Convergence (The Blending Book 1)

by Sharon Green

  Lorand rinsed and washed his hair three separate times before deciding he'd done all he could. He'd been able to hear the newcomer moving around without speaking, and it was possible that this man would be friendlier than the last. The least he could do was introduce himself, but that sort of thing went better when you looked a man in the eyes. He reached for the towel he'd positioned right at the edge of the bath, but his groping hand couldn't even find the bath edge. He must have moved too far the last time he rinsed, and now he needed help to get back where he needed to be.

  "I'm sorry to bother you, but I seem to have lost the edge of the bath," he said, speaking in the general direction of the gentle splashes he'd heard. The man had come into the water, and wasn't far from where Lorand stood. "If you'll guide me back to it, I'll introduce myself in the proper way once I can see again."

  Lorand heard a soft chuckle, and then there were two hands on his shoulder and back, turning him in what was hopefully the proper direction. He moved forward with arms outstretched, searching for the edge even as he wondered about the newcomer. The poor man seemed to have very small hands, which must have gotten him teased as a child and ridiculed as an adult. Lorand would have to be careful not to say the wrong thing and upset the fellow; he'd already had words with one of his brother applicants, and didn't want to get the reputation of being a troublemaker. His hands finally closed on the towel, so he used it to wipe his eyes and soak up some of the water in his hair, then he turned back to the newcomer.

  "Lorand Coll, Earth magic, at your-" service, only his mind finished, his tongue too frozen with shock to speak the word - or any other. The man with the very small hands wasn't a man at all. He was a woman- She was a woman, and the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen despite the obvious hardship she'd been through. Golden-blond hair and blue-green eyes, an oval face with the most perfect features, a slender body with large breasts, a tiny waist, and beautifully shaped legs… Perfect was the only word to describe her, that and-

  "Naked!" Lorand blurted, his tongue starting to work again at precisely the wrong time. "We're both naked, and you're a woman!"

  "How lovely of you to notice," she returned in a warm, husky voice that reached down to caress him in a usually unmentionable place. "I'm a woman and you're a man, and we're both unclothed. Do people usually bathe in their clothes where you come from?"

  As she spoke she moved toward the deep water, but still hadn't stopped looking up at him. She was such a little thing, not particularly short but slender and delicate, yes, that was it, delicate. And naked. Her having called it "unclothed" instead hadn't helped in the least.

  "That was a silly question, and I'm glad you're ignoring it," she said with a tinkling laugh as she lowered herself a bit more into the water. "Ummm, this feels marvelous, Lorand Coll. I'm Jovvi Hafford, Spirit magic, and I have the feeling you've never bathed with a woman present before. I thought the custom of mixed bathing had spread everywhere."

  "Not everywhere," Lorand answered hoarsely, frantically trying to decide what to do. What he wanted to do was stop staring at her like a virgin boy and casually turn his back to hide his own nakedness, but he couldn't think how to do that without appearing like an awkward child. And if there was anything he didn't want to look like in front of this incredible woman…

  "Then I really must apologize," she said in that velvet voice, now sounding completely sincere. "If you're not used to mixed bathing, then you must be horribly embarrassed. I should have waited until you were through and gone, instead of barging in and intruding. I'll wrap up in a towel and wait outside, and you can-"

  "No," Lorand interrupted, stopping her as she actually began to leave the bath. "I won't hear of you waiting for what I know you need so badly, not just to soothe my backward beliefs. It so happens I was just about through anyway, so please let me be the one to allow you your privacy. It's the least I can do for being so rude."

  Lorand had no idea where all the flowery words and phrases were coming from, he just felt great that they were. He'd read a lot of things over the years that his father had considered trash, but some of the heroes in those books had spoken like that. Maybe that was where it had come from, and if so he blessed his teachers for having made him read them. That was because Jovvi Hafford now smiled at him in a way that made her even more beautiful, and seeing that was worth anything he could imagine.

  "That must be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me," she replied, speaking what had to be a lie, but a very pleasant one. "I'll accept your offer if you insist, but it would be perfectly all right if you stayed. I won't mind in the least."

  "I'd mind staying even less than that, but I think it will be better if I go," Lorand forced himself to say, then turned casually to the steps. "I'll be out of your way in no time at all."

  Jovvi didn't respond to that, so he was able to concentrate on wrapping the towel around his middle as if it were totally unimportant. In point of fact the towel now hid the extreme interest he'd found in the woman, something she'd happily missed seeing while he was in the water. He would have blushed like a firebloom if she'd noticed, but now he was safe.

  Or relatively safe. He kept his back turned while he dried himself in record time, briefly wishing his magic could have helped the way Mardimil's magic had dried him. Jovvi certainly wasn't watching him, but that wasn't keeping him from imagining her gaze on him, rating what she saw. Rating what usually wasn't seen by anyone but other men. Damn it, stop thinking like that before you start to blush like a schoolgirl!

  Lorand couldn't remember dressing ever taking so long, and the fact that he couldn't hurry in any obvious way just made it worse. But he wasn't going to add to that by saying anything, so as soon as he was ready he gathered up his dirty clothes and headed for the door. When he reached it he thought he was in the clear, but Jovvi's voice came just as he began to push through.

  "It was nice to meet you, Lorand Coll," she said in a way that made his toes want to curl. "See you later at dinner."

  "I certainly hope so," he managed to get out, then finally escaped without looking back. But he'd wanted to look back, and after he reached his room he wondered if she would have minded. She hadn't seemed to mind when they were in the water, but it wouldn't have been the same with him fully dressed. No, he'd been right not to impose on her broad-mindedness, especially since he couldn't match it. Between the two of them, he was the overly-modest old maid.

  But maybe that was something he'd get over. Lorand sat down in one of the room's very comfortable chairs, closing his eyes in order to look at Jovvi again. If he was smart he'd work at getting over his modesty, but meanwhile there was dinner to think about and look forward to… Good thing he hadn't made more of a fool of himself by asking for directions to a cheap place to eat…

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Jovvi stood in the middle of the four-foot-wide walkway and trembled, feeling all those emotions of anger and outrage batter at her. She had to calm those feelings and bring them to a peaceful balance, but reaching to them a few at a time hadn't worked. When she released one group of them in order to soothe another, the first group went back to raging.

  She had to cross twenty-five feet of walkway to reach the door that would let her out of that place, but if she tried it with all those feelings storming around her, she'd be knocked off the walkway to her death.

  She was really terrified and desperate, but when her quaking mind began to think that she'd never been so frightened in her entire life, some tiny part inside her immediately denied that. Her father had been killed in a mining accident when she was nine, and her mother had been left with Jovvi and her two older brothers and the baby. Her mother, a very minor talent in Water magic was already taking in washing to help make ends meet, and the death of her husband was a blow she'd never recovered from.

  Some women fall apart when tragedy takes away the one source of strength and safety in their lives, but some grow hard and tough themselves as a replacement for what was gone. Jovvi's mother had b
een a pleasant and loving woman who scolded but smiled indulgently when her husband tried to spoil their children. That changed completely and without warning once her husband was dead, as though someone had taken her a great distance away without moving her body an inch. Parli, Jovvi's mother, turned as cold as an uncaring stranger, and never again looked at her children with love.

  But that didn't mean she stopped looking at them, usually in a darkly musing way. The silver from their father's death price wasn't much, but Parli had been paid for each of the children. Jovvi had stood behind the door to their shack's second room, listening to the stranger her mother had become muttering aloud as she counted and recounted the silver. No matter how carefully the amount was stretched, it couldn't possibly last more than four or five months. After that they would all starve if she didn't do something, so she would have to do something.

  For a very long time, Jovvi had no idea what that something would turn out to be. Living on almost nothing was very hard, and she and her brothers took to roaming around their part of town, searching the refuse of those who were wealthier. Almost everyone fell into that category, and occasionally they found things that were edible. When that happened she and her brothers shared the treasure, making no effort to bring any of it back to the stranger who pretended to look after them.

  Jovvi wasn't sure just when she noticed that the baby was gone, but Parli certainly didn't mention it. Nor did she seem particularly upset, so Jovvi thought she understood. The baby had been the weakest of them, and simply hadn't been able to survive living on almost nothing. The little girl had died, and now Parli was pleased because there was one less mouth to feed.

  But five months went by, then eight and more, and the meager amount of silver still hadn't run out. They all wore rags and usually went to bed hungry, but Parli still had silver to count at night when she thought the children were asleep.

  Then, about eleven months after her father's death, Jovvi's oldest brother disappeared. She and her last remaining brother searched everywhere for him, but no one had seen him nor did anyone see him again. It was supposed that he ran away from what could no longer be called a home, but he hadn't even said goodbye to her. They'd been so close… Had he been afraid she'd beg to go with him, and hadn't wanted her any more than their mother did?

  After that she and her other brother grew apart, so when the day came that he also disappeared without a word of goodbye, Jovvi wasn't surprised. It had become a matter of everyone for himself, so Jovvi was surprised when she returned to the shack and Parli smiled at her.

  "The best for last," she murmured, stroking Jovvi's cheek once before turning back to her cooking fire. "Come and eat, Jovvi, so your beauty will come more quickly to full bloom."

  Jovvi had had no idea what Parli was talking about, and grew even more confused when decent food was available more often than it had ever been before. She still wore rags, but at least she now had what to eat every once in a while. It wasn't until she was almost twelve years old that the man and his bully boys came to get her, the man her mother had sold her to. That was when she realized that the baby hadn't died and the boys hadn't run away … and even though she was a widow her mother was pregnant again…

  "Now, that was when I first understood the meaning of fear," Jovvi whispered to herself, gathering together the scraps of her courage. "But I survived it and the worse that followed, so I refuse to not survive this. There's supposed to be a way to win, and all I have to do is find it."

  All. That had been easy to say, but doing it would prove a good deal harder. The invisible wind of all those emotions buffeted her mercilessly and with ever-increasing strength, and simple determination would never get her across those twenty-five feet to escape and safety. She'd have to calm and balance the emotions, but the way she'd already tried hadn't worked. Maybe if she ran…

  Jovvi sighed, discarding the idea of running without any further consideration. She'd been a very fast runner during her childhood, and could have managed a good deal of speed even dressed the way she was. But the strength of the invisible wind would overcome even the fastest runner in the world, knocking her off balance and off the walkway. No, she needed to find a way to shield herself from the buffeting long enough to get across the walkway, but how could she do that?

  In frustration she tried to soothe the raging around her again, and actually managed to calm a group, hold it, and then calm a second group. When she tried to hold those two and reach for a third, the whole thing fell apart and she was back to where she'd been. And she staggered a little under the renewed load, which brought the sour taste of fear back to her mouth. She had to get out of there, or all her plans would die along with her.

  And that wasn't something she was prepared to let happen. She'd worked too long and hard to get where she was to let it all go to waste, not even if that gauntlet of unbalance stretched all the way back to Rincammon. There had to be a way to get past it-

  Jovvi stood very still as the idea came to her, making her wonder if she could do it after all. The key to getting out of there had to be going through the storm, since it wasn't possible to go around it. Going through meant balancing the forces raging at her to keep from being knocked over, but that didn't mean they all had to be balanced at once. She supposedly could have drawn in enough power to do that, but her sense of preservation told her she'd never be able to handle it. No, she had to hold and balance only two groups at a time, and that way she might make it.

  If she held one group on each side of her. If she released those two and took another two that would allow her to move forward. If she could stand fast until she had the second two groups balanced well enough to move between them. If, if, if…

  But there wasn't any other choice and Jovvi knew it. Her face perspired freely now, echoing the strain the rest of her body felt, but there was no getting around it. She had to try her idea and make it work, or else her lifetime of struggle would have been for nothing. She took a deep breath, ignoring how uneven it was, and plunged into the first of it.

  Balancing the first two groups of emotion on either side of her was fractionally harder than it had been the last time she'd tried, showing she was seriously beginning to tire. That meant she had no time to waste, so she moved to the far side of her small island of calm, dropped the two groups, and reached for two more. She nearly lost her balance before the second two groups were calmed, but she couldn't let herself notice that. She simply had to keep on with it, moving three or so feet ahead with every successful effort.

  By the time Jovvi was almost to the door, she was drenched in sweat and lightheaded. She reached to the last two groups automatically, but calming the railing storm made her clench her teeth and fists with the effort. She'd almost lost the previous groups too soon, and if she hadn't been so exhausted she would have been terrified. But there was no strength to spare for terror, only for doing what had to be done.

  The calm in the last two groups took forever to come to full balance, but once it did Jovvi was able to reach the door. It had a simple latch string coming from a hole drilled through it, but pulling the string didn't open the door. It lifted the latch so the door could be pushed open, and it took Jovvi a short while to figure that out. Once she did she stumbled through into what looked like a hall, finally able to let go of the power. If she'd had to hold it for even one more minute…

  Paying no attention to whether or not the hallway floor was clean, Jovvi used the wall opposite the door to help her sit down without falling down. The muscles in all four of her limbs had turned to quivering water, and she couldn't understand why she hadn't passed out. Fainting wasn't something she'd ever actually done, but passing out after a time of incredible harshness…

  "There, there, my dear, it's all over now," a male voice soothed, and suddenly there was an arm around her shoulders helping to support her. "Here, drink this and it will make you feel better."

  "This" was a cup of what looked like water, but when the man helped Jovvi to drink from it she
found it was better than water. It began to return a small measure of strength to her almost immediately, so she drained it to the very last drop.

  "Yes, you will feel more like yourself in just a few minutes," the man said as he took back the cup, giving Jovvi the chance to see that he was the man from behind the table in the outer room. "And now I can offer my congratulations for your accomplishment. Your first test is passed and behind you."

  "First and last test," Jovvi corrected, making no effort to be in the least pleasant or pleasing. After that ordeal she certainly looked a complete horror, so there would have been no point in trying to play the game. "My life is mine to live, not yours to threaten, so you will never get another chance to do the same again. As soon as I've recovered my breath I'm leaving, so you may summon a carriage for me at once."

  "A coach is already on its way," the man replied in something of a murmur, looking at her the way most men did when she stood fresh and lovely and smiling. "I'm afraid it won't be taking you where you think it will, though, because this is not the last of your involvement with us. A series of sessions have already been scheduled for you, and you will appear for them. The law is quite clear on the matter, and even a woman as breathtaking as you must obey it."

  The man's hand had begun to stroke her arm where it had previously rested, bringing Jovvi as close to outrage as her exhaustion allowed. She quickly shifted out of reach of the fool who believed he could enjoy her without paying her price, and stared at him coldly.