Taming Fire (33 page)

I went out with him often, and in that more than anything else I began to rebuild my strength. Two weeks saw me standing beside him, hour after hour, hauling in the nets. Three weeks saw me casting my own over the other side, and soon Joseph was bringing home a greater catch than he had ever managed before.

Then one night when the azurefin were running, we chased along above them by the light of a starry sky. We had almost as much as our boat could carry, but azurefin brought a fine price and Joseph wanted to fill her up. For my part, I'd worked a full day and into the night without the least complaint, and I wanted to see how far I could go. So we agreed and chased the azurefin north along the coast.

And then the rain began to fall, pelting down hot and hard despite the clear sky overhead. We had no other warning as the clouds raced in, but that was enough for Joseph. He dumped the nets and dropped the rigging and had the sails down before I even knew what was happening. He moved mechanically, but I could see the touch of fear in his eyes and a tremble in his hands as darkness fell upon us, and the rain came harder down.

"What's wrong?" I asked, and his lips twisted in a frown.

"Got greedy," he said, without looking up at the storm. He tossed me a length of rope. "Better batten down. Will be bad."

I swallowed against my fear. Waves sloshed the boat now, but they weren't yet much worse than the ones we dealt with every day. Rain came down, but it wasn't a deluge yet. But I knew Joseph. I knew his manners. And I'd never met a more able boatman. If he was afraid....

I followed his example and sank down into the hold, and even as I did the waves grew larger. One splashed across the bow and caught me open-mouthed, and I had to cough and sputter and duck my head before another one washed over me. The rain came harder now, and I saw the flash a breath before a long, low, grinding crack of thunder rolled over the sea. And another behind it. And another.

The boat washed violently to one side and I reached out to steady myself. And as I did, from habit more than reason, I slipped into my second sight and glanced across the powers that surrounded us.

My blood went cold with fear.

It was the sea as I had seen it before—as I had always seen it—deep and strong and deadly. But it was wild now, stirred with wind and fire, and the power of the storm came not in threads but in sheets. They flashed across the surface, they twisted in the deeps, they flicked and flared and roared in senseless fury. And there among them, like a leaf within a gale, bobbed our tiny little boat, two sparks of life within it easily snuffed out.

A wave tore over us and I saw the sheet of it scream up and slash down. It fell like the blanket of air Lareth had once used to bind me to the floor, and as I saw it coming I almost expected it to crush in the same way. But this was merely water. As it fell it tore across the sturdy bow and broke around the mast. It hit me hard enough to knock me down, but then its force was spent. It spilled into the bottom of the boat and it was done.

But there were more. Thousands more. Millions of the waves churning, boiling up in their frenzy, and with every heartbeat that passed they grew more powerful. Another soared high and crashed almost straight down, and the force of it drove the breath from me and shattered the ship's heavy mast to splinters. And that wave held enough power still to flash away, dragging back out to sea. If Joseph hadn't caught my hand the wave would have dragged me out with it.

And though he pulled me back in, there was no relief in his eyes. There was only dread acceptance. He turned his eyes up into the storm then, and I saw a wave flashing toward us that could shatter the boat as easily as the last had done the mast. And behind it another one greater still. I saw the great sheets of living water thrown up, stretching, folding over us—

Fear flooded through me, and I reached out on pure instinct. I did as I had wanted to do when the dragon dropped me, as I had wanted to do when I could not support my own weight, and I touched the threads themselves with my mind. I didn't bother constructing a visualization, building a reality small enough that I could believe in it but large enough to save our lives. That kind of magic was beyond my grasp.

But the power of the storm was right there. In easy reach. It required no force of will, no fancy tricks of the mind, just the simple physical effort of bending and shaping. I flexed muscles I didn't really have, stretched out my fingers to touch the reality
beneath
reality, and took the fabric of the storm into my hands. I snapped it out around us, as though I were throwing a cloak across my shoulders or spreading a blanket over my bed, and whipped the wave itself out in a dome above our heads.

It roared, wild waters still churning, but it did not fall. It made a shell above us that denied nature and reason, but I held it there by force of will. In my mind's eye I could see through it, and I watched as a larger wave came crashing down, but it spilled against the fabric of my wave and washed into the sea all around us. I felt the wind dance across the waters—threads still, but thick as my arm—and I pulled one down beneath my wave and slammed its end against the stern of our boat.

A jet of wind and water stabbed up out of the sea beneath, and even without a mast the gust hurled us forward. Above us the wave stretched out, curled and crashing and roaring still as though it might fall in the next heartbeat. I grabbed another rope of wind and bent that one, too, and with two of them behind us the little fishing boat flew across the waves like a skipping stone. I carried the wave with us, stretched out and protecting us from above, and we sped toward the shore.

I felt my heart hammering, louder even than the storm in my ears. I felt the ocean's fury slamming against the wave above as though it pounded on my shoulders, and every blow threatened to rip the fabric from my grip. The winds, too, twisted and writhed, and whenever one escaped me our little boat settled to a fitful stop. I found more, though. Another to replace the one that had gotten away, and as another wave crashed down and I felt the water above me slipping from my grasp, I grabbed another thread of wind, and then a fourth, and threw them all into getting us to safety.

With my attention so focused on the elements I had no eye for our position. I threw us east without guidance or care. I had one breath to hear Joseph's frantic scream, to see the terror in his eyes, and then the ship slammed to a sudden, violent stop. Momentum tore me from my place on the stern and heaved me through the air, and the force of the winds I'd summoned flung me further. Joseph tumbled out, too. He held on to the rope secured to the shattered mast just long enough to slow him, so he stretched out long across the sand and tumbled in a low roll while I flew through the air.

The wind never died. It raged against the stern of the boat, even run aground, and flung it up into the air like a catapult's shot. I crashed to earth and stars flashed in my eyes. Darkness rushed at me—all too familiar—but I forced it away as I saw the boat arcing back down to earth. Even if it didn't hit me it would crush Joseph.

So I released the winds within my grasp, and the wave above, and focused all my attention upon the earth. The slow and steady earth. It appeared to my second sight as neither thread nor sheet, but pebbles. Tiny, useless pebbles of energy, but I remembered the huge weight of the mountain built out of these impossibly tiny stones.

I rolled to my feet and threw myself into a long dive. I landed beside Joseph and reached out with the magic of my mind to grab up the energy of the sand. I flung it up in a handful above me and the earth around us exploded up in a great puff. Then the sand fell back down, burying us side-by-side in a shallow grave, and when the boat crashed down above us it scraped on past.

And then the wave drove down behind it. That hurt worse, deadly force delayed but not decreased, and it pounded straight down into the shore along a quarter-mile stretch. I didn't hold the earth above us as I'd done the wave. I didn't have the strength. So the wave splashed down through to soak us again, and then it dragged much of the sand away with it, so Joseph and I both heaved back up out of a shallow pool of mud and sand and sea water, coughing and spluttering. Alive.

It took some time to gather our wits. Then Joseph went to the wreckage of his ship. It was still intact, but nothing close to seaworthy. I watched him from a distance, respecting the privacy of his grief, but after he'd made his assessment he turned back to me without any strong emotion in his eyes. I cocked my head.

"Is she ruined?'

"Ruined," he said, his voice matter-of-fact. "But we're alive." He fixed me with a gaze that demanded acknowledgment, and after a moment I nodded. He nodded back. "And now I understand." He turned back, looking north along the beach, and I knew he was looking in the direction of the stone he'd placed. "Magic."

"No," I said, shaking my head. "I didn't...I just now...." I couldn't put to words what I had done. What I had done was impossible. It was more than magic. It was separate.

The fisherman turned back to me and raised an eyebrow. "Can you get us home?" He made a gesture with his hand, a little arch, and I recognized the shape of a summoned portal. I considered it for a heartbeat, but I had no idea how.

"I don't think so," I said. I reached out with my second sight again, and grabbed at threads of air, but these were not the trunk-thick ropes that had propelled our ship along. That storm was far away, now, and drifting up the coast. The air here was little more than a breeze. I tried wrapping it around Joseph and lifting him into the air, but it only flapped at the folds of his sodden clothes, and he shivered.

I shook my head. "I'm sorry. I don't know how."

He shrugged one shoulder and started down the shore. "Better start walking, then," he said. "Get some boys from town up here tomorrow to see what we can salvage."

I fell into step beside him, numb. I had touched the wind and rain. I had bent elemental power to my will. I remembered the strength of the wave stretched out above me, the battering energy of more waves crushing against it. I remembered tempest winds twisting in my grasp.

I reached out again, testing, and bent a thread of air toward me. I felt only a breath of air over my cheek. A puff against my ear. With the boat I'd used more, though, so I stole a thread of air up off the sea, and another high above. I reached for a breeze that made waves in the grasses higher inland. I gathered them together into a bunch, four little breaths, and combined they were enough to blow a modest wind against us. I remembered the air magic that had been used against me before and wrapped those threads in a cuff tight around my ankle.

But when I strained against it I was able to pull free, as easily as though I were forcing forward against a strong wind. I reached for more threads from the air around me, thinner, spidersilk threads of still air, but these added very little to the strength of my spell, and after the fifth thread the others began to twist free of my control. I reached for a sixth and lost control of two.

And while I tried to catch them back another one twisted free. I grunted, frustrated, head throbbing, and let them all go. Another three paces down I let the second sight fade, too, and settled for the strength left in my legs. It got me home. I fell into my bed, and Joseph into his, and we slept the good sleep of the quiet dead.

It had something to do with power. I figured that. Order magic—Academy magic—took its strength from the will of the worker, but order magic would have been hard pressed to do what I did within the storm. The magic I'd done was different. I gave it shape, gave it direction, but the strength was all its own. I'd done amazing things with the strength of a blustering storm, but I could barely shift a stone with the quiet energy of an environment at rest.

Not a large stone, anyway. Certainly not a boulder. Not a tree. Not something larger like, say, a battered old fishing boat. The thought was strong in my mind the following afternoon as I stood outside a circle of local fishermen examining the wreckage of Joseph's ship. They'd noticed quickly how little I knew of the business at hand, so they paid me little mind as they discussed the options and guessed how much might be salvaged.

Their guesses were grim. I eavesdropped, heart sinking, but Joseph just nodded as though they confirmed what he already knew. Nothing much rattled him. I listened and waited and wondered how I might help. I'd done this, in a way.

I was working on a plan to carve a channel across a hundred paces of beach with the strength of little breakers, when one of the villagers shook his head and said, "Strange days. Dark days everywhere. Dragons in the sky, storms that'll do this, and kingsmen fighting rebels on the plains above Tirah."

That last snapped me out of my thoughts. I pushed through the circle and up to the speaker. He was a little man, and he shrank away from the intensity of my gaze. But I held his eyes. "What about Tirah?"

He shrugged. "The King's Guard's fighting for the baronies out west," he said. "Ain't you heard? The rebels have the heartlands—"

"I know," I said. "I know. But you mentioned Tirah."

Joseph dropped a hand on my shoulder to calm me. "Tirah's old news," he said. "Guard took it three months ago. Didn't realize you'd want to know."

I shrugged one shoulder. "I'd hoped to join the Guard," I said without thinking. "Take up the amnesty."

A look passed around among the fishermen, and I winced. Joseph didn't even bat an eye, and that eased my soul a bit. And none of the others spoke up. There were plenty of ways a man might go afoul of the king's justice, not all of them unfamiliar in territories like this.