So she understood High Mage Agina’s reasons for pushing. She even sympathized. But she couldn’t agree with the decision. She met the younger woman’s sharp gaze. It was the curse of the old, to know so much and be so little regarded. Oh, they pretended to respect her. But they no longer heeded what she said.
First Mage Otha did the only thing she could do. She repeated what she’d been saying for centuries. She spoke with the conviction only one granted the sight could claim when speaking about the future. “Our moment will come,” she said. “If we wait.”
High Mage Agina’s lips compressed in an expression of frustration. She didn’t understand. She didn’t truly believe in the sight, just as a man without hearing cannot believe in music. First Mage Otha was the last of the Tessilari who possessed this particular gift. There was no one left who understood her.
Agina let out a slow breath, and stood. She was disappointed. Well, so was Otha. The First Mage responded with only the barest of nods as the younger woman took her leave and walked out of the room.
Otha settled back onto her cushions. She closed her eyes. She wasn’t trying to see, but she did anyway. A face rose up behind her eyes. It was a face as familiar as even her own, so often she’d seen it. And it was not a nice face.
Eyes closed, sun warm on her skin, Otha saw what she’d seen so many times in her 403 years of life. She saw the man, face twisted into a scowl, walking with a pronounced limp, leading the thin, grubby child on a leash towards ….
She could never see what. She could never see why. She could never see when.
Such were the limitations of the sight. She only knew this man, whoever he was, would deliver their moment. If only the Tessilari would wait.
◈
Jey swung her staff at Treyam’s head, keeping her balance distributed between her two feet. As she expected, Treyam stepped back. In the moment of his movement, she ducked, let go of one end of the staff, and sent a ferocious swipe towards his knees. Just for practice, she knit a quick active force spell and dropped it onto the staff. She felt the velocity of her swing increase.
The staff, carved all over in a filigree of ancient runes, hummed with magic. It was an ancient weapon, beautifully crafted. The stone it had been made from somehow altered to be hard as iron, light as bamboo, and very receptive to magic. She’d discovered how to make it burn in her hands, how to back it up with deadly force, and how to call it to her from as far away as she could get. The staff was the sort of thing Jey had hoped to find in the Valley of Mist when she’d first arrived.
Unfortunately, it was not hers. The staff belonged to Treyam. There were only six such weapons in the valley. Treyam had inherited his from his father, who had been given it by his father before him. It was a treasured and revered artifact of a time when the Tessilari had been a different sort of people.
Jey had no hope of getting one of her own. The art of making such things was lost.
The staff, fortunately, was also enchanted so it could not harm one of its own blood. Still, Jey had not learned to trust the thing entirely. Even while her heart beat a little faster and her blood pounded in her veins, adrenaline singing in her system as she imagined the blow that swing would have delivered had it been leveled against a true opponent, she pulled the staff at the last moment and only tapped lightly on Treyam’s knees.
The young man collapsed into the grass anyway, laughing in mock defeat. Jey straightened, setting the end of the staff on the ground. For a moment, irritation overtook all other emotion. She stared down at Treyam. His warm brown eyes were alight, his skin flushed with exertion. He’d dropped the weapon he’d been using – Jey’s staff, which was made of fine hardwood but no match for the one Treyam loaned her with increasing frequency. This is the problem, she thought as she stared down, feeling the frustrated tension in her shoulders, the tightness of her jaw. They don’t take it seriously.
If Treyam sensed her disapproval, he gave no sign. His laughter smoothed into his trademark half grin. He stretched to his full length on the smooth lawn. It was a fine day. Although the edge never seemed to leave the wind here in this high valley, today the sun was warm.
Jey found herself softening against her will. How could she blame them, really? She lifted her eyes to the jagged mountains that surrounded them, peaks reaching towards the sky like broken teeth, ringing them in on all sides. The fog lay at their base. For centuries, the Tessilari had lived with a twofold defense against reality.
In an absent gesture, Jey rubbed a hand over the inside of her elbow. Concealed there, beneath her sleeve, were the scars. There were hundreds of them – pale pricks in her skin where the needle had gone in, again and again. I will not forget. She made this promise to herself every day. She made it for the same reason she insisted Treyam spar with her every day. She made it because it would be so easy to let things slip. And Jey had already forgotten enough for a lifetime.
She shivered, the sweat on her brow cooling. She felt a brief stab of loneliness for Phril. He was fine, she knew. He was in one of the greenhouses, basking in the sun, stretched out on a brillbane leaf. It was too cold for the plants and tessili alike outside of the greenhouses. At first, Phril hadn’t liked to be separated from her. He’d refused to stay behind. But here in the Valley of Mist, his wings grew stiff in the knife-edged air. Slowly he’d become accustomed to letting her leave him. She could feel him growing more and more complacent by the day.
On the one hand, she was glad. It had alarmed her when she’d learned other tessili could be reasonable – that they could think rationally and adjust their behavior accordingly to logic. Phril had never possessed that skill. He’d always been volatile, often behaving in ways that could easily have led to his own death, and thus Jey’s as well. Seeing him change now that their lives were not in danger gave Jey hope for his sanity.
Still, she missed him a little.
Nine months, Jey had been here. She knew she’d lost her edge. Phril was going soft, Elle wasn’t even trying to maintain her combat skills. The restless frustration boiled up in Jey again as she turned to stare at the mouth of the valley, where a narrow gap in the mountains stood blocked by the heavy mist.
There was a rustle of fabric as Treyam rose. He took a moment to brush the clinging grass from his sleeves. He came to Jey and stood next to her, following her gaze.
As so often happened, Jey felt a little tug of … something … when Treyam came near. He stood beside her now, his body blocking the breeze. She was aware of how close he was, how easily he could reach out and touch her.
Jey took a small step away, as she always did when she felt that tug. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to respond, or that she wasn’t curious about where the pull might lead her. But she could see what falling in love with Lokim had done to Elle. It was another temptation Jey had to resist if she had any hope of doing what she’d promised.
The Academy still stood out there, far down in the valley of Deramor. And Jey would not let her attention be diverted until the men who had made those scars on her arm were brought to justice.
As if reading her thoughts, Treyam spoke. “Tomorrow.” His voice was smooth and rich. He spoke now in a low tone, barely loud enough to hear. “Tomorrow, at last,” he said, “they will let me fulfill my promise to you.”
About the Author
Robin has always been enamored with magic.
When she was a child, that meant reading books. When she was a slightly older child, it meant trying to write her own. She produced her first attempt at a fantasy story at the age of 10. It was an unintentionally blatant (and considerably less well executed) rip-off of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Fortunately for everyone, Robin's stories have gotten a little more original over the years. She currently lives in Iowa City, where she hangs out with her husband, trains horses, and writes.
learn more at robinstephen.com
Robin also writes contemporary western romance
If you like horses, love
stories, and the desert, explore Robin’s work under the pen name Stefani Wilder. Her book, A Man Who Rides is available now.
see stefaniwilder.com for details
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