Idalia grabbed Kellen's hands and dragged him in among the dancers.
'Idalia—no! I don't—' Kellen yelled.
'Relax—you learned this one back in the City!' she shouted back.
And it was true, though there the steps were slow and decorous, and certainly did not involve whirling your partner high into the air to be caught by another. But they were the same steps, and once Kellen realized that, he let the music take him, stamping and whirling through the complicated figures with an ease that made his partners shout and whistle appreciatively.
'WHAT… is… that thing?' Kellen asked his sister, when the music had changed to a slower piece to give the dancers time to catch their breath, and he and Idalia had gone in search of refreshment. Their progress was slow, for everyone wished to say personal good-byes to the two of them, but at last they had a moment to themselves.
'Verlin calls it a fiddle-faddle. They come from the High Reaches. I'm sure the Mountain Traders have offered them to the City, but I don't suppose they've ever been licensed there.' Idalia snorted. 'Why ask? Of course they haven't. 'Lute and harp were good enough for our grandfathers, certainly they are good enough for us,' ' she said, in a fair imitation of Lycaelon at his most patronizing.
'And flute,' Kellen said helpfully. 'And one or two other things. We got a bowed psaltery five years ago because we already had the plucked and hammered kind. But, oh, Idalia—it makes such wonderful music! And just think of all the other things out here in the world that never made it through the Golden Gates! Here, and beyond the Sea, and, oh, every' where!'
It just made his heart ache to think of it. All the opportunities lost… all the things that could have been, and never were. It was enough to make you weep…
WATCHING Kellen's rapt excited face as he spoke of Verlin's fiddle-faddling, Idalia blessed the old Centaur for staying behind to play here tonight. Since their discovery of the High Council's plans, Kellen had been dangerously closed-in and angry, and anger was a perilous self-indulgence for a Wildmage.
It was not that those who walked the path of the Wild Magic were expected to detach themselves from human emotion, for that road led quickly to the closed-off asceticism of the High Magick, with all its pitfalls. Wildmages lived in the world, not cut off from it, and were expected to participate in all its griefs, terrors, and loves.
But anger was a destructive emotion, more so than any other. It destroyed the capacity for clear sight that a Wildmage needed above all things, and the first thing it destroyed was self-judgment. A Wildmage poisoned by anger might never even know it until it was too late, thinking only that he or she was filled with a righteous need to bring justice and balance back into the world.
That the Wildmage's spells would turn against them and fail them, that the price exacted would be too heavy to bear for a spell cast in blind anger, would be cold consolation to Idalia if the caster was Kellen.
But everything was going to be all right. She was sure of it now. Sometimes Idalia forgot how young her little brother was, how sheltered a life he'd led until the last few moonturns. He was only seventeen; far too young to bear the burden of guilt for the flight of the inhabitants of the Western Hills into unknown peril.
Until tonight she'd been afraid that the guilt would sour him, the anger work in him like a canker, and his thoughts turn into darker paths. It was enough to unsettle a far older and steadier soul… but Kellen could not have responded so to Verlin's music if the toxins of blind revenge were working in him.
She was furious with their father and the Council, and had fought a hard and bitter battle against her own rage to keep it from affecting her.
Why couldn't Lycaelon leave well enough alone? Kellen was gone from the City; as good as dead to him. What in the name of the Gods was driving the man on this suicidal course? The City could never possibly hold the territory Lycaelon so rashly claimed. The Wildlanders would fight back eventually; the western farmers weren't Lycaelon's tame cowed lowland villagers, nor yet his utterly pacified Armethaliehans.
Yes, if they resisted, they would lose. If they fought, they would die. And the High Council might get its own way for a time, 'ruling' over lands they had emptied of the people who had lived and worked there.
But High Magick wasn't free for the asking. Like the Wild Magic, it, too, had a price and must be paid for. If the High Council had to spend more and more of its power to pacify its new Western Holdings, where would they go to replace it?
And what would happen when, in the fullness of its ambition, the High Council of Armethalieh turned its attention from the Western Hills to the High Hills?
Idalia smiled her hard wolf-smile. The Mountain Traders had nowhere else to go: their lands backed directly on the Elven borders, and the Elves would not give up their lands for the asking. And even if the Mountain-folk did have somewhere they could flee to, they wouldn't: the Mountain Traders had hated the City for generations with a cordial and stubborn hate. They hated the Council and its policies nearly as much as they loved their wild mountains—they would not abandon them for the Elven forests even if that was possible. And the Mountain-folk were far from helpless. By now, most of the Wildmages that had been driven out of every other place that Armethalieh had taken for its own were gathering in the High Reaches. The Mountain Traders would be able to call
