join the Anduras. Pacing the approximate borders, using her Mage Sight to look for magical signatures or unusual tracks of anything the scouts might have missed, Stardance felt her frustration mount. It’s just useless makework , she thought angrily. There’s nothing out here--they just want to keep us busy until they can figure out what to do next. I don’t know why we’re even bothering. Even so, she continued with her task.
At first, Kir had flown overhead, helping her keep track of where her wedge overlapped with segments being examined by the other students; their bondbirds were in the air for the same purpose. After she had finished the first circuit of her area and started a closer inspection of the inside of the wedge, she gave Kir permission to land.
For several candlemarks, Stardance combed the forest, starting at the outer border of her space and spiraling inward until she reached the landmarks of the clearing that was the last, central piece of the area she was assigned to. She heard only the natural sounds of the forest, although as she neared the edges of her wedge she sometimes heard mutterings from the other students or scouts. At one point, she looked up to see the scout’s goshawk bondbird lazily coasting overhead, but she neither saw nor heard any trace of the young man himself.
After another candlemark of pushing through brush and finding nothing of more concern than small rodents, Stardance stood in the small clearing that marked the “point” of her wedge. Releasing her Mage Sight with a sigh of relief, she loosened her water skin from her belt and took a drink.
:Thirsty.: Kir’s MindVoice was her most plaintive. The falcon had alternated between soaring on the thermals and perching in trees near Stardance to watch her, her head cocked to the side as though she were trying to make sense of her mistress’ actions.
:Come, then,: Stardance replied, lifting her hand for the falcon, who plummeted from the sky. Raising the bird from her arm brace to the leather pad on her shoulder, Stardance held up the water skin, tilting it so a careful stream poured into Kir’s beak. Kir shook her head, sending droplets spattering over Stardance’s face and hair. Stardance winced and pulled the water skin away, mock-glaring at her bondbird. The falcon was unchastened, her eyes glinting as she tilted her head, and Kir’s teasing amusement in the back of her mind drew out the first smile Stardance had felt since the last Storm. Since Triska . . . she stopped the thought abruptly.
:I, at least, still have work to do,: she scolded the bird, but her tone was affectionate. Rather than return to the skies, Kir folded her wings back and shifted her talons on the leather pad, stabilizing her grip and rebalancing her weight so Stardance could move without disturbing her.
Stardance turned in place, her irritation with the fruitless exercise of looking for magic now returning. She studied the clearing again, glancing to the sun for her bearings. As she recalled, this place had once had a strong ley-line, which had been tapped and drawn deeper toward the Vale to power the Heartstone. Most of the sections of forest the students were searching today contained at least one former line or node. Might traces of these have survived the Storms? Was that what the Elders had hoped they would find with their closer examination?
She closed her eyes, the better to feel for any echo of the crackling energy of the magic, once so familiar to her, and expanded her Mage Sight outward. She Saw nothing—no lines, no web of energy to draw from—but she had a vague feeling, a sense that the magic was still there, somehow. She frowned in frustration. Not even sure how to go about it, she tried to change the focus of her Mage Sight, broadening and refining it at the same time. Suddenly, her mind seemed to twist, and she could See a faint tracery, limning everything around her with a subtle silver, fainter than the tiniest of ley-lines. To this odd Mage Sight, her shielded self was now surrounded by a faint haze of what she was sure was power, but she couldn’t tap it or shape it. How could anyone make use of this?
“It looks like I seize the fibers, but is not so. Look deeper.” Triska’s voice rang in Stardance’s head so clearly that the girl opened her eyes and looked around the wild forest, expecting to see the beloved snout hovering just behind an exceptionally large leaf, laughing at Stardance for believing her to be gone.
But even Kir was silent, and though the falcon liked to pretend to be aloof and regal, she would have been twittering like a magpie if anyone familiar were near.
Stardance took a deep, unsteady breath, fighting back the crushing disappointment, the weight of loss heavy within her. Then she remembered when she had heard those words. It had been a spinning lesson, when she had been trying to use magic to help feed the fibers to the spindle faster—and had, of course, ended up with great clumps instead of smooth thread.
After those words, she had watched Triska spin, this time with her Mage Sight, sure that the hertasi was using some innate magic. How else to explain how far superior Triska’s threads and weaving were? But Mage Sight had shown her nothing, just the glow of Triska’s door wards, like and yet somehow unlike those used in the training rooms.
“Is in mind,” Triska had finally said. “Think to make self attractive to fibers, no more.” It hadn’t made sense to Stardance at the time, so she hadn’t given it further thought, but had continued to practice spinning without attempting to use magic.
Could this faint magic be spun like the loose fiber into stronger thread? Stardance looked around the clearing, trying to remember where the lines had lain before the Storms. Unable to recall, she shrugged.
“See if it works, first,” she muttered. “Time enough to reshape later.”
:?: sent Kir.
:Not you, silly thing. As if I’d reshape so much as a feather.:
Kir preened her plumage briefly, then resettled on Stardance’s shoulder, tucking her beak behind the girl’s ear in a gesture of reassurance.
Stardance closed her eyes, then opened her Mage Sight with that same twist of her mind until she could once again See the faint fog of diffuse energy around her.
Like attracts like, she thought, and fed a tiny bit of her personal power outside of her shields, letting it drift and ripple a fine radiance over her skin, inviting the nebulous energies around her to join it.
Long minutes passed, and she was about to throw up her hands and go back to the Vale in disgust, finished with this pointless task, when she again heard Triska’s voice in her head.
“The silk waits for no one, but it will not be rushed.”
Stardance fed a little more of her energy out to her surface, ignoring the first warnings of energy strain, imagining waggling fingers of magic waving “come, dance with us” into the energy-mist. So caught up was she by the image and the feeling she was creating that she almost missed the response of the magic-haze around her.
It was exhaustion that caught her attention—or, rather, that she no longer felt exhausted, despite using her personal energy. Slowly, she brought her Mage Sight back into sharper focus and was astonished to See faint tendrils coalescing out the mist, drawn into her shields, replenishing her.
Stunned, she thoughtlessly reached out, almost grabbed for those precious strands of power, until she practically felt Triska’s presence beside her and remembered what had happened when she had first spun thread, how everything had tangled together when she had stopped letting the fibers flow through her fingers and had started to reach urgently for them.
Slowly, she stretched out to those tendrils with her coruscating Mage-fingers—bringing the strands together, plying one to the next and to the next with utmost care, until she had a tiny line started.
It was a mere runnel, nothing like the ley-lines that had fed the Heartstone and powered the Vale, nothing even like the line that had once flowed through this very clearing, but it was still decidedly a line.
But what to do with it? She couldn’t stand here forever, a living lodestone in the magic-haze.
Now, she was unsurprised when Triska’s voice again echoed in her head. “Every weaving starts with the warp thread.”
With Mage Sight and normal vision layered one on the other, Stardance examined the clearing, which stood on a slight incline. Like water, magic tended to run downhill, so she shifted, trailing the tiny threads of magic down the slope, careful not to move so quickly as to break even one.
As she paced the lowest edge of the clearing, she found what she sought.
Though not of the quality of a Heartstone, the large rock at the edge of the tree line seemed to have enough quartz in it to hold the power from this tiny line she had created. It would serve well enough for her to tie off a warp thread here. Maybe, once the power had gathered and grown, weft threads could be brought in to shape it, reweaving the network of lines that had once tracked through the Pelagiris. Or it could be guided to run its path elsewhere, perhaps even back to the Vale.
With exquisite care, she reached out to the stone with her shimmering Mage-fingers, sending some of her own power to dance over the stone, to wave invitingly to the tendrils she had drawn with her. Ever so gently, she
