Owlsight v(dt-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  Experimentally, he moved to one of the little runnels collecting the flow - nowhere near large enough to be called a ley-line - and sensed the pressure increase when he interposed himself in the flow.

  “It feels good, doesn’t it?” Firefrost said with satisfaction. “I always think it feels like bathing in sun-warmed silk.”

  He nodded absently; it both felt and looked good, a warm amber glow the exact color of the light near sunset on a cloudless summer evening, and a sensation of being slowly revitalized.

  “If you go somewhere that the energies are distorted or marred, you’ll feel that as well,” Firefrost told him. “It will make you sick, and you’ll learn to tell what’s wrong by how it affects you. Right now you need most to learn to snap in and out of Mage-Sight and Mage-Sense accurately and infallibly, so that if you ever do come across such a place, it won’t entrap you. Now that you have the trick of Seeing this level, your assignment will be to practice exactly that until I think you’re ready for the next step.”

  “Can the good magic entrap you, too, with not wanting to leave that feeling?” he asked.

  “Not if you’re mentally healthy - no more than you’re entrapped at the feast table,” she replied. “Once you’re ‘full,’ you’ll feel willing to leave.”

  The mage did - something. Darian couldn’t quite tell what it was, but it felt a little like a static spark arcing from the mage to himself, more of a shock than pain, but enough to bring him back to the ordinary world with a startled gasp.

  “This is why you need a Healing Adept to teach you properly,” Firefrost said, still sitting serenely where she’d been all along, cross-legged in the shade at the edge of the meadow where he and Kel had picnicked. “Starfall is a fine mage, experienced and full of wisdom, but he cannot see and sense the earth-energies in the way a Healer-Mage can, he cannot move about in the realm of pure energy the way we can, so he could not teach you how to access them. I am a Healer-Mage, but I can only take you so far - you have the potential to become a Healing Adept, and your teacher should also be at that level, if you are going to reach that potential.”

  Darian nodded; he also sat where he had been all along; his “movement” in the overworld of energies had all been with something other than his physical body. “I think I know why you brought me here, too,” he said shrewdly. “Even though most of the mages have been teaching me in the safety of the Vale, if I’d made the breakthrough there, I’d probably have been blinded.”

  Firefrost beamed at him, her young-old face suddenly wreathed in the wrinkles of her proper age - well over seventy. Smile-lines, mostly; Firefrost was a very cheerful person. “Very good! Yes, and I advise you to practice and learn to control this type of Sight in a safe place outside the Vale until you’ve gotten it well in hand. So many ley-lines come into the Heartstone in the Vale that you would be blinded if you can’t dim things down for yourself. And you’d have a headache for a week that would make you wish you were dead!”

  Darian was still conscious of that faint pressure of energy; he realized that he always had been, he just hadn’t known what to call it. “So this is why some places in Valdemar made me sick until we cleaned them up!” he said wonderingly. “That’s why Snowfire and Starfall would watch me so closely - they couldn’t feel where things had gone wrong, and they used me to find the places for them!”

  Firefrost nodded, and her approval warmed him clear through. “And you understand why they had to do that, don’t you? Or now are you feeling misused?”

  That was the last thing on his mind. He shrugged. “They didn’t have much choice, did they? I mean, they did have a kind of choice, they could have used dowsing or some other way to find the bad places, but it was so much quicker to use me - and besides that, it didn’t cost them anything in magical energies of their own. They wouldn’t have risked me if they didn’t think that we could all do what we did without any harm to me.”

  He couldn’t resent being “used”; not after the way he’d been vehemently angry with them over using up energies they could ill afford in order to accomplish things that he had been able to do at far less expense. He’d essentially offered himself for whatever need they had at that point, so there was no reason to resent the fact that they’d taken him up on the offer!

  “This - this form of the Gift that you have - is very similar to the Earth-Sense of some monarchs,” Firefrost went on in her low, age-roughened voice. “They can’t actually see the energies most of the time - not unless they are also mages - but they feel them. They can also feel what is wrong with the energies of their land at a distance, which can be very useful. The monarchs of Rethwellan have it, the highest of the Priests of Vkandis have it, the Son of the Sun Solaris has it, and the new King of Hardorn has it. In the King of Hardorn’s case, though, it was - imposed on him. With his consent - though I sometimes think he didn’t know what he was consenting to.” She raised an ironic eyebrow. “There is an ancient earth-religion sect of that land that still retains the full knowledge of the Earth-Taking ceremony, and has managed to give Earth-Sense to every monarch of Hardorn except the late and unlamented Ancar.”

  “Will I be able - Scratch that. I will be able to do what Starfall did about cleaning places up, but faster and more easily, won’t I.” He made it a statement, but was pleased to see Firefrost nod. “It’ll be like Healing for a Healer; instead of having to figure out what’s gone wrong, I’ll already know by how it affects me, and because of that I’ll know how to fix what’s wrong and get it right the first time, instead of fumbling around using trial and error.”

  “It will be quite natural to you - as will some other things, such as moving and acting in the overworld of mage-energies, once you’ve gotten the proper instructor. And you will be able to accomplish things I can only watch and admire, if you ever have access to enough energy.” Firefrost sighed. “Still, we all have our abilities, and - ”

  “And anyone who can reverse the effects of frostbite has no reason to feel self-conscious,” he replied, daring to interrupt her. “Any Healer can save what there is left of the damaged tissue, and so could most mages - but anyone who can restore and rebuild all the damage that has already occurred has nothing to be ashamed of!”

  That was how Firefrost had gotten her use name at the age of fourteen, when she was newly come into her abilities. While she was scouting the boundaries of k’Vala, a blizzard too huge to be steered away had swept across the forest and everyone who could was out scouting for those who might have been caught in it. She had been the only person anything like a Healer to come upon a family of tervardi taken by surprise by the storm. She had not only saved them from freezing, but had almost completely reversed the effects of the profoundly crippling frostbite (or “firefrost” in the Hawkbrother tongue) that they had suffered. By the time the help she had called for arrived, most of the damage was Healed, and no one suffered anything worse than a little superficial scarring at the extremities.

  “I sometimes suspect that the only reason I could was that I didn’t know I couldn’t,” his teacher said, only half in jest. “Still. . .”

  “Still, a little magic used with precision and at precisely the right time is better than a great deal of magic used sloppily and clumsily, too late or too early,” he said firmly. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that!”

  “Very well! The student rightly rebukes the teacher!” Firefrost laughed, throwing up her hands as if to fend off a blow. “Now, I would like to see if the student can evoke his Mage-Sight in the realm of the overwork without the coaching of his teacher!”

  “I hear and obey,” he said, bowing a little at the waist, and sent his mind down that peculiar “twist” that Firefrost had shown him.

  Once again, the world around him was overlaid with the overworld of energies. This time he had a kind of double vision, with the real world showing through the flowing energy-fields, and he decided to see if he could narrow his focus -

  Even as he thought that, in a dizzyi
ng rush that “felt” exactly as if he were diving off a cliff into the river, he found himself contemplating the life-forces of a single blade of grass. Except that he was far, far “smaller” in perception than that blade of grass!

  Oh. My. The slender stem loomed “over” him like one of the great trees of the Vale. As he gazed “upward,” his mouth falling open, he tried to take in the immense complexity of this seemingly insignificant bit of flora, and failed.

  I think my brain is overflowing! He tried to break free of the fascination and couldn’t - tried again and still couldn’t - and gave a wordless cry for help to his teacher.

  With another of those startling shocks, he found himself looking only at the real world again, from his proper perspective, and sighed with relief.

  “Next time, ask before you do something like that,” Firefrost told him sternly, crossing her arms over her chest, and giving him a harsh glare. “That was not what I asked you to do, was it?”

  “I didn’t know I was doing it until I’d done it,” he admitted shakily.

  She shook her head, the fine silver hair escaping from its braids with the movement and floating in fly-away strands about her face. “Now you see why you need a Healing Adept to teach you. It’s entirely possible that you could get yourself into something that I can’t get you out of! In the future, tell me what you think you want to do before you’re in the overworld, all right? With someone of your potential, a wish often becomes fact before you have the least idea what’s going on.”

  He felt very tired, all at once, and certainly he and Firefrost had put in more than enough work for one day. It had taken all afternoon before he’d learned that twist that brought him into the overworld. “Can we stop now?” he asked meekly. “I’m getting worn out.”

  Firefrost lost her stern glare and smiled ruefully. “And so you should be - and it’s my fault for letting you go back in when I knew you would be getting tired. Just run through those primary exercises I showed you, and we’ll go back to the Vale.”

  Now that he knew what they were for, the “primary exercises” in energy manipulation were far easier than they’d been earlier this afternoon, and he ran through them accurately, if not quickly. For the last one, he guided energy from the tree he sat beneath to a particular runnel rather than allowing it to flow into several as it would normally have done, and this time nothing escaped his “herding.”

  “Clean,” Firefrost approved. “Very clean. I couldn’t have done it better. Let’s get ourselves back home, shall we?”

  He got to his feet and aided Firefrost to hers. She was as much Starfall’s senior as Starfall was Darien’s and, until Darian arrived, the only Healing-Mage that k’Vala had. She had greeted his arrival with relief - and pleasure, when she learned his potential.

  She was the kindest and most patient of his three teachers, although Starfall ran a very near second. If his unknown Healing-Adept teacher was half as easy to get along with as Firefrost, Darian thought that he would count himself lucky.

  The other teacher, Adept Darkstone, was much more difficult to like. He gave Darian his full attention, true, and was absolutely punctilious in giving Darian the most precise and accurate instructions, but it was all done without any feeling whatsoever. Darian still didn’t know a thing about Darkstone’s background, not even something so minor as which tree his ekele was in, and he’d been getting lessons from the Adept for a week.

  The one thing that he did know was the single thing Darkstone made clear at the very beginning; the Adept was entirely against the idea of working with Valdemarans in any way. He did not want outsiders in the Vale, around the Vale, or even aware that the Vale existed. He wanted Hawkbrothers to be a frightening presence in the forest, a glimpse of eyes in a shadow, the warning arrow out of nowhere.

  Darkstone wasn’t the only Tayledras who felt that way, though all the ones that Darian had met so far had treated him with distant courtesy at least. There was, after all, a tradition of Tayledras accepting the occasional outsider into their ranks and Clans. The thing that this particular faction opposed was the wholesale “adoption” of Valdemar on the same basis as the Kaled’a’in.

  Hard as it was to believe, there was even a faction that didn’t want the Kaled’a’in in k’Vala Vale! Their reasoning was a bit obtuse, along the line that “if the Goddess had wanted k’Leshya back with the Tayledras, the Goddess would have led them to us after the Sundering.”

  Useless to argue that this was precisely what had happened - if a bit later than they would have preferred. This lot no more wanted trondi’irn and gryphons in Tayledras Vales than they wanted Shin’a’in and their fighting mares in Tayledras Vales.

  Fortunately, Firefrost was as amused by them as they were outraged by her - and she had power and seniority in the Council over most of them.

  Even if she didn’t, she could probably reduce them to gibbering just by chuckling at them, tickling them under the chin, and telling them to “run along and learn to play nicely with the new children.” He began to see that there were a lot of advantages to age, some of them enough to provide compensation for losing some of the advantages of youth!

  In deference to Firefrost’s age, they’d ridden here on a pair of dyheli rather than hiking on foot. The two does had wandered off somewhere, but Kuari had kept track of one, while Firefrost’s snow-white peregrine had followed the other. Now, without prompting, the birds came winging back, flying under the level of the branches, while the dyheli does sauntered along behind at a brisk walk. Darian offered his linked hands to Firefrost; with a half-bow of her own, she stepped into them, and he boosted her into the well-padded saddle, then hopped onto the other waiting doe. Firefrost avoided the elaborate robes some of the mages - Darkstone for one - liked to wear, and the intricate hairstyles as well. Long, easy-fitting tunics and loose trews of silks in simple colors were what she preferred, and she kept her hair in two braids or a coiled braid at the nape of her neck. Today she wore green, with a necklet of rainbow-moonstones, a single white primary from her bird fastened into her braids.

  “The other day someone asked me why I hadn’t changed my name for a use-name,” he told her, as they rode side by side. “I told them it was because I felt like the same person. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Perfectly sound, good sense,” she replied with a laugh. “Really, Dar’ian, the reason we change our use-names in the first place is because the ones we’re given as children don’t fit us when we become adults. Think about the use-names for the children you’ve heard - Bluefeather, Littleflower, Honeyfawn, Jumpfrog - who’d want to be saddled with something like that as an adult?”

  “Huh - or as an adolescent!” he countered, from the lofty vantage of eighteen. “So how do people get their adult use-names? Yours was given to you, right?”

  “Yes, and if you manage to do something notable at about the time you’re ready for an ‘adult’ use-name, that’s usually what you get. Sometimes you get tagged with something notable that happens when you’re ready for a new name.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners with amusement. “That’s how Starfall got his - it was at a Midsummer celebration, and he’d climbed to the top of a cliff overshadowing the main swimming pool at the Vale we had back then. This was on a dare, you see - the usual male foolishness over a girl - and he jumped from the cliff into the pool at precisely the same time as an extremely bright shooting star flashed overhead, mirroring his fall, even to the same angle. So -’starfall’ he became and has remained.” Her eyes crinkled up even more. “And the funniest thing about it is that because he was diving at the time and had all of his attention on the dive so that he wouldn’t break his silly neck, he never saw the falling star that gave him his name!”

  “Steelmind?”

  “He never forgets anything, and proved it by reciting to one of the Elders a speech he had made that was precisely contradictory to the position he supported at that moment.” She laughed. “Potentially embarrassing, but he didn’t do it in public. Neverthe
less, the Elder in question told everyone that the boy had a mind like a steel cage - nothing that got locked into it ever escaped.”