The Towers of the Sunset - L. E. Modesitt [121]
But the redhead is looking at the ground, her lips pursed tightly, her hands clasped behind her.
LXXVIII
CRESLIN DEMONSTRATES AGAIN, his white-oak wand arcing in slow motion.
Thoirkel, the black-haired soldier with the scraggly beard who had first met Creslin on the pier, follows the maneuver slowly, trying to duplicate the ease displayed by the silver-haired man.
Creslin stops him halfway through. “Your wrist . . .”
Thoirkel steps back and begins anew.
This time Creslin does not watch the maneuver fully but concentrates on the man himself, looking at the order and chaos warring within Thoirkel. Then he reaches out, and as Klerris has taught him to do with the plants and the mountain sheep, strengthens the order within the soldier.
“Oh . . .” Thoirkel staggers, shakes his head, and lowers the wand. He brushes his lank black locks off his forehead, then looks down at the white-oak wand in his hand.
“You’ll be all right, but you need more practice.” Creslin nods to the next man. “You are?”
“Narran, ser.”
Like Thoirkel, threads of white and black intertwine within the soldier; unlike Thoirkel, the white threads are strong in themselves. Creslin sighs silently, hoping that not many of the men are as chaos-dominated as Narran. He raises his wand again.
LXXIX
CRESLIN SLOWS HIS steps by the orchard that he and Klerris have reclaimed. The pearapples are just beginning to bloom, earlier than in the lands of Candar. And, too, the frosts will be later on Recluce than in Candar.
Megaera’s footsteps scrunch in the sandy clay of the road as she struggles to catch up with him.
He drops into a walk along the low stone wall separating the trail that will one day be a real road from the orchard. Farther south, along the eastern shore, the trail rises to the top of the black cliffs, to the site he and Klerris have picked out for the holding, and where Megaera has cleared the ground to bare rock and he has begun the stonework.
“You do . . . this . . . for . . . pleasure?” the redhead pants, sweat rolling down her face. Her thick hair is twisted into a bun at the back of her head. “With . . . boots . . . on?”
“Hardly for pleasure. It’s to make me a more efficient killing machine. You don’t fight when wearing sandals or going barefoot.” He smiles sardonically, setting his hand on the stone, then removing it from the sun-warmed heat. “You ready for the next part?”
“Next part?”
“The rest of the hill?”
“Not . . . yet . . .” Her breath is more regular now, but Creslin avoids looking at her, for even when she is disheveled and sweaty, he will find her desirable, and that desire will bring both of them pain.
Instead, his eyes travel across the gnarled trees that have begun to show new life, his senses reaching out to strengthen the flow within them. Beyond the trees, he sees the tan wool of one of the few mountain sheep that he and Klerris have coaxed out of the hills and into the regenerating greenery above Land’s End.
Some of the green is from the makeshift aqueduct and some from the tougher grasses that Klerris has coaxed into covering the clayey soil.
“What are you looking at?”
“The sheep.”
“Sometimes you’re like two different people. Working with stone and plants and animals, you can be so . . .”
Creslin takes a deep breath, not wanting to deal with the question she has raised. “Ready?”
“No. But I’ll follow you. Anything you can do . . . I’ll learn.” She wipes her forehead with her upper arm and takes another deep breath.
Creslin begins to jog along the short flat before the trail turns and heads upward and due south behind the rock jumbles that build to the high, black stone cliffs.
Behind him, Megaera’s lighter boots echo his steps.
On the winds, he can hear her murmurs between her gasping breaths. “Westwind .