by Dawn Cook
The push of the wind against the boughs was soothing, and she smiled and shut her eyes again. It reminded her of when she used to climb the pines behind the house for a better view of the western hills. She had spent almost an entire fall up in those trees: scraping her palms, getting sap in her hair—watching for Papa.
Alissa slumped in an unhappy memory, blanking her mind of everything, unwilling to think about her papa right now. She and her mother had come to the realization years ago he must have died, but to know it, to live it, made the hurt as fresh and new as that winter night when a sobbing, frightened child figured out for herself that Papa wasn’t coming home this time.
“Nothing,” Alissa whispered, willing all thoughts from her with a slow, exhaled breath. “Empty.” There was peace to be found in the lack of thought. “Blackness.” She sank deep into herself, finding that practiced, still-point-of-absence that her mother taught Alissa to be when she was about to lose her temper. Idly, Alissa noticed a thin whisper of a glow. It skirted the edges of her mind’s eye, not really there, and she smiled at her fantasy, eagerly grasping at anything that wasn’t a reminder of her papa.
She let it grow. It blossomed from a smudge, to a smear, until with a jolt she realized it was really there! Sunk deep in her unconscious between her thoughts and reality was a luminescent silvery-golden sphere. Her eyes flew open, and it was gone.
Alissa’s breath caught and her heart pounded. It wasn’t that glorious, spreading net she had glimpsed this morning. This was something different!
Realizing how this mental exploration worked, she again closed her eyes and unfocused her concentration. The entire process was similar to finding a dim star on a dark night. Look at the star directly and it can’t be seen, but by shifting her focus a bit, she might spot it out of the corner of her eye. It took some effort, but soon she found the thin glow again. The light came from a thick tangle of lines weaving among themselves to form a hollow ball. It was the shell that was giving off the light. What, by her papa’s ashes, was it, and why hadn’t she seen it before?
By her papa’s ashes? Alissa thought. Ashes? Or dust? She had never seen the sphere until her mother gave her that bag of dust. The Navigator knew she had spent enough time day-dreaming before now to have seen it had it existed. The sphere and the bag of dust had to be one and the same.
It made perfect sense. Her papa wouldn’t give her a smelly little bag of dust if it wasn’t important.
Curious, Alissa took a pinpoint of thought and focused it upon the glowing sphere. In a trice she lost the entire thing: the sphere, the enclosing lines, even the vague impression of power at rest, were all gone. She bit back a sigh of annoyance and started over. It took a moment, but once she relaxed, the sphere came swimming into existence. With a small shove, she pushed her focus into it.
It was the snick of a key, a jolt of connection, as satisfying and certain as a butterfly bumping into her. Alissa gasped, wildly clamping down on an upwelling excitement. A strand of shimmering silk had shot from the sphere, racing through her thoughts in a graceful S-wave to slam to a startling stop.
Refusing to open her eyes, she stared, watching the glowing stuff pool up, spreading out like cracks in new ice. Her head began to throb, and with some surprise she recognized her headache from this morning. Now she was on familiar ground, and she mentally opened the path to release the force as Useless had. The ribbon of force, or thought perhaps, flowed back to the sphere in an elegant reflection of itself before disappearing back inside. A twisted, crossed loop flowed icily through her mind, forging a connection between her consciousness and the sphere.
“Oh!” she exclaimed in delight, and the grip on her focused impassivity shattered. She was back before the fire with a bowl of blueberries in her hands.
“If you’re going to horde the food,” came Strell’s wry voice, “you should at least eat it.”
Shocked, Alissa looked up, finding Strell sitting unnervingly close to her, eating a handful of berries. “How long have you been there?” she blurted, refusing to give in to her urge and shift herself away from him.
“Not long,” he said slyly.
“I don’t remember you sitting down.”
“Didn’t think you would.” He grinned as if he knew something she didn’t. “Well,” he drawled, reaching over to take a berry from her bowl, “how did it go?”
“What?” she asked.
“How did it go?” he repeated. “Did you find out how to control your blackouts?” Smirking, he took another berry.
“Stop that!” she shouted, pulling the bowl close.
Talon opened her wings and shifted on the stack of firewood. Alissa didn’t recall her return either. Her lips pursed in confusion, and Strell had the audacity to smile. He watched in evident delight as her scowl turned into a glare, and then he began to chuckle. “I’m not laughing at you,” he asserted between guffaws.
“Would you be so kind,” Alissa said tightly, “as to inform me how you got back into camp without my knowledge?”
Beaming, he said, “I walked.”
Alissa made as if to throw the berries at him, and he raised his arms in mock fright. She never would, of course. She would eat them. Sometime. In the very near future. She hoped.
“Oh, all right,” Strell said, relenting. A trace of worry crossed him. “I thought you had blacked out, but you were sitting up and Useless didn’t—uh.” He tried to disguise his shudder by stretching his shoulders. “You didn’t answer me. I figured you were trying something.”
Somewhat relieved, Alissa reached into her bowl to find there were only three berries left. He had eaten them all. She stiffly extended the bowl. “Want the rest?”
“Yes,” he grunted, and her eyes widened as he actually leaned over and took them.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” she said under her breath. Her concentration must have been so deep that she lost sight of what was going on around her. She didn’t like that. Not at all.
“So . . .” Strell twisted to reach Alissa’s old floppy hat, and he handed it to her. It was filled with freshly picked blueberries. “What had your attention so tight that I could snitch food from you?”
Alissa’s ire melted to a confusing mix of pleased embarrassment, and she fought to keep from blushing as she dumped half the berries into her bowl and passed the rest back. “I’m not sure what I did,” she admitted. “You might say I made a link between something and nothing and back again. It surprised me. I lost it.”
“Something and nothing, eh?” he teased, popping a berry in his mouth. “Think you could do it again?”
“What, now?”
“Yes. Now.”
“Not if you’re going to watch.” Ashes, she thought, how embarrassing!
“Tell you what. I’ll just go over there”—he pointed to his customary side of the fire—“and completely ignore you.” He grinned, apparently finding something amusing in the idea.
Alissa frowned, not sure she could concentrate if she thought he might be watching.
“Oh, go ahead,” he cajoled, taking the hat with the berries and shifting himself. “Unless you really want to wait until I’m asleep to try again?” Whistling a child’s tune about three mice and their ill-fated excursion into a kitchen, he reached into his inner coat pocket and took out his pipe. True to his word, he ignored her and began to polish it.
She eyed him suspiciously, but it wasn’t until he began to play a lullaby that she took a slow breath and closed her eyes, trusting him to keep his word. It was easier this time, and Alissa managed to retain the barest perception of camp as the sphere came swimming to the forefront of her thoughts. The individual ribbons of gold, yellow, and white that gave it shape were so intense, it was almost painful. Even more fascinating was that she couldn’t focus upon the gaps between the strands. Her attention seemed to slide away.
But she could slip a thought between them, and as she listened to Strell’s music, she did. Again the ribbon of force curved through her thou
ghts. The outgoing channel was open before the incoming flow had a chance to build and give her a headache. It was with great satisfaction that Alissa felt the force return smoothly back to where it had originated, making a crossed loop.
Now she was ready to try something new, but she had no idea where to start. Carefully she withdrew part of her attention from the glittering loop to focus back on her surroundings. Strell’s playing and the hiss of the fire became obvious. She could almost feel the thick wool beneath her legs and the flickering, come-and-go warmth of the fire. Confident everything was as it should be, she set her attention back to the loop, hunting for that chaotic maze of lines she’d seen that morning.
As her focus centered into a relaxed still-point, the thin spiderweb of tracings she recalled drifted into existence. The bright glow of the sphere and crossed loop had distracted her from seeing it before. Being empty of anything, the thin lines were nearly impossible to see. They were a blue so dark as to be unseen against the absolute blackness of her mind, and if not for the thin gold tracing they were shot through with, she wouldn’t be able to follow them. Sprawling in every conceivable way, they seemed to be solid from only one direction. The tracings touched one another and fragmented like the veins in a leaf, weaving a fantastic pattern in all directions with more junctures than there were stars.
The network was dark and cold, easily overshadowed by the bright glow from the crossed loop and sphere. Alissa studied it, trying to get a better sense of what under the Navigator’s Hounds it was for. She was sure she could do something by directing the loop of force through the pathways, but which route did what? There were too many possibilities.
Begin with what you know, Lissy, her papa would say, so with a mental shrug, she found the lines she used to eliminate her headache. She placed a drop of awareness there as a permanent dike to prevent that agony of a headache should she black out again. Terribly pleased, she smiled.
Her contentment was distressingly short-lived.
Waves of anger and surprise broke over her, shocking in their intimacy. They weren’t her emotions, and suddenly frightened, she mended the opening she had created in the sphere. Her twisted loop emptied and grew dark in an unheard hiss. Alissa willed her consciousness back to the fire, becoming frantic when she found she couldn’t. Someone was holding her in the nether place between her thoughts and reality, and that someone wasn’t happy.
Something in her broke then. Anger, hot and potent, filled her. Not the anger of fear or frustration, but of being wronged and knowing there wasn’t the slightest consideration she was aware of it. It was Useless. He shouldn’t be here. He wouldn’t stay. She would get him out!
Revulsion joined her anger, and as if in response, the glow about the sphere intensified. With a sudden, silent explosion, a wave of force shot from the sphere in a flat pulse, looking like a ripple spreading out from a thrown pebble. There was an unheard yelp of surprise and hurt.
“Bone and Ash!” she felt Useless say in her thoughts as he ducked behind a hastily constructed bubble of thought. “Where the Wolves did that . . . Meson, you fool. You gave her that source? She’s going to kill herself.”
Pleasure joined Alissa’s anger, silky-smooth and seductive. She was not without recourse. She encouraged a second pulse, feeding her anger with the justification that he had no right to be here. This was hers and hers alone.
A second pulse shot out, seemingly more intense, more controlled. Again, the presence hid. “Ashes,” she heard him gasp. “She’s nearly incorporated the cursed thing. What the Wolves did Meson do, tie it over her cradle?”
There was a tug on her awareness, as if someone yanked her attention in another direction. Immediately a thick blanket of glowing gold obscured the sphere. Alissa felt herself stiffen as she realized Useless was putting a barrier between her and her sphere.
“Hey!” she shrieked into her thoughts. “What are you doing?”
“I can . . . hear you,” Useless stammered into her thoughts. Shock poured from him, so thick, her anger turned sluggish, overwhelmed by his emotion. “Can you hear me?”
“Of course I can hear you,” Allisa thought hotly.
“Do you think I’m an idiot?”
Now confusion joined the thick slurry of their emotions. “No, of course not.” He seemed so dazed, he had to turn to conversation as familiar ground. “I just . . . No Keeper, much less a latent one, has ever heard me in this fashion before.”
“Get out,” Alissa thought coldly, holding her temper just barely.
“Now, see here . . .” he said placatingly.
Furious beyond reason, her anger focused, sending out another pulse. It slammed into the barrier Useless had placed about her sphere, her outrage beating its strength ineffectively out on the golden shield. As if in response, a wave of vertigo shook her to her core, and she fought to keep her awareness intact. The dizziness ebbed, leaving only a frenzied outrage. He had walled her off from her sphere. How dare he!
Alissa flung a quick thought at his barrier to break it. “No!” she shrieked as icy hot flames shot from the shield to engulf her thoughts. It was the same pain that had destroyed her papa’s mind, and she panicked. But the fire ebbed to nothing before the hurt became permanent. It was a warning, nothing more. She was left huddling within herself. Shock, hurt, and pain swirled through her, but Useless’s satisfied huff burned them away like dross, leaving a bright and shiny rage. “I said, ‘get out,’ ” Alissa thought at him.
“Child . . .” he said softly, but the emotion that flowed from him was pity, making her all the more angry.
“Get out!”
“Alissa, calm down,” he cajoled. “I’ve sealed off your source with a ward. Nothing can get in or out, and if you don’t stop trying to fry me, you’re going to burn your tracings to ash. I have every right to deny you access to your source until you know what you’re doing. It was an accident that you possess one, and an even bigger misfortune you’re cognizant of it.”
“Get out!” There was a faint glow about her tracings. It grew, fed from her own spirit, taken from somewhere within, from her own strength, not the sphere’s. In an instant, it filled her tracings. A pulse of force exploded in all directions. It lacked the focus the first had, but it was just as effective. Perhaps more so.
The resounding boom of silent thought left Useless shaken. “Wolves, Alissa. Just listen for a moment.”
“Get out!” Another blistering hot thought shook him. Alissa’s tracings were building up again, and she knew Useless saw it as well; he immediately seemed to fade.
“Fine,” he seemed to snap. “I’ll leave. But listen to your slippery songsmith and go home. Give Bailic another fifteen years to choke out his last breath. Your instruction must wait until things are settled.” He hesitated. “Don’t bother coming back if you can’t control yourself.”
“Fifteen years!” she cried, then, “More settled! Don’t you mean until someone gets you out of your cell?” But he hadn’t heard. He was halfway gone, taking his emotions of anger, surprise, annoyance, and irritation with him. Alissa’s own emotions seemed weak and paltry by themselves. But there was something else he took with him, and she frowned as she realized it was amusement.
“Ashes. That went well,” she seemed to hear him chuckle. “How did she figure that out?”
Quickly Alissa willed herself back to the fire and Strell. Opening her eyes, she blinked in confusion. First she thought the camp had been rearranged, but then realized she was standing on Strell’s blankets, her finger pointing at him rather rudely. Talon was nowhere to be seen.
Strell was standing stiffly up against the tree she had been against. He was gripping his pipe with a white-knuckled strength. Alissa’s berries had spilled in a cascade of blue upon the brown of her blanket, and the memory of her tracings seemed to put ribbons of gold connecting them until she shook off the last of her mental imagery. “Alissa?” Strell said hesitantly.
“Well, yes,” she said, dropping her arm and wonde
ring how she had gotten over there.
Immediately he relaxed. “You—uh—passed out,” he said, his eyes dark with emotion, but he wasn’t angry at her. “Again.”
There was an awkward silence as they exchanged places, each ignoring that something had occurred that Alissa wasn’t aware of. Silently she put the berries back into her bowl. Her fury at Useless had been frightening. She had never wanted to hurt anyone before. Now that it was over, it was embarrassing. “How long was I out?” she asked softly.
“A moment or two, but it seemed like forever.”
Alissa glanced uneasily across the fire to where Strell sat, unusually still. His hands were empty, and that in itself was strange. Generally he was oiling this, cleaning that, or mending something else. Sitting there, he looked angry and frustrated.
She set her bowl down and sighed. “Useless talked to you?”
Strell nodded, his gaze firmly on the night. “If you want to call it that.”
“He was angry?” she guessed.
He nodded again.
“Why? It’s not your fault I won’t go home.”
Strell made a pile of needles with the toe of his boot. “Let’s just say I’m beginning to feel like an unwelcome suitor from a poor family.” He squashed his hill flat and looked up. “I know you won’t, but please, won’t you go the coast? Your mother wouldn’t have sent you if she had known what happened.”
Alissa bit her lip and dropped her eyes, and she heard Strell sigh. The rest of the evening was spent in silence, each on their own side of the fire doing nothing, lost in their respective thoughts they were reluctant to share. Talon returned as Alissa settled herself for sleep, startling both her and Strell with her abrupt entrance. Strell had told her that Talon didn’t like Useless. Apparently she had left when he showed up. Now that she felt safe again, the small bird had returned. Alissa wished she could lose her apprehensions so easily.
Strell had long since collapsed on his bed, just staring up at the sky. Alissa, too, found sleep elusive. Slowly the mist deepened, and as she was drifting off, she turned to him and murmured, “It’s not magic, Strell.”