six #3
“You can’t practice sorcery at all?”
“Are you disappointed? I know I am.”
A light laugh tickled the air. “I don’t get many opportunities to see julah sorcery. The priestess I worked for was… well, she wasn’t totally untalented, but she was a bit lacking.”
Mira almost asked who the priestess had been. I probably know her. Or at least of her. Instead, she drummed her fingers on the table and said, “I bet you’re wondering how the daughter of the two most powerful sorcerers in the universe stacks up to them, though.”
Sulim shrugged. “A little. Everything I know about your parents is from broadcasts and books. They don’t exactly show off.”
“They used to. At the Academy. I was always compared to them, even by instructors.”
“Well?” Sulim offered another cracker. “How do you stack up?”
Mira helped herself. “Before this…” She showed the tattoo on her forearm.
“I was quite powerful. Top three in my Academy years, depending on who else was there. But my skills are quite different from my parents. Both of them are powerful, in the destructive and constructive senses. They can grow a field and raze it in ten seconds.”
She had seen the videos from their Academy years, from digital archives taken to prove their merit to the Temple.
“I can’t say I’m that strong. At least not in that way.”
“You’re not powerful?”
“I can be when I need to be. But I’m nowhere near as awe-inspiring as my father, nor as creative and delicate as my mother. She’s an artist. Seriously, she’s a Master in classical dance. Maybe you’ve seen her perform on the broadcasts. She does it every year.
It’s sort of House Lerenan’s whole thing.”
“It’s exquisite what your people can do.”
“And terrifying, I imagine. It’s probably a boon that my mother and I are suppressed. Less fear among humans that way.”
“That tattoo does it for you?”
“Indeed. It’s the same kind of tattoo we’re given as initiates in the Academy until we’re trusted enough to control our sorcery.”
“Does it feel strange?”
Nobody had ever asked Mira that before, nor had she really thought about it.
Yet when she closed her eyes and thought about trying to do anything as simple as teleportation or moving the package of crackers with her mind, she realized a dull ache existed in the back of her mind.
No, it’s in my sinew. Warden Mopah was powerful enough to manage a low-security women’s prison, but Joiya was more powerful.
There are only two people who could suppress my mother’s sorcery. If even they could…
“It’s like a fuzzy block in my body,” Mira explained.
“To be honest, I don’t think about it much because I don’t bother trying. You have to understand, there’s an energy cost, and every julah has a different reserve level. My mother’s well is deep. So is my father’s. They do things and make it look so easy. But even they can be suppressed.
I guess what the tattoo does is dry up our wells, so it makes it harder and more exhausting to use sorcery.”
“So… you could still do it?”
“I suppose if I really wanted. But many julah couldn’t, even if they tried.”
“Wow.” Sulim sat back on her feet and rested her elbows against her table. “That’s incredible. The most interesting thing I can do is pull a half-birthed foal the rest of the way out.”
“Well, I certainly can’t do that.”
“Have you ever needed to?”
“No, I can admit that I have not. Sounds messy.”
“I take it that julah don’t like ‘messy.’”
“Oh, we avoid it at all costs. Especially those of us from powerful Houses. Getting ‘messy’ is for the smaller families that rely on the kind of agriculture that cannot be totally done by sorcery and machinery.” She thought of House Ullan in the tundra when she said that.
She briefly met Sulim’s gaze from across the table. Such furtive glances already did things to Mira that she would probably regret later.
“You haven’t asked me why I’m on penance.”
Sulim slightly blushed, as if caught wondering that very thing. “I figure it’s none of my business. Something like that is very personal, isn’t it?”
“Suppose so.”
After a moment of silence, Mira pulled herself away.
“I should probably get going. You have a routine to keep, after all.”
“Oh…” Sulim looked away. “Yeah.”
“Probably have a couple more foals to birth today.”
“I don’t know about that…”
Mira placed a hand on the table before scooting back toward the ladder. “You have a lovely space here, Sulim. I should leave you to it, for I’ve intruded for far too long.” She looked at some of the books in their built-in shelves. “A lot of care went into this little cubby of yours.”
“As I said, I don’t get a lot of guests.”
Mira began her descent down the ladder, already regretting not having a chance to show off her teleportation skills. If I even have them anymore.
She meandered out of the barn once she found her footing on the floor. Yet as the morning sun greeted her in the small clearing surrounding the barn, she glanced back up at the loft, where she saw a pair of hazel eyes gazing back at her before quickly disappearing again.
At least something was interesting around there.