what he’d been, mat she wouldn’t add her voice to the cool wind. She’d done that for Yohan who, even so, had needed three days to find her grove his first time.
Yohan had dreamed of magic, like this youthful templar.
Yohan had tried his best, but not as dramatically as Pavek, who grunted, groaned, and knotted every muscle with his efforts. He put forth a prodigious amount of sweat and tweaked the consciousness of Quraite’s guardian spirit. It was not impressed and certainly not compelled, but it was aware.
Once a stranger roused the guardian—which Yohan had never done—she desperately wanted him or her to succeed. The price of failure here, where Quraite was strongest, was invariably death. If Pavek could not shape the guardian’s will with his own, the ground would open around him and his corpse would join several dozen others shrouded in the myriad roots. And although that was a fate that served her purpose—adding lifeforce to Quraite-Telhami preferred to nurture Quraite with living druids rather than strangers’ corpses.
On the other hand, Pavek was not the only disenfranchised templar wandering the Tablelands. The sullen broods of several city-states had been cut loose when their sorcerer-kings died or disappeared. Surely Pavek was not the only one who missed his borrowed power. She knew she’d sleep more easily if Pavek demonstrated that once a mind had become a conduit for a sorcerer-king’s corruption, it could never master a more honest invocation of Quraite’s guardian.
She sat patiently, hoping for one outcome, but willing to be satisfied with the other. Then Pavek, suddenly and unexpectedly, abandoned his efforts.
“It’s impossible!” he explained with a disgusted snarl, tearing out a handful of grass and flinging it across the stream. “There’s no silent voice for me to listen to. Not even that damned ’cool wind’ of yours to follow. I know what I’m supposed to be looking for, and it’s not there. You lied to me, old woman. Cheated and deceived me. You knew it couldn’t be done, but you wanted to watch me burst apart trying. You wanted me to break my own spirit, to keep your own hands lily-clean. Well, I’ve seen your kind before: they’re all over the templarate. And I’ve learned not to play your games. I won’t make a fool of myself for your amusement. I quit instead!”
She could keep any emotion from shadowing her face, even the frustration she and the grove shared at that, moment. He’d come close. He’d come very close and brought the cup to his lips, but he had not sipped or swallowed. And she did not know whether disenfranchised templars in general, or only this templar in particular, were incapable of druidry.
Of course, if all templars were quitters…
But she wasn’t fool enough to think that. She sensed that Pavek’s shortcomings were uniquely his own.
“You lack patience, persistence, and, most of all, you lack faith of any kind in me, in my grove, in yourself. I’m the one who’s been cheated and deceived, Pavek. You said you wanted to learn; you lied. Find your own way, Just-Plain Pavek, if you dare.”
She gathered up her hat and veil, though the sun was close to setting and its light wouldn’t bother her eyes when she left the grove, left him here overnight. He was quite safe, unless he tried something destructive. And if he was foolish enough to do that, he deserved to spend eternity among the roots.
Pavek stiffened as she floated up from the ground. Fear was the dominant emotion on his face, and his thoughts were so focused on Ruari’s exhortation: Feed his bones to the trees, Grandmother, that the half-elf’s spiteful words echoed literally through the trees.
He shouted “Wait!” and without waiting to see if she heard or complied, squeezed his eyes shut.
Tilting her head to one side, listening to the guardian’s surge as it honored an evocation, she sank back to the grass. Pavek hadn’t suddenly acquired faith, but he was desperate, too desperate to think and, according to Akashia, this would-be druid was at his best when he wasn’t thinking.
There was no grunting or straining this time, merely a prolonged exhalation that emptied his mind as well as his lungs. She leaned forward, holding her breath as the guardian stirred. There was an image visible on the surface of Pavek’s mind: King Hamanu, the Lion of Urik, astride a mound of vanquished warriors with the severed head of one of them gripped in his upstretched hand.
Her blood froze: if Pavek summoned the sorcerer-king