Through the jewels in my ear, she reached inside of me. As if she were drawing back a curtain, she pulled back a piece of my thoughts, exposing a dark, empty hole. Into the hole poured a stream of green-and gold-streaked darkness from the center of the spinning ring-pure power, an immense wave of it like nothing I’d experienced before. Fire burned in my veins, filling me, swelling my lungs and stretching my skin. My heart drummed against my chest until I felt like I was going to burst.
Notole let go of my mind and took the ring from my hand, while I gulped air. “Now, my young Prince,” she said, “try it. Touch the glass there on the far shelf.”
I pointed my finger at a wine goblet that guttered in the candlelight across the room, and it shattered into a million pieces at my thought. Three more beside it splintered when I looked at them. A candle flame grew to a bonfire, and then I blew a puff of air in its direction and snuffed it out again. I considered the battling warriors. I couldn’t even see them, but I commanded them to be paralyzed and knew it was done because I could hear their angry and fearful thoughts. I quickly set them to breathing again, for their anger had turned into panic. They were suffocating.
I hadn’t known power could be like this. Drawing a huge breath, I lifted a table with my wish and flew it about the room. A book slipped off the table, but I slowed its falling so that I could catch it before it fell to the floor. All of this as I sat on the edge of my stool. Everything that had been difficult or impossible all these months was now easy.
“Well done, my young Prince. Few in the world-perhaps no one save the three of us-can take so much into themselves so quickly. You will do well. Very well, indeed.” All the Lords were with me in my mind, touching me, smiling at me, pleased with how well I had done. I was pleased, too, and could think of nothing but doing more of it.
When I left the Lords’ house that night, I felt strange and excited, but I noticed that the night was exceptionally dark. Even the giant torches that burned over the entrance to the Lords’ house seemed to have little effect.
A slave sat at the top of the stairs waiting for me. When he took my cloak, his eyes met mine for a moment, and I felt such a wave of terror from him that I stepped back. He averted his eyes quickly. I considered reading his thoughts, but decided I would rather take another look at the puzzle that had been set for me. Maybe I could find some enchantment that had been undetectable before. I told the slave to prepare a bath and wait for me there.
Once the slave was gone, I took the things from the wooden box and examined them again. Bits and pieces. Natural objects, except for the mirror. Not chosen idly. The sand arrangement had taken great care to make; too bad I’d had to spill it. The mirror, too, had taken time to create, yet it was not expertly made. No enchantments on any of it.
My mind flicked to the Leiran boy, but dismissed him almost as quickly. He was not one to speak in riddles, even if he could have gained access to my apartments. I turned over the mirror to look for clues, but when I saw my reflection, I couldn’t think of puzzles anymore. I drew closer to the lamp and took another look. My skin crept over my bones.
My eyes weren’t brown any more, but black, so dark that you couldn’t see where the colored part left off and the pupil began. I threw the mirror and the other things back in the box. Cold and sick, I jumped into the hot bath and sat for an hour trying to think only about power and sorcery and what I might be able to do with them. My slaves didn’t look at me. I ignored their terror and the whispering presence of the Lords who hovered in the deeps of my head telling me how well I had done at my lessons.
I didn’t sleep well. When morning came, I pulled out the mirror and took another look. My eyes were brown again. I was very relieved, and decided it had just been exhaustion. Things often got confusing in Notole’s rooms.
Sword training occupied the morning, but I found it difficult to concentrate on anything but sorcery. But Notole didn’t call me that day, and when I spoke to her, she said she was not available for teaching.
I waited almost a week, the hunger for sorcery burning in me like a fever. At last she called, and I ran across the courtyard and down the stairs to her den, hoping she would open the purple velvet bag and pull out the brass ring. She did.
That day we let our minds travel through the Zhid encampment outside the fortress walls. A troop of warriors was being punished by their commander for lax discipline. The warriors’ anger at the punishment and their desire for revenge was eating away at them as they labored in the desert, but they dared not rebel. With Notole’s help and her oculus, I drank deep of their fear and hatred, and it tasted better than the first sip of water after a desert march. I was bursting with power.
We practiced control that day-holding objects, stacking them, making them move in precise patterns, and controlling the thoughts of others. The Drudges were easy; they were so dull and afraid, I could make them think anything I wanted. The Zhid were more challenging. Their minds were filled with so many things: war and strategy, fighting skills, and scheming about their fellow warriors and their superiors. I had trouble trying to intrude on their minds, but eventually one of the house guards had a fearsome nightmare in the middle of the day, thanks to me.
It was far into the night when I went back to my rooms. I worked on sharpening my sword, ate a meal, and cleaned myself up. Only then did I pull the wooden square out of the box and look into the polished bit of metal. It had happened again. This time the area of black was larger than the normal colored part of the eye. It didn’t hurt. My eyes just looked strange… but no one but slaves or Drudges were going to see them.
My eyes were normal again the next day, and I almost brought the question about them to mind, but I decided against it. The Lords might not let me continue with Notole’s lessons if it kept happening.
Another long week went by before Notole called me to her again and set the oculus spinning. On that day, we watched as the Dar’Nethi survivors of a Zhid raiding party were sealed into their slave collars. An immense surge of power filled me as I listened to their screams. I felt like a volcano, huge and rumbling and dangerous.
“This time we will travel beyond the walls of the fortress and see what we can find for entertainment,” Notole said. She put out the candles, so that the only light in the room came from the emeralds in her golden mask and the green-and-gold orb of the oculus that hung over our heads. I was quivering with the power dammed up inside me. When she took my hands in her dry, withered fingers, she had to speak only one word and our minds came free of our bodies.
I could see everything, just as if I were flying. We soared through the vast temple of the Lords where the three giant statues sat under the roof of stars, and we passed through the walls of the Lords’ house and looked down on the courtyards, crawling with slaves and Drudges and warriors. We sailed into the noonday and called up a whirlwind that turned the air red as it picked up sand, blasting the desert encampments and scouring the cliffs. Warriors and slaves looked like ants crawling on the desert. When I was little I had sometimes dropped grasshoppers and beetles into anthills to see what would happen; now I could do the same with people. So I picked up a few slaves in the whirlwind and deposited them behind the Zhid lines, and I sucked Zhid warriors into the wall of sand and dropped them amid the slaves. Notole laughed, but we didn’t stay to watch them sort it out. Instead we soared into the vast emptiness of the Wastes. Notole showed me how to call up lightning, and for hours I practiced blasting rocks to rubble and setting thorn bushes afire.