Path of Honor (49 page)

Reisil glanced quickly at him, wondering if there was a double meaning to his last words. But he merely sat down, motioning for her to do the same.

“We’re going to start with this.” He touched the chunk of quartz. “You’re going to learn to channel your power into the quartz. That way when you lose control later, you’ll know what to do with the excess. One word of warning: I know what that bird is, and I’m telling you right now, she’s got no part in the learning. You must do this yourself, without help. Later she will add to what you can do, but for now, you don’t borrow strength from her. Do you understand?”

Reisil nodded. So the Kvepis couldn’t entirely forget she was
ahalad-kaaslane
.

“But before we involve your magic, we’re going to review how magic works and where it comes from. Listen carefully. I will quiz you as we go. You cannot go further until you understand this perfectly.”

The hours reeled away, and Reisil hardly noticed. Kvepi Debess spoke quickly, but clearly and methodically. He never lost patience with her, and by the end of that day, she’d learned to find her power without the crutch of anger.

“It’s like a river flowing through your deepest center. The calmer you are, the deeper. And even though it rises higher when you are angry, it loses potency. In many ways you are lucky you have not been able to reach it with calm deliberation, or you might have incinerated yourself. To peform to your highest ability, you must be able to summon the power without fear or anger or frustration, or whatever else happens to be driving you.”

What proved most difficult was summoning only what she wanted.

“That’s too big a hammer for the nail,” Kvepi Debess said for the fifth time. “You don’t want to divert your river out of its bed, you want to borrow a little stream. Enough but not too much.”

At the end of the day, Reisil was exhausted but exuberant. She’d managed at last to summon her power, drawing only what she wanted.

“Tomorrow we’ll actually do a bit of work with it. Small things. Basic skills work. You’re quick, though, and it won’t be long until you can do much more. Now get on with you. I’ve a thing or two to get done. Supper’s waiting. Take your time in the morning. I won’t want you too early.”

That night Reisil ate ravenously, pattering enthusiastically to Kvepi Kaisivas. Hope and pride danced in her blood.

The rest of the week passed in similar sessions. Each day Kvepi Debess closed the wards, and Reisil learned to move objects, to light candles with a thread of power, to burn designs on a slab of wood. The power of the quartz stone continued to grow as she channeled excess energy into it. The stone itself had begun to glitter with an inner core of energy, its pink and yellow seams like dark veins against the milky flesh of the rock.

By the end of the second week, her third in the stronghold, Reisil had become proficient enough to begin creating her own spells.

“You understand that ordinary apprentice work lasts years?” Kvepi Debess said sourly one morning, drinking from a pot of kohv. His eyes were bloodshot, and there were fresh wounds on his arms. Dark circles framed his gray eyes. “Well, nothing for it. You’re further along than that, and you have already performed larger works of magic. You have an instinct for it, and with principles, you shouldn’t do more than light your hair on fire or burn your clothes off.”

Reisil smiled uncertainly, not sure he was joking.

“You’re ready for the apprentice test. May as well start there and move you through journeyman levels as seems fitting. For your first part of the test, take this iron bar. I want you to remake it into a filigree like this.” He produced an intricate drawing, the pattern fine as a thread in some places, the surface etched with still smaller designs. “You use too much magic, and the bar will melt and you have to begin again. The entire work must be done with utmost control.”

And then he left her in the warded workroom. Reisil began slowly, resting herself every time fatigue started to fog her control. Still, the delicate work took her far into the night. By the time she was through, her underclothing was drenched and her hair was matted to her head. Kvepi Debess examined her work with a critical eye, nodding finally. “Not the most artistic representation, but it’ll do. Now off to bed with you. Be here at first light.” At Reisil’s pained look, he grinned remorselessly. “Part of the testing. Lucky you finished before light or there’d be no sleep for you at all.”

Reisil began the next day bleary-eyed and tense. Her heart raced, and she could hardly hold down her breakfast.

“All right, then. Today it gets a bit harder. You’ve shown you can maintain fine control; now you’re going to show how you do with varied controls and distractions.”

Kvepi Debess led her away from his laboratory, through a maze of tunnels until they arrived at a spacious room cut into the rock. A group of twenty or thirty Kvepis were gathered, their robes sparkling in the lights. As he closed the doors, Kvepi Debess activated the wards. The room flared with rainbow light, and then it subsided.

“Fairly simple. We’re going to throw things at you, and you’re going to catch them and put them in bins over there.” He pointed to rows of boxes, some large enough to hold three horses, against the far wall. “Points off for dropping anything, or worse, for destroying it.”

With that, Reisil was thrust into the middle of the room. She didn’t know how long she remained there. The first objects were small. Mugs and glasses, plates and jars. Then came stones ranging from pebbles to boulders. There were dressers and wardrobes, a horse trough, an anvil, a flurry of eggs, a tree trunk. More than she could remember. At first they came one at a time, then as she caught these easily, two and three and four until she could hardly breathe. Her magic fought her. She grew more tired and tense, the objects coming faster and more of them. She hardly dared blink lest she miss something. Desperately she whipped out tendrils of power, no longer able to see
what
was coming. Grayness closed around her vision, and her legs trembled. She could smell her fear, acrid and sour. Sweat rolled down her skin, and her clothing clung clammily.

Still she fought to keep her controls. The room was warded, but only against escaping power. What would happen to the Kvepis inside if she let her power erupt? Ash. She remembered the bodies on the bluff. The burnt-out husks in Patverseme. The deep scar on the land where they’d taken Saljane. She felt her fingers blister, the heat crawling up her arms. She began to smell smoke, burning hair. Her own.

“Enough.”

It was Kvepi Debess. He came forward, examining her from head to foot.

“Refused to give in, did you? And would have let yourself burn up too. It’s a lesson well learned. You can only swim in that river for so long before it eats you alive. What say you?” he said to the gathered Kvepi. “Need we the final test, or has she done both in one?” There was a murmuring, not unfriendly. Reisil blinked, seeing only a mass of blurry movement. “So be it. You passed the second test superbly. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen any other last so long. And the final test would have been to see how much power you could restrain and for how long. But again, you’ve outdone our expectations. Most apprentices fold far before they begin to burn.” He lifted her arm at the elbow to examine her hands. They were red and raw and covered with weeping, white blisters.

“I didn’t know what would happen to you if I let go. We left the quartz,” she mumbled through dry, swollen lips. Kvepi Debess stared at her a long moment and then threw back his head in a long, ringing laugh. It went on and Reisil swayed, baffled. Finally he caught himself, gasping and sniffing.

“Ah, my young friend. Sometimes I forget what you do not know—you seem so far advanced. We have the power to shield ourselves, and each and every one of us has become adept at capturing loose magic and storing it away.” He patted her shoulder. “Still, I expect you would have lasted equally as long with such knowledge. Your power would not have gotten the best of you without such worries and fears. Congratulations. The day after tomorrow we begin again with the next stage of your training. Go, get some rest. Eat. We’ll send Uldegas along to treat your burns.”

Reisil turned away, stumbling as she went to the door. Then Kvepi Debess’s voice called her back.

“Be proud of what you’ve accomplished today, Reisil. I am certainly proud of you. Would that I could claim more responsibility.”

At his words, a flower of pleasure bloomed in her chest, and neither the pain of her burns nor her exhaustion could smother it. She smiled wide.

“
Y
ou aren’t really a healer,” Kvepi Debess said abruptly, chewing on a meat pie, a napkin tucked in his collar. Reisil shot him a startled look, washing down a mouthful of buttered bread with a cup of milk. It was the morning following the apprentice test.

There had been a grand celebration in her honor the night before. Most every Kvepi had attended, offering toasts and praise. She couldn’t remember ever having felt so happy. In the midst of it, she had caught herself. What was she doing? The wizards had done so many horrible things—the list of their crimes seemed endless. But that all seemed so far away. She found herself reveling in their compliments, wanting them to think well of her. They were such a change from the
ahalad-kaaslane
. The wizards had every reason to be suspicious of her, every reason to despise her for killing so many of their own, and yet they welcomed her. And the
ahalad-kaaslane
, who had had every reason to welcome her, to trust her, had chosen instead to ostracize her.

“Did you hear me?” Kvepi Debess asked gruffly.

Reisil pulled herself back to the present. “What do you mean?”

“It’s not really your talent. Oh, you are reasonably good at it. I expect that has a lot to do with your tark training. You know the bits of the body and how they work, and so you make the proper repairs. Still, you don’t have the same kind of instinct for it that I’ve seen in other healers.”

Reisil stared at him. Not a healer? But of course she was. She’d trained to be since she was ten; even after becoming
ahalad-kaaslane
she had thought of herself as a healer. The Lady had said it too:
Heal my land. Heal my children—human and animal.

“Now Uldegas, he’s a proper healer. Quick as a thought, he is. What did you think of the way he healed your burns?”

Reisil stared down at her pale hands and wrists. The tan was gone from them, but so were the burns. And Kvepi Uldegas had done it with hardly a glance, then retreated back to his workshop with little more than a grunt in response to her thank-you.
She
couldn’t have done it that easily.

“A battle mage maybe. Or weatherworker. Earthworking is a possibility too. Larger magics. The difference is that healing takes fine, small magics, and you’ve proved you can do that, but the larger magics take the talent to withstand, to hold, to channel it to a purpose. Uldegas never could, even before the banishment. You’ve demonstrated a talent for that. Of course, some depends on whether you can create the proper spells—”

“Why are there no women Kvepis?” Reisil interrupted suddenly, wanting nothing more than to shift the subject. And it was a question that had been gnawing at her for weeks.

“Eh? Women Kvepis? Don’t have ’em,” Kvepi Debess replied.

“Why?”

He shrugged a broad shoulder. “They exist. Fewer than men. Don’t know why. Whieche side of the guild mostly. Haven’t had one in the Nethieche since I can remember.”

“You destroyed most of the Whieche, didn’t you? And anyone else who wouldn’t follow you. The Karaliene said that, the night Kvepi Mastone summoned the Demonlord.”

His gray eyes fastened on her. When he answered, his voice was unchanged, conversational, congenial. “We did. Women are unpredictable. They do all right for a while, and then they start getting ideas. Start paying more attention to wanting children and such instead of concentrating on the magic. Get soft. Too bad, too. A lot of decent women with power.”

Reisil swallowed, setting her fork back on her plate. “So why bring me here?”

“You’re one of us. Proved it with that killing on the Vorshtar Plain, and then again with the men we sent after you. Impressive. Most women don’t have the heart. Always arguing against necessity. But not you. You think things through, see what’s what, and you don’t hide from it. Always got to remember your purpose and stick to it. Sometimes it means hard choices. But you know that.”

As he spoke, Reisil felt as if a hand were squeezing her throat. Her food sat in her stomach like cold lead, and her hands shook. She wanted to protest, to defend herself from his praise, but all she could remember was killing the assassins—wizards. The predatory anticipation, the thrill of power, the terrible joy.

She looked down at her plate, no longer hungry. Was he right? Was she really one of them? All these weeks she’d been content to pretend so: wearing the robes, learning how to use her magic, delighting in the warmth of their welcome. They all seemed so kind and generous, so . . .
benign
.

But they weren’t. These were the same people who’d destroyed Mysane Kosk. They’d kidnapped and raped Ceriba. They’d created the plague. Here in the stronghold, they practiced and perfected their magic. But to what end? Regaining power. Harvesting Kodu Riik. And they didn’t care who had to die in the process.

Reisil wondered for the first time what the wizards did in their laboratories and workshops.

“Ahem. Kvepi Debess?”

Kvepi Kaisivas stood in the doorway. His hair was damp from the steady rain falling over the valley stronghold. He rocked back and forth from his heels to his toes, an air of suppressed excitement surrounding him.

“Kaisivas, what brings you to my workshop this fine day?”

“Good news. There’s been a sighting. Tapit’s just gone out. Took two teams, the source is so powerful. At least two of them. I thought you’d like to know.”