Storm Warning - Mercedes Lackey [155]
He blinked at her in surprise; she only grimaced. “Don’t ask me, I have no notion what could have caused something like that,” she told him.
He turned his attention back to the map, thankful that there were fewer red dots than green or yellow. There definitely was a pattern there; the dots were spaced out at equal intervals, and if you followed a line of them, they would sequence as three greens, a red, and three greens and a yellow. But there didn’t seem to be a center to the pattern, or a point of origin.
“I wonder—” An’desha began, then stopped.
“Go ahead,” Master Tam urged. “You know magic, and we don’t. If you can suggest some kind of meaning or interpretation, I for one would be happy to hear it.”
“Well—I wonder if what has happened is that with the transformed and blasted places, there was too much energy brought to bear, and that is why the damage?” Then he shrugged. “I am grasping at straws.”
“That’s no more than we’ve been doing,” Master Levy confessed to him. “Let’s follow that theory for a moment.”
Karal couldn’t understand more than half of what either of them said, but they seemed to understand each other, and that was the important part. Since An‘desha didn’t seem nearly as shy of these people as he had when he’d first walked into the room, and since Natoli was immersed in the discussion and ignoring everything else, Karal finally left them and assigned himself to one of the desks where others his age were making copies of the same chart that Master Tam had unrolled in front of An’desha.
I can make a copy of this to take back with me; that will save these others from having to make a spare. He helped himself to pens, ink, and paper, and when he had finished that task, he began making copies of his own notes for the other Masters, just as the rest were doing.
When his tired eyes threatened to unfocus completely, he finished one last page, and rolled up his map and the pages of descriptions of the “magic circles,” and went to find An’desha.
Despite the latter’s promises to Firesong, An’desha had been giving demonstrations of mage-craft to the engineers, and he was tired and ready to go back to the Palace. When Natoli declared her intention to defect as well, the whole group broke up, yawning.
“I’ll walk back to the Palace with you,” she said, as Karal handed An’desha back his cloak. “I’ve got a room in the wing where they put some Blues who don’t have patrons or aren’t highborn, and who also don’t live in town. We share it with the Healer- and Bardic-trainees.”
“I’d wondered,” Karal admitted, slinging his cloak around his shoulders, as Natoli found hers in the pile of student Blues. “You kept popping up in the Palace and you acted as if you belong there.”
“In a sense, it’s the only home I have,” Natoli admitted. “Father was Chosen after my mother died of complications of childbirth. No, it wasn’t me,” she added hastily. “It was a still-birth, and I was about four. He brought me with him to the Collegium since he hadn’t any place else to take me, and I’ve spent all of my life here. When he went out on circuit, one or another of the Heralds would take care of me until he got back.”
Well, it wasn’t the worst sort of childhood, though it was nothing like the warm family situation Karal had enjoyed.
“It sounds lonely,” An’desha said ingenuously as Karal opened the door and held it for the two of them.
Natoli only shrugged as she stepped out into the dark street. “Mostly, it was odd. When Father was here, he made sure I knew he wanted me there, and that he cared about me. For lack of anything else to do, once I got old enough, I took most courses in all the Collegia except the ones in Bardic that had to do with performing and composing,