He had a daunting task ahead of him. He’d be all the better for warmth, food, and rest—for a bit of amusement too. And he’d been understating his case when he called Vivian good company.
He’d known he loved her in the moment when she’d slipped laughing from their shared bed, and he’d thought,I could wake like this as long as I can imagine and never tire of it.
Telling her would be cruelty. He was certain of that as well.
Vivian glowed in the light from the cave walls. She looked up occasionally from the sole of her boot, which had started threatening to come unstitched, and smiled at Olvir. He couldn’t tell if she loved him or not.
It didn’t matter.
There was another reason she’d come with him, one that was more specific than simply being a companion to face off the hazards of travel and less specific than her powers. She hadn’t mentioned it. Olvir hadn’t asked. He hadn’t even let himself name it inside his mind.
He wished he could have spoken it aloud, if only to reassure Vivian that he understood—that, if the last extremity occurred, he was glad that she was by his side to meet it as she’d faced every other danger they’d encountered. But to be too conscious of what might happen, let alone speak it aloud, could deprive her of any advantage she had if the moment came.
Acceptance and the need for surprise made an odd balance.
Give her peace, please,he prayed silently,if my wishes can sway the matter at all. If this ends badly, let Vivian do what needs doing without undue pain, and let her know, somehow, that I thank her for it.
His bond with Tinival remained as it ever had, its rhythm constant. It neither strengthened in acceptance nor weakened in rebuff.
The Silver Wind was just and kind. Olvir would have to trust to that.
“Think it’ll suffice?” Vivian asked, glancing over at the mail shirt that lay, recently oiled and rewrapped, in Olvir’s lap.
“Ah.” Realizing she meant the armor, he had to pause for a moment to find an answer and to face what came next. “As well as any mending can without a blacksmith handy. And if you don’t mind watching me for a little while, I suppose I should meditate again.”
Chapter 26
Olvir went into his own soul cautiously this time, braced for the sudden onslaught of memories and more for the proximity to Thyran’s hideous consciousness. He was surprised to find neither.
The fragment wasn’t quite a fragment any longer. It wasn’t fully Olvir, either, or not in the same way as his day-to-day experience of himself. The memories it carried and the images it sent were still separate from his normal awareness, and he still had to reach for them—but now the effort was less like speech in an unknown language and more like trying to remember events from long ago, maybe with a bottle or two of wine to further blur his recollections.
He saw a grizzled man in brown and gold livery bending over him, his face haggard and his lips raw where he’d bitten them. A forest rose, all shades of green and brown, and he ran laughing through it with two others, beings who shimmered too brightly for Olvir to see clearly, even through memory. A knife rose, and he fell when it did, the ground cracking and shifting around him. Fire roared through a dark room full of robed figures.
Tinival’s song ran through it all now, becoming the steady harmony beneath the variations. The memories spread themselves out accordingly. Olvir doubted that he could control which ones arose and when, but he had a little space apart from them, a bit of room to think, and the sense that the ability was within his grasp. It would only take practice.
Warily, ready to retreat at any moment, he thought of Thyran. The connection was there when Olvir focused on it, but fainter, blurred, whether because Olvir had gained some control or because Thyran wasn’t using Gizath’s power just then. Olvir was glad of it, whatever the reason, and glad to let go once he had found it out. Pressing further would be far too risky, especially since they couldn’t do much about Thyran’s plans if they did discover any surprising information, and he had no desire for additional contact. At a distance and veiled, the possessive rage that was Thyran’s nature nonetheless scraped against Olvir’s soul, cold and slimy and sharp.
He turned his attention away from Gizath’s messenger and in the retreat became aware of the world around him at that moment. Olvir felt the mountains in which he sheltered, the solid shape of rocks and the pathways that wound through them. Atop them in the caves, or within them, were the echoes Vivian had said Ulamir was talking to. Olvir had no part in that conversation, but he knew it was happening and felt a trace of the ties that had once joined the stonekin: parents to children, lovers to lovers, priests to people, friends to friends.
His bonds with Vivian, and hers to Ulamir, stood out among those echoes, the only ties recent enough to be clear and well defined. The connections between them hummed, clear notes occasionally rising to the surface. Olvir suspected that he might be able to turn those into a song, but he veered away. Vivian was her own woman, no target for his power, especially when he didn’t fully understand it.
He went outward instead, beyond the mountain.
The storm was there, of course, and Olvir wouldn’t have liked anybody’s chances if they’d tried to travel in it, but it was no longer quite the howling fury it had been. The spiraling patterns of wind that had formed it were loosening, strands drifting off from the main body. The blizzard was unraveling like an old garment.
Olvir thought that he could help it do so.
Thyran’s example showed him the method. The knowledge felt as if it had always been his, simply rusty with disuse. He reached out with his spirit and found the wind pattern closest to unwinding from the main body of the storm.
Easing it out was a slow, tiring process. There were many places where that wind was tangled with the others, and the simple task of moving it left him wearier than an hour of hard riding would’ve done. Wind had no weight, and it didn’t actually fight him, but the pattern of what it had been doing had a strong hold.
All the same, he uncoiled it from the others, bit by bit, until the last loop straightened out. Freed, it whisked off westward. The circling center of the storm expanded in its absence, still going but becoming looser, calmer. Olvir caught a glimpse of more wind shapes separating from one another.
He fell back into himself then, but the change was less significant than it had been after his previous attempts at contact. All his limbs felt heavy, his brain numb with weariness, but there was no feeling of losing a separate connection, only of shifting his awareness away from what he’d been doing.
“Forgive me saying so,” Vivian said after he’d duly sworn on Letar’s statue that he was himself and followed the gods, “but you look utterly wretched. In a handsome sort of way, of course.”
“I think a child could knock me over right now.” Moving his lips to speak wasn’t precisely taxing, but Olvir was aware of the motion, as a well-rested man wouldn’t have been. “But I also think I may have made the storm end a touch quicker.”
