Darian rubbed his reddened eyes and sniffed again, but looked up at Snowfire with mingled surprise and disbelief. “Why should he care? It doesn’t matter how I feel - “
“But it does,” Snowfire interrupted. “It matters a great deal. Adept Starfall is a great favorite among the children of our Vale; he is accustomed to being liked for his kindness as well as respected for his wisdom, and it makes him feel badly if someone is hurt by his actions or words.”
“I’m not worth worrying about,” Darian mumbled, looking down at the ground. “There’s no reason why he should think about me. There’s no reason why any of you should think about me, you’re all important people. You’re all these amazing warriors and mages, you can do things that nobody back in Errold’s Grove would believe, and I’m - I’m just the worthless troublemaker nobody else wants.”
Snowfire nodded to himself mentally as the boy’s words echoed what Nightwind had already surmised.
“I’m sorry to hear you say that, since I don’t in the least agree with you. I truly hate to spoil a friendship by beginning it with a quarrel,” he replied lightly, and was rewarded once again with Darian’s glance of dumbfounded astonishment.
“How can you say that?” the boy asked, incredulously. “There isn’t anybody in Errold’s Grove who’d believe their ears if they heard you say that!”
“Why, what would they say?” Snowfire asked, ingenuously.
“That - that I’m ungrateful, disrespectful, and I don’t know my place,” Darian said, in what was very nearly a growl, turning his gaze away from Snowfire’s face and back down to the ground.
Snowfire made a noncommittal sound. “And why would they say that you’re ungrateful?”
“Because after all the effort they’ve gone to in order to make sure I had someone to take care of me, and have food and shelter, and the trouble they’ve gone to in order to see that I was going to learn a useful trade, I’m not grateful, and I don’t know my place,” Darian muttered, his voice full of resentment.
Snowfire shifted his weight, and took a more comfortable pose, giving himself time to think out his answer. “It seems to me,” he said carefully, “that you already had the grounding in a very good trade, that being the one that your parents followed. It seems to me that - provided you liked that trade, of course - you could, with a little effort, have found someone else in that trade to take you as half-trained apprentice, and thus you would have supplied your own food, shelter, and Master. So I fail to see why they should think you should consider yourself beholden to them for what they did. After all, the choice of caretaker, lodging, and trade was theirs, not yours, and you had never asked them to undertake it on your behalf. If someone cooks food I do not care for and offers it to me when they know I am not hungry, should I be grateful to them?”
“Some people would think so,” Darian replied, but his spirits seemed a little higher.
He shrugged. “Then some people are foolish, and that is their problem, not mine, nor should it be yours. However, there is this to consider; would any of their children, at your age, have been able to do as you would have done had they waited to let you try?”
“No,” he admitted. “They’d have been pretty helpless. They’d have had to get a relative to take care of ‘em and sort things out for them.”
“Then wouldn’t it be reasonable to say that they were taking care of things for you as their own children would have needed care?” Snowfire waited for Darian to make the next leap of logic.
“I guess so.” Darian didn’t say anything else, but Snowfire could tell he was thinking about something. I hope it’s that he can see why they would expect him to be grateful, even though he wasn‘t obliged to feel gratitude. Poor lad. He was a tervardI being brought up by hertasi, who didn’t understand why he wanted to live at the tops of trees instead of a nice, safe burrow deep in the ground. And he didn’t understand why he should be grateful that they kept giving him the room farthest from the exit!
“Well,” Snowfire said at last. “Why would they say you were disrespectful?”
“Because I pretty much told them what you just did,” Darian said with some wonderment, so surprised to hear his own thoughts echoing from Snowfire’s mouth that he was hard put to keep his eyes down on the ground.
“Well, if you told them in approximately the same words that I used, I can understand being called disrespectful,” Snowfire chuckled. “You might consider cultivating a more diplomatic approach to avoid conflict in the future. But what is this about ‘knowing your place’?”
Darian looked up at him from beneath a pair of fiercely knitted eyebrows. “I guess I wasn’t humble enough,” he replied. “Old Justyn, he just let everybody treat him like the whole village’s servant, and I guess I was supposed to act the same.”
“Really?” Snowfire did not let his expression of friendly interest slip. “Perhaps, though, it wasn’t that they treated Justyn as if he were a servant, but as if they had become so accustomed to his services that they took him for granted?”
“Maybe.” Darian’s fierce expression eased a little. “I suppose that was it. I guess when you do things for people and they get used to you being there, it’s natural to kind of get taken for granted.”
“Exactly true.” Snowfire nodded calmly. “That is why, from time to time, our Vale Healer goes out into the deep Forest to meditate and refresh his spirit. When we have to do without him for a while, we notice again how much he does. Of course, if any of us were to have a genuine emergency, he would return, but that rarely happens. When he comes back, he is invigorated by his rest, and we are properly appreciative of all he does. Now, that your Master did not do this is as much his own fault as the villagers’. Our Shin’a’in cousins have a saying, ‘To treat a person like a carpet, it is necessary that one do the walking, and one allow himself to be walked on.’ “
Darian actually smiled a little, and rubbed his reddened nose with the back of his hand. “That’s a funny saying. But I guess I see the point.”
“It seems to me,” Snowfire continued, with perfect calm, “that the people of your village could have used a deal more exposure to the wider world, and were stubborn and loud in their refusal to change their ways.”
Now Darian laughed out loud. “That’s a funny thing for a Hawkbrother to say!” he replied. “Hellfires, you people never even came out of the Forest till just a little bit ago! Most people thought you had feathers instead of hair!”
“That would be the tervardi, not the Tayledras,” Snowfire chuckled. “And again, the cousins say, ‘It takes a mule to repeat a mule’s bray,’ which is to say, the one most likely to recognize a fault is the one who suffers from the same fault. Hmm?”
“I guess so.” Darian grew quiet and thoughtful, and Snowfire wondered if he had caught the second lesson - that a great deal of the trouble between himself and his guardians lay in the fact that neither of them cared to compromise the vision they had for Darian’s future. A clue that he just might have came a moment later, when he asked plaintively, “Do I have to be a mage?”
“That is a good question, Dar’ian. Well, you have the Gift, and it seems reasonable to train it, so that it is at least under your control,” Snowfire replied judiciously. “Having a Gift is a bit like having a very large and active dog. Think about the large dogs you have been around in your life, from pups to adults. If you do not train a dog to obey you - what happens?”