Competitions (4 page)

“If you’re through stuffing yourself, it’s time you got back to practicing,” she said as she stopped beside my table to look down at me. “You don’t have forever to make your pitiful attempts at testing, you know, so you’d better get moving.”

“If I don’t have forever, then I ought to make my pitiful attempt right now,” I answered, using my nervousness over the test to counter rising annoyance. “Who did you say I had to speak to about watching me?”

“Gerdol is your examiner,” she responded automatically, then shook her head as if to dismiss the entire idea. “But that’s ridiculous, you can’t possibly be ready after only a single morning’s practice. If you think I intend to bother Gerdol for nothing, you have another think coming.”

“Either
you
can call him, or I will,” I stated, flatly refusing to let her get a rise out of me—at least where she could see it. “If I can’t do it, we’ll all soon know.”

“Yes, yes we will,” she said, brightening with the idea of my failure. “And then I’ll be rid of you, so it’s worth bothering Gerdol after all. I’ll be right back.”

Her enjoyment and happiness were clear as she made her way toward the table holding mostly men, but by the time she reached it she’d lost a good deal of both. Even though there were more women than men in our aspect, she’d said, the only ones who could be examiners were men. That arrangement was an old story, but she acted as if it were brand new—or could be changed by complaining about it. Her complaints had about as much chance to change things as mine would have about my parents trying to sell me into marriage again. Apparently Soonen had never learned that if you don’t like the way something is, you have to find a way to change it.

Soonen spoke diffidently to one of the seated men, and after a moment he rose and followed her away from the table. He wasn’t a very tall man, a bit shorter than Soonen, in fact, and had whiskers framing his face. He wore nothing of a mustache to hide the annoyance in his expression, and was a bit on the plump side. He followed Soonen at his own deliberate pace, and when he reached my table he frowned down at me.

“I’m given to understand that you’ve already requested an examiner,” he said in a deep, heavy voice. “Can that possibly be true?”

“It can be and is,” I answered, hating the way my voice trembled at his obvious disapproval. “I don’t blame you for not wanting to take Soonen’s word for things, but this time she happens to be right.”

Soonen drew her breath in angrily at that, but Gerdol first raised his brows, then chuckled.

“Well, it’s been some time since we’ve had a lady of proper tastes in these precincts,” he said, his tone having softened as he looked me over. “Come along, my dear, and do the best you’re able. If you find it beyond you to complete the course today, there’s always tomorrow or the day after.”

He offered his hand to help me rise, and I forced myself to take it as well as to smile my thanks. Jovvi had mentioned how easy it was to use men’s weaknesses against them, but I hadn’t understood what she meant until just this minute. Soonen complained and apparently made a nuisance of herself, but would have gotten a lot farther if the men around her wanted to impress her. If a system is designed to exclude you, doesn’t it make sense to maneuver members of that system to where they
want
to change it?

That latest line of thought was a bit frightening, but not as much as the testing I was about to undergo. I would have preferred to think about social change, but as soon as Gerdol led me to the first practice cubicle, all my attention centered on what was about to be done. I moved into the cubicle, took a deep breath, then stepped hard on the lever on the floor in front of me. The lever caused a box to fly open and a wide cloud of soil to be thrown into the air, and then it was time to perform.

Reaching for the power had never been very hard, but lately it had developed into a reflex like opening your eyes after hearing a strange sound. It was there almost before I realized it, already having woven my fires into the necessary patterns, sending flame to consume every grain of soil in the air. My fires had to be very hot to accomplish that trick, and when I let them fade again there wasn’t even a hint of soil left.

“Well, that was quite impressive, my dear,” Adept Gerdol said with pleased indulgence, as if he were speaking to a precocious child. That undoubtedly meant he was able to do the same, and I was about to ask him not to talk down to me when I heard the sound of a bird scolding. I quickly looked up and sure enough, there was the brown, gold, and white chickadee.

I still found it difficult to believe, but all morning while I practiced I’d had the company of that bird. It seemed to have no fear of the fire I used, which was strange enough in itself. Add to that its manner of seeming to support and encourage me when I’d needed it the most, and you have something that goes beyond strange. Now it seemed to be telling me to keep my mouth closed, a reminder I needed. Lately I’d found that using the power seemed to calm many of my fears and apprehensions, but fortunately or unfortunately the state of mind didn’t stay with me for long.

“Yes, quite impressive,” Adept Gerdol was saying as I turned to him. “That’s one mastery to your credit, and if you’d like to leave the next until later or tomorrow, I’ll join you for a cup of tea.”

“I’d be delighted to share tea with you later, Adept Gerdol,” I answered in a way that would have made Jovvi proud of me. “Right now, though, I prefer to continue. Once all this testing business is behind me, my mind will be clear enough to concentrate on other things.”

“Of course, my dear, I quite understand,” Adept Gerdol said as he took my hand and patted it. “We’ll continue on as long as you’re able, and then we’ll have tea.”

He used the hand he held to lead me to the next cubicle, and I caught a glance of Soonen on the way. The woman had her lip curled into a sneer over the way Gerdol was behaving with my encouragement, which showed she didn’t understand the true state of affairs. She’d been the one to give me the idea about trying manipulation when she’d spoken about how men reacted to my “sort,” so it was completely accurate to say that she was directly responsible for everything I did.

And that might even include my performance during the tests. I’d finally forced myself to admit that I wanted to
show
the woman, show her what I could do and that I wasn’t the helpless little toy she’d claimed. The second cubicle had a pull cord which released a wide spray of water from a tank overhead, and even as I yanked on the cord I heard a trill of avian support and encouragement.

But by then I had the power flowing through me again, and the object this time was to burn the water without creating steam. Once again the feat required the use of a woven pattern in my very hot fires, but then that, too, was done.

“Excellent, my dear, truly excellent,” Adept Gerdol said heartily with triumphant birdsong as a faint backdrop. “Two masteries one after the other. You’ll certainly want to try for the third, and afterward we’ll have our tea and discuss the best way to increase your precision.”

I turned to the man again with a smile and a nod, but on the inside I was fuming. The oaf expected me to fail at the next exercise, just the way Soonen had almost certainly failed and possibly the way
he
had. The haunted part of my mind feared that they would prove to be right, but the rest of me was too bloody angry to even consider failure. But not to use strong words like “bloody,” at least to myself. I’d never said that word out loud, and probably never would.

I walked to the third cubicle surrounded by the most calming birdsong I’d ever heard, so that when I stepped inside I felt less angered and more controlled. The thought came that it would be marvelous to be able to take that bird home and feed it seed and bread until it was too heavy to fly, but that wasn’t likely to become possible. The bird wasn’t really there to support me, I simply needed to believe it was.

So I held to my beliefs as I looked at the pile of wood thrown one piece on top of another in the middle of the cubicle. The pieces were each about a foot in length and were carved into different shapes, an oval shape with a splotch of blue paint just visible in the pile’s middle. The piece with the orange paint splotch which had been there earlier had had to be replaced, and I’d done the replacing myself.

Both Soonen and Adept Gerdol stood waiting silently for me to fail, undoubtedly thinking that I couldn’t yet be up to burning one single piece of wood in the pile without at least singeing some of the others. At first I hadn’t thought I could do it either, but then I’d tried it—and had discovered I already knew how to keep my flames from burning what they shouldn’t. Once or twice I’d had occasion to guard what surrounded my fires, like when Jovvi’s sponsor had come to the residence, and the woman’s two henchmen had tried to hurt Jovvi and me. I hadn’t considered that practice at the time, but apparently it had been nothing else.

“The oval piece of wood, with the blue splotch of paint,” I said, naming my target, more than eager to get on with it and have it behind me. When Adept Gerdol murmured his agreement that he saw the piece, I took it as my cue to begin. Yellow-red fire flared all around the oval piece of wood, making me think of winter and logs in the fireplace. But only that one small piece of wood burned, and somewhere far away a part of me marveled that I was able to protect things from my flames as well as burn them. Most people never mentioned anything about the protecting part, and then it was all done.

“You’ve burned it,” Adept Gerdol said slowly, now sounding numb. “Without burning any of the other pieces. You’ve mastered it.”

“She couldn’t have,” Soonen protested, again sounding furious. “There are probably singe marks all over the pieces in place we can’t see from here.”

“Then go and take a closer look,” I offered, turning to regard both of them. “I got rid of every singed piece in the cubicle before lunch, so any you find will prove that I failed.”

The two Adepts had gone pale for some reason, but that didn’t stop Soonen from pushing past me to get to the wood pile.

She began to turn over pieces of wood, after a moment throwing them harder and harder, and that spoke more clearly than any words she might have used.

“There aren’t any singed pieces, and the third mastery is yours, Dama,” Adept Gerdol said, just as if he were a stranger. “Would you care to continue on, or would you prefer to rest for a short while first?”

“Continue on,” I answered, wondering why he was acting so strangely. The next three cubicles required an increasingly more delicate touch, but there didn’t seem to be much doubt that I’d master that group as well. And my decision to continue on seemed to frighten him even more. He bowed his agreement shakily, then held out a hand to ask me to precede him. So we left Soonen still raging among the pieces of wood, and went to the next cubicle.

That one had wedges of leather rather than lengths of wood, and the following cubicle had strips of cloth. When I’d been practicing the cloth had really made me worry, but then I’d realized that protection was protection. It took the same effort and amount of power to protect cloth as it did to protect wood, even though that didn’t seem quite right. It should have been harder to protect cloth, and I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t.

Especially when I reached the last cubicle, which contained feathers. That one really made me nervous, and by then Soonen was back with us. She wore the oddest expression, something like terrified anger, and Adept Gerdol’s expression wasn’t much better. The man was obviously nervous and disturbed, and his patronizing had turned to obsequiousness.

“You’re supposed to choose the ten feathers I’m to burn,” I reminded him, turning in the cubicle’s doorway. “Would you like to begin?”

“
Ten
feathers?” he echoed, shaking his head with a frown. “You only need to burn three, Dama. Where could you possibly have gotten the idea of ten?”

“I must have misheard,” I said, only glancing at a Soonen who had frozen where she stood. She was the one who had told me ten feathers were required, probably to frighten me into believing I’d never do it. But it hadn’t worked out that way, since I’d practiced—and had gotten—ten feathers cleanly burned. Hearing the truth actually relaxed me, so I turned back to the pile of feathers with full confidence underscored by happy birdsong.

Adept Gerdol chose the three most difficult feathers to reach, of course, but once I’d burned the last of them Soonen didn’t even suggest there might be singeing. Unprotected feathers don’t singe, they burn, a lesson I’d learned well the first time I’d practiced with them. I’d been nervous and unsure of myself then, but now I turned back to the two Adepts with more confidence than I could remember feeling in many years.

“I believe that that’s the last of it,” I said, speaking only to Adept Gerdol. “If you’ll declare the mastery, I’ll be able to go and have that tea.”

“Of course, Dama, of course I declare the mastery,” he assured me quickly while I thought about having something a lot more substantial along with the tea. I’d just finished lunch a short while ago, but I still felt completely hollow. “Allow me the honor of escorting you back to your table and ordering the tea for you.”

He offered his arm in a way that looked downright diffident, as though he might possibly be afraid of my turning my fires on
him
. As an Adept he should have had nothing to worry about; after all, it stood to reason that if you were able to protect feathers from burning, you should have no trouble protecting yourself.

But once I’d taken his arm, it came back to me that he—and Soonen—probably weren’t able to do that exercise. How they’d gotten to be Adepts without it I had no idea, but I was almost completely certain that that had to be the case. They hadn’t been able to attain the masteries but I had, and that must be what they were afraid of. I was stronger than they were, and they hadn’t been very nice to me.

I let Adept Gerdol seat me at the table, feeling a small chill creep around my backbone. The fear the two people were showing couldn’t be based on the possibility that I might turn out to be offended by their previous behavior. It had to come from reality and past experience, specifically with others who’d proven to be stronger and had also done something to them or to people they knew.