INBORN (The Sagas of Di'Ghon) (24 page)

“Excellent, now closer.” He said, “What do you see?”

“Nothing. Not a damn thing.” Jorel, again.

Elycia let her senses sweep downward into the sky just over head. An eagle soared high to the east. He was moving in a wide circle, obviously watching a particular patch of earth for his breakfast.

“Can you make out the feathers on his wings?” Lars asked, smiling.

She nodded and he laughed.

“Closer.”

The
air
around them was filled with minor movement. She could feel the simplest of things. Occurrences that would normally not interest her in the least.  Fifty yards off to their left, a single pine cone fell from high up in the tree tops. Tiny shards of rough bark fell as the pine cone struck a heavy limb, knocking them loose.

“Bring it in.” He said.

There were thousands of little azure strands of air just within the few feet around the wagon. Each and every one of them were separate and yet somehow connected at the same time. It was mind boggling.

“Find one.”

The
air
swirled around the sides of the wagon in a dance of cerulean wisps as the green and yellow bouncing box lurched forward.
Air
puffed like billowing mushrooms from the horse’s mouths in two competing rhythms. Wafts of
air
slipped through the wagon, rolling along the underside of the roof. Little waves played with her hair, moving just a little here or there.

Elycia hesitated. She swallowed back any distractions and focused one tiny strand. She willed every other detail away, letting herself focus every bit of her concentration on just that one. A snippet of energy reached out and snagged it. It was no bigger than her pinky, but she had it firmly in control. She could feel it connected to her now. It would not escape.

“Be ready.” He warned.

Even before he finished the sentence she felt it coming. Elycia gasped as a joy so complete that she was sure it was every shred of happiness she’d ever experience
d all rolled up into one solitary moment. Her face rose as if in acceptance of an imparted gift from above.

Then, as if the man had just appeared out of nowhere, she could feel Lars Telazno through the meldstone. He had always been there. He hadn’t magically left the wagon and reappeared. Yet, her awareness of the man existed on a different plane now. She felt his emotions, a steady thrum of control, holding back the wave of joy that threatened to overwhelm him if he faltered for an instant.

“Steady.” He said and she knew that he saw her in the same exact way.

Her first instinct was to hide. Having someone see your feelings wasn’t something she was exactly comfortable with, but Lars had assured her in advance that he would keep her secrets private. Now that she was melded to him through the stone
, she knew he was telling the truth.

There wasn’t the slightest bit of hesitation in the man’s commitment to her. She could see that now. The other thing she saw was
that his commitment to Thaniel was equally as steadfast. He would die to see either of them safely to Di’Ghon, where he desperately hoped he could protect them. Something from his past was driving the man. An old memory, a regret, made him wary about the place. Yet, his heart knew it was the only way he expected her to thrive. In Thaniel’s case, live.

“Hello.”
Lars Telazno said, a greeting that came as a heartfelt welcome, as if he were an old uncle that had been waiting at the door of a larger, more complete world. In a way, he did.

“Hello? You go somewhere I didn’t see?” Jorel scoffed.

“Draw my strength. See how I manage the flood of emotion. Good, now will the Jen’Ghon to you.” Lars Telazno intoned.

As Lars Telazno had showed her, using just the tiny crook of her finger to help her make the mental leap, she called it. At first, as had been the case yesterday, nothing happened.
The strand wriggled as if it would slip away, twisting into the others, before it birthed into yet another strand, in an endless cycle of movement.

Elycia strengthened her resolve
. The Jen’Ghon would hear her. It had to. With no will of its own, the little ghon didn’t have a choice but to submit to hers. She focused in tighter on the spinning current and called it again. It would hear her call.

The little
jen
twitched.

“Excellent.” Lars affirmed. Through the meldstone, she could feel him smiling inside. The man was proud of his ability to bring her along. “You know what to do next.”

Little beads of sweat popped out on Elycia’s brow. She was afraid to spare the concentration to wipe them away. Elycia watched the
jen
slip left and up as if it were trying to escape into the larger currents that rolled above it.

“Keep your focus.” He warned.

“You do know that this whole conversation sounds perverted, right?” Jorel waved his hands in the air. “Just sayin. It does.”

She set her chin, refusing to be ignored.

Then, time seemed to slow, allowing her mind to catalogue every sweet instant. Already she knew what was about to transpire. She filed it away in her mind, knowing that this moment would live on in perfect memory for the rest of her life. In a flurry of movement the little
jen
twisted back over on itself, curving back towards her in a tight arc. It spun through the rest of the air like an acrobatic piece of living cerulean silk.

“Keep your focus, but allow yourself to feel what I’m doing.”

At his command
air
swirled around him. He selected a single strand. He pulled it to him, forcing it to stand erect against all the buffeting forces around it. Like a blade standing on its tip.

“Call it with your will. Force the strand into your palm.” As he spoke the current of
air
floated to him and settled, still standing straight up in his other palm. “You are its master. It wants to obey you.” He closed his palm and in a blink it dissipated into a puff that was sucked back into the eddying swirls around it.

Elycia put an image in her mind of the strand standing up in her hand.

“That’s it.” Lars Telazno soothed. “You’re doing it.”

The little strand snapped to attention and floated obediently to her palm. Lars was giggling with delight on the inside and all business on the outside.

“Now, call more.”

She added another. Now that she’d done it once, it seemed a lot easier. Another. Before she knew it she had a whole handful of them.

“Now, set them free,” He instructed and added, “carefully and one by one, in order.”

Surprisingly, now that she thought about it she knew every last one of the strands and which order she called them.

“You’ve done more in two days than some do in years.” He said as he gestured for her to let go of her grasp on the Jen’Ghon.

“Really?” She asked, as the cerulean world winked away. “You’re not just saying that?”

She pulled her fingertip from the meldstone and instantly the bright light that only the two of them could see waned to a gentle glow. It was almost nothing by comparison.

“No, child.” Lars went to put the stone away. He
paused, stared at the barely visible glow, and sighed. When Thaniel held it the thing looked like harnessed lightning. The meldstone wasn’t nearly as bright for her as it was when Thaniel touched it, but Lars still seemed excited about it.

Lars caught her eyes as she watched him lingering with the little stone.

“You know what? Why don’t you hold on to this for a while?” He smiled with one corner of his mouth as he tossed it to her.

The moment she touched it the meldstone lit up like crazy again. Elycia felt a little sad for the man but there was no hiding the delight she knew he saw in her eyes.

“Can I?” She asked like a little child with a redcake.

“Of course, that’s what it’s for.” His eyes closed as he settled back into a pile of blankets.

That’s when she noticed Jorel had gone unusually quiet. He was sitting with his arms folded and glaring at her.

She knew what he was thinking. Suddenly embarrassed that she was smiling about
what she’d ridden Thaniel so hard about, she shoved the stone in her pocket and started gnawing on the crusty bread again.

Ear to Ear

“This town’s as good as any other. Why don’t you stay here?” Elycia was so used to Jorel’s sarcastic tone by now that she didn’t have to turn around to know that it was him.

“Go away.”

Since the moment they left Ontar Hold he hadn’t uttered one word to her without it being a barb of some sort. At first she knew he didn’t mean any harm. It was just… well… Jorel.  Yet, the past few days felt very different. Ever since Thaniel ran off into the woods and gotten kidnapped by the ramphyr he’d been on her every chance he got. Served her right really…

“You know, with the smell coming from the tannery, people won’t know you don’t bathe.” He sniffed loudly.

The town, a bunch of dark wooden structures, not a one of them built in a straight line, smelled like rot. A monstrous water wheel, suspended in the gorge that the tannery was built over, never stopped turning. The huge paddles churned a steady mist into the air, coating everything without a roof in a layer of slick moisture. Regardless of the fact that the sky overhead was the brightest blue she’d seen in years, the town was soaked.

“I thought we were supposed to be keeping an eye out for Thaniel…” She turned to head in the opposite direction.

“We? I’m not trusting you to keep an eye out for him. Seriously, why don’t you stay here?”

“I am going to Di’
Gho
n
. No one has to go with me.” She said flatly.

“Right.” He rolled his eyes. “Like that’s gonna happen.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Thaniel will want to go to wherever you go, whether you deserve him or not.”

“Di’Ghon is the right place for him.”

“That’s not what you said at the keep. You said he was a monster. You said it was better he’d never been born.”

“Things change.”

Jorel shook his head unconvinced.

“Why? Why did you change your mind? Because you’ve got the same thing he does?” He asked.

“Well...” She started to say something but realized she didn’t really know how to finish it. “You make it sound like I’ve got leprosy.”

“Listen, Thaniel,” Jorel’s voice softened, nearly breaking with the strain, “he’s real strong in some parts, and well… vulnerable in others. I don’t believe everything that old man says about him. And I definitely don’t think he’s some kind of monster.”

“Telazno…” She started to explain.

Jorel cut her off with a wave and a harsh glance.

“Listen, I don’t know everything that happened between you two back in Ontar, but I know something happened, and I know you owe him for it. All I’m saying is that you should keep that in mind before you judge him, especially now that you both have… leprosy.”

That was the word she used…

Now that she knew the truth, having experienced it herself, continuing to think of him as a monster was impossible. How could she have ever thought of him like that anyway? Other than him being
inborn, when had he acted like anything other than a delightfully charming boy, albeit a really awkward one, who couldn’t keep from tripping himself whenever he was around her? Thaniel climbed that tower three times to get her ice blossoms because he couldn’t work up the nerve to ask her to be his festival kiss.

He had
also done something very wrong. She couldn’t deny that now either. At first it didn’t seem like such a bad thing. I mean how bad could some warm weather really be? But Lars Telazno’s explanation of how horrible the act would turn out to be was based on such simple logic, that it couldn’t be denied.

The warm weather shouldn’t be in the Anwarian Region. As a result, the vast mountain range covered in eons worth of snow and ice, was melting. Even the great glaciers, some of which Lars said were over ten leagues high would melt. With that much water making its way down from the high reaches, every brook, stream and river would be overrun with walls of raging white water. Settlements, towns, and even cities in its path would be wiped from the face of Arth as if they never existed. People would die by the thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands.

Elycia remembered all too well how the wind howled through that chamber when he called the dra. Yet, now that she looked back on it all, she knew he hadn’t meant to do any harm.  He just didn’t have any idea what he was doing.

A sweet aroma of pheasant and cooked onions broke her concentration. Jorel was loudly sucking air around a scalding mouthful of meat pie. The way he was gingery shuffling the rest of the steaming pie back and forth, he looked like he was trying to decide which fingers he wanted to burn the least.

She made a show of rummaging through a pile of brightly colored scarves in a street peddler’s covered cart while Jorel scanned their surroundings. The man had a messy bin full of perfectly hued purple and blue ones.