The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [29]
As she made her way through the crowd, Valandario came across Neb, kneeling beside a travois and tying down some sacks of gear. He worked slowly, methodically, with an odd set to his shoulders, as if perhaps his neck or arms pained him. His yellow gnome stood nearby, hands on its hips, and watched with a frown. Val stopped beside him.
“Neb,” she said in Deverrian, “are you all right?”
He looked up at her, but for a moment he didn’t recognize her— she could see the lack in his ice-blue eyes, cold, narrowing, suddenly affronted. The yellow gnome reached over and pinched him. Neb laughed and shook his head in self-mockery.
“My apologies, Wise One,” Neb said, “I was thinking somewhat through.”
“Well and good, then, but you know, you need to close down your dweomer practices when it’s time to do mundane things.”
“I do know that!” He’d snapped at her, then once again covered it with a smile. “But you speak true, of course. Actually, I was only thinking about herblore, what plants will help wounds heal cleanly and the like.”
“Oh, well, then, that shouldn’t harm you. But do try to strike a balance, Neb, between this world and the ones beyond.”
“I’ll try harder to do just that.” But his tone of voice implied that he had no intention of following her advice.
As Valandario walked on, she was thinking that she was glad he was Dallandra’s apprentice, not hers.
Branna had already noticed the problem that Valandario had seen in Neb’s eyes. Even as the alar journeyed north, the two apprentices kept up the practices their teachers had set them. Every morning and evening, they found time for their work while the camp packed up from the night’s stop or set back up again in the sunset light. When it rained, the alar stayed in camp, giving them a day or two to catch up on anything they might have missed.
After the simplest dweomer exercise, even so little as tracing a pentagram in the air with his hand, Neb’s ice-blue glance turned cold and penetrating. He would seem to be looking at the view or whatever lay in front of him from a great distance away, as if he were unsure of its reasons for existing. Yet when he turned away and looked at Branna, he would smile, and the expression in his eyes became soft and warm again. This pronounced change made her feel that she was watching a shapechanger, not an apprentice.
On a morning when the rain kept the alar in camp, Neb spent some hours working through the steps of a simple ritual, tracing out a circle around him, then visualizing blue fire springing up at his command. Branna, who’d been doing some memory work, looked up from her book to watch him as he finished the exercise. This time the look in his eyes made her think of an honor-bound warrior who sees his worst enemy. Then he glanced her way and grinned.
“This is harder than I thought,” Neb said.
He’s back. The words formed themselves in Branna’s mind so clearly that she laid a hand over her mouth as if to keep them in. She covered the gesture with a cough.
“It is, truly,” Branna said. “My mind keeps wandering when I try to see the flames.”
“Mine, too. I keep thinking about that wretched plague back in Trev Hael.” Neb paused, frowning at the floor cloth. “I keep wondering how it spread so fast, and why it spread at all.”
“Well, my poor beloved, it was a truly ghastly horrid experience. I’m not surprised you can’t forget it.”
“It’s not a question of forgetting, but of understanding it.” He looked up, his eyes so grim and cold that she flinched. “Is somewhat wrong?”
“I’m not sure,” Branna said. “It’s like you become someone else at times. When you work dweomer, you turn into Nevyn, don’t you?”
“Well, so what if I do? I mean, I am Nevyn, really, when you think about it. I was him, and if we’re talking about the long view of things, I am him still.”
“You’re not, though. You’ve got a new life now.”
His look turned murderous, but only briefly. “Well, I suppose so,” he said. “Of course that’s true. On some level,