He sighed, and threw his arm over his eyes, feeling as if it wouldn't be such a bad thing to be a Falconsbane and not have to worry about angry mothers or guilty consciences.
That's why their way is easier, I suppose. Well, I've got a conscience and I'm stuck with it. He couldn't use his mind and his magic on An'desha to make him pliable again. Besides being wrong, it would be stupid. No matter what he did, if he played with An'desha's mind, what he would have when he had finished wouldn't really be 'An'desha' anymore. So what would be the point to all the work? If he wanted someone to be his toy, he could pick someone at random, a stable-boy or page, anyone. That wouldn't be right either, and it still wouldn't be An'desha.
He swallowed with difficulty. So where does all this leave me? The odd man out, with An'desha spending more and more time away from me. And I'll have to smile and pretend everything is fine.
It looked as if he was going to have a great deal of uncomfortable time to fill as An'desha drifted farther and farther from him. But what else could he do? The single course that was open to him was confrontation, and that would only drive An'desha away faster.
He was not prone to depression, but now he tried to swallow a hard and uncomfortable lump of despair that seemed to have gotten lodged in his throat. I thought I had finally found someone I could spend the rest of my life with, and once again it comes to nothing. He felt so loaded down with melancholy he might never be able to rise again. No one understood. They looked at him, saw how handsome he was, how Gifted a mage he was, how intelligent he was, and thought that everything always fell into his hands. They didn't know, they couldn't guess, how hard it was for him to make and keep friends, much less lovers—never dreamed just how lonely he was. it was easy to find people who would fill his bed; impossible to find anyone who would fill his heart. Temporary lovers were easy to come by, but reliability was rarer fare.
I suppose the best thing I can do is to work, he thought dully. If I keep my mind occupied, my heart generally leaves me alone. That always worked in the past, and the gods knew that they had enough troubles now, trying to come up with the next solution after the breakwater.
I should go make myself available to Darkwind, Elspeth, and the Valdemaran artificers. That was what he should do, all right; it was the logical direction. But that was what An'desha was doing, which would only serve to put him in An'desha's company. An'desha might like the artificers, but they made Firesong think of bees or ants—logical, well-coordinated, but without souls. Their 'magic' was a thing of gears and clockwork, regular and completely artificial.
Besides, Darkwind and Elspeth are much, much better than I am at this new approach to magic. It obviously doesn't feel artificial to them.
No. No, I cannot learn to like these artificers. I cannot learn to think the way they do, or to admire the way they think. Their odd, mechanical approach to what he still felt, deep down inside, was a process that was part instinct, part art, and part improvisation, robbed magic of all the beauty and the thrill he had found in it when he first began to make use of his Gift. Without beauty, what was the point anyway?
They've taken poetry and reduced it to a mathematical formula, that's what they've done. But knowing the formula doesn't mean you can produce poetry; it only means you can produce well-crafted doggerel.
The more he thought about it, the more he rebelled, soul and heart. He had tried to work with them before, and in the end, neither he nor they had been comfortable.
They keep trying to find ways to measure things that should be felt, not measured. You can't take a ruler to a love affair, you can't holdup a gauge to weigh sorrow, and you shouldn't try to find a way to measure magic!
Melancholy had weighed him down a moment before; now irritation drove him to his feet again. He pushed himself up off the couch with a muttered curse, and flung his power around the room recklessly, lighting the wicks of every lamp within the walls with an ostentatious flare. Aya started, uttered an unmusical squawk of annoyance, and settled down on his perch with all of his feathers fluffed, glaring at his bond mate through a slitted blue eye.
Firesong ignored him, although he sensed Aya's own irritation in the bond bird mental mutterings. Well, that was as much a reflection of his own unsettled emotional state as Aya's peevishness. When his emotional state was negative, so was the firebird's.
Maybe he'd better get out of Aya's way for a while, before their mutual irritation started to get out of hand.
A hot soak, perhaps. If nothing else, soaking in the hot pool in the garden below would unknot some of his tension-knotted muscles. If he didn't get them relaxed, he'd have a headache before morning.
Abruptly he turned and took the spiral staircase down to the ground floor of the ekele. Here, frosted glass lamps like little moons placed among the foliage displayed the wonders of a Hawkbrother Vale in miniature. Luxuriant plants spread their leaves in every part of the room, which had floor-to-ceiling windows comprising all four sides. Firesong had landscaped with rocks and plants until it was impossible to tell—particularly at night—that this was a little corner of Companion's Field in Valdemar, and not a private corner of a real Vale. Finally, after much forced growth, vines covered the uprights between the windows, the trees and bushes hid the glazing, and a canopy of leaves concealed the ceiling. As he had leisure, he added tiny spots to the ceiling that absorbed sunlight by day and emitted it at night, mimicking stars.
