a single trick any of his commanders or mages could work that she hadn't seen before - and countered before. The Herald-Bitch Talia had been made a Sun-priest herself, and vested with the authority of the Arm of Vkandis by yet another bitch, the High Priest Solaris. And Bitch-Princess Elspeth had simply vanished, on some other quest for help, and he had to assume, given the absence of panic, that she was succeeding, even though not one of his agents could locate her.
And Bitch-Adept Hulda sat and twiddled her thumbs.
He was beginning to grow very tired of women. He had already grown tired of Hulda.
He was not aware of the fact that he had spoken her name until the echoes sent it back to him. This time he did snarl.
Yes, he was growing very tired of Hulda. He was tired of her whims, her eccentricities, her pretenses. What had been charming and exciting when he was sixteen now bored him - when it didn't disgust him. She was too old to play the coquette, too old for girlish mannerisms. And when she cast them off, she acted as if she was the monarch here, and not he.
That galled him almost as much as her consistent failure, and he would have tolerated the former if she had not brought him the latter. But she had the attitude without producing results, and if she weren't an Adept, he'd have had her slow-roasted alive by now.
When he was younger, he had accepted the fact that she virtually ruled him without a thought. But then, he had accepted many things back then without a thought. He was older now.
And wiser.
She treated him exactly as she had when he had taken the throne. She spoke, and expected him to listen attentively; she issued orders, and expected him to fling himself into whatever she ordered him to do.
I could have tolerated all of this if she had only done what she had promised. Out-thinking her was a challenge then....
She had pledged him before he took the throne that he would soon be an Adept to rival her; she swore he would have power beyond his wildest dreams, power enough to level mountains if he chose. She swore that she would teach him everything she knew.
But the power never materialized, and the training she gave him never went beyond the level of Master. She had never taught him how to use all the powers he could Sense, and all the training she had given him until that moment had made it impossible for him to touch them. Or at least he had not been able to touch them during the time that she had been his only teacher.
He had encountered this reluctance on Hulda's part to give him any more real teaching two years ago, shortly after he had turned Master. He had been certain at that moment that the powers of an Adept were almost in his grasp, that it would only be a matter of a little more training.
That was when the excuses began. Hulda suspended his regular training sessions, telling him that he was beyond such things. That had made him elated, briefly - until he realized that there was no way other than regular training to achieve his long-sought goal. And when he began to seek her out, asking for more teaching, she was always busy....
And at first, her excuses had seemed plausible. After so many defeats from the west, they were taking no chances. Hulda had mustered a cadre of mages of relatively low power to watch the border for any weaknesses in the force that protected Valdemar from magic. She needed to organize these people, to make certain that the coercion spells upon them were powerful enough to keep them at their work no matter what temptations and opportunities to defect were placed before them. But after weeks of such excuses, they began to wear thin.
After a few months, he took matters into his own hands.
He had been collecting mages since his first, ill-fated attempt to take the Valdemaran throne. Now he began doing more than collecting them and placing them under his coercion spells; now he began finding out, in a systematic sweep through his mage-corps, just what they knew.
He had been collecting and recruiting every kind and type of mage that showed even the faintest traces of power - from hill-shaman to mages of no known School. By aggressively pursuing a course of forced-learning, he had picked up every bit of knowledge, however seemingly inconsequential, from any of his 'recruits' that had teachings he had not gotten. He had also been collecting every scrap of written information about magic that he could lay his hands on; every grimoire, every mage's personal notebook, every history of ancient times, and anything concerning magic to be had from within the Empire. Much of it had been useful. Some of it, he was certain, Hulda herself did not share. But none of it brought him the prize he was trying to reach -
At least, not to his knowledge. As he understood it, only an Adept could use the power of 'nodes,' those meeting places of the lines of power that he could use. Every attempt he had made so far had resulted in failure. He was still not an Adept, and he had no idea how far he was from that goal.
He had been trying to find an Adept to teach him, with no luck. Of course, Adepts could be avoiding Hardorn; everything he had ever heard or read indicated that the kind of Adept willing to teach him would also be the kind unwilling to share power, and that was precisely the problem he had with Hulda. Hulda might be warning them off, somehow. It would not surprise him much to discover that she had been working against him, preventing him from locating an Adept so that he would always be her inferior.
