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“Why do you keep twitching?” the brunette Selda wanted to know. “You look like you have a palsy.”
Daine glared at Selda but held her tongue. The older girl was like some people back home, never happy unless she had something to complain about. Still, the comment was enough to make her guard herself so she wouldn’t jump at the hint of copper light. She came to like seeing it. Her only regret was that copper was the only magical glitter she saw—no blue or green threads, no bronze mists and pearly shimmers.
She had a fresh shock that day: when she saw Onua with the ponies, the same copper color threaded the K’mir’s head and hands.
“Why so surprised?” Numair asked that night, when Daine told him. They were on their way to the horse meadow once more. “She’s—what’s the K’miri term?—horse-hearted. Did you think Thayet would commission just anyone to obtain mounts? The Riders depend on horses more than any other military company. Onua ensures they have the best.”
“Does she know?” Daine asked.
“Of course.” He boosted himself up to sit on the top rail of the fence. “She doesn’t have it enough that she needed training in it, like you. There are a few people here with it: a man and his grandson in the palace mews, two sisters at the kennels, some of the hostlers. Stefan, the chief hostler, has a lot of it. He breeds great-horses—the extra-large mounts many knights need to ride in combat. I trained him.”
Shaking her head, Daine sat on the rail beside him, looking at the animals grazing in the meadow. “And I only heard of all this two days ago.”
He tweaked her nose. “Being all of thirteen, of course you should be omniscient,” he teased. “Now, magelet—to work.” He pointed to a pony grazing by itself nearly three hundred yards away. “Call to it.”
She opened her mouth, and he clapped his hand over it. “ Without sound.”
She glared at him. “Then how’m I supposed to call her?” she asked, his palm tickling her moving lips.
“With your mind. One thing I’ve noticed is that you tend to be confused about how you speak to and hear animals. We’re going to break you of the habit of assigning concrete manifestation to magical phenomena.”
“What?”
“Believing you actually hear or speak with your body when all of it is done with your mind. Call that pony.”
“‘That pony’ is a mare. Why can’t I just talk to her?”
He sighed. “A time may come when being heard will get you killed. Also, your mind needs discipline. If your thinking is more direct, what you can do with your thoughts will happen more directly. Learn to focus your mind: focus creates strength. Meditation helps you reach the same end.
“We’re doing spring cleaning up here.” He tapped her forehead with a long finger. “Once you put everything into its proper place—once you organize your mind—you’ll be able to find what you want quickly. Now call her, please.”
Daine clenched her teeth and thought, as loudly as she could, Come here, please! The mare continued to graze peacefully.
“Think of the magic,” Numair said calmly. “Try again.”
An hour or so later they gave it up and went inside. Daine’s head ached fiercely, and the pony had not come closer by so much as a step.
“We’ll keep practicing,” Numair said calmly.
“Lucky me,” she muttered, following him into her room. A large book lay on her writing table. “What’s this?” She opened it to a colored page and gasped in awe: it was a precise drawing of the bones of a wild pig.
“It’s a book on mammalian anatomy,” he said, sitting down on her bed.
“A book on what?”
He sighed. “I keep forgetting you’re not a scholar—sorry. Anatomy is what’s inside a body: muscles, veins, organs, and so on. ‘Mammalian’ refers to mammals. You know what they are; you just don’t know the fancy term. Warm-blooded animals with hair-covered bodies that suckle their young are mammals.”
“That’s most of my friends.” She said it quietly, turning page after page of drawings with fingers she had scrubbed on her shirt.
“Exactly. If you’re to learn healing, you need to understand how animals are put together.”
“I already know some.” Here was a bear’s skeleton; here the veins and organs of a cat. Every drawing was done with an eye to the finest detail.
“This book will help you to organize what you know and add to your present knowledge.”
She made a face. “Why? My friends don’t organize their minds. Everything they think about is all tumbled together, willy-nilly.”
“For them that’s enough,” he said patiently. “As animals they remember the past only vaguely. They are unable to visualize a future, apart from the change of seasons. They have no comprehension of mortality—of their deaths. They don’t learn from books or teachers, so they have no need to structure their minds in order to find what they learn. You, however, are human and different. If you do not find a way to organize your mind, at worst you might go mad. At best, you’ll be stupid.”
She made a face—she didn’t like the sound of either fate. With a sigh she looked at the page before her. The artist had drawn a bat, its frame spread so she saw how bones fitted together. “You’d best take this when you go. My friends come in every night. I wouldn’t want it soiled.”
“The book is spelled against dirt and tearing. It’s yours. I want you to use it, not admire it.”
It took a moment for her to realize what he’d said. “Mine!” she gasped. “No! It’s—it’s too valuable. The likes of me don’t keep such things!” Her fingers shook, she wanted it so much, but peasant girls didn’t own books.
He caught her hand, his eyes earnest. “Daine, listen to me.” He pulled her down to sit beside him. “You’re a student mage. You need books like this to do your work. I am your master. It’s my duty—in this case it’s my pleasure—to give you whatever books and scrolls I believe you require to learn. Unless you don’t want to learn?”
“Odd’s bobs, of course I do!”
“Good. Then get your book. We’ll start at page one.”
They ended some time later, when Onua knocked and stuck her head in. “We’re about to meditate. Come on, if you’re coming.”
“Do we have to?” Daine asked, closing the wonderful book.
“Spring cleaning,” he replied, getting to his feet.
She followed him to the Rider mess. She’d been surprised to learn
that meditation was required of all trainees, not just Gifted ones. They worked at it every night before they went to bed, along with all their officers, Daine, and Numair, “whether we need it or not,” Evin commented once, in a whisper.
That day set the pattern for the next three weeks. It took Daine six days to learn how to deliberately call the nearest pony without using words. Numair then had her summon a pony farther away but still within sight, until she could do that. Next she had to call an animal from inside the barracks or stables, where she couldn’t see it: often that was Tahoi or one of the cats that slept in her room. She worked hard. Each task took less time to master.
Anatomy lessons she swallowed in gulps. Every spare moment she had went into studying her beloved book and memorizing its contents.
Meditation was the hardest. She did her best, wanting to control the copper fire that was her kind of wild magic, but clearing her mind was hard. Stray thoughts popped into her head; something would itch; a muscle would cramp, and she would have to start over. Often she fell asleep. The best thing about meditating with the trainees was the knowledge that she wasn’t the only one who was easily distracted or who dozed off.
Slowly they all grew used to their work. She saw it in the trainees before noticing it in herself, as their bodies hardened and the hard routine became habit. After two weeks she was taken off watching them on foot and put to teaching archery, something even the officers had to work to beat her at. It wasn’t until she saw that few trainees were falling asleep in meditation that she realized she no longer fell asleep, either. With practice it got easier to learn to think of nothing at all. The deep breaths emptied her thoughts and quieted her body rhythms. Her mind learned to drift. She began to feel as she had in the marsh, when she had listened for the hawk.
Is that what it is? she thought one night, lying awake in bed. She grasped the badger’s claw. “I wish you’d come and tell me,” she whispered, earning a curious look from the pine marten who had arranged herself and her kits on the girl’s blanket-covered legs.
If the badger heard, he did not answer the summons. “Typical,” Daine told the martens, and went to sleep.
