“That seems to be the thing he’s focused on most.”
Rage suddenly enflamed Dalcey, and he made a furious, insane effort to wrench away from the Rider. “Give it back! Give it back! Give it back!” he started shrieking, meaning the weapon, or the poison, or his freedom, or his life, he couldn’t even have specified. Through the open door, he could hear footsteps approaching and voices muttering, but he was in a berserker fury. “Let go of me! Give it back!”
A hard clout to the head from behind, and Dalcey was on his knees, with his senses spinning and his vision blurring. Tayse kept one hand on Dalcey’s wrists and used the other to yank Dalcey’s head back by the hair. “Be quiet,” the big man said in a threatening voice. His black eyes bored into Dalcey’s; they looked fierce enough to pierce a man’s skull.
Dalcey whimpered and tore his gaze away. He found himself staring straight at the young man, Cammon, the mystic. He wasn’t frightening, not in the rough physical way that Tayse was, but there was something otherworldly about him. His eyes were huge and strangely colored; his face was preternaturally calm. He was watching Dalcey as if the stranger was a wild animal brought over from a foreign shore, a creature both fascinating and repugnant.
“May the Pale Mother strike you dead,” Dalcey whispered, not that he believed in the goddess, not that he believed in curses, but he wanted to express his venom, and everybody knew that mystics feared the Silver Lady.
Cammon didn’t blink or look away or appear frightened in the least, just continued watching him. For a moment, Dalcey had the strangest feeling, as if this boy really could read his mind, scan his heart and retrieve all of his long-held memories, chart the tangled and vicious course of Dalcey’s life. Everything he was, everything he had felt, said, offered, refused, stolen, coveted, or destroyed-all of it-the boy comprehended each piece of Dalcey’s life in a single glance.
And looked away, unimpressed. “Are we done here?” Cammon asked. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 2
JERRIL was trying to prove to Cammon that he was stronger than snow, and Cammon wasn’t having any of it.
“It’s too cold out here,” he protested for the seventh or eighth time. “I can’t even feel my toes.”
“You’re allowing your body to control your mind,” Jerril said in his usual, imperturbable fashion. “You must teach your mind to control your body.”
“I can do that when I haven’t frozen to death,” Cammon said.
Jerril merely smiled and waited. Jerril was the most patient man Cammon had ever met. Tall, bony, bald, and dreamy-eyed, Jerril always gave the impression that he had just been struck by some new and fascinating thought and needed a moment to merely stand and consider it. Cammon had seen Jerril happy, had seen him enthusiastic, had seen him tired, but he had never seen Jerril irritable or anxious or in a hurry.
“All right, I’ll try again,” Cammon grumbled. He was sitting right in the middle of a snowbank, wearing no coat, and his bare toes were buried beneath an inch of ice. They had been out in the tiny, winter-brown garden behind Jerril’s house for twenty minutes now, and Cammon was starting to shiver. “And then I’m going in.”
“That’s fair,” Jerril said. “Close your eyes.”
Cammon did, but it scarcely mattered. It was all still visible to him-or, no, that wasn’t the right word-tangible, perhaps. Jerril sitting before him, perfectly comfortable in the cold snow on the hard ground, Lynnette humming in the kitchen as she began organizing the evening meal, Areel upstairs hunched over some obscure textbook and muttering in his daft way. The busy streets of Ghosenhall, crowded with thousands of residents and hundreds of visitors, some sad, some weary, some angry, some excited, most just concentrating on their particular task of the moment, calculating how quickly it could be accomplished and what their chances of success would be. Fainter, farther, but still, if he strained, discernible, a blurred oceanic mass of thoughts and feelings and desires from all the souls of Gillengaria collected on the continent from northeastern Brassenthwaite to southwestern Fortunalt.
Scattered across that map, five bright, urgent spots of color. Tayse and Senneth closest to hand, only a mile or so away at the royal palace. Kirra and Donnal in restless motion, somewhere to the west and hundreds of miles distant. Justin to the east, so far away he was difficult to detect-still across the Lireth Mountains, then-and followed by a persistent shadow. Ellynor. Cammon still could not sense Ellynor’s existence independent of Justin, but he could feel her insistent pull on Justin’s attention and by that alone gauge where she was and if she was well.
“Close your eyes and concentrate,” Jerril said, his voice mildly reproving. “Shut out the thoughts of everything else.”
“I can’t,” Cammon said.
“It’s not easy,” Jerril corrected, “but you can. You know how to close your mind to the world around you. You can block out the existence of strangers. Shut those doors. Close them off.”
It took a tremendous effort but Cammon did it, envisioning, as Jerril said, doors slamming shut between his line of sight and everybody else in the world. First he lost the sense of the great expanse of Gillengaria, then he walled off his perceptions of the city of Ghosenhall. It was harder to overlook Jerril and Lynnette and Areel, and he didn’t think he’d ever be able to choke off the other five. It would be like smothering his thoughts completely; it might happen when he was dead.
“Now. Imagine me turning invisible. Remove me from your consciousness. Put yourself in a small shelter, a tiny place made of stone and sunlight. You are there all alone. The heat is beating down. There is only you and air and sunshine.”
A snug shelter against weather and intrusions; Cammon could build that in his mind. But what took shape was not a small stone cottage on a bright day. What he saw, as clearly as if he were sitting there now, was a dilapidated temple, half open to the elements, snow sifting in through the fractured rafters. A fire made merry in the middle of the floor. Senneth’s magic turned the whole place so warm that they were peeling off coats and boots, turning to each other with appreciative smiles. Justin was settling the horses, while Kirra and Donnal prowled around, examining something painted on the walls. Tayse had a hand on his dagger, still not convinced that danger did not lurk somewhere in the shadows, but all of the rest of them knew that they were safe. Safe, warm, together, unafraid. Finally at rest.
“Cammon. Cammon.” The voice seemed to come from a long way off and sounded as if it had been speaking for quite some time. For a moment, Cammon couldn’t place it-who had found them in this forgotten temple in the middle of a blizzard, who had been able to track them so far?-and then a hand shook his shoulder. He started and his eyes flew open, and briefly he was confused to find himself sitting outside in daylight face-to-face with an utter stranger.
Jerril.
Jerril’s house. Jerril’s lesson. The world snapped back into focus.
“I think I might have gotten it that time,” Cammon said cautiously. He was no longer shivering, though as soon as the illusion vanished, so did his sense of warmth and well-being. He would be cold again in about half a minute. He checked his toes. Pink and toasty.
Jerril was smiling. “Where did you go? In your mind?”
“To a night and a place when I was traveling with Senneth and the others.”
“Well, you succeeded at shutting me out completely-me and the surrounding environment. Which was exactly what I wanted you to do, except perhaps not so completely.”
“I don’t see how I can shut it out and be aware of it.” Cammon knew that he sounded sulky, but that was how he felt. Everything Jerril asked him to do was always impossible; except it wasn’t impossible because Cammon always learned to do it. But the learning could be extraordinarily draining.