He settled for a moment to let his muscles recover; he felt them quivering with fatigue as he sat down. He had pushed himself in this Wind Dance, to far closer to his limits than he usually tried to reach. The steps which appeared deceptively easy, required perfect balance and control a required fully as much effort to sustain as Tre'valen's more energetic Hawk Dance.
He listened to some of the others discussing dances and dancers past nodding when someone said something he particularly agreed with. No one else wanted to follow his performance, and some of the players took that as a signal to put their instruments away and rest their weary fingers.
As Darkwind settled his back against the tree and slowly sipped his water, he considered the Outlanders- Elspeth in particular. They were less of an enigma than he had feared they would be, although he still wished he knew a great deal more about their culture.
Elspeth was more of a problem than her friend Skif, simply because of her position as his student. She was sometimes fascinating, sometimes infuriating, often both.
She compounded his own problems as he resumed his position as an Adept. As his father had pointed out, he had a great deal to re-learn; how much, Darkwind was only now figuring out. What Starblade didn't know was that his son was already giving Elspeth lessons, even while he was retraining his own powers.
Elspeth posed a peculiar hazard, that of half-knowledge. She had full training in the Gifts of mind-magic, though no true training in her magepowersbut some of the Mind-Magic disciplines were similar enough to give her a grasp on magery, but without controls. Her sword had at one time provided some guidance and tutelage, but Elspeth had a great deal to learn about even rudimentary magics. Without the blade Need about to keep her in hand, he had not felt safe about having Elspeth walking around loose without beginning those early lessons in basic control.
What he had not reckoned on-although, given her quick temper, he should have anticipated the difficulty-was her impatience with him.
She wanted answers, and she wanted them immediately. And when he was already impatient with himself, he didn't feel like explaining himself to an Outlander who had barely even seen magic in action before she came south.
Her insistence on forcing years' worth of learning into a few weeks was enough to drive the most patient of savants to distraction, much less her current teacher. She can be so irritating...He leaned his head back and stared up into the pattern of faint light and deep darkness created by moonlight, mage-lights, and tree branches.
There was randomness, no discernible pattern, just as there was no discernible pattern to his life. A season ago, he would never have been able to imagine the events of the past several weeks. A year ago, he never, would have believed his life would change in any meaningful way, except for the worse.
He sighed, and ran his hand through his hair, fluffing it to cool and dry it. Elspeth was a disruption to an already confusing situation. The problem was, she had the infuriating habit of being right now and again in matters of magic-matters in which she had no experience and little knowledge.
He'd dismissed all of her suggestions initially. Then, when she'd been proven right a time or two, he'd thought at first that it was pure luck.
No one could always be right or wrong after all, but a day or so ago, he'd finally seen the logic to her ideas' successes. In general, when she saw something that she thought could be done magically, but that he had never learned, her theories turned out to be, in principle, correct.
One case in point that still annoyed Darkwind was treating the lesser lines of power as if they were a web, and the mage was a spider in the midst of that web. She'd reasoned that anyone working magic within the area a mage defined as his 'web' would create a disturbance in the lines of power, which the mage at the center would feel, in the same way a spider felt an insect in its web. The advantage of this was that it was a passive detection system; there was nothing to alert the intruding mage that he'd been detected.
It was nothing he'd been taught. He'd been certain it wouldn't workuntil she sketched a diagram, extended a few tendrils of energy, and proved to him that it would. It had been something of a shock to his already-bruised pride, and he followed along numbly as she refined the idea.
As if it weren't enough that she was attractive, in her unadorned way.
She had to be innovative, too.
The mage-lights dimmed, sending the boughs above vanishing into shadows; and he looked back down from his perusal of the branches to find that everyone had left the clearing but him. The celebration was winding down, as couples and groups sought ekeles or hot springs, and the rest, not ready to seek beds, gathered in the meeting- circle or beside the waterfall.
He stretched his legs, carefully, to make certain they hadn't stiffened up on him. They weren't cramping as he'd feared; he was in better shape than he'd thought, apparently. But he didn't feel much like rejoining the rest who were still celebrating; he rose slowly, and began pacing, making a point of walking as silently as he could. It was a lot easier to do that here, on the clear paths, than out in the forest. There was no point in losing his hard- won scouting skills just because he was resuming his position as an Adept. There was a Tayledras saying: 'No arrow shot at a target is ever wasted, no matter how many break.' It meant that no practice or lesson, however trivial it might seem, was a loss.
Now, reclaiming his magery, he was discovering the downside of that saying.
I didn't realize how much I'd forgotten until I started trying to teach her, he admitted to himself. If she'd just be a little more patient with me...When something went wrong, Elspeth wasn't particularly inclined to sit and wait quietly until he got it right again. Magic wasn't simple; spells had to be laid out methodically, and when something got muddled, a responsible mage couldn't just erase things and start over. Spells gone awry had to be unmade. Generally Darkwind had to retrace his steps carefully, in order to find out exactly where he'd made those mistakes.
Only then could he undo what he'd done, go back to the beginning, and start again, constructing correct paths.
Whenever he was forced to do that, Elspeth would invariably ask questions at the worst possible time, when interruptions would be the most irritating. She never seemed to know when to keep quiet and let him work. Why was she in such a hurry to master every aspect of magic~ Mastery took time and practice; surely she was bright enough to realize that.
Even now, he realized she was irritating him. How can she do that? he asked himself, pausing in his pacing for a moment to examine his reaction.
