“The Triium…”
My teaching was already handy in sorting myth from fact. The Triium was a mid-schooling history lesson, about three female magic wielders who had taught Mistress Eiorenne—one of the oldest, most beloved temple masters. She had died centuries ago in a terrible rock fall from the southern Spine.
Before her, females were never as strong as males. The simple, brute force males used to wield more powerful magic wasn’t possible for a woman.
The Triium, a set of three women whose names were lost to time—or maybe never even known—had each defeated the temple masters on their own to reach Eiorenne, the daughter of Master Wilkes.
They took Eiorenne to the Southern Sea to show her how they had learned to wield magic and she found her own, different way to do it.
To return to the temple, she had to defeat each of the fourteen masters there, including her own father.
She did. Easily. And the fifteenth seat of the council was created.
Lunella waggled her eyebrows. “Did you think they stopped with just Eiorenne? Oh, no. They taught every woman they could how to wield their power. And of all of the men who watched and tried to mimic what we could do, only Dorian was able to learn it.”
Ophelia nodded sagely. “And now, we own half the council. As it should be.”
“As it should,” the others chorused.
These women were powerful and were nothing to be trifled with, and they were willing to teach me to be just like them.
Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I started to want that. I began to want to learn, to be more than a teacher. More than just the naïve friend who had no clue about the giant spy network that her friends were part of.
More than just a simple magician who entertained with a dancing flame in her palm.
More than the girl who walked into that cave.
More than the woman who took the robes.
More.
Sona smiled at me. “I think she gets it.”
* * *
Strings and strands of magic hung from Carolee’s hand.
“Balance,” Mistress Ophelia said. “For every strong man, there must be a strong woman.”
It was fascinating to watch Mistress Carolee control her magic. She used it so differently from Master Dorian and completely different from every other male I’d seen so far.
There was subtlety in her weavings, a play with the strings that Vitus and Master Argo had never shown me. They were right about the blunt force.
“Men are straight lines.” Lunella drew a line on the ground. “They are linear. Not more than one string of magic, not more than one line of thought, not more than one goal at a time.”
Mistress Sona took the stick from Lunella and carved the line into five pieces. “Yes, it is true that men make plans. Complex ones that can see five, ten, twenty steps ahead. In no way are we saying that men are incapable of complex thought. But in the execution of the plan, they are linear.”
“Women,” Mistress Maurielle said, taking the stick, “think in clusters. Act in clusters.”
She drew bubbles in the dirt as she slowly turned in a circle. “We don’t just think ahead. We think to the side and to the past. We keep tabs on all of those things as well.”
“In most cases,” Mistress Sona took the stick again, “the way we think about things connects the thoughts too, and we are surrounded by our thoughts.”
There was a full cloud around Mistress Maurielle.
“That is where your strength comes from,” Lunella said. She traveled around, pointing at the cloud that surrounded her fellow temple masters. “This ability to surround yourself and think—and work—non-linearly.”
I stared, amazed, at the ground around Mistress Maurielle. There was a cloud drawn in the ground that went all the way around her. Hearing these other women talk about how I thought, how I always had more than just one idea in my mind was… comforting.
