Whoever it was, she was going to be very sorry she did it. He didn't care who it was who did it. First he was going to beat her to within an finger's breadth of her life, then he probably wouldn't speak to her again for a very long time. As angry as he was, he was more than capable of even thrashing Kimmie, who was pregnant with his child. Not even that would protect her from his vengeance if it turned out that she was the one who did this to him. He wouldn't kill whoever did it, but she'd be on his bad side for the next few hundred years. It may take that long for her to heal from the thrashing he intended to lay down on her.
Standing up, feeling the lightness and total freedom that was his once again, the freedom to jump incredibly high, to run faster than a horse, feeling his unnatural Were-cat strength flow through him, he padded over to the chest and pulled out one of the shirts that the tailor Cassiter had made for him. It was too small for him now, but that was easily fixed. As if the time as a human had never happened, Tarrin wove a quick spell to enlarge the garment, feeling full and complete control over the Weave once again.
Strange. The Goddess said he wouldn't have the height, but she was wrong. He was just as he'd been before the Firestaff stripped him of his Were nature, eye to eye with Triana. And he felt exactly the same as he had before that happened to him, as if being a human had never happened. All he had was the memory of it, and the influences of that time on his outlook now.
Whatever became of this, he knew it had to be fast. The return of his memory meant that the weight of the mission was again heavy on him, and he knew that the Tower was not a safe place. He could spend no more than three days here. That was all. Three days to make sure there were no lingering side-effects of the turning and the potion, and three days to track down the culprit and punish her in the most brutal manner possible without killing her. After those three days, whether he found her or not, he had to leave. It was only two months before the Firestaff activated, and summer would soon be winding down into fall. If he wanted to travel, it would be best to get out there and get a jump on the autumn storms, and give him as much time as possible to lose any pursuers and disappear with the Firestaff. Time was of the essence now, both for him and for anyone who intended to try to take the Firestaff away from him. He needed time to escape, and they needed the time to find him.
He already knew exactly where he was going to go. The one place in all of Sennadar no man, no matter how desperate or insane he was, would dare set foot. The Desert of Swirling Sands. It was also one of the few places on Sennadar where a man could hide from an army with a reasonable chance of getting away with it. The brutal heat and rugged terrain would work to his advantage, and his magical abilities would allow him to draw those pursuers deeper and deeper into the Holy Mother's deadly embrace and let the desert do the killing for him. And then there were the Selani. Even without them, the desert was the ideal place to hide, but not even the most fanatical army was going to risk a confrontation with the Selani in their homeland. They'd get annihilated, and they knew it. With the Selani and the desert itself to protect him, he knew that he could do what the Goddess needed of him, and that was keep the Firestaff away from everyone else.
It wouldn't take him long to get there, and it would be a very short trip if he could get Ianelle to teach him how to Teleport. If he could learn how to do that, protecting the Firestaff was going to be a very simple affair. If he found himself threatened, he could jump halfway across the Known World in the blink of an eye. He'd like to see them follow him after he did that.
No, wait… he already did know how to Teleport. That was right there with the memories, and with calm surprise, he realized that the vast majority of the spells that had been lost to the human katzh-dashi lived on within him now. He had absorbed them when the magic potion sucked in all the memory of the Weave, and the Goddess had not bothered to erase them from his memory. He knew how to Teleport, he knew every spell that Auli had used in her rampages of troublemaking through the Tower, he knew the spells that Syllis and the old Council had used to control the Sha'Kar. He even knew spells that they did not know, such as how to safely Transmute into certain known forms. Shapeshifting. Shapeshifting through Sorcery, an art lost since before the Breaking, before the Sha'Kar, an art lost with the Blood War.
Touching a finger to his temple, he sorted through this new knowledge quickly yet thoroughly, understanding each new spell and how it worked, and how it could be altered to conform to a given situation. There were hundreds of them, myriads of possible alterations of those weaves
Those spells, added to the ones he had figured out on his own and the ones Spyder taught him, gave him a truly vast command of the Weave, and tremendous versatility. It helped that he was sui'kun, that a great many of them required High Sorcery in order to be used, and that he could use them by himself when he needed them.
Teleporting. Tarrin snorted in mild amusement when he realized that his idea wouldn't work. A Sorcerer could only Teleport to a place he knew intimately. Not a place he had seen, not even a place he had visited, but a place where he had spent time and had come to know the area. He knew that he could Teleport easily to Aldreth, his home, and to the Tower. He could Teleport to Dala Yar Arak, or Shoran's Fork, places where he had spent much time and had come to know specific places very well. He could Teleport back to the deck of the Star of Jerod or the Dancer, two ships where he had spent much time, even if the ships weren't where he last remembered them to be. He thought he could Teleport back to Amyr Dimeon, for though he hadn't spent very long there, he had certainly made sure to know the place. And he knew he could Teleport to Keritanima's palace in Wikuna, or Iselde's house back on Sha'Kari. It wasn't the power to jump all over the world, but he could certainly go from one side to the other in a big hurry if he needed to do so.
Strange to wake up with such an expanded memory. It was almost confusing, but the memories didn't seem jumbled or hard to comprehend. They were just there, just like all his other memories, and they only stood out when he skimmed through them looking for something specific. Both the ones that were his and the ones that were not, the ones that were normal and the ones that had been resurrected by the magical potion, which had faded from his memory. Or at least he'd thought that they had. He knew, even though he wasn't sure how, that the effect was over. He wouldn't remember absolutely everything for the rest of his life, because the potion's power wouldn't be there forever. It was already almost gone, and though its magic wouldn't give him a perfect eidectic memory, he wasn't sure if the memories he regained from its magical power would remain as they were, or slowly fade over time. Only time would answer that question, he was sure of it.
But this was not the time to be pondering such trivial matters. He didn't have much time, and he had alot to do. He walked over to the mirror, feeling his tail act to counter-balance him, and he felt oddly whole once more, rather relieved to be free of the debilitating constraints of the human form, to be himself once more. He had enjoyed the time as a human, but now that his mind was once again whole, it would never have been content to remain in that confining body. He leaned down and looked into it and found the reflection staring back at him exactly as he remembered it to be, the maturity that had been put into his features by Shiika's aging kiss, the height, the fetlocks. He wondered why he had regained his height, when even the Goddess said he wouldn't have it if he was turned again. She said it was a measure of age, and that age was stripped when the Were magic was torn from him. But he was his tall self once more, the age taken from him replaced when the Were nature was imparted to him again. He touched his cheek, then his jaw, then reached up and delicately pinched the tip of his cat ear, feeling it both in his fingers and in the ear, which flicked irritably from the pressure. Yes, everything seemed the way it was supposed to be.