“There were hawks there once,” Kyril said, “for I climbed to take some when I was a young man. But that was long, long ago.” He looked at the distant sea of smoke and flame; to the others it was blurred by distance. “There have been no hawks there for years…”
Renata interrupted the conversation, saying, “Dorilys, can you tell where the fire on that slope will move next?”
Dorilys blinked, her face going blank, staring into the distance. After a moment she gestured, and for a moment Allart, astonished, realized she was speaking so rapidly it was gibberish.
“What, child?” Renata asked, and Dorilys came back to herself.
She said, “It is so hard to say it in words, when I can see the fire where it was and where it is and where it is moving, from its start to its finish.”
Merciful Avarra, Allart thought. She sees it in three dimensions of time—past and present and future. Is it any wonder we find it hard to communicate with her! The second thought that hit him, hard, was that this might somehow have some bearing on his own curious gift… or curse!
Dorilys was trying to focus down, to search, struggling, for words to communicate what she saw.
“I can see where it started, there, but the winds drove it down the watercourse, and it turned—look—into the… I can’t say it! Into those net things at the edge of the wind-stream. Donal,” she appealed, “you see it, don’t you?”
He came and joined her at the window. “Not quite what you see, sister. I think perhaps no one sees it quite as you do; but can you see where it will move next?”
“It has moved—I mean, it will move there, where they will have the men all ganged together to fight it,” she said. “But it will come there only because they come. It can feel—No, that isn’t right! There aren’t any words.” Her face twisted and she looked as if she were almost crying. “My head hurts,” she said plaintively. “Can I have a drink of water?”
“There is a pump behind the door,” the man Kyril said. “The water is good; it comes from a spring behind the station. Be sure to hang up the cup when you have drunk, little lady.” As she went in quest of her drink, Renata and Donal exchanged long looks of amazement
Renata thought, I have learned more about her laran now in a few minutes than I have learned in half a season. I should have thought to come here before.
Kyril said in a low voice, “You know, of course, that there are not any men fighting the fire now; they controlled it and left it to burn out along the lower crags. Yet she saw them. I have seen nothing like this since the sorceress Alarie came here once with a fire-talisman to gain command of a great fire, when I was a young man. Is the child a sorceress, then?”
Renata, disliking the ancient word smacking so much of superstition, said, “No; but she has laran, which we are trying to train properly, to see these things. She took to the gliders like a young bird to the air.”
“Yes,” Donal said. “It took me far longer to master them. Perhaps she sees the currents more clearly than I can. For all we know, they are solid to her, something she can almost touch. I think Dorilys could learn to use a fire-talisman; the forge-folk have them, to bring metals from the ground to their forges.”
Renata had heard of this. The forge-folk had certain especially adapted matrixes, which they used for mining and for that purpose only; a technique both more crude and more developed than the highly technical mining methods of the Towers. She had the Tower technician’s distrust of matrix methods developed in this catch-as-catch-can, pragmatic way, without theory.
Kyril looked into the valley, saying, “The cookfire is out,” and erased the chalk mark on his map. “One less trouble, then. That valley is all as dry as tinder. May I offer you some refreshment, sir? My lady?”
“We have brought food with us,” Allart said. “Rather, we would be honored if you would share our meal.” He began to unwrap the packages of dried fruit, hard-baked bread, and dried meat that they had brought.
“I thank you,” Kyril said. “I have wine here, if I may offer you a cupful, and some fresh fruit for the little lady.”
They sat near the window so that Kyril could continue his watch. Dorilys asked, “Are you alone here all the time?”
“Why, no, lady. I have an apprentice who helps me, but he has gone down the valley today to see his mother, so for the day I am alone. I had not thought I would be entertaining guests.” He drew out his clasp-knife from his heavy boot and began to peel her an apple, spiraling the peel into delicately cut designs. She watched with fascination, while Renata and Allart watched the clouds moving slowly across the valley far below them, casting strange shadows. Donal came and stood behind them.
Renata asked him, in a low voice, “Can you, too, sense where the storms will move?”
“A little, now, when I can see them spread out this way before me. I think perhaps that when I am watching a storm I move a little outside of time, so that I see the whole storm, from start to finish, as Dorilys saw the whole fire a little while ago.” He glanced back at Dorilys, who was eating her apple, chattering with the ranger. “But somehow at the same time I see the lightnings in sequence, one after another, so that I know where each one will strike and which first, because I can see the pattern of where they move through time. That is why, sometimes, I can control them—but only a little. I cannot make them strike anywhere, as my sister does,” he added, lowering his voice so that it would not carry to the little girl. “I can only, now and again, divert them so that they will not strike where they have already begun to move.”
Allart listened, frowning, thinking of the sensitive divisions of time which this gift took. Donal, picking up his thoughts, said, “I think this must be a little like your gift, Allart. You move outside time, too; do you not?”
Allart said, troubled, “Yes, but not always into real time. Sometimes, I think, a kind of probability time, which will never happen, depending on the decisions of many, many other people, all crisscrossing. So that I see only a little part of the pattern of what will be or what may be. I don’t think a human mind could ever learn to sort it all out.”
Donal wanted to ask some questions about whether Allart had ever tested his gift under kirian, one of the telepathic drugs in use in the Towers, for it was well known that kirian somehow blurred the borders between mind and mind so that telepathy was easier, time not quite so rigid. But Renata was following her own line of question, her mind again on her charge.
“You all saw how the fire troubled her,” she said. “I wonder if that has something to do with the way she uses her gift—or strikes. Because in anger or confusion, she no longer sees a pattern of time clearly; for her there is nothing but that one moment, of rage, or anger, or fear… She cannot see it as only one of a progression of moments. You spoke of a fever she had as a child, when storms raged around the castle for days, and you wondered what dreams or delirium prompted them. Possibly there was some damage to the brain. Fevers often impair laran.” She considered for a long moment, watching the slow inexorable drifting of the storm clouds below them, which now masked a sizable part of the valley floor.
Dorilys came up behind them, winding her arms around Renata like an affectionate kitten trying to climb into a lap.
“Is it me you are talking about? Look down there, Renata. See the lightning inside the cloud?”
Renata nodded, knowing the storm was just beginning to build up enough electrical potential to show lightnings; she herself had not seen lightning yet.
“But there are lightnings in the air even when there are no clouds and no rain,” Dorilys said. “Can’t you see them, Renata? When I use them, I don’t really bring them, I just use them.” She looked sheepish, guilty, as she added, “When I gave Margali a headache, and tried to do it with you, I was using those lightnings I couldn’t see.”
Merciful gods, Renata thought, this child is trying to tell me, without knowing the words, that what she does is to tap the electrical potential field of the planet itself! Donal and Allart,
picking up the thought, turned startled eyes on her, but Renata did not see them, suddenly shuddering.
“Are you cold, cousin?” the child asked solicitously. “It is so warm…”
All the gods at once be thanked that at least she cannot read minds as well…
Kyril had come over to the window, looking with concentrated attention at the curdled mass of gray that was the storm center and the lightnings just beginning to be visible within it. “You asked about my work, little lady. This is a part of it, to watch where the storm center moves, and see if it strikes anywhere. Many fires are set by lightning, though sometimes no smoke can be seen for a long time after.” He added, with an apologetic glance at the noblemen and Renata, “I think perhaps that some unknown forefather endowed me with a little foresight, because sometimes when I see a great strike I know that it will later blaze up. And so I watch it with a little more care, for some hours.”
Renata said, “I would like to inquire into your ancestors, and find how even this diluted trace of laran came into your blood.”
“Oh, I know that,” Kyril said, again almost apologetic. “My mother was a nedestro of the old lord of Rockraven’s brother—not he who rules there now, but the one before him.”
So how can I say there is any laran gift which is all evil, without potential use for good? Renata thought. Kyril had turned his own small inherited gift to a useful, skilled, and harmless profession.
But Donal was following his own thoughts.
“Is it so, then, Kyril? Why, then, we are kinsmen.”
“True, Master Donal, though I never sought to bring myself to their notice. Saving your presence, they are a proud people, and my mother was too humble for them. And I have no need of anything they could give.”
Dorilys slid her hand confidingly through Kyril’s. “Why, then, we are related, too, kinsman,” she said, and he smiled and patted her cheek.
“You are like your mother, little one; she had your eyes. If the gods will, you will have inherited her sweet voice, as you have her pretty ways.”
Renata thought, How she charms everyone, when she is not being proud or sullen! Aliciane must have had that sweetness.
“Come here, Dorilys,” she said. “Look at the storm; can you see where it will move?”
“Yes, of course,” Dorilys narrowed her eyes and squinted her face in a comical way, and Allart glanced at Renata for permission to question her pupil.
“Is its course fixed, then, not to be changed at all?”
Dorilys said, “It’s awfully hard to explain, kinsman. It could go this way or that, if the wind changed, but I can only see one or two ways the wind could change…”
“But the path is fixed?”
“Unless I tried to move it,” she said.
“Could you move it?”
“It’s not so much that I could move it,” Dorilys frowned in fierce concentration as she fumbled for words she had never been taught and did not know existed. “But I can see all the ways it could move. Well, let me show you,” she said.
Allart, sliding lightly into rapport with her mind, began to sense and see the thick gray high-piled storm clouds as she saw them, everywhere at once. Yet he could trace where the storm was now, where it had been, and at least four ways it might be.
“But what will be cannot be altered; can it, little cousin? It follows its own laws; does it not? You have nothing to do with it.”
She said, “There are places I could move it and places I could not, because the conditions are not right for it to go there. It’s like a stream of water,” she said, fumbling. “If I put rocks in it, it would go around the rocks, but it could go either way. But I couldn’t make it jump out of the stream-bed, or run back uphill; do you understand, cousin? I can’t explain,” she said plaintively. “It makes my head ache. Let me show you. See?” She pointed to the enormous anvil-shaped storm mass below. His sensitivity keyed into hers, he suddenly saw with his own gift, the probable track of the storm with others less probable through and over the most likely path; it faded into the nothingness of total unlikeliness and then impossibility at the far outer edges of his perceptions. Then Dorilys’s strange gift was his own gift, expanded, altered, strangely different, but basically the same: to see all the possible futures, the places where the storm might strike, the places where it might not because of its own nature…
And she could choose between them like himself, to a very limited degree because of the forces outside herself which moved them…
As I saw my brother on the throne, or dead, within seven years. There was no third choice, that he could choose to remain content as Lord Elhalyn, because of what he is. …
He felt almost overwhelmed by this sudden insight into the nature of time, and probability, and of his own laran. But Renata was more practical.
“Can you actually control it, then, Dorilys? Or just tell where it will go?” Allart followed her thought. Was this simply precognition, foreknowledge, or was it like the power of levitation, moving an inanimate object?
“I can move it anywhere it could go,” she said. “It could go there or there”—she pointed—“but not there because the wind couldn’t change that fast, or that hard. See?” Turning back to Kyril, she asked, “Is it likely to start a fire now?”
“I hope not,” the man said soberly, “but if the storm should move down toward High Crags there, where the resin-trees grow so thickly, we could have a bad fire.”
“Then we will not let it strike there,” Dorilys said, laughing. “It won’t hurt anything if the lightning strikes down there, near Dead Man’s Peak, where it is already all burned over; will it?” As she spoke a great blue-white bolt of lightning ripped from cloud to earth, striking Dead Man’s Peak with a searing blaze, leaving a glare of sparks on all their eyes. After a second or two they heard the great crash of the thunder rolling over them.
Dorilys laughed in delight. “It is better than the fire-toys the forge-folk set off for us at midwinter!” she cried, and again the great flare of lightning arched across the sky, and again, while she laughed excitedly, pleased with the new ability to do what she would with the gift she had borne, not knowing it, all her life. Again and again the great blue-white, green-white bolts ripped and flamed down on Dead Man’s Peak, and Dorilys shrieked with hysterical laughter.
Kyril stared at her, his eyes wide with awe and dread. “Sorceress,” he whispered. “Storm queen…”
Then the lightnings died, the thunders rambled and rolled into silence, and Dorilys swayed and leaned against Renata, her eyes dark circled, smudged with fatigue. Again she was a child exhausted, white and worn. Kyril lifted her tenderly and carried her down a short flight of stairs. Renata followed him. He laid her on his own bed.
“Let the little one sleep,” he said.
As Renata bent over the child to pull off her shoes, Dorilys smiled up at her wearily and was at once asleep.
Donal looked at her, questioning, as she came back to them.
“She is already asleep,” Renata said. “She could not fly like this; she has exhausted herself.”
“If you wish,” Kyril said diffidently, “you and the little lady can have my bed, vai domna, and tomorrow, when the sun comes out, I can flash a signal for them to bring riding animals for you to return home that way.”
“Well, we shall see,” Renata said. “Perhaps when she has slept a while, she will have recovered enough to fly back to Aldaran.” She moved behind him to the window, watching as his brow ridged in a worried frown.
“Look. The lightning has struck there, in that dry canyon,” he pointed. Renata, with all her extended perception, could not see the slightest wisp of smoke, but she did not doubt that he saw it. “There is no sun for me to flash a signal. By the time it comes out again the fire will have taken hold there, but if I could reach anyone—”
Allart thought, We should have telepaths stationed on these watchtowers, so that they could reach others stationed below at such times. If someone were standing
by in the nearest village, armed with a matrix, Kyril or another could signal to have the fire put out.
But Donal was thinking of the requirements of the moment. He said, “You have the fire-fighting chemicals I brought from Tramontana. I will fly there in my glider and spread the chemicals where the lightning struck. That will damp the fire before it really starts.”
The old ranger looked at him, troubled. “Lord Aldaran would be ill pleased if I let his foster-son run such a danger!”
“It is no longer a question of letting me, old friend. I am a grown man, and my foster-father’s steward, and responsible for the well-being of all these people. They shall not be ravaged by fire if I can prevent it.” Donal turned, breaking into a run, down the stairs and through the room where Dorilys still lay in her stunned sleep. Kyril and Renata hurried after him. He was already buckling himself into his flying-harness.
“Give me the chemicals, Kyril.”
Reluctantly the ranger handed over the sealed water-cylinder, the packet of chemicals. When mixed together, they would expand into a foam that could cover and smother an extraordinary expanse of flames.
As he moved toward the open space, before he could break into the run of takeoff, she stopped him.
“Donal, let me go, too!” Would they really let him fly alone into such danger?
“No,” he said gently. “You are too new to flying, Renata. And there is some danger.”
She said aloud, and knew her voice was shaking, “I am not a court lady, to be sheltered against all dangers. I am a trained Tower worker, and I am used to sharing all the dangers I see!”
He reached out, took her shoulders gently between his hands. “I know,” he said softly, “but you have not the experience of flying; I should be hindered by having to stop and make certain you knew precisely what to do, and there is need for haste. Let me go, cousin.” His hands on her shoulders tightened and he pulled her into a quick, impulsive embrace.
“There is not as much danger as you think, not for me. Wait for me, carya.” He kissed her, swiftly.