We could kill a horse and drink the blood but had no way to carry it with us and walking didn’t appeal. I didn’t relish drinking it but would before going without and dying. Our only hope seemed to be sneaking back and avoiding capture. That choice seemed counter-productive and almost negated our narrow escape. Walking into the waiting hands of our enemies to get a drink of water almost made me want to laugh.
Almost, but not quite. It also made me want to cry out in frustration. I turned to look at Kendra. She was looking at me instead of out at the landscape—and she wore a smile. I said, “What?”
She motioned that we should go back to our horses. We moved in a crouch again, more for habit than need, but in the vast openness, there might be unseen watchers. We mounted and turned a little east and south. We were too far away for the army to chase us because they needed water as much as us, but to be safe, we allowed more distance.
Turning east would eventually take us to the sea. Now, all we required was water. Enough for the two of us and our horses, because they would grow as thirsty as us. Kendra rode with a smile, seemingly unworried.
As it grew dark, she pointed to a small cut in the ground where flowing water in the past had cut a swath of a rugged canyon. The sides were only as tall as the roof of a small house, but a fire built down there wouldn’t be seen. The bottom of the canyon was as dry as my mouth.
Kendra kept us moving until she finally pulled up and dismounted while humming a jaunty tune to herself. She didn’t speak. The horses were tethered and staked. Kendra made a dry camp, without a fire which surprised me. When we were settled in, and the darkness had closed over us, she used a blanket to sweep out a hollow in solid rock after removing limbs, leaves, and whatever else had collected there. The hollow was a few steps across and ten long.
“Okay, enough. What are you doing?” I asked.
She said mysteriously and playfully, “Well, I don’t want to drink dirty water, do you?”
I shook my remaining few swallows in the canteen and heard barely a splash. “Right now, dirty water wouldn’t bother me.”
“Well, it does me.”
I gave her a look that said she was losing her mind in the heat and dryness of the desert. She saw it and laughed as she patted the blanket she sat upon, telling me to sit beside her. I did.
She said, “We have to find water or go back to the lake and surrender if they catch us, which they probably will.”
“I know that.”
She pointed at me with an unwavering finger in the starlight while we sat beside the depression in the rock. “I want you to fill that with water.”
“What?”
“That hollow. Why do you think we cleaned it out?”
“No, I meant what do you want me to do?” I nearly shouted. She smiled, but in the darkness, I don’t think she knew I saw it.
She said, “Make it rain. I want rain to fill that hollow with water.”
“Rain? I can’t do that. Only mages can create storms.”
She ignored my protest and elevated voice. She spoke in a calm, reasonable manner, “I’m not asking for flashes of lightning and roaring thunder over the entire Brownlands. I want a little raincloud right over the top of us. Enough to fill that depression so we can drink, and the horses can too.”
“I’ve never made rain. You know that. My abilities are minuscule.”
A short time passed before she said as calmly as if she was speaking to royalty at Crestfallen, “I suppose your magic cannot uproot trees and fling them as if they are straw, either. I’ve seen you take water from the outside of a goblet and move it to the floor where someone slipped on it. That’s all I’m asking. Do that, only more of it.”
“A few drops are different than a storm,” I protested, losing some of my resistance.
She scooted closer and waved an arm to encompass the area around us. “There is water all over around here. Dew on the leaves, more in the soil just under the surface. Inside the plants. Water is everywhere when you think about it.”
I didn’t want to think about it but did. I reached out with my mind and felt around. She was right. But I was no mage. Still, the water was there, and I had concentrated it in one location in the past to form a puddle on a tile floor. A few spoons, at most. I had done that several times. It was the same as filling the rock pool in front of us, on a smaller scale.
I closed my eyes and pulled the water from the surface of the nearby leaves of a scrub oak tree. Not many, just two or three, then expanded the pull until I’d drawn all the water to us. It hovered in tiny droplets in the air, too fine to have the weight to fall, like a fog. A little shove by a puff of air spinning in a circle above us caused them to collide and combine and grow heavier.
I felt a few drops on my head. Not many, but a few and those encouraged me to reach farther away and pull more moisture into the air above us. More raindrops fell.
“You’re doing it,” she cooed.
A few inches under the surface of the sand was far more moisture, and easier to gather. I pulled it free and brought it to the air in front of us, where it combined with what was already there, and suddenly, we were sitting in a rainstorm. The drops were large, splatting on us and pelting the depression in the rock.
Kendra was laughing. She punched me in my shoulder and called, “Enough! We’re getting soaked.”
I drew my mind back and opened my eyes. The rain already slowed, but still fell. In front of us was a puddle a few inches deep, wide enough to leap across, but too long to do the same. She grabbed our canteens as if the water would disappear if she didn’t fill them quickly enough. I numbly sat and watched.
Magic pulled strength from me, but it was not physical weariness that numbed me. It was mental. Not that it tired my mind in any manner, but the awareness that I’d created a storm. Kendra knelt and scooped water into her mouth, then called to me, “It is wonderful. Get over here.”
I went to her side and knelt. My fingers touched the water as if I still didn’t believe it existed. The water was cool and wet. I drank my fill. Wonder kept my mind from working properly. When I stood, I said, “I’m going for a walk.”
“To where?” she asked.
“To see how big the rainstorm was.”
She leaped to her feet. “Let’s do it.”
We walked perhaps ten steps in the sand that was damp, the water already seeping down into the ground. Then the sand was as dry as before, perhaps drier since I’d pulled moisture from below. We walked the perimeter of a crude circle that existed about ten steps from where we’d sat. A tiny circle of wetness any child could throw a stone across.
My mind was consumed with elation.
“You did it,” she said.
I released the horses and watched instinct move them to the puddle and begin drinking. With the fog above us dissipated, the stars returned. Still not fully believing, I went back to the puddle, across from the horses, and while ignoring them, I knelt and scooped more water into my mouth with a shaking hand.
“You are a mage,” Kendra said with conviction.
We returned to our campsite to sit on wet blankets and laugh about it. Ordinary things seemed funny. We were happy and no longer thirsty. My mind kept wandering back to the idea that I’d filled a “lake” with water. A small one, but that was fine with me. I’d produced water in the desert. No matter what was said after that, we laughed.
Anna’s voice filled my mind like a crashing wave on rocks. *I was wrong.*