at her, etched in living flame.
Just when she thought the fire would burn her into ashes, a cool wind brought the darkness.
* * *
“Haven’t you got anything better than this slop?” Jarid jammed the wooden spoon back into the bowl of zeli-and-callyt porridge. Sticky, gray spots spattered over the table.
The woman’s plump face didn’t change. Leaning over, she whisked the bowl off the table without a word. A moment later, she returned from the kitchen with a wet cloth and scrubbed the mess up.
“Our next meal comes at the Twelfth Hour, more or less.” Her broad chierra face regarded him blandly. “Perhaps our poor fare will be more to your liking then.”
Jarid shoved his chair back from the table and stood, not bothering to hide his irritation. His stomach was clamoring for real food. “I wouldn’t even feed that sludge to a savok on its way to slaughter!”
The corners of her mouth tightened. “I regret such plain fare be not fit for a Lord’s table, but we have naught else to offer.”
“Never mind!” Jarid glared around the empty dining room. “I want to talk to whoever’s in charge here.”
“That would be Sister Lealla.” The plump woman gave the table a final rub, then straightened. “Though she be making her morning reverences right now, so if you could wait a—”
“I am not accustomed to waiting.” He fixed her with an icy stare and tried to insinuate a tendril of controlling thought into her simple mind.
She patted him on the shoulder. “Of course not, your Lordship. I’ll be happy to fetch her, myself, just as soon as she be finished.”
Damnation! he swore silently. What had that fall done to him? He could no more get a grip on her than he could have gotten on the mind of a road marker. “Don’t bother!” He shouldered past her. “I’ll do it myself!”
Ducking his head under the low doorway, he emerged into the morning sunshine and paused. Although he couldn’t control the woman, he had seen quite clearly in her mind where he would find this ‘Lealla.’
Around one side of the simpl
e stone keep lay a kitchen garden where several older women bent over the low neat rows, weeding. On the other side grew a young grove of callyt trees, fenced with low, bristly keiria bushes. Beyond that stood a virgin forest of true-trees, mostly spine-wood and redthorn.
Jarid ignored the stares of the women and walked through the fruit grove, searching for a break that led into the woods. He was losing precious time here. If he didn’t catch up to his runaway cousin soon, that meddling Searcher would succeed in taking her before the Council. He didn’t know how well his handiwork would hold up to trained scrutiny and had no intention of finding out. Haemas Sennay Tal must die before anyone could question her on the events of that night. Then Tal’ayn would at last be his.
A faint path led through the underbrush into the old growth forest. Jarid followed it for a few minutes, sensing a thought-presence just up ahead. A faint smell of wet rocks and water drifted back to him. Ducking his head under a low branch, he pushed aside a curtain of low-hanging vines and stepped into a small clearing carpeted with flowering moss.
A silvery, irregularly shaped pool bubbled up from the foot of a large red slab of rock slanting up out of the ground. A hollow-cheeked woman sat with her legs folded beneath her long, gray skirt, contemplating the pool’s mirrored surface. Her mind was so still that he could pick up nothing from her.
He walked closer and saw the pool had been banked with quarried white stone. At one end, broad steps led down into the clear water. The gentle bubbling of the spring, like the faint ring of crystal striking crystal, was the only sound.
He cleared his throat, but she didn’t respond. “I need some supplies,” he said, but the loudness of his own voice startled him, seeming to echo through the looming trees.
“It’s not wise, like, to intrude upon the Mother.” The woman turned her lined, sun-bronzed face up to him.
“I don’t intend to stand here, bandying superstitions with you, woman. I need a mount and some supplies so I can continue my journey. I have important business.”
“I know.” Closing her dark eyes, the chierra woman tilted her face up into the soft morning light. “Men be always in such a hurry. As long as you’re here, why don’t you sit for a while and open your mind to the Mother’s voice?”
“Forget the religious drivel!” He seized her shoulders and yanked her slight body off the mossy ground. She weighed no more than an empty sack. “Get me a mount and some supplies right now, or you’re going to be very sorry!”
The water’s crystalline sound grew louder, echoing through the trees until the vibration set his teeth on edge. He released her, and staggered backwards. His hands flew over his ears, but the sound seemed to come from everywhere, even inside his head.
Sister Lealla rose gracefully from the ground, her thin hands folded neatly before her. “There’s no point fighting the Mother’s voice. Open your mind and receive Her wisdom.”
The crystalline resonance in the glade built up to the level of pain, stealing even the breath out of his lungs. He tried to shield it out with no success, then stumbled toward the edge of the trees.
She trailed him calmly, a faint smile on her work-worn face. “It seems She wants something from you.”
Deafened and blinded by the clamor of a million crystal bells ringing inside his head, Jarid flailed for support. One hand smacked against the rough bark of a tree and he clung to it, sweat pouring down his face.
“You should be honored to serve her purpose.”
He forced his trembling legs to take another step, then another until he reached the shade of the surrounding trees. The vibrations eased and he stumbled a few more steps.
Yes, he told himself, the sound really was less. He crashed through the woods, heedless of the cuts and scratches, emerging finally into the callyt grove.
Sinking to his knees under the slender young trees, he tried to slow his gasping breath. His chest ached with the effort of breathing, and even here, he could still hear the faint tinkling. Bloody Darkness! What had all that been about?
After a moment, his head cleared. It had to be that blasted knot on his head, he told himself. All he needed was some time to recover, and then he’d show these dirt-grubbing peasants what a real Lord could do.
* * *
Kevisson sat by the girl’s side, gauging her pale, strained face as she slept. He guessed he should be grateful that the silsha had missed out on the fire-making fiasco. It would have torn him to shreds if it had picked up her fear and pain.
What had made him so confident he could teach her? He wasn’t even a Master yet, just a competent Searcher. Shaking his head angrily, he threw another branch on the fire that had very nearly cost both of them their lives. He glanced down at his singed tunic.
Power lay buried in her sleeping mind, too much power over which she had no control. She was not only a danger to herself in this condition, but to anyone who tried to work with her. What he had foolishly done had only made matters worse.
He wondered what the Masters would say when he brought her back. They might think it kinder to seal off her psi centers and let her live a quiet life. But then, what of the Council, he thought . . . what of her father?
She groaned in her sleep and rolled over, throwing one arm across her grimy, soot-blackened face. Kevisson monitored her sleeping thoughts, then grimaced; the burning again.
Leaning over, he touched her forehead with his fingertips. No dreams, he spoke to her sleeping mind. She resisted him and he caught the image of an older man’s angry face etched in incandescent yellow-orange fire.
No dreams! Feeling sick and shaken, he increased the force of his will until her sleep deepened into darkness. Then he sat back and watched the still, drawn face. It would almost be kinder if she could just sleep and never wake again.
SHE WANDERED lost in a vast despairing darkness thick with the stench of burning and smoke. Somewhere ahead, a voice called her name, insistently, over and over, but she also felt a baleful presence, waiting to make her pay for what she had done to her father. Soon, very soon—
“Haemas, listen to me,” the voice insisted hoarsely. “You have to wake up.”
Painfully, she forced open her gritty eyes and blinked up at Kevisson Monmart’s haggard face framed in late afternoon light.
The corners of his mouth tightened. “Now control it.”
She lifted her head from the smelly ummit blanket, her neck and shoulders as stiff as if she’d slept for a hundred years. “What--?” Without warning, the hungry flames leaped up in her mind again, roaring and eager, followed by an explosion of real fire from the campfire’s dead ashes. Back in the trees, the tethered ummit bawled and strained at its rope.
“No, you can’t let it come back!” Kevisson’s fingers dug into her shoulders. “Concentrate on the sound of my voice. I kept you in deep sleep all last night and most of today. This time you have to control it so we can go on.”
“All . . . night?” She could barely make out his face through the flickering sheet of yellow flame behind her eyes. A few feet away, the campfire licked at overhanging tree branches.
“It’s feeding on your fear—and your guilt.” Kevisson’s golden-brown eyes bore down on her. “You have to fight! I don’t know what really happened at Tal’ayn, but I don’t believe you deserve to die for it.”
Tal’ayn . . . her father . . . Sorrow stabbed through her, and the flames, both real and in her mind, roared higher. She smelled acrid smoke as the leaves overhead caught fire. Cursing, Kevisson beat out the glowing sparks that dropped onto his shoulders.
She shuddered; no doubt she did deserve to die, but the Searcher didn’t. Concentrating, she summoned every scrap of strength she had left to send the flames—away. They resisted cunningly, fading here, breaking out somewhere else, stronger than before, but she pursued them with a ferocious single-mindedness until she finally extinguished them all, one by one.
> “Good. Now, hold onto that.” Kevisson rubbed sooty fingers over the golden-brown stubble covering his tired face. “And no matter what, stay awake. If you go back to sleep right now, your subconscious may rekindle that blasted fire.” He filled a wooden mug with water and passed it to her.
She let it roll slowly down her parched throat. “Then why did you let me sleep for so long?”
“Because,” he said wearily, “every time I tried to wake you, the flames escaped. You could have died at any time. Me too, for that matter.”
She sat up, then closed her eyes as the trees swooped dizzily around her head.
“Finish that water, and then you’d better eat something.”
A wave of nausea flooded over her. “I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat.” He took the cup from her hand and refilled it. “And you need to get down a lot of fluid too. You’re already close to being dehydrated.”
“I don’t understand what went wrong.” She leaned forward and pressed her forehead against her knees. “Yernan taught me to make fire when I was very small. Nothing like this ever happened.”
“It’s my fault.” Kevisson’s voice was bleak as he began packing the saddlebags with their meager supplies. “I knew something was wrong with your psi senses, but I didn’t think. Unfortunately, that nearly cost both of us our lives.” He paused in the middle of emptying the tiny kettle. “You’ve never been Tested, have you?”
She made herself finish the water. “No, I won’t be sixteen for a few more days.”
Shaking the last drops out of the kettle, he stowed it in the saddlebags. “My best guess is you’ll have at least a Plus-Ten Rating. That is, if you ever regain enough control to be Tested. It’s control you lack, not Talent.”
A Ten, she thought, even Jarid had only Tested as an Eight. Then she glanced around the clearing anxiously, smelling smoke in the breeze that whispered against her hot skin.
HM01 Moonspeaker Page 15
