"That's my boy," Camara Tal smiled. "I'll go find the bug. You two keep an eye on that. And find some way to clean her up. She stinks," she said, wrinkling her nose.
"No argument from me," Dolanna said, touching the Weave. Tarrin watched as Dolanna used weaves of Water and Air to clean the filth from Jula's body, scrub her hair clean, and remove the detritus from her fur. Looking at her when she was clean was like looking at an entirely different Were-cat. She was just as pale as he remembered. She was taller, and her Were-cat body was leaner and more muscular than she had been before, but it didn't alter her basic body shape. She was still slim and pretty. Her blond hair was much longer now, another side effect of being turned, very long and thick, but tangled and unkempt. A very long session with a brush would return it to its past glory. Tarrin knelt by her and rolled her over on her back, putting a finger to her neck to check her pulse. Still very slow and regular. She was still out cold. Even her regeneration was having trouble getting her back awake.
"Tarrin, you didn't, did you?" Sarraya demanded even as she flitted into the tent. She had her hands on her hips and glared at him, not a span from his nose.
"I didn't bite her," he assured her. "I found her like this. Believe me, I really want to know what happened to her."
"So this is Jula," Sarraya mused. "She doesn't look all that dangerous."
"Wait til she wakes up," Tarrin grunted. "She's totally mad. Dolanna's going to show me how to try to supress her instincts. Hopefully, that'll restore her rational mind."
"That's a good idea," Sarraya agreed. "It should. It's the instincts that cause the madness. Take those away, and the insanity should fade."
"Alright, Dolanna, show me what to do," Tarrin said, turning to his instructor.
The weave was unbelievably complicated. It was no wonder it had taken Dolanna so long to put it together. It was only steps below High Sorcery in its complexity, and Tarrin's respect for his mentor and friend was raised several notches as she demonstrated the weave he had to use. "That is what I used on you, dear one," she told him. "There are going to be differences, because you are the same race as she is. I have seen you improvise before, so I have confidence that you will feel out the changes you will need to make."
"Alright," Tarrin nodded to her. "Let's do this."
It was a marvelously simple combination. Sarraya used her Druidic power to keep his Sorcery in check, and he reached through her restrictive shield on him and touched the Weave. The result was that the Weave didn't try to flood him as it usually did. The power flowed into him slowly, allowing him to completely control it as he had been able to do before High Sorcery had overwhelmed his ability to weave spells. That awesome power was isolated from him, kept on the other side of Sarraya's Druidic barrier. It was kept a little too well. "Loosen it a little, Sarraya. It'll take me hours to weave the spell at this rate."
"Just tell me when to stop," she replied, and he felt the Weave's energy flowing into him faster. It continued to increase, until he reached a level where he felt he was comfortable. It was fast enough to grant him the power he needed to weave the spell, but not so much that he couldn't resist its flowing into him when he was done.
"Right there. Alright, Dolanna, tell me if I weave this wrong," he said, and he began. It took him nearly ten minutes to weave the spell, from all the flows except Confluence, a massive ball of crisscrossing flows. He wove them together slowly and carefully, sweating from the effort and straining to keep the loose tangle of flows from interacting with one another prematurely. He literally wove it flow by flow, twist by twist, following Dolanna's guiding advice as the weave took shape inside Jula's body. When he felt it was done, he snapped it down and released it, sensing its operation and adjusting it as it took effect as best he could. Since he had never done it before, he had no idea how best to tweak the weave for maximum effect. He could only guess at it, going on what he knew of his own instincts and the way they felt when they took over.
Leaning back on his heels, Tarrin blew out his breath when the weave was finished. He cut it off, letting it evaporate, but it left behind a magical effect inside Jula's mind much like a Ward, a magical effect that would separate and supress her Were instincts. It wouldn't last forever, however. Just as Dolanna's weave had unravelled within him, his spell would eventually wear off. Jula had that long to learn how to stave off the madness, better this time than her first attempt to do so. Her instincts would be felt behind that curtain of magical protection, and they would progressively grow stronger and stronger as the weave weakened. Hopefully, as it had done for him, that separation would give her the critical time she would need to learn how to control the madness.
Putting a paw on her forehead, Tarrin wove together a healing weave and released it into her, which made her body shudder slightly at the icy cold sensation. He'd given her a concussion when he was hitting her in the face, that was why she was still unconscious. His own regenerative powers were rather slow when it came to healing damage to the brain. Probably because of the complexities involved in it. Jula tried to roll on her side, but a paw on her shoulder held her down. She groaned incoherently, reaching up and grabbing his wrist in a weak grip, her tail wrapping around his ankle reflexively when it made contact with him. Then her restless movements eased, and she relaxed back to the floor of the tent.
Her eyes opened, slowly. She blinked a few times against the light, and he could see from her eyes that she was coherent. The burning quality that had been inside them, induced by her madness, was gone. She looked up at him in dumbfounded shock for a long moment, then she shuddered when his paw shifted against her.
"So this is it," she said calmly, submitting to his hold on her. "Did you wake me up just so I could be ready for it?"
"I see you remember," he said, a bit coldly.
"I remember everything," she said, shuddering and closing her eyes sharply. "Everything. Sometimes memory is a curse. Why am I not insane now?"
"Tarrin supressed your instincts," Dolanna said flatly.
"Did you want me to be rational for this? I'm impressed, Tarrin. Your brutality goes quite beyond anything I could ever manage."
"You'll believe that in a few rides," he said stiffly, taking his hand off her shoulder.
She stared at him. "You're not going to kill me, are you?" She rose up on her paw, looking up at the four of them in surprise. "You want what I know, don't you? You resisted the urge to kill me, just so you could make me talk? You even cured my madness, just to get at my knowledge. Goodness, you're nothing like what Kravon believes of you, Tarrin."
"That's part of the reason," Tarrin told her gruffly. "This is the other." He reached down and grabbed the end of her tail, and pulled it away from his ankle.
"Surprised to see me like this?" she asked with a slight little smile. "You don't give a girl many options, Tarrin. After you so effortlessly ripped out my spine, I had a choice of either dying, or drinking some of your blood that they stored for study. I always plan for eventualities. I could see that facing your wrath was a definite possibility. I was proved right in that."
"It backfired on you, did it not, Jula?" Dolanna asked. "You felt that you could control it as easily as Tarrin seemed to control it. Reality is a harsh mistress."
She sighed, and a little shudder ran through her. "I should have let myself die," she said with utter sincerity. "Just do me one favor, Tarrin. When I'm done talking, when whatever you did to me wears off, kill me. I'd rather be dead than be like that again."
"You give up too quickly," Sarraya said with a grin. "We don't turn our backs on children, girl."