Gift of the Unmage (12 page)

“The one thing that you can take back from this place,” Cheveyo said, “is the sure knowledge that, when there is a battle to be fought, it is you who can choose the place of the battlefield. I cannot tell you why you chose what you chose, but you are going back to your home with weapons with which you can break the bonds those choices have forced upon you. The answers you have gained—the answers to your
who
and
when
and
where
—you may have had all the pieces before, but you had no idea how they fit together. It’s like that spilled cornmeal. Now, after the time you have spent here, you know it belongs in a pottery jar.”

“Thanks,” Thea said, unable to stop a wry grin. “Can I take the jar back home with me when I leave so I can stuff all my troubles in it?”

“If you think that it would hold them,”
Cheveyo said. “But you are your own jar, Catori. You hold all your questions, all your answers. This place has been a way station, not a destination—you were never sent here to become one of my people or to be adopted into my tribe. You were not meant to live out your days in the mesas and the red sand, however beautifully they reflect the light. Tell me, have you ever paid conscious attention to the patterns into which you weave your light?”

“I think I…” Thea shot Cheveyo a look full of astonishment. “I thought I did,” she said, correcting herself. “And yet, now that you ask, I can’t seem to remember a single pattern I ever did—it’s as if they just come by themselves and decide what needs to be woven.”

“It is no different with the things that you weave to shape your life,” Cheveyo said. “Do you believe your light weaves have meaning?”

“Of course they do!” Thea said, so emphatically that she stopped, startling herself into a reflective pause. “But if I didn’t know the pattern,” she murmured, “how do I know it is significant?”

“Because in another context, seen from a different angle or a different point of view or sim
ply distanced from you by time and experience, many patterns that seem formless and without meaning suddenly become something that shapes your very existence. What you have woven here in the desert with me—what you have woven back in the First World with the Old Ones who breathe life and spirit into us all—all of this is now in the pattern of your life. All of this will mean very different things to you when you return to your home.”

“My answers?” Thea said, her voice almost plaintive.

“To more questions,” Cheveyo said gravely, “than even you can think to ask. But I think you need to prove something to yourself first, before you leave my home to return to yours.”

“What’s that?”

“Come,” he said, rising. “We will walk.”

“We’re going back to the Road, aren’t we?” Thea said, scrambling to her feet, wiping berry juice off her chin.

“You are going back,” he said. “You will lead me.”

“But the last time,” Thea said, “your staff—”

“Yes,” he said, and held out his staff to her. “This will show you the way.”

“But it’s…but that is…I can’t take that!”

“No, you couldn’t, not if I were unwilling,” Cheveyo agreed, his usual faintly aggravating self-possession back in full force. “But you are not
taking
it, you are borrowing it with my blessing. That is a very different thing. Now come, this is Chuqu’ta. If we do not do this before the clouds bring the rains this afternoon, we may have to run for cover. These are the male rains, the summer storms—they do not last very long, but they are violent, and even I respect their power. They and I try not to argue too often because I am not certain that I win enough times to make it worth the fight. Take it. Let us go.”

Thea reached out hesitantly for the staff. For a moment both their hands rested on it, side by side, Cheveyo’s large, calloused fingers and ridged nails and skin tanned almost into leather from years of exposure, a stark contrast to Thea’s, smooth, pale, long-fingered, full of a feminine grace even given the grime underneath her nails and the red welt across the fingers that had held the ribbon of Tawaha’s fire. And yet there was something very alike between them, too. They were kin from afar, separated by their different worlds, different times, but linked in
the bond of power, of that fundamental magical sense that Thea had for so long bitterly reproached herself for lacking.

She had it. She
had
it. All she had ever needed to learn is why she had never tapped into it.

“Well?” Cheveyo murmured.

Without another word, Thea turned, gripping Cheveyo’s staff firmly, and began walking.

2.

T
hea had not forgotten the early treks that Cheveyo had taken her on when she had first come to his house. Sometimes they had caught the barest glimpse of the Road as it stretched out into the horizon, insubstantial, teasing the edges of vision like a hallucination. Sometimes she could see the Road taunting her from just beyond some impassable hedge of thorns or a wilderness of sharp stones, solid and real and as far away as if it had been on another planet. Sometimes, many times, they had failed to find it at all and spent fruitless hours walking in the heat, searching for what seemed to be no more than a fevered dream.

And yet she had stood on it once, stood firmly on the level hard ground, finally feeling the
power of it through the soles of her bare feet.

The day she had been carried from it when her spirit had quailed at the power of what she had done.

This time it did not take very long at all. It was as though the Road was no longer a wild thing hiding from Thea, playing games with her mind. She had been allowed to step upon it, had stood on it, had been invited to return. By every sacred law, it was hers now, a part of her, something she could claim as her own.

Even so, she hesitated for a long moment as she came to a sudden unexpected stop at the wall of unshaped stone that bordered the Barefoot Road here, which had apparently decided that it would choose to exist less than an hour’s easy walk from Cheveyo’s front door. The Road stretched as far as Thea could see, absolutely and precisely straight from horizon to horizon, some thirty feet wide, its surface smooth and bare of stray blades of grass, as even and flat and hard as any paved highway of Thea’s own world. It looked as though it had been slapped into shape and kept clear by a thousand years of passage, by many thousands of reverently bare feet set upon it.

“Where does it go?” Thea finally asked quietly, her eyes resting on where the Road met the horizon.

“To where it needs to take you,” Cheveyo said. “You can give me back the staff now. You don’t need it anymore.”

As once before, when he had taken her to the mesa from which she had stepped into the First World, his voice came from behind her. Thea turned her head, realized that she had somehow taken that step onto the Road or it had stretched to enclose her, that she stood with her feet bare upon it and Cheveyo’s staff resting lightly on the ground by her toes. She glanced down, curled her feet against the Road, felt its solidity beneath her soles, and then looked up at Cheveyo again.

“You aren’t coming, are you,” she said.

“The Road takes no two people to the same place,” Cheveyo said. “It was my task to bring you here. Where you choose to let the Road take you now, I cannot follow.”

“Can it take me home?” Thea asked a little wistfully.

“It can take you anywhere,” Cheveyo said, “although it may choose its own manner of achieving that destination. Give me the staff.”

“Is this good-bye?” Thea said, hesitating, clinging to the staff for another moment, her eyes unexpectedly bright. At the moment of parting, she suddenly knew that she would miss Cheveyo—his dry humor, his brusque good mornings followed by precise orders of what the day’s activities would be, his apparent inability to give quarter in anything he asked her to do, and his quiet pride when she did succeed in her tasks, even the aggravating quiet serenity that was his shield against the trials of the world. He had taught her everything without seeming to teach her anything at all.

Thinking back, she was astonished and a little ashamed at how she had wronged him when she had first arrived. He had not been the ending of anything at all—he had, in fact, been the beginning of everything….

For some reason Thea’s mind latched fleetingly on the duffel bag she had brought with her when she had stepped out of the Alphiri Portal into Cheveyo’s world—the duffel bag that was still pretty much packed exactly as it had been when she had carried it into Cheveyo’s house and left it slumped against the wall behind the curtain that divided her space from his in the single
room. How little she had needed its contents. How lightly she abandoned them, as she set her face toward home.

Cheveyo allowed her the moment of reflection. When she looked up again, it was with a sense of something powerful and new within her—an echo of Cheveyo’s own serenity, perhaps.

She held out the staff. “Thank you,” she said. There was nothing more she wanted to say, nothing less. She didn’t feel the need to ask a single question.

Cheveyo took the staff, bowed his head in acknowledgment.

“I will never forget you,” Thea said, lifting her hand in a gesture that was farewell, taking a single step away from the edge of the Road, ready to start walking.

“I know,” Cheveyo said, “because I have something for you. Wait.”

He unfastened the two feathers that had always been tied to the head of his staff with a leather thong, the black feather and the black-and-white. Then he took something from around his neck, threading the two feathers onto a new thong that had been his necklace and already
had something hanging upon it. When he was done, he held his handiwork out to Thea.

“These two you know,” he said, nodding at the two feathers he had just taken from the staff. “You have seen them every day, for as long as you have lived in my house. For once, I am giving you an answer to a question you never asked—what they mean. The black-and-white feather is an eagle’s; the black one is from a raven. They were given to me by my own teacher, many, many years ago, and now I pass them on to you because they are symbols of things you already have, of things you brought here with you—the eagle’s feather for courage, the raven’s feather for wisdom. The third feather is a gift from me to you, one I have carried with me for many weeks in the knowledge that this day would come.”

Thea stared at the third feather, her vision a little blurred with tears. It was a long one, barred gray and white, and one she could not identify. “Whose is the third feather?” she whispered.

“My people take animals as totems of our faults and virtues,” Cheveyo said. “One of them is the wild turkey, and it is from a turkey’s wing that this third feather on your necklace comes. It
will serve, I hope, to remind you of one of the most important lessons you have learned while in my care.”

Thea felt the beginnings of laughter bubbling within her. “And what is that?” she said.

“Patience, Catori,” Cheveyo said with one of his rare smiles. “Patience.”

Thea ducked her head to let him place it around her neck, and then, after another long moment, they stepped away from each other, Thea farther onto the Road, Cheveyo into the desert scrub at his back, the stone wall between road and desert suddenly a solid barrier between them. He lifted a hand in blessing and farewell.

“Go well,” he said gravely. “Perhaps it may come that we shall cross paths again, for the Road goes everywhere. And now, I think I shall go back and see if this time I cannot prevail upon the gods of the summer storms. I am in the mood for a challenge.”

Thea said nothing, not trusting her own voice, merely raising her right hand in a gesture that was an echo of Cheveyo’s own; her left was curled with protective pride around the three feathers that he had given her, the three virtues with which he had blessed her. Then she turned
and began walking away without looking back.

Somewhere far behind her she could hear the distant sound of thunder, as if in answer to Cheveyo’s defiant words.

The mesas rising to the side of the Road were beginning to reflect back the orange-gold light of a sun sinking toward sunset before Thea stopped walking, as though waking from a dream. The parting with Cheveyo had left her feeling wretched, but she had not felt
lonely
, not until this moment, not until she realized that the sun was going down. With the liquid sunlight of summer pouring down all around her, she had almost unconsciously been remembering Tawaha’s words:
Where you are and where light is, I will always be with you.
However irrational it might have seemed, that litany had made her feel safe from harm.

Now, suddenly, she felt the first flutter of panic. The sun was going down, the swift desert twilight would be upon her very soon, and after that, night. And she had no real idea of what to do next, other than to keep walking. The way back, she had been told, lay through an Alphiri Portal—which was fine, except that she had no knowledge of how to open one. And even that
paled into insignificance as she considered whether she wanted to open one, not with an Alphiri at its controls and herself trusting that she would be delivered where she wanted to go. She could not forget the expression in the eyes of the one who had turned to glare at her through the Portal, one of the three in the woods near her home who had been waiting there for her to return.

What is it that they want from me?

As though searching for a way to make her feather talismans yield the virtues for which they had been named, Thea touched the eagle feather, the middle one, and stroked it gently. Courage: to face the night alone, or to find a way to call the Alphiri, to have them open the Portal that would take her home….

Her fingers, stroking the feather, suddenly froze as they came into contact with something else, hidden under her tunic—something she had worn ever since she had first set foot in Cheveyo’s world, something her own father had placed around her neck.

You’d better wear it
.

The Pass. The medallion that had paid for her passage here. The price of the passage home.