Under The Vale And Other Tales Of Valdemar v(-105 Read online

  :I, at least, still have work to do,: she scolded the bird, but her tone was affectionate. Rather than return to the skies, Kir folded her wings back and shifted her talons on the leather pad, stabilizing her grip and rebalancing her weight so Stardance could move without disturbing her.

  Stardance turned in place, her irritation with the fruitless exercise of looking for magic now returning. She studied the clearing again, glancing to the sun for her bearings. As she recalled, this place had once had a strong ley-line, which had been tapped and drawn deeper toward the Vale to power the Heartstone. Most of the sections of forest the students were searching today contained at least one former line or node. Might traces of these have survived the Storms? Was that what the Elders had hoped they would find with their closer examination?

  She closed her eyes, the better to feel for any echo of the crackling energy of the magic, once so familiar to her, and expanded her Mage Sight outward. She Saw nothing—no lines, no web of energy to draw from—but she had a vague feeling, a sense that the magic was still there, somehow. She frowned in frustration. Not even sure how to go about it, she tried to change the focus of her Mage Sight, broadening and refining it at the same time. Suddenly, her mind seemed to twist, and she could See a faint tracery, limning everything around her with a subtle silver, fainter than the tiniest of ley-lines. To this odd Mage Sight, her shielded self was now surrounded by a faint haze of what she was sure was power, but she couldn’t tap it or shape it. How could anyone make use of this?

  “It looks like I seize the fibers, but is not so. Look deeper.” Triska’s voice rang in Stardance’s head so clearly that the girl opened her eyes and looked around the wild forest, expecting to see the beloved snout hovering just behind an exceptionally large leaf, laughing at Stardance for believing her to be gone.

  But even Kir was silent, and though the falcon liked to pretend to be aloof and regal, she would have been twittering like a magpie if anyone familiar were near.

  Stardance took a deep, unsteady breath, fighting back the crushing disappointment, the weight of loss heavy within her. Then she remembered when she had heard those words. It had been a spinning lesson, when she had been trying to use magic to help feed the fibers to the spindle faster—and had, of course, ended up with great clumps instead of smooth thread.

  After those words, she had watched Triska spin, this time with her Mage Sight, sure that the hertasi was using some innate magic. How else to explain how far superior Triska’s threads and weaving were? But Mage Sight had shown her nothing, just the glow of Triska’s door wards, like and yet somehow unlike those used in the training rooms.

  “Is in mind,” Triska had finally said. “Think to make self attractive to fibers, no more.” It hadn’t made sense to Stardance at the time, so she hadn’t given it further thought, but had continued to practice spinning without attempting to use magic.

  Could this faint magic be spun like the loose fiber into stronger thread? Stardance looked around the clearing, trying to remember where the lines had lain before the Storms. Unable to recall, she shrugged.

  “See if it works, first,” she muttered. “Time enough to reshape later.”

  :?: sent Kir.

  :Not you, silly thing. As if I’d reshape so much as a feather.:

  Kir preened her plumage briefly, then resettled on Stardance’s shoulder, tucking her beak behind the girl’s ear in a gesture of reassurance.

  Stardance closed her eyes, then opened her Mage Sight with that same twist of her mind until she could once again See the faint fog of diffuse energy around her.

  Like attracts like, she thought, and fed a tiny bit of her personal power outside of her shields, letting it drift and ripple a fine radiance over her skin, inviting the nebulous energies around her to join it.

  Long minutes passed, and she was about to throw up her hands and go back to the Vale in disgust, finished with this pointless task, when she again heard Triska’s voice in her head.

  “The silk waits for no one, but it will not be rushed.”

  Stardance fed a little more of her energy out to her surface, ignoring the first warnings of energy strain, imagining waggling fingers of magic waving “come, dance with us” into the energy-mist. So caught up was she by the image and the feeling she was creating that she almost missed the response of the magic-haze around her.

  It was exhaustion that caught her attention—or, rather, that she no longer felt exhausted, despite using her personal energy. Slowly, she brought her Mage Sight back into sharper focus and was astonished to See faint tendrils coalescing out the mist, drawn into her shields, replenishing her.

  Stunned, she thoughtlessly reached out, almost grabbed for those precious strands of power, until she practically felt Triska’s presence beside her and remembered what had happened when she had first spun thread, how everything had tangled together when she had stopped letting the fibers flow through her fingers and had started to reach urgently for them.

  Slowly, she stretched out to those tendrils with her coruscating Mage-fingers—bringing the strands together, plying one to the next and to the next with utmost care, until she had a tiny line started.

  It was a mere runnel, nothing like the ley-lines that had fed the Heartstone and powered the Vale, nothing even like the line that had once flowed through this very clearing, but it was still decidedly a line.

  But what to do with it? She couldn’t stand here forever, a living lodestone in the magic-haze.

  Now, she was unsurprised when Triska’s voice again echoed in her head. “Every weaving starts with the warp thread.”

  With Mage Sight and normal vision layered one on the other, Stardance examined the clearing, which stood on a slight incline. Like water, magic tended to run downhill, so she shifted, trailing the tiny threads of magic down the slope, careful not to move so quickly as to break even one.

  As she paced the lowest edge of the clearing, she found what she sought.

  Though not of the quality of a Heartstone, the large rock at the edge of the tree line seemed to have enough quartz in it to hold the power from this tiny line she had created. It would serve well enough for her to tie off a warp thread here. Maybe, once the power had gathered and grown, weft threads could be brought in to shape it, reweaving the network of lines that had once tracked through the Pelagiris. Or it could be guided to run its path elsewhere, perhaps even back to the Vale.

  With exquisite care, she reached out to the stone with her shimmering Mage-fingers, sending some of her own power to dance over the stone, to wave invitingly to the tendrils she had drawn with her. Ever so gently, she nudged the line she carried toward the stone. It wavered uncertainly, but she waited, dimming her own radiation bit by bit until the fine line quivered and with an almost audible snap fell into place, finding the stone and settling, sinking into the earth, drawing the energy-haze with it.

  Now separated from the support of the tiny tendrils of power drawn from the fog, Stardance staggered as a drain-headache blossomed into full power, drumming the insides of her skull. Kir launched to a nearby tree, chittering her concern, but Stardance kept her from calling to any nearby bondbirds. Moving slowly, keeping to paths that were as out of the way as possible, she stumbled, she hoped unseen, back to the Vale, barely able to climb the stairs to collapse onto the bedroll in her ekele. “Are you sure?” Winternight leaned forward, one hand twisting over the head of his staff. “None of the students were Healing Mage-talented, so far as we knew.”

  Dayspring nodded. “It was a ley-line and what resembled the beginnings of a node. I’m not sure why I scanned the safe areas we were crossing as we returned to the Vale, but I’m glad I did. It was tiny, but must have been formed by an external influence, not the natural gatherings of power in channels. There hasn’t been enough time for the magic to settle so cleanly. And this was the only place where I saw such a thing.”

  “We need to know who was in that area. We need that student, that Gift. K’Veyas has never had many Healing Ma
ges, and now that Silverheart is the only one left, well, she’s wearing herself out.”

  “I never noticed signs of Mage Healing in any of the students I taught,” Silverheart added, her voice soft. She was too young for the lines that had creased her face in the last few days, strained not only by the Mage Storms themselves but by the demands of attempting to restore some balance to the power around the Vale. “But neither did I work with all of the trainees.”

  “My apologies for my lateness,” Windwhisperer said, brushing aside the curtains at the entrance to Winternight’s ekele. “There was a Change-Creature in the area I was working in, which delayed our return until we had dealt with it.” He shrugged off the questions. “Not magical, so the scouts will be better equipped to relate the details. My younger son had an interesting tale, too, from his work in the safe area, but we can discuss that later. First, why the summons?”

  Winternight gestured to Dayspring, and the younger Mage spoke.

  “You assigned the students this morning, didn’t you?” Windwhisperer nodded. “We need to know who was in the area that went east toward the cliffs, between the stand of tallpines and the slope just before the meadow. There’s a ley-line and a node there, and they weren’t there when we went out this morning.”

  Only a close observer would have noticed the flicker in Windwhisperer’s eyes before he leaned back, his face as calm and still as ever.

  “There were three students in that approximate area, but as it happens I know who created it, for my son observed her. Stardance.”

  The other three Mages inhaled sharply.

  “I never taught her . . .” Silverheart murmured at last.

  Winternight was silent for a moment, studying Windwhisperer’s face. “Is your son near?”

  Windwhisperer nodded and bent his head toward his kestrel bondbird, who hopped off her perch and darted out the open window. “I thought you would want to speak with him, so I asked him to wait below and said I would send Tria when we wanted him to come up.”

  A moment later, the young scout tapped at the entrance, then pushed aside the curtains and entered the room.

  “Welcome, Nightblade,” Winternight nodded at a seat next to Windwhisperer, and the new arrival sat. “Your father tells us you were paired with Stardance in the searching of the safe areas today.”

  Nightblade lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug. “Not so much paired,” he replied after a moment’s thought. “I thought it would be best for the oldest scout to stay nearest to the youngest Mage student.” His voice left a subtle shade of emphasis on the fact that he was the oldest of those assigned to work in the safe areas with the students, hinting that he felt he deserved to be out with the rest of the fully trained scouts.

  Winternight chose to ignore the implication. “What did she do?”

  “As we left the Vale, Stardance made it clear that she did not wish for me to be immediately near her, so I went farther into the forest and watched her from the trees, or through Miel’s eyes. She was diligent, tracking back and forth so that she covered every bit of her assigned area of the forest. She finished in a clearing, and it was there that she seemed to be working magic, although I don’t have enough Mage Sight to know for sure. At times she moved her fingers, very slowly, like she was working with something fragile that was held between them. A couple of times she tilted her head, as though she were listening to something or someone. Then she walked to the stone at the edge of the clearing and held her hands over it, not quite touching it, for a long time. After that, she nearly collapsed and barely managed to stagger back to her ekele. I made sure a hertasi would take care of her and found my father, to tell him.”

  Windwhisperer nodded confirmation, while Silverheart leaned forward. “Did she say anything? Anything at all?”

  “She talked aloud to her bondbird a couple of times, and I think she said something about ‘seeing if it works.’ Other than that, nothing that I heard.”

  When there were no other questions, Windwhisperer nodded a dismissal, and his son slipped out. The Mages turned to Silverheart, waiting for her thoughts. The only Healing Mage in k’Veyas, this was her field, her expertise.

  Silverheart leaned against the wall of the ekele, her eyes half-closed in thought. “Stardance. She was the one more or less adopted by the hertasi who was caught in the Change Circle, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “So. Hurt, angry, lonely, and, from what Windwhisperer said of her last night, stubborn. Not the ideal time for any of us to ask her what she did, and why. And how.”

  “She would not refuse the direct command of the Elders,” Windwhisperer said thoughtfully, “but I agree that she would not respond well.”

  “I need to watch her do this, to see how she is working. But we can’t send anyone extra out with her, or she might not do anything. I wish I could use Mage Sight through Cede’s eyes!”

  “But you can through mine,” Windwhisperer replied. “I realized today that I’m getting a little old and weary to keep up with the scouts,” he continued with a wry smile. “You can link to me, and I can watch her with Far Sight.” He paused, considering. “Is it likely that she could harm herself, or anyone else, if she experiments on her own?”

  Silverheart thought for a moment. “It is possible that she could become too absorbed, too focused, and forget to come back to herself. But if we are watching her, even from a distance I should be able to recognize the signs, and we can use a bondbird to shock her out before she gets lost.” She shrugged. “The magic is so diffuse, so faint, that there is little risk for injury. There just isn’t enough power for her to do anything significant.”

  The Mages all nodded in agreement. Even in these few days after the Storms, magical accidents had been fewer. And smaller.

  Stardance woke, blinking and rubbing her eyes to shake the last traces of exhaustion-headache from her mind. It took a moment for her to remember how she had gotten so drained, and then the images flooded back over her. The magic-haze, the tendrils, memories of Triska . . . She almost murmured the hertasi’s name, waiting for the ache of loss to build, to overwhelm her with emptiness as it had every time she’d thought of Triska in the days since the last Mage Storm—and was stunned when it seemed a little muted, as though she was a tiny bit less raw inside. She would have considered it further, but a hungry Kir was already protesting how late she had slept.

  As morning drew on, once again she gathered with the other Mage students for Windwhisperer’s instructions. Each day they were to expand their search farther away from the Vale, as the scouts and full Mages widened the range of the safe areas.

  Stardance was surprised to be glad when Windwhisperer told them to take areas just beyond those where they had searched the day before. She would have the chance to see what had happened overnight to her little runnel. A tiny bubble of unexpected anticipation welled up within her, not dimmed even when the young scout (Darkmoon? Nightdark? No, Nightblade) again paced his steps to hers as they left the Vale. Today, he seemed less angry, less resentful of his assignment, but she was still relieved when he drifted away from her, farther into the forest.

  When she was sure he was out of her hearing, she slipped between the trees into the clearing where she had threaded the little line together. It was easier today to make the shift in her mind to See the more diffuse energies around her.

  Her little line still glowed to her Mage Sight, tracing down the slope to pool in the large rock. Was the line a little broader, a little stronger than she had left it? Stardance couldn’t be sure, but she thought that maybe it was. The stone itself had retained the magic that trickled through the runnel. She paused, considering. Would it accumulate enough power that it would need an outlet? Reaching out with a gentle touch beyond her shields, she tested the energy in the stone, then released it. Unless a great deal more magic suddenly flooded down the tiny line, the quartz in the stone could hold the gathering power for days, at least. She turned and moved deeper into the forest, heading for the ou
ter limit of the new area she would be searching.

  Silverheart unlinked herself from Windwhisperer’s mind, rubbing her eyes to clear the afterimages of Mage Sight layered on Far Sight.

  “So, what do you think?” the Elder asked her, his eyes closed as he continued to “watch” Stardance move through the forest.

  “She is very young,” the Healing Mage answered slowly, “but her instinct seems good.”

  “Is she truly working with the earth magics on that level?”

  “It seems so. As Dayspring suggested, that is a tiny runnel and rudimentary node—well, more of a locus than a node. Since she knew exactly where they were and only touched them to verify their presence, it appears that she did create them.” Silverheart paused for a moment, considering. “There had been a fairly strong ley-line and node in that clearing. If the girl remembered that, and tried her experiment there because of it, I don’t think we need to monitor her closely until she gets to where there used to be stronger nodes. From the old maps, I think there are two in her area today. One just beside the little waterfall and one closer in, near a stand of pines.”

  There was a brief silence, and Windwhisperer stood, shaking his shoulders to loosen himself as he released his Far Sight half-trance. “I’ve set Tria to watch her and alert me when she nears either of those areas or if she does anything unusual. No sense in using Far Sight for that long if I don’t need to.”

  Silverheart nodded. “It may not take much energy, but there is little from which to replenish yourself. Now, we wait.”

  Stardance looked up, checking her position. Yes, she had completed the first arc of her wedge and was almost at the waterfall that dropped the stream down below the cliffs that had marked the edge of her area the previous day. Hadn’t there been a node, here, too? The ley-lines often followed the patterns of the streams, for there was so much life in the water to supply them.