“Well, maybe I’m just little tired,” Gideon admitted to Chandra. “Does it seem far to you?”
She couldn’t see his expression. Instead of answering him, she prodded, “You were about to tell me how you met your teacher.”
“Was I?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m bored.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “Of course, we could talk about something else. The scroll, for example.”
“Then I’d be bored.”
“So how did your teacher find you?”
“Well, you’ll identify with this,” he said. “I was a criminal.”
“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.” She asked, “What did you do? Attack women and take away their valuables?”
“Very funny. As a matter of fact, we sacrificed the cutest animals we could find and drank their blood from our victims’ skulls by the light of the moon.”
“Then this place should bring you back to your roots.”
“To be serious, we mostly broke into rich people’s homes-”
“We?”
“There was a group of us. I was the leader, more or less. We stole money, goods, valuables. And, uh…”
He seemed reluctant to continue his story. “Yes?” she prodded.
“Then we gave it away.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “To the poor.”
She frowned. “Why?”
“We were…” He seemed to search for the right word. “Idealistic.”
“That’s a far cry from drinking animal blood.”
“I was very young. I wanted to change things,” he said. “But I didn’t know how. I was good at stealing. Good at fighting. Pretty good at handling a group of wild boys my own age.”
“That’s easy to believe.”
“But I had a lot to learn.”
“Where were your parents? Didn’t they try to rein you in?” Her own parents had certainly tried, back when she was a girl.
“My mother was dead by then,” he said.
“And your father?”
“Who knows?” He sounded indifferent. “I never met him.”
They all walked in silence for a while. Chandra really started to feel, deep in her bones, how helpless she was here without her power. Even if they did get some answers from this wise woman Jurl was taking them to, what would they do to get away from this plane? She tried to stop thinking it.
Finally she broke the silence: she had to find something to distract her from these thoughts.
“Your teacher,” she said suddenly.
“What?” She could tell by Gideon’s reaction that he had been far away. Perhaps lost in thoughts similar to her own.
“How did your teacher find you?” she said urgently. “How did he get you to give up your life as an outlaw?”
There was a pause. Then he said, “What makes you think I gave it up?”
She released her breath on a puff of surprise. Then she smiled-and felt grateful to him for making her smile. “I stand corrected.”
In fact, for all she knew, he was an outlaw. She had assumed he followed her here to capture her and take her back to Kephalai. She had vaguely supposed he was some sort of inter-planar bounty hunter. The Prelate had employed someone with extraordinary abilities to go after Chandra last time. Why not this time?
But since the Prelate’s forces didn’t know where the scroll was, this planeswalker obviously hadn’t returned it to them.
Perhaps Gideon was still an outlaw. Or at least playing all the angles and working on both sides of the fence. The thought warmed him to her.
“As long as you stick to our bargain and don’t try to deliver me to the Prelate,” she said aloud, “I make no judgments about the path you have chosen in life.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“So were did your teacher find you?”
“I was in prison,” he said.
“We do have a lot in common.”
“He was respected, and the prison wasn’t well equipped to hold someone with my abilities,” Gideon said. “So I was released into his custody.”
“And that’s how your education began?”
“Yes,” Gideon said. “More easily than he expected, I suppose. After my initial resistance-and an attempt to escape his custody-I became a dedicated student. Eager.”
“You liked the power,” she said, remembering her own obsession with it when she had started discovering some of the things she could do, things that no one in her community had understood or condoned.
“Yes, I liked the power. I liked developing and honing it. Mostly, though…” Gideon paused pensively. “Mostly, I realized that my teacher was the first person I’d ever met who could help me find what I was looking for.”
“Which was?”
“Direction. Focus. A path for my life.”