Sharon Shinn - Reader And Raelynx

Jerril.

Jerril’s house. Jerril’s lesson. The world snapped back into focus.

“I think I might have gotten it that time,” Cammon said cautiously. He was no longer shivering, though as soon as the illusion vanished, so did his sense of warmth and well-being. He would be cold again in about half a minute. He checked his toes. Pink and toasty.

Jerril was smiling. “Where did you go? In your mind?”

“To a night and a place when I was traveling with Senneth and the others.”

“Well, you succeeded at shutting me out completely-me and the surrounding environment. Which was exactly what I wanted you to do, except perhaps not so completely.”

“I don’t see how I can shut it out and be aware of it.” Cammon knew that he sounded sulky, but that was how he felt. Everything Jerril asked him to do was always impossible; except it wasn’t impossible because Cammon always learned to do it. But the learning could be extraordinarily draining.

“No, it’s most contradictory,” Jerril agreed. “But you must find a way to not lose yourself so completely in your mind that it is hard to find your way back. You are very vulnerable if your mind is nowhere near your body-and you cannot call it back instantly.”

Cammon’s toes were starting to remember that they were tucked into a snowbank, and the rest of his body was beginning to shiver. He was suddenly ravenous and almost too weak to stand, as if he hadn’t eaten in days.

“I think I have to go in now,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m going to fall asleep out here and then freeze to death.”

Jerril smiled again and stood up with easy grace. He was probably in his midforties, a good twenty-five years older than Cammon, but he had more energy than Cammon could claim on his best day, and Cammon was usually inexhaustible. “Yes, you’ll sleep well tonight, I think,” he said. “This was a very good day’s work, you know. It took me a year to master that particular trick. It took you a week.”

Jerril often praised Cammon, to encourage him to try harder, but that was a slip. The older mystic almost never let on how phenomenal he thought Cammon’s talents were. Such news always made Cammon uncomfortable and a little afraid, as if he was too strange to be with ordinary folks, too odd to have friends, set apart, lonely. He had been alone long enough, and terrifyingly enough, to never want to experience the state again.

“Maybe I have a better teacher,” Cammon said, making the words light.

Jerril touched him on the arm, guiding him toward the back door and the scent of Lynnette’s cooking. Jerril, of course, had instantly sensed Cammon’s moment of panic. He was a reader; everyone’s emotions were as plain to him as hair coloring and skin. “You have the best teacher,” he said loftily. “You should have learned it in three days.”

That made Cammon laugh as he stepped through the door. Lynnette smiled at the sound, looking up from the stove with her face all flushed with heat. She was plain-featured, good-natured, and nearly as patient as Jerril, though not nearly as powerful. “It went well, then?” she asked.

“Very well,” Jerril said. “So now he’s hungry and then he’ll fall asleep before we can even get him to bed.”

“I was going to ask him to fetch Areel. Dinner’s ready.”

In this household, you didn’t fetch someone to the supper table by running up to his room and knocking on the door. You sent a thought tendril in the other person’s direction- Dinner , you might be thinking, or Come here now -and he would start, and realize he was hungry, and lay down his pen or close his book and hurry to the kitchen. But Cammon didn’t have the energy for even such simple magic, not tonight. He could scarcely keep his eyes open.

“Don’t worry about it,” Jerril said, pushing Cammon to one of the chairs pulled up to the kitchen table. “I’ve summoned him. Cammon, you’d better eat while you still have the strength to lift a fork to your mouth.”

Cammon was halfway through his meal before Areel had even wandered downstairs. Areel was a strange old man, bent and thin and fierce-looking, with bushy white eyebrows, an unkempt white beard, and a mad look in his eyes. Tonight he carried a book with him to the dinner table and continued reading throughout the meal, not deigning to make any but the most cursory conversation. Cammon, of course, was so tired he could only offer monosyllabic comments, which left Jerril and Lynnette to carry on a discussion by themselves. They didn’t mind; they had been married twenty years and still managed to find plenty to talk about. Though Cammon paid little attention to what it was. He finished his meal, stumbled to his room, and fell asleep before he had even managed to get himself undressed.

ITwent better the next day, if only a little. Cammon was able to build his mental retreat without totally losing track of where he was-to shut Jerril out without falling into some kind of waking dream. But that was when Jerril was just sitting there, gazing off into the distance. When Jerril began a determined assault on Cammon’s shielded mind, Jerril was able to stroll right into that firelit, snow-kissed temple.

“That’s amazing,” Jerril said, the first time it happened.

“What?” Cammon asked. He was feeling grumpy again. He had not realized Jerril was going to try so hard to break through his defenses. Jerril had taught Cammon virtually every trick Cammon knew. How could he keep the other man out?

“I could almost see it, for a moment-that place you’ve constructed in your mind. Your mental image is so vivid I can almost step inside.”

Projecting thoughts at Jerril had always been easier than protecting them from the older mystic. “Can you see the graphics on the wall?” Cammon said, imagining the lines and circles that were barely discernible in the crumbling paint and then imagining the memory inside Jerril’s head.

Jerril paused a moment, eyes only half focused, as if staring at an internal vision. “Very unusual,” he said at last. “Do you know what they are?”

Cammon shook his head and the vision faded. “Senneth thought they might be depictions of the sun goddess. The Bright Mother.”

“Ah. And this place is a temple?”

“Maybe. It was hard to tell. It was all falling down.”

“Call it up again, but this time try to keep me out.”

By day’s end, Jerril could still break through to the images in Cammon’s head, though each try took him longer. And it was becoming easier, if only slightly, for Cammon to keep his mind shut but his senses alert.

“Better,” Jerril said when lessons were over. “Time for dinner. How do you feel?”

“Just as hungry as yesterday, but not as tired.”

Jerril nodded his bald head. “That’s progress.”

Tonight, Areel had left his book behind and lectured instead on what he had been reading. Boring stuff, Cammon thought, scarcely paying attention. The first day he had arrived, Cammon had been able to tell that Areel was rife with magic, but it had been hard to define exactly what that magic was. Eventually he decided it had to do with things. Understanding them, finding them, fixing them, knowing how to put them to good use. If you lost your shoe or broke your spectacles, Areel was the man to see. If you wanted to buy a bolt of lace in a peculiar shade of pink, he could tell you exactly where such a thing might be found. He wasn’t especially good with people, except Jerril and Lynnette. Cammon liked him, but he wasn’t surprised when many others didn’t.

“The sword was broken then, and shipped back to Karyndein, both of the jewels still in the hilt,” Areel was saying, finishing up some tale about a king who’d lived two hundred years ago, as far as Cammon could tell. “Never to be seen in Gillengaria again!”