Storm Rising (16 page)

I could not convince him that ignoring his power was more dangerous than learning to control it. In many ways, Falconsbane had no control; he acted on impulse more often than he planned things. I tried to show him that such impulsive actions were second nature to him, and that unless he
learned
to control his power, it would control
him.

It had been Karal who had devised a plan to show An’desha that he had the self-control to use his magic without abusing it—by provoking him to the point where, if he had
not
had self-control, he would have flattened the young priest.

I have to give him this much; that was sheer, unadulterated bravery on his part. I’m not certain that I would have trusted An’desha’s will and ability to control himself in that situation, and I live with him. Or used to, anyway.

Not that Firesong hadn’t tried other means of convincing An’desha, but the young man could not be convinced by his lover. The trouble was, Karal could convince him, because Karal’s ploys had all worked.

Damn him.

Now An’desha, emboldened by his success and
encouraged by Karal-damn-him, was looking for answers from someone other than Firesong. Suddenly he was no longer content with the guidance and advice he got from his lover. He was striking out in directions—often directions of a mystical bent—that Firesong didn’t like and didn’t want to take for himself.

It would be my luck that he’d find a priest to be his best friend. Priests make people so—deep.

Karal was not An’desha’s lover; he wasn’t An’desha’s type in the first place, and in the second, as far as Firesong could tell—and his instincts there were seldom wrong where the extremes of sexual preference went—Karal was at the opposite end of the spectrum from
shay’a’chern.
Perhaps that actually gave him an advantage over Firesong; An’desha knew that he had no ancillary motives for his advice.

Once again, Firesong’s conscience pointed out that Firesong almost
always
had ulterior motives behind anything he tried to get An’desha to think or do. Of course, he had An’desha’s best interests at heart. They just happened to coincide with his own best interests.

I can convince myself of that quite prettily. I wonder if I could convince anyone else.

He ground his teeth in frustration and stared at a lamp hanging from the ceiling. At this point it was just a dark round shadow against the lighter ceiling. Soon he would have to light the lamps, if he didn’t want to have to stumble around in the dark.

So what am I supposed to do now? Am I doomed to lose him? Can’t he see how I feel about him? It’s not as if I haven’t obviously been courting him. At least, I think I’ve been
obviously
courting him.
It was a frustrating position to be in, since he’d never
had
to court anyone’s attentions before; he’d always been on the other end of the courting, and others had always labored to catch and hold
his
attention.

Now, here he was, with the situation reversed. He was turning himself inside out trying to catch and hold An’desha’s interest, and it wasn’t working.
Now I know how it must have felt to Rainbird when I was oblivious to his overtures. The problem is, just what am
I going to do about it? How am I going to get him back?

He knew one thing that he was very good at that might work. Besides magic, of course.
I could certainly launch a seduction that would completely overwhelm him; I’d have him so swamped with sensuality that he wouldn’t have the energy to even
think
about anything or anyone else.

It would be a very successful seduction, too—for a while.

Unfortunately, I know precisely how long that particular tactic can work from personal experience
, he thought
glumly. The “spell” of seduction only lasts as long as the seducer has energy. And the seducer is going to run out of energy before the seduced does.

Besides, An’desha wasn’t stupid, nor was his nature centered on sex or sensuality. The trouble, as far as Firesong’s ambitions went, was that An’desha’s mind was awake now and growing. It wasn’t going to just “go to sleep” again, and a mind like An’desha’s needed more than an overwhelming of the senses to occupy it for very long.

That led to another temptation entirely. Firesong was not—quite—a Mind-Healer, but he had many of the same skills, and one of his minor Gifts was that of Empathy. He knew enough that he could, if he chose, tamper with that too-awake mind and put it to sleep again, or paralyze it.
Oh, it would be
so
easy to take what I know and begin manipulating him. I know all of his weaknesses, all of his fears, everything that makes him twitch, everything that makes him feel good about himself. Yes, it would be so easy to twist An’desha around—

It was so tempting—but—

His stomach twisted, and he grimaced.
Oh, that’s no answer either. It’s wrong, and I know it. Father would have a cat, and Mother—I know what she’d have to say if she knew I’d even
thought
about doing something like that to another person.
He shuddered; he had faced monsters, mage-storms and Mornelithe Falconsbane, and none of them had frightened him as much as
the prospect of facing his mother with a guilty conscience.

He grimaced again, this time at his own foolishness.
I don’t care what anyone else thinks about me, but may the gods help me if Mother found
that
out.

And besides his mother—
oh, gods. What if my dear ancestor Vanyel got wind of this?
He shuddered again; he definitely did
not
want to have to deal with that. Although, given the two of them, he’d rather be forced to deal with an angry ghost than his mother in a state of righteous wrath.

He sighed, and threw his arm over his eyes, feeling as if it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to be a Falconsbane and not have to worry about angry mothers or guilty consciences.

That’s why their way is easier, I suppose. Well, I’ve got a conscience and I’m stuck with it.
He couldn’t use his mind and his magic on An’desha to make him pliable again. Besides being wrong, it would be stupid. No matter what he did, if he played with An’desha’s mind, what he would have when he had finished wouldn’t really be “An’desha” anymore. So what would be the point to all the work? If he wanted someone to be his toy, he could pick someone at random, a stable-boy or page, anyone. That wouldn’t be right either, and it
still
wouldn’t be An’desha.

He swallowed with difficulty.
So where does all this leave me? The odd man out, with An’desha spending more and more time away from me. And I’ll have to smile and pretend everything is fine.

It looked as if he was going to have a great deal of uncomfortable time to fill as An’desha drifted farther and farther from him. But what else could he do? The single course that was open to him was confrontation, and
that
would only drive An’desha away faster

He was not prone to depression, but now he tried to swallow a hard and uncomfortable lump of despair that seemed to have gotten lodged in his throat.
I thought I had finally found someone I could spend the rest of my life with, and once again it comes to nothing.
He felt so loaded down with melancholy he might never be able to
rise again. No one understood. They looked at him, saw how handsome he was, how Gifted a mage he was, how intelligent he was, and thought that everything always fell into his hands. They didn’t know, they couldn’t guess, how hard it was for him to make and keep friends, much less lovers—never dreamed just how lonely he was. It was easy to find people who would fill his bed; impossible to find anyone who would fill his heart. Temporary lovers were easy to come by, but reliability was rarer fare.

I suppose the best thing I can do is to work
, he thought dully.
If I keep
my
mind occupied, my heart generally leaves me alone.
That always worked in the past, and the gods knew that they had enough troubles now, trying to come up with the next solution after the breakwater.

I should go make myself available to Darkwind, Elspeth, and the Valdemaran artificers.
That was what he
should
do, all right; it was the logical direction. But that was what An’desha was doing, which would only serve to put him in An’desha’s company. An’desha might like the artificers, but they made Firesong think of bees or ants—logical, well-coordinated, but without souls. Their “magic” was a thing of gears and clockwork, regular and completely artificial.

Besides, Darkwind and Elspeth are much, much better than I am at this new approach to magic. It obviously doesn’t feel artificial to them.

No.
No, I cannot learn to like these artificers. I cannot learn to think the way they do, or to admire the way they think.
Their odd, mechanical approach to what he still felt, deep down inside, was a process that was part instinct, part art, and part improvisation, robbed magic of all the beauty and the thrill he had found in it when he first began to make use of his Gift. Without beauty, what was the point anyway?

They’ve taken poetry and reduced it to a mathematical formula, that’s what they’ve done. But knowing the formula doesn’t mean you can produce poetry; it only means you can produce well-crafted doggerel.

The more he thought about it, the more he rebelled, soul and heart. He had
tried
to work with them before,
and in the end, neither he nor they had been comfortable.

They keep trying to find ways to measure things that should be
felt,
not measured. You can’t take a ruler to a love affair, you can’t hold up a gauge to weigh sorrow, and you shouldn’t try to find a way to measure magic!

Melancholy had weighed him down a moment before; now irritation drove him to his feet again. He pushed himself up off the couch with a muttered curse, and flung his power around the room recklessly, lighting the wicks of every lamp within the walls with an ostentatious flare. Aya started, uttered an unmusical squawk of annoyance, and settled down on his perch with all of his feathers fluffed, glaring at his bondmate through a slitted blue eye.

Firesong ignored him, although he sensed Aya’s own irritation in the bondbird’s mental mutterings. Well, that was as much a reflection of his own unsettled emotional state as Aya’s peevishness. When his emotional state was negative, so was the firebird’s.

Maybe he’d better get out of Aya’s way for a while, before their mutual irritation started to get out of hand.

A hot soak, perhaps.
If nothing else, soaking in the hot pool in the garden below would unknot some of his tension-knotted muscles. If he
didn’t
get them relaxed, he’d have a headache before morning.

Abruptly he turned and took the spiral staircase down to the ground floor of the
ekele.
Here, frosted glass lamps like little moons placed among the foliage displayed the wonders of a Hawkbrother Vale in miniature. Luxuriant plants spread their leaves in every part of the room, which had floor-to-ceiling windows comprising all four sides. Firesong had landscaped with rocks and plants until it was impossible to tell—particularly at night—that this was a little corner of Companion’s Field in Valdemar, and not a private corner of a real Vale. Finally, after much forced growth, vines covered the uprights between the windows, the trees and bushes hid the glazing, and a canopy of leaves concealed the ceiling. As he had leisure, he
added tiny spots to the ceiling that absorbed sunlight by day and emitted it at night, mimicking stars.

The centerpiece of the room was the soaking-pool, fed by a hot spring brought up from deep beneath Haven by Firesong’s power—the heat source was partly natural, partly magical, and shielded as well as the Heartstone under the Palace. With all of the strange effects of the mage-storms about, the last thing Firesong wanted was to discover his spring gone either boiling-hot or cold as ice.

He stripped off his clothing as he walked, leaving a trail of discarded garments until he reached the side of the pool and dropped into it. It was too bad that there were no
hertasi
here; he would have to pick up after himself. But just at the moment, he didn’t feel like being careful.

According to legend, it was Urtho, the Mage of Silence, who had first discovered the way to create these pools.

Hah. According to legend, Urtho is also responsible for first discovering the wheel, taming the horse, and cooking meat.
Firesong sank up to his chin in the hot water, cynically reflecting on the many legends surrounding the last of the Great Mages. Obscure legends even claimed that Urtho had achieved much of his power by inventing ways to measure magic and to use it efficiently!

As if Urtho were some sort of Mage of Artifice! I don’t think so. Urtho has become whatever the speaker wants him to be at the time.

That was the argument the gryphons had last used on him—that if Urtho had used ways to measure and ration magic, couldn’t Firesong?

Of course, if anyone would know whether or not the claim was true, it would probably be the gryphons and the Kaled’a’in. They alone held actual records of the Mage-Wars and the time immediately preceding the Cataclysm. The people who had become the Shin’a’in and Tayledras had both escaped without any such things. Clan k’Leshya, the Clan that had welcomed outsiders, that had supported and cared for the gryphons, that had
held both Urtho’s trusted chief of wizardry and his chief
kestra’chern
, had been entrusted with the care of all of Urtho’s records during the escape to safety.

Well, so what if he was a superior Artificer Adept? Why should I change my ways of working—ways that have served me very well until now!—just to emulate someone dead millennia ago? For that matter, didn’t
my
way of working take down
his
ancient enemy when he failed to do so?
He smiled into the steam, for the first time today feeling both smug and superior.
So, there’s a great deal to be said for intuition and creativity! I’ll wager none of these artificers could have figured a way to safely shut down k’Sheyna’s rogue Heartstone either!