A Gathering Of Stones

##

Korimenei settled into her fast-vigil. She sought to re-find that sense of connectedness with air and earth, with plant and beast that she’d gotten as a gift for those few moments when she sat on the trunk and dabbled her feet in the dust.

The sun rose higher, dust motes danced in the rays that slid through openings in the needle canopy above and behind her. She was all sensory data, perception without self-awareness. Then lost it. Then had it again. Then lost it. And lost it. And sank into self-doubt and sourness. Shadow shrank about her, hot yellow sunlight crept toward the blanket, came over it, touched her knees, her fingers. She rubbed at her eyes, looked up. The sun was almost directly overhead. “Three days,” she said aloud. “Three days.”

She rocked on her buttocks, straightened her legs, flexed and loosened the muscles in them until the stiffness was gone. She stood, stretched, shivered all over. Two hours only and already the exercise seemed futile, a fanatic’s flagellation of body and spirit. She let her arms drop. There you go again, you silly maid, aping Settsimaksimin, roaring phrases in your alleged mind. Her fast had begun this morning with a breakfast of juice and a hardroll. She was hungry, her stomach was grumbling and she had that all-over sense of debilitation she got when she went too long without eating. Three days, she thought again and just managed to stifle an obscenity, one of the many she’d picked up when she was a rebel child wandering Silagamatys’ waterfront when she was supposed to be in bed.

She fished a tin cup from the rucksack, filled it at the stream and sat on a flat rock with her feet in the water. The stream went down a long shallow slide here, with a steady brushing hum punctuated occasionally by the pop of bubbles or a troutling breaking surface. She sipped from her cup and watched the clear cold stream smooth as glass slip over her bare toes. The sun was hot on her head and shoulders; behind her she could hear the buzz and mumble of insects. Her stomach cramped. She closed her eyes and willed the nausea to go away. It was mostly imagination, she knew that well enough, but knowing didn’t seem to help. Three days. I’ll be a rag. Why am I doing this?

She rinsed the cup, filled it again and took it back to the blanket. She lowered herself onto the dreampattem, set the cup beside her and folded her long legs into the proper configuration. Ten years she’d spent learning control of her Talent. That’s all it is, this school, Maksim told her once, control. And maybe expanded possibility. Maybe. She could testify to the truth of that now. Control and the limits of control. She told herself she knew her limits, she told herself she had earned a degree of confidence in her skill and in her strength. She’d survived each trial so far, but every new step was a new threat. She didn’t believe there could be more for her to learn; the last two years she’d spent consolidating what she’d dredged up out of herself during the first eight years of her schooling. She didn’t want to believe there was more power out there waiting for her to tap into it; she was afraid of touching any hotter, wilder sources. There were times during the past ten years when she was working hot that the power she was shaping threatened to consume her. She managed to hang on, but each time was worse than the last, each time she came closer to losing it, a lesson she took to heart. She had an edgy uncertainty working in her now, a fear that the next time she touched heat, she wouldn’t be strong enough, that she’d die, or worse than death, find herself controlled.

“Trago.” she said aloud. “Come talk to me.” She waited, hands on her thighs, opening; closing, short ragged nails scratching erratically at the canvas of her trousers. He didn’t come. She never knew if he heard her when she called him; sometimes he showed up, sometimes he didn’t. This looked like one of the latter. “Damn.” If it weren’t for Trago locked dreaming in crystal, she’d run and trust her reflexes to keep her loose. But he was the hook that bound her to the Shahntien’s whim and she had to play out this farce.

##

I put him, Maksim said, where his god can’t reach him. If I kill him, child, there’ll only be another taking his place, another and another, no end to it. He’ll sleep and sleep and sleep… Maksim turned his head and smiled at her… until you and only you, young Kori, until you come and touch him awake. He is in the Cave of Chains. If you can get yourself there, Kori, all you have to do is touch the crystal enclosing him. It will melt and the boy will wake. No one else can do this. No one, god or man. Only you.

##

She scratched at her nose. All over the place, she thought. I did better concentration my first year. “Tit,” she said, “give us a look, will you?”

Nothing. Obviously he was busy with other things, things more important than a long gone sister. She moved her body impatiently. He’d been looking over her shoulder for years, studying what she studied, maybe even nudging her when he wanted something she wasn’t dealing with at the moment. She’d been driven, those first years. She’d thought it was because she wanted to get away as soon as she could and free her brother. She had to learn, to grow accustomed to working hot and fast, she had to find a way to outwit the Shahntien so she could escape her claws. To outwit Maksim who made a habit of sending his eidolon to chat with her. Maybe it was more than that, maybe it was Trago pushing her. One thing she did know, he was watching and studying a long time before he started talking to her. She worked her mouth. It hurt, thinking that way, but the most important thing she’d learned (besides control, of course) was never lie to yourself. No matter what extravagances you practice on other people, it’s fatal to lie to yourself. She had the Shahntien to show her the truth of that, she had Maksim. Odd, the way he treated her. She could swear he never lied to her, never even shaded the truth. It was hard to take at times, but in the end she was grateful to his habit, in the end she saw this as the starkest compliment he ever paid her. In the end it was why Shahntien Shere stopped hating her. And life at the school got to be a lot easier.

The sun slid down its western arc; shadow crossed the stream and crept around her, cold and silent. Depressing. She was tired and hungry and she hadn’t managed more than a moment or two of real meditation the whole futile day. Her stomach cramped repeatedly through that interminable afternoon, at times she could think of nothing but food. She dreamed of roast chicken with brown-gold gravy pooling round it. She thought of shrimp fried in a batter so light it might have floated off at a breath of wind, succulent pink shrimp. Peaches, peeled and golden, dripping with a rich fragrant nectar. Strawberries. plump tartsweet, floating in whipped cream. She wrenched her mind away and contemplated a blade of grass she pulled from a clump beside the blanket. She considered the greenness of it, greenness as an abstract idea, greenness as it was expressed in this particular physical object, mottled with lines of darker color, with pinpoints and patches of black and tan; she considered the edge where the blade left off and the air began, the finely toothed edge that was not so much green as an extraction from the colors combined into green, a pale anemic yellow fading to white, to no-color.