One moment the tent was empty, and in the next Alera stood over the sand table at its center post. She chuckled warmly. "It took Sextus more than a year to be able to recognize my presence. How is it that you have learned the trick of it so quickly?"
"I've spent most of my life without any furycraft to help me," Tavi said. "Perhaps that's had something to do with it."
"Almost certainly," Alera said. "Very few of your people realize how much furycraft happens without their knowledge."
"Really?" Tavi asked.
"Certainly. How would they? Watercrafters, for example, gain a sensitivity to others that becomes a part of their very being. They have few, if any, memories of what it was like to exist without that sense. Nearly everyone in Alera has their senses expanded in some way, to some degree. If they suddenly lost access to their furies, for whatever reason, I expect that they would feel quite disoriented. I should think it would be something like losing an eye."
Tavi winced at the image. "I notice," he said, "that you haven't answered my question."
Alera smiled. "Haven't I?"
Tavi eyed her for a moment. Then he said, "You're saying that I'm crafting without realizing it?"
"Without feeling it," Alera corrected. "You make clear to me what it is you wish to accomplish, and I set about ordering it, within my limitations. But the effort for it still comes from you, as with any other furycrafting. It's a steady and gradual process, one you don't feel happening. You only become aware of it when physical symptoms begin to trouble you." She sighed. "It killed Sextus; not as much because he pushed too hard - though he did - as because it made him dismiss the symptoms of his poisoning, incorrectly, as part of this process."
Tavi sat up and studied Alera more closely. She held her hands in front of her, folded inside the opposite sleeve of her misty "gown." More of the gown was gathered over her head in a hood. Her eyes looked sunken. For the first time since Tavi had seen the great fury manifest, she did not look like a young woman.
"The weathercrafting," he said. "It was a strain on you as well. It's hastening your... your dissolution, isn't it?"
"It was a strain upon all of Alera, young Gaius," she replied, her voice quiet. "You upset natural order on a scale that is rarely seen - in concert with the eruptions of two fire-mountains, to boot. You and your people will feel the aftereffects of these few days for centuries to come."
"I sincerely hope so," Tavi said.
The great fury glanced at him and smiled, briefly. "Ah, there it is. I sometimes think that if one cut open the scions of the House of Gaius, they would find well-chilled pragmatism flowing in their veins instead of blood."
"I have provided abundant evidence to the contrary, today, I believe."
"Have you?" she replied.
"And again," he said, "you have avoided answering my question."
Her smile widened, briefly. "Have I?"
"Infuriating habit," he said. "My grandfather must have learned it from you."
"He picked that one up very quickly," she acknowledged. "Sextus was strongly devoted to the idea of being as mysterious as possible when it came to his capabilities of furycraft. He would have looked at his staff and shrugged when they wondered how such a thing as an unthinkably late freeze and a steady breeze for several thousand miles' worth of travel would be possible."
"When in fact, anyone with a High Lord's talent could manage it," Tavi murmured. "If he had, as his partner, someone such as you, who could direct his power to precisely when and where it needed to be to have the greatest effect, however widely dispersed those places might be."
"I suspect the scions of Gaius did not wish the notion to become widespread," she said, "for fear that all of those folk with a High Lord's talent would immediately set about creating such partners of their own."
"Could such a thing be done?" Tavi asked, curiously.
"Almost certainly - to one degree or another. It is also nearly certain that they would not be able to create a... shall we say, a balanced being."
"Someone like you," Tavi mused, "only mad?"
"I suspect the results of such an effort would make the current definitions of madness somewhat obsolete."
Tavi shivered. "The potential for conflict on that scale... It's... unimaginable."
"The House of Gaius is many things," Alera said. "But never stupid."
Tavi sighed and settled back down on the cot again. He rubbed wearily at his eyes. "Where is the main body of the vord now?"
"Closing on the mouth of the Calderon Valley," Alera replied.
"Aquitaine is still trying to draw them all there?"
"It would appear so."
"Playing the anvil to our hammer," Tavi mused. "With all those civilians at stake, behind his lines. I'm not sure if he's brilliant or a bloody fool."
"His foolishness has been limited to a fairly narrow spectrum, all in all," Alera replied. "His tactical ability in the field has been sound. If he can force the vord Queen to oversee the assault on Calderon, he effectively pins her in place for you. My suspicion is that he expects you to lead a team of Citizens to find and neutralize the Queen."
"Of course. That's how he would do it," Tavi mused. "But he doesn't know about Varg and his warriors."
"Indeed not. And I think it possible that the vord do not, either. The path ahead of us is empty of anything but token enemy forces."
Tavi grunted. "The Queen is laying a trap of her own. Expecting me to march in with a pair of Legions and drive straight toward her, find her, and send all our finest furycrafters after her. So she'll let me through in order to know where the strike is coming from. And she'll have something in mind to counter it. Once she's destroyed me, she'll be able to finish Calderon at her leisure."
Alera opened her mouth to speak, paused to consider, then simply nodded.
Tavi grunted. "Have you been able to locate her any more precisely?"
Alera shook her head. "The croach remains... foreign, to me."
"Impenetrable?" Tavi asked.
She mused over the question for a moment. "Imagine the way your skin feels when aphrodin paste is applied to it."
Tavi grunted. It was often used upon cattle, minor injuries, and in certain cases of the healer's craft. "It goes numb. You can't feel it at all."