Farmers treated weeds the way templars treated Urik's street-scum, but druids weren't farmers or templars. Druids tended groves. They nurtured their plants not with fertilizer but with magic—usually in the form of stubbornness and sweat. Telhami's stubbornness and Pavek's sweat. Right now, his sweaty hide was rank enough to draw bugs from every grove and field in Quraite. He wanted nothing more than to retreat to the cool, inner sanctum of the grove where a stream-fed pool could sluice him clean and ease his aches.
Armor-plated mekillots would fly to the moons before Telhami let him off with half a day's labor in her grove. Telhami's grove—Pavek never thought of it as his, even though she'd bequeathed it to him with her dying wishes—was Quraite's largest, oldest, and least natural grove. It required endless nurturing.
Pavek suspected Telhami's grove reached backward through time. Not only was it much larger within than without, but the air felt different beneath its oldest trees. And how else to explain the variety of clouds that were visible only through these branches and the. gentle, regular rains that fell here, but nowhere else?
It was unnatural in less magical ways, too. Druids weren't content to guard their groves or enlarge them. No, druids seemed compelled to furbish and refurbish; their groves were never finished. They transplanted rocks as readily as they transplanted vegetation and meddled constantly with the water-flow, pursuing some arcane notion of 'perfect wilderness' that a street-scum man couldn't comprehend. In his less charitable moments, Pavek believed Telhami had chosen him to succeed her simply because she needed someone with big hands and a strong back to rearrange every rock, every stream, every half-grown plant.
Not that Pavek was inclined to complaint. Compared to the mul taskmaster who'd taught him the rudiments of the five templar weapons—the sword, the spear, the sickles, the mace, and a man-high staff—while he was still a boy in the orphanage, Telhami's spirit was both good-humored and easygoing in her nagging. More important, at the end of a day's labor, she became his mentor, guiding him through the maze of druid magic.
For all the twenty-odd years of his remembered life, Pavek had longed for magic—not the borrowed spellcraft that Urik's Lion-King granted his templars, but a magic of his own command. While he wore a regulator's yellow robe, he'd spent his off-duty hours in the archives, hunting down every lore-scroll he could find and committing it to his memory. When fate's chariot carried Pavek to Quraite, he'd seized the opportunity to learn whatever the druids would teach him. Under Telhami's guidance, he'd learned the names of everything that lived in the grove and the many, many names for water. He could call water from the ground and from the air. He could summon lesser creatures, and they'd eat tamely from his hand. Soon, Telhami promised, they'd unravel the mysteries of fire. How could Pavek dare complain? If he suffered frustration or despair, it wasn't his mentor's fault, but his own.
The permitted process was straight-forward enough: Dig up the weeds from an established part of the grove. Bring the bare-root stalks to the verge, and plant them here with all the hope a man could summon. If a weed established itself, then the grove would become one plant larger, one plant stronger, and the balance of the Tablelands would tilt one mote away from barrenness, toward fertility.
Day after day since Telhami died, Pavek weeded and planted little plots along the verge of her grove. In all that time, from all those hundreds and thousands of weeds, Pavek had tilted the balance by exactly one surviving plant: a hairy-leafed dustweed looming like the departed Dragon over the slips he had just planted. The dustweed was waist high now and in full, foul-smelling bloom. Pavek's eyes and nose watered when he got close to it, but he cherished the ugly plant as if it were his firstborn child. Still on his knees, he brushed each fuzzy leaf, pinching off the wilted ones lest they pass their weakness to the stem. With the tip of his little finger, he collected sticky, pale pollen from a fresh blossom and carefully poked it into the flower's heart.
"Leave that for the bugs, my ham-handed friend. You haven't got any talent for such sensitive things."
Pavek looked around to see a luminously green Telhami shimmering in her own light some twenty paces behind him, where the verge became the lush grove. He looked at his dustweed again without acknowledging her, giving all his attention to the next blossom.
Telhami wouldn't come closer. Her spirit was bound by the magic of the grove and the grove didn't extend to the dustweed....
Not yet.
"You're a sentimental fool, Just-Plain Pavek. You'll be I talking to them next, and giving them names."
He chuckled and kept working. Other than Telhami, only the half-elf, Ruari, and the human boy, Zvain, treated him anything like the man he'd always been. And Telhami was the only person, living or dead, who still used the name he claimed when he first sought refuge here. To the rest of Quraite he was Pavek, the glorious hero of the community's desperate fight against High Templar Elabon Escrissar. In the moment of Quraite's greatest need, when the community's defenses were nearly overrun, when druid and farmer alike had conceded defeat in their hearts, Pavek had called on Hamanu the Lion-King of Urik. He surrendered his spirit to become the living instrument of a sorcerer-king's deadly magic. Then, in a turn of events that seemed even more miraculous in the minds of the surviving Quraiters, Pavek had delivered the community from its deliverer.
Pavek hadn't done any such thing, of course. King Hamanu came to Quraite for his own reasons and departed the same way. The Lion-King had ignored them since, which made a one-time templar's heart skip a beat whenever he thought about it.
But there was no point in denying his heroism among the Quraiters or expecting them to call him Just-Plain Pavek again. He'd tried and they'd attributed his requests and denials to modesty, which had never been a templar's virtue, or—worse—to holiness, pointing out that Telhami had, after all, bequeathed the high druid's grove to him, not Akashia.
Until that fateful day when Hamanu walked into Quraite and out again, every farmer and druid would have sworn that Akashia was destined to be their next high druid. Pavek had expected it himself. Like Pavek, Akashia was an orphan, but she'd been born in Quraite and raised by Telhami. At eighteen, Kashi knew more about druidry than Pavek hoped to learn with the rest of his life, and though beauty was not important to druids or to Kashi herself, Pavek judged her the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen.
And as for how Akashia judged him...
"You're wasting time, Just-Plain Pavek. There's work to be done. There'll be no time for lessons if you stay there mooning over your triumphs."
Pavek wanted his lessons, but he stayed where he was, staring at the dustweed and getting himself under control before he faced Telhami again. He didn't know how much privacy his thoughts had from the grove's manifest spirit; he didn't ask. Telhami never mentioned Akashia directly, only needled him this way when he wandered down morose and hopeless paths.
If Pavek couldn't deny that he'd become a hero to the Quraiters, then he shouldn't deny, at least to himself, that right after the battle he'd hoped Kashi would accept him as her partner and lover. She had turned to him for solace while Telhami lay dying, and he'd laid his heart bare for her, as he'd never done—never been tempted to do—with anyone. Then, when Telhami made her decision, Kashi turned away from him completely. She wouldn't speak with him privately or meet his eyes. If he approached, she retreated, until Pavek retreated as well, nursing a pain worse than any bleeding wound.
These days, Kashi kept counsel and company strictly with herself. Quraite's reconstruction had become her life, and for that she needed workers, not partners. As for love, well, if Akashia needed any man's love, she kept her needs well hidden, and Pavek stayed out of her way. He spent one afternoon in four drilling the Quraiters in the martial skills Kashi wanted them to have; otherwise Pavek came to the village at supper, then returned to the grove to sleep with starlight falling on his face.