Cloud Warrior 05 - Forged in Fire

by Holmberg, D. K.

  Tan shot toward Amia and lifted her, spinning to check if she was injured.

  “I’m fine, Tan.” She looked down at Cora. “What was that?”

  He stared at the older woman. She had gray and thinning hair, now neatly trimmed. She wore simple clothes, a chestnut wool sweater over a light brown dress and looked nothing like a shaper, but of course, she had been in the separation chamber, her bond stolen from her by Par-shon, and was one of the lucky—or unlucky—to have survived. Tan had not managed to get her to say anything to him since he’d rescued her.

  “That,” he began, “is a warrior shaper.”

  2

  A Warrior

  Tan stared at Cora, unable to shake the surprise he felt at her attack. Not simply the fact that she’d attacked them, but that she had managed to do so using each of the elements. Other than Roine, Tan thought himself the only warrior shaper alive.

  Tan’s shaping left her lying on the street near the entrance to the university. No one else walked along the street, though that wasn’t altogether uncommon. With all the work the shapers were doing to repair it, most steered clear, unwilling to get too close. Since the attack on the city and the way the shapers had been controlled by the archivists, a general unease had developed about shapers, even those of the kingdoms. The unease spread throughout the city, leaving something of a quiet anxiety hanging over everyone living in Ethea, though with each day, that anxiety eased.

  “She’s the shaper? Are you certain?” Amia asked.

  There were no windows in the rebuilt walls for someone to have looked through while they shaped their attack and he sensed no one else. Then he scanned Cora, looking for signs of the runes that would mark her as one of the bonded shapers, but didn’t see anything.

  “There’s no one else. It had to be her.”

  A warrior shaper. Had she been from the kingdoms once? Roine should have known her, though. Even Tan’s mother should have known her, and she’d never made mention of a warrior named Cora.

  “There should have been one of our shapers with her,” he said.

  Amia closed her eyes and shaped quickly, then pointed down the street.

  They found Cora’s escort not far away. Wallyn was a skilled water shaper who reminded Tan in some ways of the Par-shon bonded water shaper Garza. Wallyn had a similar build, all wide in the belly with loose jowls that shook as he laughed, which was often. He preferred loose-fitting clothes, wearing what looked like a lady’s dress that flowed over him and was tied loosely around the waist with a length of thick rope. He was balding, left with only patches of hair on each side of his head.

  Amia touched his neck. “He’ll be fine. I don’t even know how injured he is,” she said.

  As she spoke, Wallyn shook his head. “Not injured, girl, just ashamed. An old woman managed to surprise me. There was a time when no one managed to surprise Wallyn. I can sense when they shape, but you’ve got to expect that of them first. I’ve gone soft, not thinking her capable of it.”

  Tan stretched out a hand and helped Wallyn to his feet. The water shaper pursed his lips in concentration and grunted, barely helping and forcing Tan to draw on a shaping of earth to give him increased strength. “I didn’t think she’s said much since she’s returned,” Tan said once he had Wallyn back on his feet.

  Wallyn shook his head, the thick folds of skin under his neck shaking as he did. “Nay, she had not. That’s why I was foolish enough to think her safe. Now where is she? Did she run off?”

  Tan pointed to Cora.

  “Is she dead?” Wallyn asked. The bland way he asked made it clear he wouldn’t have minded.

  “No, knocked out with a shaping of spirit.”

  Wallyn pursed his lips as he eyed Amia. “Spirit? Haven’t we seen enough shapings of spirit around here?”

  “I was the one to shape spirit,” Tan said, dragging Wallyn’s attention away from Amia. “And we’ve seen entirely the wrong types of spirit shapings. There are beneficial uses to spirit.”

  “Hmm. It seems to me that the kingdoms have survived for hundreds of years without warriors who can shape spirit. It does make you wonder whether it is even necessary. Perhaps the Great Mother thought to draw it away from our shapers. She would know the dangers of spirit.”

  Tan decided against getting into an argument with Wallyn. There were too many like him who feared spirit, feared the way it could be used, even though Tan had begun to suspect that many shapers could use a form of it. In time, Roine could be taught to weave the elements together in such a way that he could shape spirit. In some ways, it was different than a true shaping of spirit, but it was through the shaping of spirit in that way that Tan had learned to reach true spirit.

  Cora started to stir, so Tan crouched next to her. She flickered her eyes open, staring at him for a moment, and then began thrashing.

  Tan looked up at Wallyn. “Can you help with this?”

  The massive water shaper grunted and lowered his sizable heft to the ground, taking the time to splay his dress out around him so that it wouldn’t get dirtied. His shaping built from deep within and washed out from him slowly, first in a trickle, then building to a steadier wave that spread over the woman. She continued shaking uncontrollably.

  Tan had seen something like it before, only he hadn’t expected to see it here, or from Cora. As far as he had known, she was already separated from her bonded elemental. That had been the reason she was confined in Par-shon.

  Wallyn’s shaping eased and he pushed himself up, lifting the edges of his dress as he did. He wiped his hands together. “There is nothing I can do. I have not seen anything like this before.”

  Tan shot him an annoyed look and touched Cora on the wrist. He might not have the same skill with healing as the water shaper, but there were things that he could do.

  He focused first on his breathing and then stretched out toward the nymid that worked through the bedrock of the city. The great water elemental infused the stone, mingling with golud deep beneath the city where the dampness and moisture still clung, down where Tan had chosen to hide the draasin.

  Nymid. Help me heal this woman.

  The calling took strength, but Tan had grown much stronger since first reaching for the elemental all those months before. Without thinking about it, he mixed the request with a shaping of water and spirit, strengthening it.

  There was a soft fluttering against his senses as the nymid came to the surface. He Who is Tan. She is damaged. There is no healing.

  Why?

  She was, the nymid seemed to search for a word that Tan would understand, connected to that which is no more.

  Yes. She was bonded. Her elemental was severed from her.

  The ground grew damp as the nymid surfaced, leaving a thin green sheen on the rock. It bubbled up and washed over Cora, leaving her skin with a faint hint of green as well. The convulsing eased but did not stop altogether.

  Was this my fault? Tan asked. Did the shaping of spirit cause this?

  Not cause, He Who is Tan. She remembers. Her body rejects. There is no healing from water.

  Tan rocked back on his heels, trying to come up with some way to help Cora. Water might not be able to heal, but when he’d attempted to save his mother, he had wondered what role spirit might play. Tan focused on the connection to the nymid, used what he sensed from the elemental to help him understand Cora’s injuries. There, faintly, was the severed connection. It was weak and pulsing, different than it had been with Zephra. With her, he had felt the jagged edge where the wind elemental should have been. With Cora, what remained was blunted. He could not reattach it, only seal it off to prevent it from harming her further.

  Using spirit, he placed a shaping over her mind, wrapping the blunted end of the bond in spirit and pulling it back, sealing it once more within her mind. Tan couldn’t tell what the bond had been to and couldn’t repair what had been lost, but it didn’t matter for what he intended to do.

  At least the convulsing eased. She no longer
twitched, or even kicked; instead, she simply lay on the ground, the thin green film atop her a reminder that the nymid had helped.

  “What did you do?” Wallyn asked. “There was water, but too much for a warrior.”

  Tan glared at him, annoyance at how easily Wallyn had given up surging through him. “Do you speak to the nymid?”

  Wallyn frowned. “Why, no. The nymid are nothing more than a lesser—”

  Tan raised a hand to cut him off. “For someone who speaks to none of the elementals, you really think you should be making claims of one’s relative strength compared to another?”

  Wallyn huffed, glaring at Cora. “She will live now?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve done what I can. The nymid helped.”

  “Good. Then you may stay with her.” With that, Wallyn turned and started back down the street, moving with more grace than a man his size ought to manage.

  “You should really be gentler with them,” Amia suggested. “They have suffered through so many changes already.”

  “We’ve all been through change,” Tan said, touching Cora’s head and smoothing the hair back from her face. “Why should Wallyn be any different?”

  “He wasn’t the one who tried to separate you from them,” Amia said softly.

  Tan tensed. Of course Amia would know what he was feeling. It wasn’t only that Wallyn had reminded him of Garza by his size, but his mannerisms had evoked memories as well. Water shapers should be interested in healing, but Garza had thrown him in the testing room, had taken him to the place of separation without so much as an apology. When Wallyn hadn’t shown interest—real interest—in helping Cora, it brought those memories back.

  Tan lifted Cora. She was light and frail from years spent as a Par-shon prisoner, kept alive for reasons only the Great Mother could fathom, that had stripped her of any muscle. When Tan had first found her, he hadn’t even been sure she still lived. Vel had been the only one able to speak, and without his help, they might not have escaped Par-shon.

  The third shaper they’d rescued was in nearly the same shape as Cora. Since returning to Ethea, the healers had shaven his beard off because it had been far too matted to untangle and his hair shorn short, but his eyes retained that lost look. At least with Cora, they had learned her name. With the other man, they didn’t even have that. He remained silent, able to do nothing more than eat and breathe.

  “Where should we take her?” Tan asked.

  Amia touched the woman’s face, shaping her softly. “She’ll need more help than we can give her, but we need time to get her that help.” She looked up at him, her blue eyes catching the light of the fading sun. “There is something off with her spirit. It’s complex, more than I can do anything to help. Maybe in time…”

  Tan sighed. “They won’t give her the time she needs if she attacks again.” If she did, others would consider her too dangerous. He didn’t know what would happen to her then. Probably not the same thing as what had happened with the lisincend, but he wouldn’t put it past the other shapers to banish her from the kingdoms.

  “She has been through so much. There aren’t many who understand what it was like.”

  “My mother understands,” Tan said. She’d lost her bond once and nearly had it stolen from her a second time. “We need to be better than them. Better than those who would steal a bond that should be freely given. We will need to free the elemental from the bonds forced on them.”

  Cora opened her eyes and stared blankly at him. Tan waited, ready for another attack should it come, but she didn’t do anything else.

  “We will have to do much more than simply free them from the bonds.”

  Tan turned to see Roine hovering on a shaping of wind. He held it easily, nearly as skilled with wind as Zephra, but then, he’d been a wind shaper before learning he was a Cloud Warrior.

  How had Roine found them so quickly? “Wallyn sent you?” he asked.

  Roine shrugged. “He summoned,” he said, holding out the summoning coin. “In all the years I have known him, he has never shaped a request like that.” Roine dropped to the ground and glanced over his shoulder. “He said she was hurt.”

  Tan suspected Wallyn had said more than that, but Roine had known Tan the longest of anyone in Ethea, other than Amia. Roine had been with him through almost everything. He helped grab Cora and they made their way through the yard and stopped outside the shaper’s circle.

  “We returned. She attacked.”

  Roine waited, as if expecting more. “What kind of attack?”

  “Fire first, then earth and wind.”

  Roine turned to study Cora. “There were no warriors by her name,” he said. “Not of the kingdoms.”

  That last was probably the most important, Tan realized. If Cora wasn’t from the kingdoms, they needed to learn where Par-shon had found her. The kingdoms would need allies in the coming months, ideally shapers who understood what was at risk were Par-shon to advance beyond the sea, to stretch their reach into Ethea and beyond.

  “She needs time and healing that we can’t provide,” Tan said.

  “Wallyn is skilled, Tannen. You need to give him the chance to—”

  “She needs a different type of shaping than what Wallyn can provide. This is damage to more than her body. This is spirit,” Tan said. He looked over at Amia, who shook her head softly, already knowing what he suggested.

  “We can’t trust her,” she said.

  “It’s not a question of trusting her. There is much she can teach.”

  Roine looked from Tan to Amia, nodding as he began to understand what Tan intended. “The First Mother has offered her aid before.”

  “And she shaped an entire people, forcing them to serve Incendin!”

  Amia didn’t say it, but for all they knew, Cora had been one of those Doma shapers that the First Mother had shaped, using the ability given to her by the Great Mother to serve the darkness in Incendin.

  Tan slipped his arm around Amia and pulled her toward him. “You saw what we faced in Par-shon. We will need to learn all that we can if we are to survive.” And even that might not be enough, not against the Utu Tonah. “You don’t have to like her to learn from her.”

  “I don’t know if I can do it, Tan. What you suggest, after what she’s done—”

  “Cora is not the only one who will need you,” he said.

  Using what he saw from Asboel, he sent the image of the Aeta caravan through the shaped connection they shared, reminding her of the scattered Aeta, now without a leader. Amia tensed but then sighed.

  “That was only one caravan. How many families remain? How many search for someone to bring the People back together?”

  “I’m not that person,” Amia said. “Once I thought I could be, but she took that from me. She took that from the People.”

  Tan hugged her, not knowing what else to say. Amia had been broken more than any of them. Most of the time, she managed to stay strong, but she did it by burying the pain she felt deep within her. Only Tan still felt it, aware that it was there, but hidden. If she were to survive what was to come, she would need to work through that pain. The first step, he knew, was coming to grips with what the First Mother had done. There might never be forgiveness—Tan didn’t think she deserved forgiveness—but there could be healing.

  “I will help,” he offered. “Together. We can learn together.”

  She didn’t answer.

  Tan didn’t need her to in order to know what she thought. “Can you let me work with Cora, not the other shapers?” he asked Roine.

  Roine tipped his head. “Tannen—”

  “No. I saw the way Wallyn treated her. There was no real interest in healing her. Oh, he tried, but he gave up too easily. He doesn’t understand what she went through. No one can really understand unless they shared that experience of having the bond torn from you.” Tan had only known that pain for a brief period of time, barely enough to gain a true appreciation, nothing like what Cora or Vel had gone through at
the hands of the Par-shon shapers. But he knew how he had felt when he sensed Asboel being ripped from him. He knew how he would feel were Amia’s bond taken from him. It was different, but no less a connection.

  “You don’t understand,” Roine said with a smile. “What I was trying to say is that you don’t have to ask. You’re a warrior now, Tannen. You’ve proven it time and again to me, but now the others see it, too. So trust me when I say that you don’t have to ask. You have every right to be involved.”

  Tan glanced down at Cora. He might be a warrior, and he might have a shaping ability that had been lost for centuries, the ability to reach spirit, to shape spirit, and bind that with the other elements, but he still felt so unprepared. With everything that had happened to him, he felt as ignorant as he had felt the first time he realized that Roine could shape and what that meant. But he was determined to learn. He needed to learn, to understand everything the Great Mother had given him.

  “There’s a caravan of Aeta coming toward the city,” Tan said. “Can we welcome them?”

  Roine looked over at Amia, but she kept her eyes down. Tan sensed the unease she felt at the impending questions. In time, he hoped that would subside. She deserved to have a connection to her people. And he hadn’t shared with Roine, but they might need the Aeta. If there were spirit shapers among them, such ability might be needed in the times ahead. Not to shape others’ minds, but spirit had been important in removing the forced bonds from the elementals.

  “They will be welcomed,” Roine answered. “You went searching again?”

  “With the draasin,” he said.

  Roine flickered his eyes toward the sky, as if expecting to see it circling. “There is still too much fear around here regarding the draasin. You have been wise to keep them from the city.” He paused and looked down. “They are safe?”

  Tan hated that he had to keep what he was doing from Roine. Likely, he would understand. He might even agree with Tan’s actions. “They are safe.”

  There was a nagging question in the back of his mind, the concern he felt around the draasin, especially knowing the Utu Tonah’s desire to bond to one of them: How long could he keep them safe?