Valdemar 11 - [Owl Mage 02] - Owlsight

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Then please enter, Healer,” he told her, his expression carefully neutral. She entered and followed him into the communal hall where they all took their meals. At his invitation she sat down on a bench; he sat on one opposite her.

  “May I hear your proposition, Healer?” he asked politely. “I cannot say yet if I may consider it alone, or the Fellowship as a whole must debate it.”

  “I understand that, Eldest,” she replied, just as soberly. “It is a minor proposal—and simple. The Fellowship currently owes me for certain medicines and treatment for the sheep during the rains—I should like to barter that credit for a certain number of meals taken with you.”

  The old man’s brows had furrowed during the first part of her statement, but rose to his hairline in surprise as she finished. “Don’t you have your own family?” he blurted.

  “I have irregular hours, and it came to me today that we have far too many people stuffed into a single small house,” she said with a smile. “We all agree that I am fully adult, so I moved into my workshop, to free some space for my brothers. Since I will no longer be contributing to the family income, it seems wrong to take bread from their table.”

  “I can see that.” He pondered the proposal while she waited patiently. “And I am certain that you already know of our custom of the hearth kettle.”

  “Actually, Eldest,” she smiled, “I was counting on it.”

  The “hearth kettle” was a kettle of soup or stew always kept on the kitchen hearth, so that anyone who was hungry could be fed. One of the Fellowship’s customs was that anyone who begged charity was granted three meals and a place to sleep with nothing in return asked of him—and the kettle also served a useful purpose for people whose lives were built around their animals, and who thus, at certain seasons, would also have “irregular hours.” Keisha could always count on getting a bite from the hearth kettle, day or night.

  “Well, then—” Now the old man smiled broadly, and Keisha knew she’d won him over. “What if I say that we will barter unlimited meals in return for all routine care? Not emergencies or unexpected illnesses, like the sheep just had, but all the.routine health checks and medicines and tonics and so forth.”

  She saw no point in bargaining further; this was exactly what she wanted. “Then I would say that the bargain is set.” She held out her hand.

  He took it, and shook it three times to seal the bargain. “Will you stay for tonight’s dinner? We’ve egg-pie.” He raised his eyebrows again. “My wife Alse’s egg-pie.”

  She sighed happily at the mere suggestion, and smiled at him. “Eldest,” she said with complete truth, “For your wife’s egg-pie I would arm-wrestle a bear.”

  She returned to her cottage—her cottage, not her workshop anymore, and the mere thought filled her with proprietary pride—carrying a basket of warm rolls for breakfast and with the satisfied content of having had a truly fine meal. Alse had a way with spicing and adding chopped bacon and greens to egg-pie that raised the humble dish to something suitable for the table of the Queen herself. There could not have been a better omen for the start of her bargain with the Fellowship than that first meal.

  She put the rolls away and lit two of her lamps, then went out into the garden to cut a few blooms for her vase. With lamps shining brightly and flowers on the table, she felt happier than she had for months.

  And instead of studying, tonight she gave herself a holiday of sorts. With a small fire to warm the room, she picked up her knitting; with luck, she’ d finish the back of the tunic tonight. That would leave the front and both sleeves to do before winter, which was hardly an insurmountable task.

  She listened to the songs of crickets and tree-frogs, the murmur of voices in the houses nearest hers, and the distant rushing of the river. There were no shouting boys, no clumping boots—nothing but peaceful quiet.

  Why didn’t I do this sooner? I’d have had far fewer headaches!

  Perhaps because Shandi had kept peace in the house—or as much peace as anyone could. But surely at some point even Shandi had gotten tired of playing peacekeeper....

  Maybe that’s one reason why she was so ready to ride off to Haven. That, and Mum. Mum didn’t really want her to grow up, I think. Poor Mum; like it or not, children do, and there’s nothing to be done about it.

  So, it could be that Shandi had done both of them a favor, by making the break clean and quick. Yes, and me, too. If Shandi’s grown up, I’m more than grown.

  Was this how Shandi felt now, on her own, making her own decisions, having a place she could truly say was hers and no one else’s? If so, Keisha was glad for her; it was a fine feeling, and one she would be glad to share.

  I hope she has a room of her own at that Collegium place. She certainly deserves one at this point.

  She’d always been an early riser—more from necessity than virtue, it was true, but a Healer didn’t have much choice in the matter—and it had been a long day. She found herself yawning over her work just as she bound off the knitting, and realized that there were no noisy boys to keep her awake if she tried to go to sleep “early.” She lit a lantern in the loft, blew out the two downstairs, and banked the fire for the morning. As she went back up to the loft to change for bed, she sent a silent prayer of thanks to whatever deity had put this notion of moving into her mind. And if it’s the spirit of Wizard Justyn, who didn’t want his cottage to stand empty most of the time, thank you, too!

  Once the hurdle of breaking the news to her mother was over and done with, the move was going to make life easier. Much, much easier.

  Now if the mysterious Darian would just return to care for the magical needs of Errold’s Grove, life here would be just about perfect.

  Starfall

  Six

  Once, back when he was enduring his lessons with Justyn, Darian would have been conscious of nothing except how uncomfortable he was at this moment—either too hot or too cold, sitting on a rock or on a sharp branch. He could always find something to distract him from his hated lessons in magic, lessons he considered useless. That was a long time ago, far distant in time and maturity, or so he hoped. Now, none of those possible discomforts mattered, and if you asked him about the temperature or his surroundings, he’d tell you honestly that he hadn’t noticed.

  Especially at this moment, a moment of epiphanal breakthrough, when intense new experience overwhelmed every other consideration.

  “There!” said Healer-Mage Firefrost in triumph. “Now you see it, you feel it, don’t you?”

  Darian “stared” at the slow, smooth flow of energy that was literally all around him; it had taken days of coaching, but now, at last, he was able to do what Starfall had not been able to teach him—was in the overworld of energy, a world overlying the “real” world and a part of it, yet with its own separate life and rules. He used Mage-Sight at a deep enough level to actually watch the passage of life-energy from living creatures to the tiny feeder lines, and from there to the ley-lines, and on to the nodes. Every mage knew that energy flowed in that way; it was one of the first lessons in energy control—but only certain types of mages could actually see it happen at the level of individual blades of grass and insects no bigger than pinheads. Most mages couldn’t actually detect mage-energy until it had collected in the threadlike initial runnels, leaving them with the impression that the energy took the form of a web, rather than an all-pervasive flow. More than that, as Firefrost said, he felt it, a sensation entirely new to him and yet as familiar to him as his own heartbeat—exactly like the faint pressure of sunlight on his skin. Healers saw and felt the same thing according to Starfall; so did minor mages like earth-witches and hedge-wizards—these were the energies that they used, for they were unable to handle anything with more power than a small runnel. This energy was tedious to accumulate and granted them a relatively low level of power, but it was omnipresent. An earth-witch never had to search for a ley-line, and for a while after the mage-storms, hedge-wizards could accomplish more than Adepts,
who had never been forced to learn all of the minor magics that needed only the merest whisper of power.

  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 overworld 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 dizzying 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.”