“So what’s all this about my learning Rasesni?” Zandaril asked.
Penrys waved him aside with a remote look. “Shhh. That’s for later.”
She cocked her head at the closed outer door to her room on the third floor. The door between them, in adjacent student rooms, stood open, and Zandaril was seated in the one chair in her own room, while she perched cross-legged on the narrow bed. They seemed to be in an unoccupied corner of the half-empty building. “I’m waiting for someone to come. If I did that right, that’s what they’ll do.”
“I don’t like you showing them everything like that. They are not your friends.”
She sighed. “Of course not. But I have to get their respect, one way or another. If I can’t convince them it’s better for them to fight with us on their side, they’re dead anyway.”
“But not us,” he said. “Maybe we don’t belong here. What are we doing, caught up in their trouble?” The meal had not agreed with him, too different from the Kigali cuisine he had gotten used to. Different seasonings, everything subtly… wrong.
His comment got him her full attention. “Walk away? We could. Why not?”
It still didn’t feel right to him, and he spread as his hands as he tried to explain. “Among the Zannib, when there is a qahulaj, a bad wizard, one who makes things worse for his people, the word spreads. If other wizards hear of it, they set their tasks aside and come find him. And when there are enough, they remove the problem.”
He leaned forward and tried to make her understand. “Because if we don’t do it, who else can?”
Penrys said, “But this isn’t sarq-Zannib. And the wizards here, they’re as much our enemy as the Voice. Isn’t that what you’re saying?”
He nodded.
“Does it ever happen, in sarq-Zannib, that one of the wizards who comes when he hears of the problem is another bad one, and they fight on the wrong side together?”
Zandaril muttered, “I don’t know.” It had to have happened, people being what they were, but what did it mean that he knew no tales of it?
She half-smiled at him. “You understand, whatever I may have implied at dinner, I’m not going to be able to beat a trained attack from this many wizards—I’m sure of it. Once they learn how, it’s going to be deadly to us. You might want to get out now, while you can.”
He grunted. “If it will be a gamble anyway, we might as well be on the better side making an honest try.”
He lifted his head at footsteps outside the door, and Penrys rose and opened it to a knock. The young man in the hall with a masked expression was the first one who had risen to her challenge.
“I am Dzangabtig,” he announced with an inclination of his head. “We have decided we would like to study this with you, if you are willing, and I volunteered to come tell you.”
Penrys raised an eyebrow. “How many?” She made no gesture to invite him inside.
“All of us,” he insisted. “Tomorrow morning, yes? After breakfast?”
“I look forward to it,” Penrys said, and shut the door in his face.
“When did you know you would be a wizard?” Penrys asked him.
It was still too early for sleep, but they were disinclined to leave their rooms on this first night, and Penrys was in an odd mood, despite her success at acquiring hostile students. Zandaril had not liked her summation of the danger she would be putting them in by teaching these Rasesni wizards how to fight more effectively, and he wondered if she feared it as well.
“Childhood stories, you want?”
“Why not?” She lay stretched out on the bed, fully clothed. She raised her head and looked at him, seated in his chair. “Unless you would rather not, of course…”
He waved her concern aside. “I was not yet yathbantudin, not yet nine years old, and it was beginning of the spring season, the time of the taridiqa, so I was still in the winter camp, with my younger siblings and envious of my brother Butraz, impatient to join him next year.
“I had my chores, like all the children in the camp, and one of them was to bring meals to Umali, when my mother sent me. The women took charge of providing for those who lived alone, and most wizards live alone.”
He glanced at her sideways to see how she took that statement, but there was no reaction.
“This was his first year not on the taridiqa, for as long as I had been alive. He seemed ancient to me, and all of my friends addressed him as ‘grandfather’ and stayed out of his path.”
They’d made a game of it, in fact. He’d realized years ago that Umali could not have been oblivious to it, but he’d made no sign of noticing at the time. Beneath his dignity, perhaps.
“This time, when I brought him his meal, he was in a bad humor, and he barked at me to get out. I bowed and set down his basket in a hurry, but when I turned to go, he told me to stay. Only this time he said it out loud, and then I understood that the first command had been silent.”
“Ah,” Penrys commented.
“Yes. So all morning, until my mother came to find out where I had gotten to, we sat together in his kazr, on his jimiz, what we call a scholar’s rug—he unrolled it between us, and my heart sang at the honor—and talked and talked, and never uttered a sound.”
A world had opened for him that day, as though he had climbed his first mountain and seen a new landscape on the other side.
“What did your mother think?”
“Wizards run in families, but most of them never marry or have children. It’s more like those mules—you have to keep breeding the horses and donkeys to get new ones.”
A snort of laughter made him glance at Penrys. *So, something like this?* She pictured a seated elderly man with a turban from which jutted the long and shaggy ears of a mule.
*He would have skinned me alive if I’d ever shown him something like that.*
“My mother’s family had produced no wizard for four generations, but the blood was there. And here I was, proof of it. And young, too, by a few years.”
He remembered his mother’s face when she found him there, in Umali’s kazr. “My mother was proud, but sad, too. I didn’t understand why, then.”
“Hmm?”
“Wizards lead lonely lives. They are respected and cared for, they are important to the clan. But they don’t marry or, if they do, it doesn’t turn out well.”
Penrys turned over on her side to look at him. “Why not?”
*Could you marry the mind-deaf?*
“It would be hard,” she conceded. “Perhaps.”
“There aren’t many female wizards, bikrajtayab, at least among the Zannib—I don’t know why. They have no problem finding a suitable wizard.”
“And what happens with their children?”
“Mixed, some one way, some the other.”
Penrys pursed her lips. “There are female wizards here, a few.”
“We have songs, we do, about what the ordinary wife of a wizard gets up to, while her husband is away, doing wizard work. They’re funny songs, of course, but my mother’s face…”
“You must have hated that, thinking that would be your life.”
He nodded. “And it made my friendships awkward, most of them. My family, well, they were not afraid of me, a child. But they were sorry for me.”
He cleared his throat. “And it worried them, too, as they got older—this reminder that it was in their blood, too.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask if it had been like that for her, too, when he remembered that she didn’t know, and he swallowed the question.
“What was the training like?” she asked.
“We were a big clan, so we had two more wizards who traveled with the taridiqa. Very useful for messages, we all were. Umali got me started and passed me along to them when they returned to the winter camp. They taught me on the tarizd and in the zudiqazd, too, after he died.”
He raised his head and looked at her. “I was lucky. Many clans have no wizards, and young ones go unrecognized, sometimes all their lives. I had three of them.”
“But…?”
“They all agreed with each other!” It fairly exploded out of him. “There was a single opinion among them on any subject. If I questioned it, if I suggested an alternative, they were united in denial.”
Ah, the evening he had raged in Butraz’s tent, trying to explain his frustration. His brother had listened sympathetically. “What happens,” he’d said, “when the dirum-malb, the junior herd-mistress, disagrees with her mentor, over and over?”
“They separate,” Zandaril had replied, and his brother nodded.
He framed his response so Penrys could understand. “When a clan has no wizards to provide training, or if an apprentice becomes… restless, they seek out another wizard from some other clan in the tribe or even, if necessary from another tribe.
“So, I bridled my tongue and completed my apprenticeship, and they declared me ‘Zan-daril,’ a journeyman and presented me with my jimiz.”
“But that’s your name,” she said. “You can’t have been born to that name.”
“I am still a journeyman, until I complete my nayith, my masterwork.”
If we survive.
“Until then, that name will do. These foreigners,”—his gesture took in Chang’s squadron as well as the building around them—“they don’t know our customs. It’s no matter for them.”
“What’s your real name? Do you get it back?”
“Not until a jarghal, a master wizard, decides I have completed my nayith. Until then, only my family…”
He felt her withdrawal and realized she thought he classed her with the other foreigners. It was not his intention to exclude her, and yet it was true.
“I have traveled all over sarq-Zannib, and several times to Kigali,” he said, “For almost ten years I have bought books and studied with the other wizards I have met. Most were like my teachers, but not all.”
The familiar ache set in. “I miss my family. I try to visit their zudiqazd each year, and bring them tidings and gifts.
“They wish me well, I know they do.” He tapped his forehead meaningfully. “They dust the books I leave behind and introduce me to their children, and tell me about the increase to my herds. But I want to be part of their lives again.”
“Why not return for good, then?” she muttered.
“I’m not done. I can’t help it—something drives me to find out more, to do something with my learning.”
He stopped and looked at her. *And then I met you.*
*Another mentor?* He could feel the constraint in her question.
*More than that. Much more.*
Zandaril stayed awake, thinking, after Penrys had finally gone to sleep, her back fitted against his chest. He could still feel in his muscles those phantom sensations from her demonstration in the council meeting that afternoon, what it felt like to her to fly, with his own weight dragging her down, the feel of the arrows piercing her.
Her guidance in how he could follow her sensations when they made love was key to showing him how to find her core knowledge, that portion of her mind where fundamentals resided.
The things they had in common, like riding, did not engage his attention, but her knowledge of Ellechen-guma became his to employ, and they’d held conversations where he was much more fluent than he’d ever been in the spoken language. As he thought about it, he found he’d even absorbed some of the art of being female, matters of dress and carriage that he had never considered—but this he couldn’t mention without embarrassment.
He understood better now how she searched for minds when she scanned her surroundings, and what to look for when seeking animal minds. All of these were new skills for him, and he suspected when she was out of range the knowledge would fade away, but if he worked at them to make them his own, there was no reason the knowledge wouldn’t become permanent.
Finally, she’d pointed him at a wizard sleeping in a distant room and told him to talk to her in Rasesni. And he’d been able to do so, drawing upon that man.
In a single night, he’d become a better wizard, a different one. Penrys had asked him to monitor her during the class lessons to come, to learn whatever she was learning, if he could, and now he understood how that might be possible.
He knew there was still one barrier between them. She hadn’t pushed him to mind-share in the same way, after he’d explained the Zannib discomfort with it, weeks ago. She’d left him that privacy.
And now he found he neither needed it, nor wanted it.
He leaned down and nuzzled the back of her neck.
“Hmm?” came sleepily up to him.
“I wanted to share with you what you do to me, Pen-sha,” he murmured in her ear, “When I do this… and you move, yes, like that…”
