The Seeker - Isobelle Carmody [84]
The Teknoguild was concerned with studying the Beforetime and researching the effects—past, present, and future—of the Great White. I had little interest in such things, but I had met secretly with Garth only that morning. I wondered if Roland knew.
“Garth … is Garth,” I said with a smile. Roland’s lip twitched.
There was a knock at the door, and Kella entered, carrying a jug.
Roland waved his ward in impatiently as he addressed me. “Soak in that, then rub some of the salve into the soles. And stay off your feet!” he growled, slamming the door behind him.
Kella poured the liquid in a flat pan, smiling ruefully. “He’s angry with himself, because your feet aren’t healing properly.”
I lowered my feet gingerly into the shallow pannikin. A sweet scent rose from the water. “Herb lore?” I guessed.
Kella nodded. “A recipe given to us by the Master of Obernewtyn himself.”
I smiled, never quite able to accept Rushton’s grandiose title. When I had first met him, he was an enigmatic farm overseer only a few years older than myself. No one had been more astonished than I to discover he was the legal owner of Obernewtyn.
Kella was staring into the fire, its orange glow playing over her cheeks. “Rushton has not come back yet from the highlands,” she said, a faint line of worry between her brows. I wondered idly if the healer was attracted to Rushton. It would be a pity for her. His brooding singleness of purpose made him blind to anything but his complicated plans for the future. I smiled wryly.
“It’s good to see you smile,” Kella said. The old fear of revealing myself caused me a moment of panic, then I consciously relaxed. The need for hiding my expressions was past, at least at Obernewtyn.
“Yet there is not much to smile at, even here,” I said somberly.
Kella’s look sharpened. “You spoke to the newcomers?”
I nodded. “Their news is worrying. When I was in the orphan homes, torture was nothing more than a rumor.”
Kella’s face was pale. The deliberate infliction of pain was an anathema to any healer, but torture was doubly dreadful, involving as it did both mental and physical pain forged into one. She disliked even the mind-bending activities of the Coercer guild, and this was far worse.
As if reading my thoughts, she said, “Miryum claims there are times when the end justifies the means, but even a coercer could not condone torture.”
Tactless Miryum was guilden of the aggressive Coercer guild, whose function was to defend Obernewtyn and prepare for battle with the Council, if it should come to that. There was a growing rift between the Healer and Coercer guilds. The members of each, along with futuretellers, could descend into the unconscious mind—we called it deep probing. But no two guilds used the ability to deep-probe in the same manner. The mind of a coercer was a weapon to suborn the will of other minds. By contrast, the healer used a probe, honed tendril-thin, for healing. It was little wonder the two guilds were at loggerheads—they used the same ability to opposing ends.
“Anyone would think you were a futureteller,” Kella said resignedly, clearly referring to the habit futuretellers had of drifting into a dream in the middle of conversations.
I laughed. “It might be pleasant. You would never be surprised by anything.”
“Not for me,” Kella said. “I prefer to live in the present. I don’t want to know the future.”
Without warning, the door was flung open by a wild-eyed Matthew. Seeing me, his anxious expression dissolved. “Here ye are! I’ve been searchin’ all over for ye!” he said accusingly.
I blinked at him. “Oh? I must have forgotten to say where I was going.”
Kella snorted, knowing I disliked the lack of privacy that went with being a guildmistress and often evaded such formalities as making my whereabouts known.
Forgetting his frustration, Matthew hurried over. “Rushton has just come back! An’ he’s called a guildmerge.”
“When?” I asked.
“Now!” Matthew said.
My heart jumped. Rushton often traveled outside the mountains, for there was no danger to the legal