James Galloway - The Tower of Sorcery

"Is that so?" she said, raising an eyebrow. "My home lies to the east, cub. That's where we need to go."

"I can't," he said. "I have to go to the Tower. The reason I left home was because I can do Sorcery. They were taking me to the Tower. If I don't go there, I'll do magic and hurt someone without knowing what I'm doing. Besides, someone out there doesn't want me to get to the Tower," he told her wearily. "Those Trolls were after me , and it's not the first attack. You should know that," he said. "The only place I'll be safe is in the Tower."

"I'll worry about keeping you safe," she told him. "Once we get out of human lands, nobody will ever find you."

"Didn't you listen at all?" he demanded. "I don't have a choice. I have to go to the Tower. That's more set in stone than anything that has anything to do with you. Now if you're willing to travel in that direction, then we can travel together, and I'll learn what you have to teach me. If you're not, then we'll just part ways here and now and hopefully never see each other again."

"Don't dictate terms to me, boy," she said in a dangerous tone. "You'll go where and when I say you'll go."

"Then you'd best either let me go or try to kill me now," he shot back, standing straight and tall before her. He realized how tall she was as he faced off against her. Her eyes were on the same level as his, and she was only on very slightly higher ground. He hadn't noticed that before; his memories of her didn't include any where she was standing up straight, or very many that included her by herself or without pain involved. In his memory, she was twice as big as he was. It was reassuring that she was his own size.

She gave him a dark look, then she laughed ruefully. "Oh, my, this is going to be interesting," she said. "Mother always wished for me to have a child as stubborn as I was. Well, I think she got her wish. Both of us have to travel south," she said. "Let's travel south for now. When the time comes when we'd have to part, let's take this up when we get there."

"I don't object to that," he said, after a moment of weighing her offer carefully. "Just answer me one question. Who sent you after me?"

"I don't really know," she sighed. "I was careless, and someone managed to use magic against me to hold me still while someone put the collar on me from behind. It was on a deserted street in Goram."

"That's in Tor," Tarrin objected. Tor was a small kingdom on the southern coast, not far from Arkis. It was also almost a thousand leagues to the south and east.

"I know," she said. "I don't have any memory of much after that. Just little images. I remembered you, though, because the Sorceress took off that thrice-damned collar with you in the room. If she'd have left it on, I probably would never have known you existed."

"A pity," he grunted.

"No, lucky for you," she snapped back. "You seem to be dealing with the dual nature of our kind, but there are things about us that you need to know. There are rules that we live by, rules imposed on us by the Fae-da'Nar . If I wasn't here to teach you, then you wouldn't know these things, and that would hurt you later on."

"Fae-what?"

" Fae-da'Nar ," she repeated. "Think of it as an association of intelligent beings of the forest," she told him. "Centaurs, the other Were-kin, Faeries, Pixies, Dryads, Sylphs, and many others. We all live with a very loose communal government, so there's very little friction and we can all live in peace, and we don't irritate the humans and cause trouble that way. Look, there's a great deal I have to teach you, and it's not going to happen right here, right now. You're about to fall over, and I'm tired from tracking you down over the last night and day. Let's get something to eat, get some water, and we'll start south."

"Alright," he said.

They climbed down out of the trees, and Jesmind led him towards the smell of water. It was a large stream with large rocks littering the shores. "Ah, water, and it looks like we have breakfast too," she said.

"Where?"

"Don't you know how to fish?"

"Of course, but I don't have a hook."

"Humans," she sighed. "You have to make tools for everything. Come on, I'll teach you how to really fish."

Tarrin watched as Jesmind laid down on a rock by a large, deep pool, then slithered up to the edge. He stood just behind her, watching as she watched the water. Tarrin could see several silvery shapes moving about under the water. Jesmind lifted up one paw, watched intently for a second, then her hand shot into the water so fast it sounded like the surface of the water was ripped. She snatched her paw back just as quickly, and a rather large fish sailed over his head, then hit the bank and started to flop around.

"That's all there is to it," she said. "Just make sure that you aim below where you see the fish. The surface of the water bends what you see, making the fish look like it's somewhere else. Here, you try."

Tarrin traded places with her, watching the darting shapes, a bit nervous now, with tail-twitching interest. His first few attempts were badly off the mark, but he swallowed his frustration and concentrated on the task at hand, analyzing how much he had missed with the different attack angles he'd used. He got a pretty good idea how much he was off from his past attempts, so he adjusted his trajectory, waited for the right moment, then struck like a viper. His paw slammed into the water, his claws hooked into something that gave, then he yanked it out. Tarrin looked back to where it was falling, and saw a rather large silver-backed fish flopping around next to the one that Jesmind had caught, which was already starting to go still.

"Not bad," she praised. "Catch us a few more, and then we'll eat."

"Alright," he said, turning his attention back to the pool.

After about ten minutes, Tarrin had six trout laying on the bank. Jesmind used her claws to gut and clean each fish as it bounced onto the bank, her claws like knives as she cut off the heads and tails and fileted the remainder with precise skill. Tarrin stopped to drink deeply from the pool after fishing, then returned to her where she was sitting on a rock at closer to the trees. "I usually don't eat it raw," she admitted, "but it's well enough in a pinch."

"Raw?" he said with a shudder.

"Don't knock it til you try it," she said, holding out a fileted strip of fish.

Tarrin was surprised. He expected to gag the instant it his his mouth, but it actually wasn't that bad. He wolfed down his meal quickly as Jesmind watched him, his ravenous hunger coming back in a rush. "It's not like we live in the woods and act like animals," she told him as they ate. "I live in a nice cottage in about the center of the Sylvan lands. What you Sulasians call the Frontier. I hunt, and fish, and just live, and when the urge hits me, I wander around the Twelve Kingdoms and see what's going on with the humans. I built the cottage myself," she added with a bit of pride.

"Why doesn't anyone know about you-us?" he asked.

"Because there aren't very many of us," she said. "We're the rarest of all the Were-kin. And because of this," she said, holding out her arms, "we're often mistaken as exotic Wikuni."

He looked at her face, closely. Take away the ears, and she was the twin of the sailor that was on the ship. She was even wearing the same clothes. "You were the sailor on the ship," he accused.

"Yes, I was wondering when you would figure that out," she said with a smirk.

"How did you-"

"It's not easy," she cut him off. "So don't even think about trying. The human shape, it's not natural to us anymore. At one time it was, but that was long ago. We've changed since then. We can take the human shape, but it's very painful, and it's also very exhausting. I seem to have a knack for it," she shrugged. "I can hold the human shape for over four days, but it leaves me sore and aching for a week. My mother can't hold the human shape for more than six hours, and she's been practicing for over six hundred years."