“Well, Moharrin is the demand on Tahar’s time and skills. She’s in her eighties. She needs all the help she can get.” Jayat didn’t even look grumpy as he spoke. It makes me cross just to see Myrrhtide when he sniffs that way. “So we do what we must to satisfy the village’s demands, since we are the only mages here. If doing our work right means tapping a vein of power, as the mages before us did, you can’t blame us for using the tools we have.”
“Except there’s nothing here but cold earth and stones that remember something,” I reminded Jayat. “I can stretch down half a mile, and it’s all ghost fizzing.”
“I can reach even further,” Luvo announced.
From the way Jayat flinched, he had forgotten that Luvo rode on my saddle. I wondered why Luvo always had to be so slow. Didn’t he understand that life was just whooshing by?
Luvo went on talking. Slowly and pokily. “There is no crack below the ground, though it may be there was at one time. Some of the rock faces a mile to the west are cloven, as if they were sheared off. As if they were once small fault lines in the earth. But that shearing is no longer evident. You could no more reach the power in the faults under the heavy cloak of the earth than I could fly.”
Myrrhtide sniffed. “Nonexistent fault lines are all very well, but I understand our little tour of inspection will take us up on the mountain today. You may talk rocks at another time. Let’s go.”
“No.” Rosethorn pointed to a big, brown-needled pine tree on the far side of the pond. It was leaning, half-uprooted from the soft earth. “That’s a hazard. It needs attention.”
“You certainly don’t expect me to get an ax and hack at it,” Fusspot told her huffily.
“Oswin said he would cut it down,” Jayat called to Rosethorn.
She was already walking around the pond. “He took in the children the pirates abandoned. Azaze was telling me about that. He’s got enough to do with his days. I can handle this.”
Jayat turned his horse. “I know where Oswin keeps his saw.”
I put a hand on his arm. “She’ll hate it if you cut. She wants to give the tree a proper funeral.”
He frowned at me. He didn’t understand, but he had the sense to halt and wait to see what happened. I picked Luvo up and cradled him against my chest. But we can do something to help, right? I asked him through our joined magics.
Luvo and I mixed our power and let it sink into the ground. Under the pond we flowed from stone to stone. I winced at the burn of that water on each rock we passed through. Even with a foot of mud between us and the pond itself, we could feel the acid in it.
Did some evil mage poison it or something? I asked.
No mage has been here, Evumeimei, Luvo told me.
That was that. When Luvo was definite, he knew what he talked about. I don’t know how he understood things, but he did. He tells me I’ll know, too, in a few thousand years. I can’t get him to see that I won’t be around all that time. It makes me wonder if he knows something I don’t.
Ahead shone the white blaze of Rosethorn’s magic. She jammed vines of her power into some shadowy thing. The threads spread away from her to fill the shape of a leaning tree. Slowly and clumsily they tugged, trying to move its dead roots.
Luvo and I entered the stones around and under the tree. There Luvo went very, very still. I felt us flex, as if Luvo had swallowed with our magics. A wave of coolness from outside Luvo and me bore down on us. It was an invisible power that filled the earth, calling to the children of iron in the surrounding stone. The iron in fool’s gold, hematite, and olivine, even specks of iron no bigger than pinheads in the granite around us, all stirred like waking bees.
Rocks don’t like to move. Still, given a choice between their iron’s pull to that immense force, and battling the loose soil to stay put, the rocks chose to move away from the tree’s roots. Luvo and I drew them back from Rosethorn, too, so she wouldn’t be knocked off her feet.
With no rocks to help keep it standing, the tree slowly lay down on the ground. Luvo and I thanked the earth power that called the iron very politely. Luvo talked to it then for a while. My head was a bit woozy, so I drew back to my body alone, and leaned on my horse.
When I could, I drank some water and ate a peach, then looked around. Rosethorn was speaking the Green Man’s prayers over the dead pine and the other dead trees. Myrrhtide, who grumbled that he should do something, collected pond water as he waited. He worked spells on it, to see what was wrong.
Jayat’s face was covered with sweat. “What was that?” he whispered when he saw me smile at him. “Something went through me. It came from you and Luvo. I—I didn’t know what was up or down, where the village is, where the mountain or the lake is…”
“There are more important things in the world than this village and lake.” Myrrhtide was definitely cranky. Maybe he was as touchy about sick water as Rosethorn was about sick plants. “Even a half-trained bumpkin like you should understand that.”
I was taking a breath, getting ready to teach Fusspot some manners, but Luvo had come back from talking with that great force. He stood in front of me. I steadied him as he spoke in his thundering mountain voice. “Respect a mage in his lands, human. You know nothing of those things that Jayatin has put into this place. You do not know the dedication and sacrifice that he and his masters have given this lake, this village, this mountain. You preen yourself on your learning. Take shame instead for the fear that bars you from true work and true devotion. You have not the heart for it. You have not the soul to understand those whose measure will always be greater than yours.”