"Which means he hadn't been trying hard enough by himself?"
"Exactly. She is the very last resort -- and you had damned well better be careful what you ask Her for -- She'll give it to you, but in Her own way, especially if you haven't been honest with Her or with yourself. So mostly we don't ask." Tarma warmed to Kethry's interest, and continued when that interest didn't flag. This was the first chance she'd had to explain her beliefs to Kethry; before this, Kethry had either been otherwise occupied or there hadn't been enough privacy. "The easiest of Her faces to deal with are the Maiden and the Mother, they're gentler, more forgiving; the hardest are the Warrior and the Crone. Maiden and Mother don't take Oathbound to themselves, Warrior and Crone do. Crone's Oathbound -- no, I won't tell you -- you guess what they do."
"Uh," Kethry's brow furrowed in thought, and she nibbled a hangnail. "Shamans?"
"Right! And Healers and the two Elders in each Clan, who may or may not also be Healers or shamans. Those the Crone Binds are Bound, like the Kal'enedral, to the Clans as a whole, serving with their minds and talents instead of their hands. Now -- you were saying about magicians?" She was as curious to know about Kethry's teaching as Keth seemed to be about her own.
"There's more than one school; mine is White Winds. Um, let me go to the very basics. Magic has three sources. The first is power from within the sorcerer himself, and you have to have the Talent to use that source -- and even then it isn't fully trained by anyone I know of. I've heard that up north a good ways they use pure mind-magic, rather than using the mind to find other sources of power."
"That would be -- Valdemar, no?"
"Yes!" Kethry looked surprised at Tarma's knowledge. "Well, the second is power created by living things, rather like a fire creates light just by being a fire. You have to have the Talent to sense that power, but not to use it so long as you know it's there. Death releases a lot of that energy in one burst; that's why an unTalented sorcerer can turn to dark wizardry; he knows the power will be there when he kills something. The third source is from creatures that live in places that aren't this world, but touch this world -- like pages in a book. Page one isn't page two, but they touch all along each other. Other Planes, we call them. There's one for each element, one for what we call 'demons,' and one for very powerful creatures that aren't quite gods, but do seem kindly inclined to humans. There may be more, but that's all anyone has ever discovered that I know of. The creatures of the four Elemental Planes can be bargained with -- you can build up credit with them by doing them little favors, or you can promise them something they want from this Plane."
"Was that what I saw fighting beside you when you took out that wizard back in Brether's Crossroads ? Other-whatsit creatures ?"
"Exactly -- and that fight is why my magic is so limited at the moment -- I used up all the credit I had built with them in return for that help. Fortunately I didn't have to go into debt to them, or we'd probably be off trying to find snow-roses for the Ethereal Varirs right now. There is another way of dealing with them. You can coerce them with magical bindings or with your will. The creatures from the Abyssal Plane can be bought with pain-energy and death-energy -- they feed off those -- or coerced if your will is strong enough, although the only way you can 'bind' them magically is to hold them to this Plane; you can't force them to do anything if your own will isn't stronger than theirs. The creatures of the Sixth Plane -- we call it the 'Empyreal Plane' -- can't be coerced in any way, and they'll only respond to a call if they feel like it. Any magician can contact the Other-Planar creatures, it's just a matter of knowing the spells that open the boundaries between us and them. The thing that makes schools of magic different is their ethics, really. How they feel about the different kinds of power and using them."
"So what does yours teach?" Tarma lay back with her arms stretched along Kessira's back and neck; she scratched gently behind the mare's ears while Kessira nodded her head in drowsy contentment. This was the most she'd gotten out of Kethry in the past six months.
"We don't coerce; not ever. We don't deal at all with the entities of the Abyssal Planes except to send them back -- or destroy them if we can. We don't deliberately gain use of energy by killing or causing pain. We hold that our Talents have been given us for a purpose; that purpose is to use them for the greatest good. That's why we are wanderers, why we don't take up positions under permanent patrons."
"Why you're dirt-poor and why there're so few of you," Tarma interrupted genially.
" 'Fraid so," Kethry smiled. "No worldly sense, that's us. But that's probably why Need picked me."
"She'enedra, why don't you want to go to Mornedealth?"
"I---"
"And why haven't you ever told me about your home and kin?" Tarma had been letting her spiritteacher's last remark stew in the back of her mind, and when Kethry had begun giving her the "lesson" in the ways of magic had realized she knew next to nothing about her partner's antecedents. She'd been brooding on her own sad memories, but Kethry's avoidance of the subject of the past could only mean that hers were as sorry. And Tarma would be willing to bet the coin she didn't have that the mystery was tied into Mornedealth.
Kethry's mouth had tightened with an emotion Tarma recognized only too well. Pain.
"I'll have to know sooner or later, she'enedra. We have no choice but to pass through Mornedealth, and no choice but to try and raise money there, or we'll starve. And if it's something I can do anything about -- well, I want doubly to know about it! You're my Clan, and nobody hurts my Clan and gets away with it!"
"It -- it isn't anything you can deal with -- "
"Let me be the judge of that, hmm?"
Kethry sighed, and visibly took herself in hand. "I -- I guess it's only fair. You know next to nothing about me, but accepted me anyway."
"Not true," Tarma interrupted her, "She accepted you when you oathbound yourself to me as bloodsib. That's all I needed to know then. She wouldn't bind two who didn't belong together."
"But circumstances change, I know, and it isn't fair for me to keep making a big secret out of where I come from. All right." Kethry nodded, as if making up her mind to grasp the thorns. "The reason I haven't told you anything is this; I'm a fugitive. I grew up in Mornedealth; I'm a member of one of the Fifty Noble Houses. My real name is Kethryveris of House Pheregrul."
Tarma raised one eyebrow, but only said, "Do I bow, or can I get by with just kissing your hand?"
Kethry almost smiled. "It's a pretty empty title -or it was when I ran away. The House estates had dwindled to nothing more than a decaying mansion in the Old City by my father's time, and the House prerequisites to little more than an invitation to all Court functions -- which we generally declined graciously -- and permission to hunt the Royal Forests -- which kept us fed most of the year. Father married mother for love, and it was a disaster. Her family disowned her, she became ill and wouldn't tell him. It was one of those long declining things, she just faded bit by bit, so gradually that he, being absent-minded at best, really didn't notice. She died three years after I was born. That left just the three of us."