"Fair enough," Nikki said.
Tarrin hadn't Created on that scale in a while, and it left him a little tired. But when he was done, six good-sized tents were standing around the fire, each one with bedrolls in them for their occupants. He created one tent for his family, one for Rahnee and Jeri, one for Singer and Thean, and one each for Kimmie, Shayle, and Nikki. Tarrin wasted no time saying his goodnights and ducking into the fairly large tent he made for his family, which had within it nothing but a pair of fairly soft, comfortable bedrolls. Jesmind and Jasana came in right behind. "I don't wanna sleep in my clothes," Jasana complained as she looked around the tent.
"Then take them off," Jesmind told her calmly, grabbing the tail of her shirt and pulling it over her head. Jasana was a Were-cat, just like her parents, and that meant that they would have on qualms about undressing in front of her. Or just about anyone else, for that matter. Tarrin took off his sword and set it on the ground beside the bedroll, then shrugged out of his vest as Jesmind unlaced her breeches.
Jesmind helped Jasana undress and slide into her small bedroll, then impatiently pulled Tarrin into their bedroll almost before he could get his breeches off. She cuddled up to him, wrapping him up to keep him from getting away, then sighed in contentment. "Goodnight, cub," Jesmind called.
"Night mama, papa."
"Sleep well, cub," Tarrin told her, then he surrendered to the peace of it all and fell immediately asleep.
The entire army was up before the sun, and was gone with the dawn.
The addition of the Rangers did not slow down the host by very much. They were all mounted, and their horses were in very good condition. The host had to stop or slow down more frequently to give the horses a chance to rest, but other than that they moved at the same brisk speed that got them to Watch Hill. Tarrin spent most of the day in his ground-eating pace, keeping stride with Mikos as he and Sathon talked. Or more to the point, Sathon talked and Tarrin listened. The Druid meant to teach Tarrin more magic, and he held to his promise.
Tarrin was surprised at how versatile Druidic magic could be. He learned a number of useful spells dealing with organic matter, from flesh to wood to earth to leather, spells to change its shape, age it, invigorate it, even destroy it. Tarrin had been startled to know that a Druid of even moderate talent could use his Druidic magic on himself and affect his own flesh, and bring about a shapeshifting by magic that was natural for the Were-kin. But where Were-kin were limited to three forms, a Druid could transform into nearly any living creature. Sathon warned him explicitely that Druidic shapeshifting was not something for him to try, because he was already a shapeshifter. Any time a Druid Were-kin attempted shapeshifting through Druidic magic, it caused the Were-kin to go temporarily insane. The magic that made up a Were-kin was incompatible with Druidic spells of shapeshifting, forcing a creature whose body was already designed to transform to do so into a form for which it was not designed. The taking of an alien shape caused the instincts within to go wild, and that triggered madness. Tarrin could understand that intimately, because he had a similar restriction in Circling. Were-cats could only circle with other Were-cats, because of the Cat's violent objection to linking with a mind that was alien to it. If the Cat objected contact with an alien mind so strongly, it only made sense that it would rebel to being trapped within an alien form. But where Tarrin couldn't use those spells on himself, he could easily use them against some unwitting victim whom he wanted to punish, but not kill. Turning someone into a carrot was a pretty formidable vengeance.
Those types of spells were very versatile. By the time Sathon was done teaching him the proper images and concepts of will, Tarrin could take a stick from the ground and make it grow or shrink, could cause it to become unbreakable, could cause it to decay into dust, and he could cause it to explode in a fiery ball. He had done that once before that he could remember, detonating a ship's wheel that had been on the deck of Sheba's ship, a very long time ago. What was more, Sathon taught him a trick of infusing a natural object with the power of the All directly, a trick that Sathon called Animation. By animating the stick, Tarrin caused it to have something of a life and will of its own, but was subservient to his commands. The animated stick would move about by itself and perform tasks as Tarrin directed it. All in all, it was a particularly clever little trick, and Tarrin could appreciate the innumerable ways in which it could be used to frighten, annoy, startle, or even outright attack another person. A strong Druid could cause an entire room full of wooden furniture to suddenly come to life and attack someone in the room with it. A nasty little concept there.
Sathon had been suprised that Tarrin knew the Druidic spells of healing, so he taught Tarrin spells for augmentation of the body. Spells to temporarily boost strength or speed or resistance, spells to turn a normal human into a juggernaut against which no other normal human could stand. Those spells were as hard on the recipient as they were on the Druid, being demanding spells to cast, but they were spells that Druids used on themselves when it became apparent that their lives were in the balance. They were rarely used because of the stress they put on the recipient's body, a stress that had been known to kill the recipient.
Then Sathon taught Tarrin spells that almost all Druids knew and used. The easiest of them was Sending, the sending of messages to other Druids through the All. It was how Thean and Triana and just about all the Druids communicated with one another, for it was easy and dependable. A Sending was little more than a message spoken into the All, and then the All caused the Druid who was the recipient to hear the message. One couldn't conduct a conversation that way, because there was a lag of several moments between the sending of the message and the receiving of it, depending on the distance separating the two. For direct communication, the Druids used two methods. One was called Greater Sending, which was a spell that was hard enough to cast to prevent some Druids from using it. It was a form of Sending, but it allowed for conversation to pass in real time so long as the casting Druid maintained the connection. The other form was what Triana did, which Sathon called a Window. Sathon himself couldn't do it, but he was familiar with the technique. The casting Druid created something of a window through the All, allowing the Druid to see the person to which he or she was talking. Triana had done that to talk to him before, so he knew what it looked like, and now how it worked.
After that was learned, they stopped for lunch, and while they were eating Sathon taught him techniques for creating, changing, shaping, destroying, or transforming elemental matter. A Druid could create fire from nothingness, transform it into earth, change its size, shape, mass, density, or content, then banish it back into nothingness. Sorcery and Druidic magic both were Elemental in nature, magic derived from natural forces, and it gave both orders of magic strong control of basic elemental forces. Creating elemental matter was a bit different from the Creation that Sarraya taught him, for it was actually much easier. The only problem with Druidic creation of elemental matter was that it was always in its base form. A Sorcerer could use Sorcery to create any manner of fire or water or air, from smoke to cold flames of light to fog to toxic clouds, but Druidic magic always limited it to pure earth or stone, pure water, pure air, or pure fire. Sorcery proved to be much preferable to Druidic forms of elemental magic when they were compared with one another. It was even possible to transmute one thing into another through Sorcery, like changing flesh into stone or water into ice or rock into glass, which was much more difficult using Druidic magic.
When they started out again, Sathon taught him Druidic magic concerning life. Druids could affect the life cycles of plants and animals, but not sentient creatures. A Druid could cause a seed to bloom into a flower, accelerating its maturation, and could likewise reverse the damage of aging in an old animal and make it young again. Sathon had no clear answer for him when he asked why they didn't work on sentient beings, only telling him that the limitation was well documented. It was a line that no Druid had crossed and survived. Druids could urge plants or animals to grow in ways that were not natural as well, causing a wolf to become as large as a bear, or causing vines to suddenly grow tens of spans in a short moment to choke off a path or conceal something that needed to be hidden. Those spells weren't very demanding, but they were very, very complicated, and they took Tarrin much more time to learn than the other spells that Sathon taught him.