The Will of the Empress - By Tamora Pierce Page 0,66
my hose, again."
Tris smiled, but her eyes rested on Zhegorz. He started twitching again while we rode through the village, she thought. He's hearing things still, even behind these walls. Castle gossip, I expect. Tris had gotten so good at ignoring voices on the wind that she had to concentrate to hear them clearly. She did so now, registering a bit of kitchen gossip, almost drowned out by the clang of pans and a shriek of dismay over burned oatcakes. Here someone scolded a dairy maid for dozing off over the churn; here hostlers commented to one another about the new horses they had to care for. It was all commonplace, but Zhegorz flinched as if each sentence were a dart sticking in his flesh.
Making up her mind, Tris excused herself to Rizu and went in search of the housekeeper. Daja caught up Tris. "It's my crazy man, isn't it?" she demanded. "You've been watching him like a hawk all day, even when you pretend you're reading. You're certain he's got what you have, aren't you? Hearing things?"
A blast of wind threw an image over both outer walls into Tris's eyes: A cow struggled in a bog. Three men tied ropes to her so they could haul the wallowing beast out of danger. Tris whipped her head around in time to see Zhegorz. He stood just downwind of her. "Maybe that, and maybe more," she said. "Look, will you steer him over by the wall, out of any breezes? I'll see about getting a room for him."
"He stays with me." The girls turned. Briar stood behind them, his hands in his pockets. "You looked at the insides of his wrists, either of you? He stays with someone, and unless you want people talking about your reputations from here to the north shore of the Syth, it's got to he with me."
"What's wrong with his wrists?" Daja wanted to know.
Tris marched over to Zhegorz, who faced into the wind that blew from the cow, his pale eyes wide and fixed. Tris seized his wrists and turned them so she could see the insides. Broad stripes of scar tissue, some old and silver-beige, others recent and reddish-purple, streaked the flesh between his palms and the insides of his elbows.
Zhegorz blinked, trying to see past the vision on the air to the person who handled him so abruptly. Tris yanked him around, turning him until the breeze struck his back, not his eyes. "Briar's right. You stay with him, Zhegorz. No more of this nonsense," she said, stabbing a finger into one of the scars. Zhegorz flinched. "Listen to me." She still didn't want the others knowing of her latest skill, but she needed to reach this man, to convince him that his visions weren't the product of madness.
Too bad he didn't have Niko to tell him that madness is a lot more interesting than rescuing cows, she thought as she dragged Zhegorz into a corner of the yard, away from Briar and Daja. "I see things on the wind, understand?" she asked quietly. She stood with her back to her brother and sister to keep them from reading her lips. "Pictures from places the wind passed over. A moment ago we both saw a cow trapped in mud, and three men trying to free her." Zhegorz gasped and tried to tug free. Tris hung on to his arm with both hands. "Stop it!" she ordered. "You're not mad. You're a seer, with sounds and with seeing, only nobody ever found you out because they were too busy thinking you were mad. Now you have to sort yourself out. You have to decide what part's magic — are you listening? — what part's understandable nerves from thinking you were out of your mind, and what part's had so much healers' magic applied that it's muddled everything else about you. I know what you saw because I learned how to see like that. But you never learned it, did you? It was there, from the time you were just a bit younger than me, only the magic sniffers missed it, or your family never even gave you a chance to show you were in your right mind." She talked fast, trying to get as much sense as she could fit into his ears, past his years of flight, hospitals, medicines, and terror. Slowly, bit by tiny bit, she felt the tight, wiry muscles under her hands loosen, until Zhegorz no longer fought her grip.