Changed by Fire (The Cloud Warrior Saga Book 3)

by D. K. Holmberg

  The First Mother fixed him with her gaze. The hard edge to her eyes passed, softening into a look of warmth. “Drawing a shaping into yourself is dangerous enough when you control the shaping. Have you ever seen one of the kingdom’s shapers pull a shaping into themselves?”

  Tan hadn’t spent enough time with kingdom shapers to know. “I don’t know. Probably not.”

  “Have you ever seen anyone pull a shaping into themselves?”

  As she asked, Tan realized that he hadn’t seen it, but he’d heard of it being done. And suddenly, he understood her fear. “But I didn’t draw fire into me to serve it. I didn’t try shaping myself into the lisincend.”

  “This may be why you survived. Even were that not the issue, you pulled fire from five fire shapers that I saw. Perhaps there were more. That is more than you would be able to handle alone. Had it not been for the draasin accepting the shaping, I suspect you would have been destroyed.”

  The First Mother touched his arm, running her fingers across his skin. It felt deadened where she touched, the sense muted. “Even with your bond pair helping, you still suffered. I don’t know how much can be healed.”

  Tan looked at his arms, almost as if seeing them for the first time. The skin was rougher, thickened, and almost leathery. He had seen skin like it before on the lisincend, though it was much tighter and almost scaly.

  “Could a water shaper heal this?” he asked.

  The roughness to his voice made more sense now as well. What had he done?

  “Water can heal, but I don’t know if any shaper can help.” She left unsaid that an elemental might be able to. “It’s possible you will heal on your own. The damage is not too far gone, at least what I can see.” The First Mother shook her head. “Perhaps I was the fool, refusing to teach, leaving him untrained. Not only a danger to others, but to himself.” She spoke almost to herself. “But without him, we would all have perished. Perhaps the Great Mother knew what was needed.” Her hand squeezed over her mouth as she lifted her face toward the sky. Her eyes closed and Tan felt a shaping build with the force of her contemplation. When she opened her eyes, she brought her chin back down in one strong motion. “I will offer what help I can to you, son of Zephra.”

  With that, she lifted herself off the stone she had been sitting on. As she walked away, her gait was unsteady and she wove through the remaining Aeta, who absently reached out a hand to steady her. Not that they appeared very steady themselves. Their eyes had a haunted look, as though they were devastated by the attack.

  “If Incendin has Aeta shapers, we don’t have much time,” Tan said. “We need to get the First Mother to King Althem to release the spirit shaping. I need to help Roine and the others.” Anger boiled within him at the thought of his friends facing more of the twisted lisincend without him.

  “The king can wait. I will go and do what I can. You need her to teach you. You need to have mastery in part of your shaping. Look at what it almost cost you.”

  “I thought I could use Asboel.” The answer sounded weak to him.

  Amia came and sat beside him. She took his hand and looked into his eyes. Worry wrinkled the corners of her eyes. “Did he help?”

  Tan nodded. “He reached through me. I felt him absorb the shaping. The First Mother is right—had he not been there, I might not have survived.”

  His mind still felt raw and painful from the fire shaping, but even that had begun to fade.

  “I’m afraid of waiting too long,” he admitted. “If we fail, the kingdoms will fall.”

  Amia patted his hand. “We all do only what we can.”

  16

  Learning Spirit

  They stood atop a small peak. A valley spilled out below, not unlike the valley at the place of convergence. Tan’s head hurt from focusing on shaping, a throbbing ache that reminded him of the pain he had felt while in Ethea before bonding to Asboel.

  “You let yourself grow distracted,” the First Mother said from the small boulder she sat on. Wind caught her silver hair and twisted it in the breeze. The thick band of silver at her neck reflected the fading light more strongly than he would have expected, making it almost seem to glow.

  “I’m sorry,” he started.

  But he couldn’t help it. As he tried to focus as she taught, he found his mind wandering, drifting back through what had happened. He had to force it away from memories of his parents and thoughts of his time in Ethea.

  “Spirit is different than the other elementals,” the First Mother said. “It is sensitivity and understanding. You need to know yourself before you can use it effectively. It’s why the youngest learn spirit the fastest.”

  He pulled back in surprise. “You’re saying I don’t know myself?”

  “I’m saying it’s harder to know yourself as you age.” She turned her back on him and gazed over the valley. “Some think it easier. That as we age, we get set in our ways, making our decisions clear, but isn’t the choice of a child much easier to gauge than the choice of a toddler? And aren’t both much easier to understand than someone your age?” She waved toward the trees. “Think of your connection to earth sensing. Without these trees, what would there be?”

  He shrugged. “Dirt and rock. Maybe some birds.”

  The First Mother faced him, eyes flashing annoyance. “Simplistic, but not untrue. And if you were to sense this without the trees, would you find it easier or harder?”

  Tan thought he understood. It was the same reason his father had taken him to abandoned iron mines when first teaching him to sense. He had to learn basics before he could add layers of complexity to his sensing.

  “You want me to pretend I’m a child?”

  “If only it were so simple.”

  With a light touch on his still-leathery forearm, she shaped him. A wave of relaxation flowed through him. Doing so only delayed his understanding, and he needed to learn as quickly as he could.

  “You need to peel away layers of your experience. Only once you have mastery over your spirit will you be able to shape another’s.”

  “Every time I try to ‘peel away’ my experience, you tell me I’m losing focus,” Tan said.

  “You haven’t reached deep enough.”

  He looked away. “Isn’t there another way to do this? The king needs your help. Your people are suffering. And Incendin could be growing stronger.”

  “My people are likely already dead,” she said softly. “And if Incendin has reached the point where they openly attack, taking the People like that, then I fear what will happen elsewhere.”

  “I have friends who are in Incendin now. They can help.”

  “As I said, they are likely dead.”

  “And when they create more of those—” he paused, uncertain what to call them “—lisincend, Lacertin thinks they will attack the draasin.”

  The First Mother studied her hands. “If you’re right and their intent is to replace the draasin, to become elementals, then they would be better served attacking while the draasin are weak.”

  What would Asboel say about anyone calling draasin weak?

  A thought troubled him. “Lacertin thinks they will try to replace the draasin, but they wouldn’t be able to do that unless they were elementals already, would they?”

  “When you suggested the lisincend goal was to become as powerful as the draasin, to eventually replace the draasin, I knew there must be more to it.”

  Tan thought of how the Incendin fire shaper had pulled her shaping through the artifact, drawing the archivist’s blood with it. “Is that why they need spirit shapers? Can we do anything to stop them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The admission troubled him for some reason. “Is that why she wanted to reach the pool of spirit?”

  “There are many ways to reach the Great Mother. I suspect they have learned another.”

  “Your shapers?”

  “Each touches the Great Mother in a different way. It is possible that collecting enough shapers of spirit,
they will be able to draw in enough of the Great Mother to fully create their transformation.”

  “You knew about this, didn’t you? That’s why you were moving the Gathering.”

  She met his eyes. “I feared it possible. If they had convinced the People serving in the archives to help, they could easily learn of the Gathering.”

  “But why? Why would the archivists sacrifice their own people?”

  “There must have been a reason, though I cannot see one.” She shifted her attention back to him. “But that is not why you are here now. Focus. Master your shaping—your spirit. Only once you learn it can you help those you wish to serve.”

  Tan gazed over the valley, thinking of what it had been like before there were trees and life and all the animals he easily sensed roaming through it. Could he do the same with his mind, with his experiences? Would he really be able to peel away his experiences to learn who he was?

  And if he couldn’t, what would happen to him?

  * * *

  Tan sat by the small, crackling fire. The fire pit didn’t dance as before, only a few logs burning, keeping back the chill of the air. The fire called to him, differently than it had when he suspected the Brother shaped him. Tan ignored it.

  He let his mind wander, trying to do as the First Mother instructed, but doing so was difficult. His head ached from wasting time trying to shape spirit throughout the day. Nothing even closely intentional had come from the time he spent. He would be better off going to Lacertin and helping him remove the Incendin threat.

  Except there wasn’t much he could do until he was better trained. Before he had feared he wasn’t a shaper like the others; his power came from the elementals. Now he grew more certain. None could really help him, not like he needed. With Asboel gone, he had no one to guide him.

  And if—when—he failed to help the king, what would become of his friends in Incendin?

  As he struggled to shape spirit, memories of Nor kept creeping up, but not the ones he thought he should focus on. Flashes of Lins and his friends slithered through his mind and made him angry. He thought of the day the Aeta had first came to Nor, of when Lins called Amia a rat. Or earlier, when Lins beat old Hildon’s dog because it stole scraps from the kitchens. Memories of Bal came to him. Annoyance at finding her hiking alone in the mountains the day he first discovered tracks from the hounds, or when she followed him throughout the village until he had to sneak away to get privacy from her. Even Cobin, first Tan’s father’s friend, and then his friend, too. How many times would they hunt together, getting lost through the woods, relying on Tan’s ability to sense their way home?

  It hurt that he wouldn’t see any of that again. Nor—his home—was gone.

  He needed to focus on better—happier—memories. Times when he’d followed his father into the woods, trailing after him as his father had taught, using his earth sensing to search for him. He never managed to find him until his father wanted to be found. Only now did he understand why. There were times in their old family home when his parents had still been together, when his father would work at his whittling while his mother cooked, happily tending to the kitchen.

  And then there was the memory of the day his father received his summons. He’d held the letter for a long time, simply sitting by the fire, staring at it. Tan remembered looking over his shoulder, seeing the wax seal and not understanding. Yet his father had gone willingly. He’d hugged Tan and kissed his mother the morning he left. It was the last time he’d ever seen his father.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  Amia watched him. He wiped his eyes, pushing back tears threatening to well up in them. “The First Mother wanted me to peel back the layers of my experiences,” he said. “She said it’s harder to teach someone with many experiences.”

  Amia laughed softly. “Since I’ve met you, you certainly have managed to have many different experiences.”

  He reached over to her and took her hand. “Not all bad.”

  “Not all,” she agreed. “You look troubled. What was the last thing you were thinking about?”

  He took a deep breath. Likely she felt emotion through the bond the same way he did. That meant Amia would know how he felt. “My father and the day he left. He got a summons from the king. Incendin attacked to the north. And he went. At the time, I didn’t know why he had to go. Nor is so far from the rest of the kingdoms that you sometimes forget you’re a part of them. Other than the manor lord, there’s no real influence from the throne, and even the manor lord rules as he sees fit. When my father received his summons, I think he almost didn’t believe it came. He stared at it for nearly an hour, sitting by the fire. At the time, I didn’t really understand it.” He shrugged. “Maybe I still don’t understand. At least now I know why the king summoned him, if not why he went so willingly.”

  Amia frowned. “Don’t you? He was an earth shaper. Don’t you now do the same thing he did?”

  “I never answered the king’s summons.”

  “No, because you don’t need the king to tell you what you must do. You went against the worst of Incendin twice, facing the lisincend.”

  “For you.”

  She laughed again. “Was it all for me?”

  The shaping might have compelled him at first, but he’d done what he needed. “I won’t serve the way my parents did. I won’t go blindly off to follow his command.”

  “Are you so certain your parents did?”

  Tan hesitated. Years living with his parents hadn’t told him anything about them. They had secrets he would never know, parts of their past they kept from him. Had they done it for his protection, or could there have been another reason?

  Even now, after seeing his mother again, he didn’t know anything about what had motivated her. She claimed to have gone to Nor because of him, because she wanted to raise him in a place where he could be safe and where his father could continue to fortify the barrier, but Tan couldn’t help but think there was more to it.

  “We need to convince the First Mother to go to Ethea,” he said.

  “She delays.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “To teach, presumably.”

  “And what happens if I can’t master spirit shaping?” Tan asked.

  “You will master it. You’re too strong not to.”

  Tan closed his eyes. He needed to tell her what he feared about his shaping. Too much was at risk if he didn’t. “There is something you should know,” he started. “I learned something in Ethea when I was working with Cianna.”

  At the mention of the fire shaper’s name, the pull of irritation worked through the bond. “I’m sure she managed to teach you something.”

  Tan frowned. “She wanted to help me learn to control fire. She thought since I bonded to the draasin, I had the potential to be a strong fire shaper.”

  “You will be a strong fire shaper. You don’t need one like her to prove it to you.”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know that I shape the same way.”

  Amia crossed her arms over her chest. One hand went to her neck. Tan was reminded, again, of the silver Aeta band. She’d taken it off for him. “How can you tell that you shape differently than anyone else? You can’t see someone shaping.”

  “But I can sense it. I’ve always been able to sense it, at least since meeting you. At first, I thought it had something to do with how you shaped me, but now I’m not sure. You know that anytime there’s a shaping, I sense it. Sometimes it’s stronger than others. For the longest time, I couldn’t use it to tell who was shaping, only that there was a shaping. With Cianna—” Amia tensed slightly when he said her name “—I could determine the direction of the shaping. I sensed the fire as she drew it out of her. Roine said it is the same for him.”

  Amia nodded. “Shapings come from within. The shaper is connected to the element. That is why those who can shape spirit are considered so blessed. We are connected to the Great Mother herself.”

  “Or anoth
er elemental,” he said softly.

  “There is no elemental of spirit.”

  Tan wasn’t as certain. What else but an elemental did they summon in the place of convergence? Unless the Great Mother was the spirit elemental.

  “Why do you bring this up? What does it matter how a shaping is drawn from the shaper?”

  “Because it’s not the same for me. When I have shaped, I don’t draw it from inside. When I try to do it as Cianna showed me, nothing happens, but when I try to shape as if speaking to the draasin…” He tipped his head toward the fire pit. With a thought, he instructed a small fire to ignite. “When I do it that way, I have control. The shaping works. Any other way and it doesn’t.”

  “So you don’t think you’re shaping at all. That you simply control the elementals?”

  “I don’t have any other explanation. I just don’t think I shape the same way. It’s why I’m not certain the First Mother can teach me to control spirit. Other than when I was in the pool of spirit, I haven’t ever managed to intentionally shape spirit.”

  “You’ve shaped it before. The draasin said you did.”

  “What if I didn’t? It happened at the place of convergence, the same place you managed to shape an elemental. I think you and Roine are right—that shouldn’t have been possible, but the shaping took. It held. But other shapers would have tried to control the elementals. Why would it work for you and not for others?”

  “Because we were in a place close to the Great Mother, a place where her power was augmented.”

  “And if I can’t shape without the elementals, I’m not a shaper at all, am I?” Tan looked over at Amia, knowing she had no answers but wishing that she did, that she knew how to explain to him what he was. “And if I’m not a shaper, what am I?”

  17

  Twisted Fire

  The flames crackled softly in the fire pit. None of the previous intensity burned there, nothing like the fire that had danced before Incendin attacked. It didn’t push back any of the cool in the air, leaving it with a bite that stung Tan’s cheeks. The skin of his arms and legs felt taut and itchy. He shifted, trying to get comfortable, but since absorbing the Incendin fire shaping, he couldn’t really get comfortable.