CHAPTER 5
The Training
Beginning with the most simple webs, Elaina’s first few hours casting were by turns tense, boring, frustrating, gratifying, and of course unspeakably exciting.
Her first failed web was of Earth. Hetarth directed her attention to the simplest Earth web, that of a stone. It looked even simpler than Water, but as it happened Elaina was enormously untalented with Earth.
The rock she was working on left the ground, to be sure, but only to explode in a hail of flying chips. The shards embedded themselves in the columns—and in Landon. Hetarth had managed a barrier of Air, but Landon had only just thrown up his hands in time to cover his face. He was terribly put out despite the fact that Hetarth repaired the damage in a matter of seconds. From then on Landon muttered and glared and backed away dramatically every time she cast a web.
Elaina found her guilt faded quickly the longer he carried on. It wasn’t as if I tried to lose the web—and I did apologize. Repeatedly.
“Now, this is clearly not your talent,” Hetarth noted. Landon snorted and was deliberately ignored. “but it is best if you reach some manner of control. If the enemy decides to pelt you with boulders or bury you with a mountain, you’ll thank me.” He assured her as she readied for a second try.
“Remember what it felt like to have the web snap that way, and try not to push it so far.” He cautioned, then shielded himself and Landon behind a wall of Air. Elaina nodded and did her best not to grimace.
Don’t let that happen—easy for him to say! Her thoughts were decidedly uncooperative. Casting that web felt like drawing a bow three times too strong for her, if the bowstring happened to be a live serpent. Water was relatively easy, and Fire and Air even better. Light looked dreadfully tricky with Air and Fire all together, but that had at least felt learnable. This was absurd! The patterns simply didn’t make any sense. Not my talent, indeed. She sighed and focused on another stone. Hopefully this one would survive.
It only cracked in three places, not moving at all. Instead of seizing and manipulating the web of the stone itself, her touch seemed to make it crack and dissolve entirely.
Hetarth sighed.
Landon smirked.
Elaina scowled. She felt like throwing the rock at the fancy young lord the old-fashioned way.
“Your spirit is obviously very little like a stone—you do not understand it well enough to cast it. I would have thought you stubborn enough to understand stone . . . ” Her uncle observed. “I suppose we will try something else.” A hopeful expression spread across Landon’s face. It made her want to stick out her tongue at him. “Shall we do more with—“
“Fire?” Elaina interrupted. She felt ever so much more like Fire than Air or Water and wanted to finish on a good note. Landon wouldn’t be smirking after she turned another shrub into a bonfire.
Hetarth seemed to understand, rolling his eyes heavenward as if to seek patience from the heavens. “Fire, then, but not on these poor living things.” He held up his arms as if to protect the plants behind him. “You can use the Fire to melt the stone.”
Elaina’s eyes narrowed. “Is it more difficult?”
“Not if you don’t make it so. In theory it is the same, but some casters build a block to working with certain items with any Element. I don’t want you to find yourself unable to lift a stone with Air, melt it with Fire, or grind it to dust, even if you cannot draw on its own nature.
Taking a breath, Elaina gathered the tiny slips of Fire in the Air, stealing the warmth and concentrating it into the strongest web of Fire she could manage. Any more than that and it would all slip away. Even knowing that, it was hard to resist reaching for everything. Going slowly felt like filling a bath one spoonful at a time. But I will not fail again. Her jaw clenched. Just enough and no more.
Heat filled her, dancing and twisting with power she cast into the stone. It glowed red. The web pulsed and crackled with the energy of flame, engulfing the stone and pouring through it. White heat shimmered at its edges. An instant before it happened, she felt the stone give. It wavered, then abandoned its shape and flowed out into a puddle.
Slowly, she released what she’d gathered. Dropping it all at once was like having a door slam shut in your face. She’d staggered back and fallen enough already to wonder if sitting would be uncomfortable tomorrow. As she let go, the molten stone divided in two, the edges curling up and swirling together into two delicate shapes that still glowed bright enough to hurt her eyes. Before she could blink, an icy chill swirled through the clearing and she lost her grasp of the pillars entirely. Like a slap in the face, she thought irritably.
Hetarth limped forward and lifted the remains of the stone. Perfectly smooth and delicate as fine porcelain, it was the shape of a two little swallows in flight.
“There we are, just a little silver and they will be perfect.” Hetarth declared as he examined it, leaning on his cane. “I’ve not lost my touch.”
“What’s it for?” Landon asked. Elaina rolled her eyes. Men! Not everything has to be useful in order to be valuable. It’s pretty.
“It’s a talisman.” Hetarth tapped it on his palm, “Once you can create the signal, you and I will be able to keep track of one another. I’ll keep this one, and you take that one,” he handed her one of the tiny birds. “When you’re strong enough, I’ll show you what to cast to bind yours to you. They are of the same material, so they are already bound to each other. Then with a little web we will always know where to find each other—the birds will point the way, so long as we each have ours.”
Elaina peered at the little bird, mystified. “They can see each other across the whole world?”
Hetarth nodded. “No amount of space is too great.”
“What about time? Can they see each other across Time? See the future?” Landon asked eagerly. Elaina grimaced at him. Strange boy!
Hetarth frowned, “Absolutely not! The fabric of Time is terribly complex in the present. The future includes an infinite number of choices and events that may or may not ever happen based on one person’s decisions in this complex present.”
“But casters tell the future all the time!” Landon protested, “There are hundreds of Prophesies.”
Hetarth shook his head, “Telling doesn’t show you what you want—it not about seeing a particular event, which may or may not ever happen depending on a thousand other things. It is a gift for seeing the current of the river that is Time and making predictions based on it. Prophecies are for key moments, like whirlpools that every current leads to, one way or another. They are reflections in the Well of Fate. You don’t get to choose what reflects, you don’t set the agenda. It was never a skill of mine—that is about as far as I understand it.”
“Who invented these, then?” Elaina asked, raising her little bird. It looked light enough to fly right off of her hand in a stiff breeze.
“Your grandmother, actually.” Hetarth smiled, “She worried about your grandfather when he traveled, so she made a way to know he was safe, to know where he was.” He shot a significant glance at Landon, who paled like a corpse and stuck one hand in his pocket, oddly enough.
“Of course,” Hetarth went on, still looking meaningfully at the boy. “There are ways to hide the connection, if you know what to look for.” Landon swallowed, and color returned to his cheeks.
Elaina watched them both, puzzled. There was obviously some second conversation going on that she was missing, but neither of the men was about to let her in on it. Annoyed, she glanced up at the darkening sky. Twilight had fallen in the clearing.
“It will be full dark soon, time to be home.” Hetarth determined, following her gaze. Landon jumped at the mention of night and eyed the wood around them with mistrust. As he started down the path, though, Hetarth gathered a ball of blue flame that sat in his palm to light their way.
Landon took it as a matter of course—it was quite tame compared to the bonfire she’d made of a pine earlier, but Elaina was intrigued. How does h
e keep it from burning his hand? Is it the Fire itself that does not burn, or some barrier? She watched the flames twist around in his palm the whole way home, but was too tired to reach out to the pillars and answer her own questions.
Dinner was a simple meal of bread and butter, cheese, and a few slices of cured ham with wine. When Elaina handed Landon his plate, however, he dropped it with a crash. He stared at her and she stared back, eyebrows raised, then looked pointedly at the food scattered all over the floor. He didn’t follow her gaze.
“You’re wasting good food! What’s the matter with you?” she demanded at last, hands on her hips.
“Y-your eyes . . . “ he stammered.
Over by the fireplace, Hetarth had looked over sharply at the mention of wasted food. When he heard Landon, he snatched his pipe from his lips to squint at her. “Come over, Elaina, into the light.”
She obeyed slowly, suddenly uneasy. He peered into her face for a moment, turning her chin from side to side. Then he smiled.
“Well that was certainly quick!” He chuckled, “We’ll have to teach you the web to hide your eyes as soon as possible.” He leaned back in his chair and took another satisfied puff on his pipe.
“To hide my eyes?” she repeated.
“To make them look brown again like mine—the Changing has already happened, they’re grey now, not color left at all.”
Elaina gaped at him. “They’ve changed already?! You said it would be days, weeks even!” she protested.
“It took a full month for me, being rather untalented with Earth, which is what they started men off with in training. Took a week and a half for your grandmother. Your father took just a week and your mother only days.” He shrugged.
“But it’s been hours!” she cried.
“So you are uncommonly strong, I told you. You’ll get used to it– just remember that in a mirror anyone can see them as they really are, not how they are hidden. Illusions do not reflect—it is a complicated thing to explain, but it may get you into trouble if you forget about the reflection when you shouldn’t.”
For a moment she only gaped at him, then snatched a spoon off the table to peer at her reflection. “They’re really grey now?” she asked.
Landon grimaced at her from the floor, where he knelt picking up his dinner. “Yes,” he groused, “and you’re standing on my bread.”
Now he cares about his food. She ignored him, peering into a mug of tea to see if the reflection was better. They didn’t have a mirror—those were expensive. She’d seen them before though, three of the Council members had hand mirrors. A peddler on his way to Cavilnor from Vinyam had one of the larger ones you could see your whole face in. It had been strange to see her face the way others saw her.
Hetarth laughed at her frustration. “Elaina,” he called, “look here.” Vexed, she looked up.
Elaina gave a yelp of surprise and jumped backward into Landon’s newly-recovered food. She could see him behind her, frowning unhappily at the floor. Hetarth smiled around the thing in his hands and there she was, staring back at herself in shock.
“It’s a mirror.” He agreed with her unspoken exclamation.
“It’s enormous!” she sputtered, grey eyes blinking at herself.
Landon shook his head and muttered to himself from the floor. She thought it was something about country bumpkins, but that couldn’t have been it. No one had a mirror this large—she hadn’t even heard of one!
“Where did it come from?”
“I made it, of course. They’re not that uncommon—plenty of casters know how to make them. The trouble is how to keep them from cracking or warping. The larger they are, the harder that is.” Hetarth explained, his smile crinkling the bronzed skin around his eyes.
Elaina couldn’t help but reach out to tough the flat, cold image of herself. Colorless eyes stared back at her, not a hint of brown or gold left in them. When she stepped back, Hetarth banished the thing into nothingness. Her uncle rose and took her shoulders, peering into her stunned face.
“Does it trouble you?” He asked gently, “Your mother was very much annoyed to lose her pretty green eyes,” his smile was wistful, “she would never cast them any other color.”
“I don’t know,” she shrugged, “I didn’t really see them much.”
“Yes, that’s true,” he mused, “we had many mirrors in those days, and you have hardly seen one. I haven’t missed them,” he admitted with a wink, “nobody misses seeing how many new wrinkles they have, even when they come slowly.”
Elaina grinned and asked, “How old are you, Hetarth?”
Her uncle sighed and cast a sidelong glance at Landon, now sitting on his heels with his twice-ruined plate of food.
“You know the pillars help casters stay well, but they do even more for us.” She nodded impatiently and he finished, “I was born in the 803rd year of the Fourth Aeon.” Elaina gaped at him. Landon stared, mouth hanging open.
“You’re . . . “
“Very old, yes.” Hetarth finished lightly, “I’d thank you not to remind me.”
Elaina glanced at Landon, who moved his plate away defensively. Over one hundred years old! Keeping her comments to herself, she slumped into her seat at the table and began eating, eyebrows halfway to her hairline. Landon was busy cutting himself new slices of bread from the loaf, muttering about ridiculously old men and grey-eyed women marching all over his dinner.