stinging reminder of what he was supposed to be doing.
Damn you, gryphon. that hurt.
With his 'ears' still ringing, he turned his attention back to his teacher, whose twitching tail betrayed his impatience.
'If you do not pay heed, I ssshall do more than ssswat you, Darrrkwind,' Treyvan warned him. 'That isss the third time today your thoughtsss have gone drrrifting.' He grunted an assent, without mentioning that each time Elspeth had been the cause of his wit-wandering. He needn't have bothered. Treyvan brought it up on his own.
'Can you not worrrk about a young female without having yourrr mind drrift?' he asked acidly. 'Humanss! Alwaysss in sseasson!' Darkwind felt his neck and ears heat up as he flushed. 'That's not it,' he protested. Treyvan cut his protests short.
'It mattersss not,' the gryphon growled. 'Now watch thiss time. thisss is how the transsssmutation ssshould look to you. Crreate the texturrre sso, pussh it frrrom you asss if rrreleasssing a brreath. Halt it herrre frrom yourr body.' Darkwind blotted everything out of his mind except the sense of the power-flows, and the magic that the gryphon manipulated. As Treyvan built the proper shield, step by slow, tiny step, Darkwind finally saw what he had forgotten.
Treyvan had woven a complex texture into the shield, in one area directing power only in, and in another place filtering it out, giving him two power flows-one from himself, the other ready to take in energy directed at him by an enemy, and transmute it. That was the problem; he'd only allowed for the single power-flow from himself. The energy coming in from outside took over the field that was supposed to channel power from himself into the first shield. Back-pressure, as in a wellspring, with only the inevitable leaks to relieve that pressure. Once there, since it wasn't shield-energy, it eddied or stood idle-or worse, waited to react with another 'color' of magic-in all cases, more than frustrating.
Potentially deadly, in fact. It never reached the transmutational part of the Working; so it never channeled to the last shield.
Mentally cursing himself, he rebuilt his shields; this time the transmutational shield worked correctly, giving him two shields for the personal-energy cost of one. At least for as long as the enemy chose to sling spellweapons at him.
'Now, you know how thisss ssshield can be countered, yess?' Treyvan asked, when the shields had been tested and met with his approval.
'Two ways-well, three, if you count just blasting away with more energy than the shunt can handle,' Darkwind replied. 'The first is to find the shunt-where he's grounded-and use it to drain energy out of the shield- hooking into it yourself, and taking the energy back. If that happens, the shield starts draining the mage that's holding it. If you do that fast enough, all his shields will collapse before he can react.' Treyvan's crest-feathers rose with approval. 'And?'
'Attack where the mage isn't expecting it,' he said. 'That can be one of two things-attacking through the shunt, which is structurally the weakest part of the shield, or attacking with something else entirely.
He thought for a moment. 'At this point, if I were the attacker, I'd go for something completely unexpected. Like... a physical attack. Send Vree in to harass him. Toss an illusion at him. Demonsbane-throw a rock at him to make him lose his concentration!' Treyvan laughed. 'Good. Now-could you have done what the sssword Need did? Could you now transssmute the energy of an attack and sssplit it?' He thought about that for a moment; thought about exactly what the sword had done. 'Yes,' he said finally. 'But only by doing what she did-holding no shields at all between the attack and the transmutationlayer.
That might work for a thing made of metal and magic, but it would be pretty foolhardy for a flesh-and-blood creature.' Treyvan nodded. 'Neverrrthelesss,' he said, pointing a talon at Darkwind, 'It did worrk. And ssso long asss Falconsssbane kept launching magical attackss against herr, it continued to worrrk. Only if he had ssseen what ssshe wass doing and launched a physical attack, or ssome otherr type of magic, would he have failed. He ssufferrred frrrom sshort sssight.' Darkwind countered that statement with one of his own. 'We were lucky,' he said flatly. 'Falconsbane was overconfident, and we were damned lucky. I have the feeling that if he'd had the time to plan and come in force, he could have taken us, all the Shin'a'in, and maybe even their Goddess on, and won.' Treyvan hissed softly. 'Your thoughtsss marrch with mine, featherlesss ssson,' he said, after a pause. 'And it isss in my mind that we ssshall not alwayss be ssso lucky.'
'In mine, too.' Darkwind nodded toward Elspeth, and tried to lighten the mood. 'For one thing, that woman seems to attract trouble.' The gryphon's beak snapped shut, and he nodded. 'Yesss, sshe doess.
Sshe hass attracted you, forr one. Ssso, let usss sssee if you can conssstruct thossse ssshields corrrectly a ssecond time-and thisss time, hold them againssst me.'
Elspeth paid careful attention to every hissed word Hydona spoke, finding it unexpectedly easy to ignore the fact that her teacher was a creature larger than the biggest horse she had ever seen, with a beak powerful enough to snap her arm off at a single bite. Even with a motivation to pay attention such as that, the gryphon already made more sense than Darkwind did. Neither she nor the gryphons were native speakers of the Tayledras tongue; Hydona was being very careful about phrasing things in unambiguous terms that Darkwind likely thought were intuitively obvious.
Another case for being careful about what you assume in translation. Interesting. that is a consideration I would expect of a Court-trained person, not a creature like Hydona.
Hydona related everything she taught Elspeth to the mind-magic Elspeth already knew. that made a lot more sense than Darkwind's convoluted explanations of power-flows and energy-fluxes. They seemed clear to him, apparently, and seemed to make sense, except when he tried to fake; she had seen bluffs in enough Court functions to recognize the signs.
Hydona clearly detailed making an anchor point and shielding, for instance; that was a lot like grounding and centering, and was done for many of the same reasons. When put that way, Elspeth stopped subconsciously resisting the idea of having to effectively double-shield, once against mental intrusions and once against magical attacks. The other thing that made sense was that Hydona had pointed out the sword Need had done all that for her; the sword was in itself a permanent anchor point, radiating a seemingly ungraspable power into the earth, forever acting as a ground for the bearer it was bonded to. Need had shields on it that Hydona doubted were under conscious control anymore-if they ever had been. She seemed to think that they hadn't been; that they were some part of the sword itself, before the spirit came to reside in it.
So that was how Elspeth had managed to work magic without all the preparations the Hawkbrothers and their large friends deemed necessary.
The precautions had been taken, they simply hadn't been taken by her.
