So she temporized, trying to buy time to think. “I haven’t been hiding anything,” she countered. It was the truth; Kethry hadn’t asked her if she could hear thoughts, or given her any tests to see if she could.
Meanwhile, her mind was running in little circles, like a mouse caught in the bottom of a jar. If Grandmother finds out about this, she’ll make me become a mage, and I don’t want to become a mage, I want to be like Tarma—
The kyree laid his ears back and winced. :PLEASE!: he “shouted” at her, making her wince, but bringing that frantic little circle of thoughts to a halt.
He sighed gustily. :Much better. Thank you. Child, I have no intention of betraying your secret to Kethry, if that is really what you want—but what you just did is precisely the reason why I wanted to speak with you.:
“What did I do?” she whispered, head still ringing from his “shout.”
His ears came back up. :Every time you feel safe and begin to concentrate on some complicated problem that involves your emotions, you do exactly what you just did. You think “out loud.“ Very loud, I might add, far louder than you know; I would imagine that one could hear you all the way to the next Keep if one was so minded.:
“I do?” She shook her head; it didn’t seem possible.
:You do,: he insisted. :Almost as loudly as I just “shouted”. And unlike my “shout,“ which was meant only for your mind, your thoughts are heard by anything receptive. You are fortunate that your grandmother is not Gifted with Mindspeaking, or your secret would be no such thing.: He flattened his ears, and looked pained; his brow wrinkled in a way that would have been funny under any other circumstances. :It is very discommoding. And uncomfortable. I won’t dispute your right to keeping your abilities to yourself, since they don’t involve mage-craft, but I must insist that you get training. Quickly. Before you cause an unfortunate incident.:
Kero bit back her first reply, which was that she had gotten training. Obviously what she had learned on her own wasn’t good enough.
Not if someone like Warrl can hear me all the way to the Lythands’.
“I can probably take care of it myself,” she said cautiously.
He lifted his lip just a trifle, and snapped at the air in annoyance. She shrank back instinctively. His fangs were as long as her thumb, and very sharp. :Don’t you realize I wouldn’t be here if that were true? There is no way you can train yourself. And untrained—well, half-trained—you are in terrible danger. You are just very lucky that the mage you killed wasn’t strongly MindGifted. If he had been—well, you’d probably be serving his every whim right now. It is ridiculously easy to take over the mind of someone who is Gifted, but untrained; your barriers are weak, and you have no secondary defenses. Right now you are more vulnerable than someone with no Gift at all. And you display that fact to the universe every time you become distressed!:
But that just led her right back to the same problem; she didn’t want Kethry to know about this. And who else was there that could train her?
She shook her head. “I can’t—”
He growled, and sneezed, as if he had smelled something he didn’t like. :Must you be so dense? I’m offering to train you myself. No one else will ever know, not even my mind-mate.:
“You are?” She could hardly believe it. “But why?”
He put his head down on his paws, and sighed. :Self-defense, child. Self-defense. I am increasingly weary of trying to shut you out, and you have at times awakened me out of my rest. Now, in the interest of peaceful sleeping, shall we work on that so-called shield of yours? You’re going about it all wrong :
And I thought I was overworked before, Kero thought with a little groan, as she opened bleary eyes two weeks later on a morning that had arrived much too soon. She’d trained herself to wake as soon as the first light of sunrise came through her eastern window. It seemed to hit her closed eyelids candlemarks earlier every morning.
The worst part of it is, if Tarma knew Warrl was keeping me up half the night, she’d probably let me sleep later. But if I tell her—no, I can’t. I don’t know what she’d think about this, and I know she’d tell Grandmother.
Kero rubbed her eyes with her knuckles, and sat up slowly. By the look of the clear, pink-tinged sky, this was going to be another perfect day—which meant Tarma would be feeling pretty frisky. Kero was beginning to look forward to rainy days; even more to days of cold and damp, with a heavy morning fog. Both conditions made Tarma’s joints ache—she would stay in bed until late morning, and confine Kero’s workouts to sessions in the practice ring against the pells or other targets. It wasn’t particularly nice to be pleased when her teacher wasn’t feeling well—but Kero had found that guilt in this case was easily outweighed by the pleasure of sleeping in.
For the past week, she’d been freed from the chopping and wood-carrying; now she practiced against the pells and in sword-dances in the morning, had an hour or two of book-training directly after lunch, and practiced against Tarma in the afternoon. She no longer wondered what she was going to do with herself—she was going to become a mercenary, like Tarma, and like some of those women Kethry had hired to protect Lordan and the Keep. The only question in her mind now was—what kind of mercenary? The books that Tarma was teaching her from were studies in strategy and tactics—the ways to move and fight with whole armies. At this point, Kero couldn’t see why she’d need anything of the sort.
But maybe Tarma had some kind of plan. Kero was perfectly content to learn whatever Tarma wished to teach her, and let the future take care of itself. Tarma was always saying that “no learning, no knowledge is ever wasted.” If nothing else, it probably wouldn’t be a bad thing for an ordinary fighter to know how whole armies moved, so she could anticipate her orders.
She stretched and arched her back, then wormed her way back down under the warm blankets. I’ll just relax a little longer, she thought, and reveled in the “silence” in her mind. She hadn’t realized just how much she’d been “overhearing” until after Warrl showed her the right way to protect herself; ground, center, and shield. For years there had been a kind of buzzing in back of all her thoughts, as if she was hearing a tourney crowd from several furlongs away. Now it was gone, and the relief was incredible.
She hadn’t quite realized how useful this particular ability could be to a fighter, either, until Warrl showed her. He’d proved she could use it to get a tactical advantage in many situations; from doing as she had during the rescue and “reading” the area for enemy minds, to reading her opponent during a combat and countering his moves before he even made them.
But she wasn’t entirely happy about using it that way.
She caught herself falling asleep again, and jerked herself back up into wakefulness. She threw back the covers and swung her legs out of bed before she succumbed a second time. A brief trip to the bathing chamber and a splash of cold water solved the problem; the water was cold enough to make her gasp, but she was certainly awake now.