Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,75

“Wonder what in particular?”

“I don’t know,” she said, frustrated. “It’s just . . . it doesn’t seem to matter how awful something is. He can just laugh and pretend it doesn’t matter to him at all. Do you think it really doesn’t?”

“Don’t know,” Burke said. “Get your feet wider. Bend your knees more. Yeah. Like you’re going to sit. Good. But if it helps any, Addie’s the same way, really. She just gets all quiet and polite. But maybe that’s just how rich folks are. Not supposed to let anybody know what they’re thinking.”

“That would be hor—Ow! You pushed me.” In the middle of her sentence, Burke had reached out and shoved at her shoulder. It had taken Spirit off guard.

“And if I could push you over, your stance still wasn’t good enough,” Burke said reasonably. “Come on, let’s try that again.”

“I wouldn’t have fallen over if you’d warned me,” Spirit grumbled, taking his hand and letting him pull her to her feet.

“Oh, yeah, the way Mr. Wallis always does?” Burke said, and Spirit had to laugh. It felt good.

They spent another half hour working on what Burke called “first principles”—he freely admitted he’d skipped all this stuff when he’d been working with her to get her ready for the demo because these were the things that could take months of work to get right (if you weren’t a Combat Mage). Standing. Balance.

“You don’t stand low enough,” Burke told her. “I know you’re short, and you think you want to be at eye-level with your opponent, but you don’t. You want to stand in your center, so all your movements come from your center and return to your center. If you do that, you’ll spend a lot less time looking up at your opponent from the floor.”

Spirit nodded. What Burke was saying made sense. And telling her why she should do it—and why she was constantly making the same mistake—was a lot more helpful that Mr. Wallis yelling at her. “So then I’ll be able to throw you over my shoulder?”

Burke shook his head, smiling. “Too much difference in height between us for you to do Ippon Seoinage—and that’s judo, anyway, not karate. But, oh, in a couple of years you could probably do a hip throw, sure. I mean, if we were doing judo.”

“And if you let me,” she said.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

Spirit hadn’t wanted to ask about Edgar at all. She didn’t really want to hear the worst—if there was a worst. But she knew that was being cowardly, because whatever had happened to him today, she was partly responsible. So when Burke said they’d had enough lesson for the night, she took a deep mental breath and said:

“Burke, what happened today when you took Edgar to the infirmary? He’s okay, right?”

Burke shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “I hope so. I ran in there with him and Ms. Bradford asked me what happened, and I said he’d had a cat-fit, and she said to put him down on a bed and go out in the hall and wait. So I did. And about fifteen minutes later she came out and wanted the whole story. So I told her Muirin had been really down in the dumps since Seth ran away, and she wanted to know how he was, so we all came up with the idea of getting someone to See for her, and Edgar was the best choice because maybe Seth was somewhere that one of the deep-trance Scrying Mages wouldn’t want to tell Muirin about. And I said he looked into his bowl, and let out a scream, and went rigid and shook for about half a minute and passed out, and I brought him right to her. And she said I did the right thing and she hoped Muirin wasn’t too upset, and I said I didn’t know because I hadn’t stayed to find out. And she said Edgar would be fine and I should run along, and I thought that was a really good idea.”

“Me, too,” Spirit said quietly.

It had become habit for Spirit to check her e-mail first thing in the morning. In addition to several other pieces of the Oakhurst equivalent of spam (a request for students to review their “wish lists” and submit their first, second, and third choices to the Office no later than December fourteenth; a terse e-mail from the dance committee saying that it was almost New Years and the voting ballot for next year’s dance committee had to be final