At last he was reluctantly forced to admit that if Idalia was sleeping so soundly, this must be normal—though down deep inside, Kellen wondered indignantly how anything this noisy and chaotic could possibly be normal. He made himself lie down again, and sent himself to sleep imagining what would happen in the City if such a storm ever came to play among the bell towers of Armethalieh…
The High Council would have a fit.
In the morning, Kellen discovered that even though the storm had been what Idalia called "normal," the high winds it had brought with it had still caused a certain amount of destruction. The two of them had spent most of the forenoon repairing the storm's damage: rebuilding the woodpile and the cairn beside the necessary pit, and locating those objects that had been blown away by the wind. It had taken a Finding Spell to locate the cauldron, which had gotten itself lodged between the branches of a tree…
IDALIA watched Kellen moving about the cabin's grounds with an amusement she tried very hard to conceal. She still remembered her own shock at encountering untamed weather for the first time—something not permitted to occur in Armethalieh—and Kellen still seemed rather surprised by it, to judge from the silence with which he finished his part in repairing the storm damage and resumed his work on the addition to the cabin.
Fortunately the lashings on the tarp had held fast, or they'd be looking all the way to the High Hills for it, if Idalia was any judge of winds. The storm had been strong enough to take down half the woodpile, after all. She picked up a broom and turned toward the house. There was soot and ashes all over the main room, courtesy of the winds that, had gotten past the dampers and blown down the chimney, and it wouldn't sweep itself out the door.
"Idalia! Idalia!"
A troupe of fauns—the little creatures almost never traveled anywhere alone—came rushing into the clearing, tumbling over themselves with the frantic urgency of their mission. They looked around wildly, spotted her, and bounded over to where she stood by the chopping stump, arranging themselves in a semicircle in front of her.
"Idalia!"
They looked up at her with panic in their eyes, in a state she rarely saw in the normally carefree fauns.
"Idalia!" they chorused, and began to babble.
She quelled them with a glance, then looked around and spotted several she recognized. "Jakar—Redmouse—Malky—what do you need today?"
All of them started talking at once.
"The Lady—"
"The Lady in the Woods—"
"The Oaklady—"
"She's hurt—"
"The treelady's hurt—"
"Lightning struck her—"
"Struck her tree—"
"The Oaklady's tree—"
"And she's hurt—"
"Come, Idalia—"
"Will you come—"
"She needs help—"
"She needs healing—"
"You're a Wildmage Healer—"
"And she's hurt—"
Idalia was used to interpreting the fauns' chatter, and she had no difficulty in extracting from their babbling the information that, somewhere in the woods, an oak-dryad's tree had been struck by lightning and she had sent the fauns for help.
By now, attracted by their clamor, Kellen had come from his own work to see what was going on. Today he was involved in the delicate task of splitting the logs that would become the cabin floor and then planing their surfaces until they were as smooth as possible. Once the log planks had been fitted into place, there would be more smoothing to be done. Though last night the violent thunderstorm that had lashed the Wildwood with wind and rain had made it seem as if the end of the world had come, the day had dawned clear, and that heavy tarp had kept the wood dry enough for Kellen to work.
The sennights of hard physical work had put a great deal of muscle on his long lanky frame, just as the constant exposure to sun and wind had darkened and weathered his skin even as it added streaks of gold to his curly brown hair. Idalia doubted that any of his City friends would recognize Kellen these days, dressed as he was in nothing but a pair of deerhide trousers and his heavy leather moccasins, and with his long dark gold hair tied back in a length of buckskin.
"What's going on?" he asked curiously.
Did he need to know how serious this was? Probably not. "An oak-dryad's been hurt, and you can't move a dryad too far from her tree, or she'll die. I'm going to go see what she needs," Idalia answered briefly. "There's no need for you to go. You stay here and keep on working. I'll send one of the fauns back for you if I need you."
Kellen grinned, his teeth white against the new darkness of his skin. "And here I thought I was going to get a rest."
"A change is as good as a rest, so if you want a rest, brother dear, you can finish chopping the kindling. Or charge some of those keystones. Both need doing," Idalia answered tartly.
"I think I'll stay with the logs." Kellen waved, and headed back to the sawhorses. Idalia went into the cabin for her healing-kit, and then hurried after the impatient fauns.
IDALIA followed the fauns through the trees, her workbag slung over her shoulder. She had to admit, if only to herself, that it was a relief to be more or less alone for a change. Kellen never seemed to tire of asking questions—though she did have to admit, he'd made a lot of progress since he'd gotten here. And it was true that if she'd had someone like herself to question when she'd begun learning the Wild Magic, she'd have asked just as many questions. If only he was as open to it as she had been…
If she were to make a guess, she'd have said it frightened him, though that hardly seemed possible… He might not think so, but in her opinion he was as brave as a young lion.
She sighed inwardly, shifting her heavy pack as she ducked to avoid a low-growing branch. She knew, just by seeing his progress over the past few moonturns, that she'd been a better Wildmage at his age than he was, and she knew, without vanity, that she would always be a hundred times the Wildmage Kellen would ever be.
Something in him always holds back—it's as if he's afraid of it, but Kellen has as much courage where it counts as anyone I've ever met.
I must say, I'm baffled. There was no reason for anyone to be afraid of Wild Magic, no matter what the High Mages said. He holds back; he won't commit himself, but to be a Wildmage, you must have the magic in your bones and blood, understand it so deeply you don't have to think about it any more than you have to think about breathing. You have to become the magic, until nothing happens around you that you're not aware of, as if the world around you is merely an extension of your own body. As The Book of Stars says, "You will come to live within my pages, and my pages are written on your heart."
But not on Kellens, apparently.
Was it only fear? Or was there something else going on? Whatever it was, she suspected poor Kellen would never come to the magic through the same route she had taken. It would seem, all things considered, that her little brother's destiny was to become something quite different from your ordinary sort of Wildmage.
I do wish I knew what it was.
Her musings were interrupted by their arrival at the oak-dryad's grove.
The oak was the Queen of the Wood, and the oak-dryads were the greatest of the tree-spirits, but the great trees were particularly vulnerable to lightning, and last night's storm had not been kind to the grove. Idalia could see that the ground here was littered with many branches torn loose by the storm winds—Nature's rough mercy, pruning the weaker branches now before they were layered with a heavy coat of winter's ice and snow— but that was only minor storm damage, part of the cycle of Life, not why she'd been called. On the largest of the oaks, one of the great branches was sheared half away from the trunk, half-charred by the lightning strike that had done it, exposing the heartwood to insect damage and frost-kill.
Its dryad sat slumped on the ground before the tree, her skin as pale as the heartwood and her ash-brown hair tangled and tumbled. She was surrounded by her sisters, their healthy golden skin and hair a sharp contrast to hers. The brownie families who made their homes in the dryads' oaks stood in clumps in the clearing, wringing their hands and murmuring mournfully, and Idalia could see more fauns watching from the bushes at the edges of the clearing.
This is bad, Idalia thought to herself with a sinking heart. The dryad was in shock from the damage to her tree, and the tree itself might very well die slowly over the winter if the damage to its trunk wasn't seen to immediately.
"Here she is—here she is—here she is—" The fauns who had brought Idalia rushed ahead of her into the clearing to join the dryads, some of them climbing into the lap of the wounded one to offer their own rough comfort. As if their arrival had been a signal, the other fauns came crowding into the clearing. Idalia followed more slowly, taking in the damage to tree and spirit, assessing it, making a plan…
One of the healthy dryads came to meet her.