Chapter 14
Zan uses his internal fire to dry out our clothes so we don’t have to hike sopping wet back to the cottage.
They’re a little too dry, in fact, almost brittle, which I tease him about on the way back.
I’m worried about how low his magic feels. But I don’t want to fight about it now and break whatever this new feeling between us is, somehow both electric and easy at the same time.
Not yet, anyway.
When we arrive back at the cottage, Teren and Nomi have made themselves busy.
Whatever food they brought has already been put away, and in our absence, they’ve been cleaning. The whole cottage smells fresh in a way I hadn’t realized it didn’t before, so accustomed to stone dust in my nose.
A vase with fresh-picked wildflowers on the table, marking it as a place where people currently live; a place that merits beauty.
A whole pile of neatly folded new clothes for me to do with what I will, spoiling me for choice to decide how I want to present myself in this world.
A new blanket in shades of blue and pink, which when Zan goes to change his clothes I cast Teren a long look over, and he grins unrepentantly.
“Get over here,” I grump at him. “It’s time for sage lessons.”
He raises his eyebrows, but joins me in the sitting room. “We’re going to do this in here?”
“You’re the Sage of Comfort. We’re going to start in a setting that you’ve made yourself comfortable in already.”
I’d intended to ease Teren into sage training. To let him get comfortable with the options, acclimate, choose what felt right for his power.
But we don’t have the luxury of time. I need to make him able to function now, first, fast, like all of them are helping me.
We don’t have a perfect, “ideal” training situation. We have reality.
I need to work with the person Teren is and what’s comfortable for him.
But I also need to work with what he really needs to know.
Nomi asks, “Want me to head outside, then?”
I shrug. “Up to you and Teren. We’re going to be working on him actually manifesting Comfort today, so if you stay close and take off your talisman, he’ll be testing on you. But it might also be educational for you in terms of being able to tell if magic is being used against you.”
Nomi considers that and then nods. “I’ll stay and keep working, then, if that’s okay with you, Teren?”
Teren frowns at me. “Am I ready for that already?”
“One way to find out.”
“That’s a terrible teaching philosophy.”
My turn to flash a grin, though it fades quickly. “We’re going to lean into what is natural for you, so it should come easily. But to be frank, with the Order now aware of your existence, we need to get you up to speed fast.”
“Comfort isn’t exactly a combat power,” Teren points out dryly.
“Any emotion can be a combat power,” I counter.
“And by the same token, any sage power can also not be a combat power. It’s a matter of our imagination.
The first magic I worked against the priests today was using my Wrath to overcome an aura of Compassion, which broke their unity.
How do you think Comfort could have dealt with the same thing? ”
Teren thinks about that. “Comfort isn’t as opposed to Compassion,” he says slowly. “But maybe... could I make the priests too comfortable to act?”
I smile, maybe with too many teeth. “Very good. Now, there are fundamentally two ways we can go about that. First, we can use our own emotion to induce it in others. If you were facing me in battle, that’s probably what you’d have to do.
But against Compassion, because your domains are more adjacent to each other, you have a different option: magnification. Do you know what that means?”
“I can connect to their feelings of Comfort and draw them to the fore?”
“Exactly. And you won’t have to work against Compassion to make that happen. All the priests will be nice and happy and absolutely too comfortable to act against you.”
Teren says thoughtfully, “Not bad as a defense, but not exactly an offense, though.”
“Sure, unless you can make a whole army hold still while your own people go and slaughter them.”
He blinks.
“You seem to be under the impression that Comfort is a weak sage power,” I say. “That’s only true if you believe it. Your imagination is the limit.”
“Yours too,” Teren murmurs, and I suck in a breath.
Yes.
I need to be able to imagine what else I can do with Wrath besides killing if I’m to win in truth.
“Lucky for both of us,” I say, “Zan and the guardians and the sages before us have kept a wealth of knowledge. I started skimming through and I think I already have a kata that will work for you, and I’ll help you modify it to what works best for you, to give your feelings form.”
Teren looks at me curiously. “Is this the way sage training usually went? Learning specific cases, and then applying them more broadly?”
I shake my head. “Oh, no, it was endless theory for ages before the priests would let you actually try anything. They thought once we had all the frameworks first that we would then be able to implement whatever we wanted from first principles. But in actuality, all sages improved with age, and I don’t think that’s simply a matter of more time to create more katas.
With the amount of emotion we hold, in my opinion moving is imperative for us, and doing is how we learn best.
“So for you, we’re going to start with some specific things that we can make work easily in actual practice, and let you start building connections from there.”
Teren nods like this makes sense, which is encouraging, considering I hadn’t actually given this thought and was operating on my gut feelings.
But Zan did point out that I can trust those.
“So starting with practice and working back to theory,” Teren says. “That does seem like it will get me started faster.”
I nod and smile slightly. “You can’t be wise about the world without moving in it,” I say, as much for my benefit as his.
And then we get to work.
When we’re done, I’m feeling more confident and assured about our chances.
Teren’s sage power packs some serious oomph.
Nomi, too, despite her own extremely meager sense of magic, has picked up the knack for feeling when it’s acting on her. Her perceptiveness is equally powerful.
Before they take their leave, though, I ask her to show me what she did with the ice cream.
As we make our way to the ice house, she talks me through how she transferred it into a large bowl.
I look at the bowl of ice cream I barely got to try.
I have time now.
But I also have more blackberries.
“Can you take this back with you?” I ask her.
Nomi blinks, then her eyes sharpen. “You want to start an ice cream business?”
I hadn’t even gotten that far yet. “Maybe? I want... to see what might be possible.”
For me as a person, and not just as a sage.
And maybe—maybe to prove that a sage can be more than our power.
“People will ask where it came from,” Nomi warns.
Teren speaks up. “For now we can just tell them someone lucked into some extra ice. We’ll take care of it, Yora.”
My chest eases.
Maybe something will be easy.
And maybe I don’t have to let the Order ruin everything.
I will keep pursuing what I want despite them.
And there’s one thing I want besides ice cream.
“Where did Zan go?” I ask as we leave the ice house behind.
“He said he was going for a walk,” Nomi said. “I’m sure he’ll be back soon—he won’t have gone far, with the priests having been here so recently. Even if they can’t come back yet, I’ve never known him to waste time.”
A kernel of unease grows in my gut.
He already went for a walk with me. Did he have more worries that he felt like he couldn’t share with me?
But I smile and we say our goodbyes and soon they’re on their way down the mountain.
And only then do I cast my senses out.
I can sense so much less now that I’m bound to my body again, but Zan I can always sense sooner than anyone else.
To my surprise, he’s not actually far after all. I start to take a breath as I turn in the direction of his magic and see the temple.
Why would he be in the place he thinks of as a prison—
And then I notice just how low the ember of his magic feels.
I run.
I dash through the field of wildflowers in no time, surging to the doors and ramming into them.
But they don’t budge—locked.
Did he want privacy? But—
“Zan, it’s me!” I yell. “Can I come in?”
Nothing.
My dread grows.
“Is everything okay?” I call again.
More silence.
I make myself count to ten. Maybe he’s just far from the entryway.
I don’t believe it.
“If you don’t answer me, I’m going to assume you’re hurt and I’m breaking the doors,” I try one last time.
No answer, and this time I don’t wait.
I whirl into a kata, forming an aura of magenta around one fist, and then I punch through the center of the doors where the bar on the other side would be.
Wood splinters.
I ram the doors open and run inside.
There, in the atrium, is Zan.
In dragon form.
Not moving.
Oh no.
I race to him. Hesitate. Pat his head.
No response.
Panic filling me, I stare at him for I don’t know how long—a minute? Five?
And then I see his chest rise and fall.
A breath whooshes out of me.
He’s not dead.
But he is hibernating.
Gods damn it, I knew his magic felt too low! But he told me he was fine and not to worry about it, and I trusted him; meanwhile he kept spending his magic without a thought for himself—on protecting me, on comforting me—
I bang my fists on his back and scream.
I’m going to fucking beat sense into him.
But for that I need to wake him up.
This isn’t a time for deep breaths.
Dragons transform and go into hibernation when they’re critically low on energy.
I know how to make exactly one food.
It’s time to make all the ice cream.
My wrath sustains me, and I use it to hold my panic at bay.
My arms may fall off, but that’s a tomorrow problem.
Today, I am a frenzy of activity.
I cook the berries, I chill the ice cream base, and then I set about starting another batch.