told Kellen once that only the Wild-mage who had charged a keystone could tap its power, and as far as she knew, that was true. Maybe the Elves were the exception to the rule; all she knew was that she had always found charged keystones eagerly accepted among the Elvenkind, for whatever reason, and so had not worried too much about not being able to pay her and Kellen's way.
But she had not expected to be riding into a disaster of this magnitude, either, and that changed everything. Certainly while she was doing her best to deal with it, no one would be asking either her or Kellen to pay for anything, at least not in tangible goods.
Before beginning her task, she forced herself to eat and drink and meditate for a while, fortifying herself for the work ahead, then selected a large flat cushion and placed it in the middle of the floor and seated herself upon it, facing west, the bag of gan counters in her lap. She spilled them out into a pool in her skirt, taking a moment to admire how the sun spilling through the windows made them glow and sparkle.
Red agates and grey; stones of shining black and golden yellow; creamy white and deep moss-green… She ran them through her ringers, hearing them click against each other and feeling their smoothness, slowing her heartbeat and her breathing, readying herself for the task ahead.
Sinking down deep within her own mind as her heartbeat slowed, Idalia imagined herself at the center of a wheel. Spokes radiated out from it: thick spokes for the cardinal points: west, south, east, north. Slenderer spokes between them cross-quartering the wheel: southwest, northwest, northeast, southeast… And between them, spokes still finer still, until the room in which she sat was gone, and in her imagination Idalia sat at the center of a silvery wheel, a compass-rose of sixty-four petals, all radiating outward from where she sat.
She began in the west, searching for the source of the wrongness, the binding of wind and weather that she sensed lay behind the unnatural drought. In the spokes of the wheel she felt the sorrow of the Elves, their weariness and despair, but those things were natural, and she ignored them, seeking farther, deeper…
There were flickers of shadow, faint hints of wrongness. Each time she sensed one, Idalia took a stone from her pile and set it on the floor in the direction the sensation had come from, and continued searching.
IT was still a little too light for the lighting of lanterns, more late afternoon than evening, but Kellen's stomach was still on the dawn-to-dusk schedule that he and Idalia had kept in the Wildwood, and it was his stomach's opinion that it was time and more than time for dinner, preferably something involving a whole roast ox. He found his way home more quickly than he had the day before, hoping Idalia would be there. It would be a great relief to talk to someone he could ask a direct question of.
He wondered how she'd spent her day, and if she'd have any news about the drought, and what they were going to do about it. Certainly her sources of information—both magical and about Sentarshadeen in general—ought to be better than his. He just hoped that old boyfriend of hers had the sense to keep out of her way, because if not…
Well, it didn't really bear thinking about.
But when he opened the door to the house, all was so quiet that for a moment he thought Idalia wasn't there at all. The great room was in shadow, but when he looked closely, the last rays of the afternoon sun spilling through the door showed him Idalia kneeling in the middle of the floor, with a large fan of pebbles spread out on the floor beside her right hand. And the whole room smelled—though that wasn't quite the right word—of magic. He wasn't sure how he knew, but he was certain of it.
And at that moment, the world changed for him.
I am a Wildmage…
It was one thing to be called 'Wildmage' by the Elves—and even at that Kellen felt as though he were masquerading as something he wasn't— and it was something quite different to be forced to acknowledge by the evidence of his own senses that it was true. He was a Wildmage, able to sense the currents of magic.
'Idalia?' he asked hesitantly.
She'd been sitting with her head slumped upon her chest as if she were asleep. Now she took a deep breath, straightened, and opened her eyes, looking up at him.
'Kellen,' she said, and blinked, and then added irrelevantly: 'Look at the time.'
What has she been doing? It had to be something to do with the drought, of course, but what?
She took a deep breath, stretching and uncoiling from where she sat— carefully, Kellen saw, so as not to disturb the pattern of the stones spread around her. 'Let's have some light. And I expect you're hungry.' She blinked again, and then said, as if surprised, 'So am I…'
'What were you doing?' Kellen asked, following her toward the stove. He made a wide detour around the stones on the floor, feeling as if he were avoiding a wasp's nest.
'Looking.' She glanced toward the floor and her expression tightened unhappily. 'And finding, though finding out what I found and what it means is going to take a lot more looking. And how was your day?'
As she spoke, Idalia took a long metal wand that contained a braided wick and lit it at the hearth, then used
