Venom's Taste - Lisa Smedman [26]
“Where did you get that rope, boy?” he’d asked.
Arvin’s answer-“I made it”-had saved him.
In the years since his escape from the orphanage, Arvin had deliberately avoided thinking about what had happened to the cleric that night. He’d hadn’t been willing to face the truth. He hadn’t wanted to wind up like his mother, frightened by her own dreams-and dead, despite her talent for catching glimpses of the future.
Arvin opened his eyes and acknowledged Zelia. He could no longer deny the obvious-even to himself. “I do have the talent,” he admitted.
Zelia smiled. “I could tell that by your secondary displays-by the ringing in my ears when you tried to charm me, and later, by the droning noise. Beginners often give themselves away.”
“That’s the thing,” Arvin hastily added. “I’m not even a beginner. I haven’t had any training at all.”
“I’m not surprised,” Zelia said. “Psions are extremely rare, especially in this corner of the world. Their talent often goes unrecognized. Even when a high-level power is manifested, it is usually attributed to some other magical effect.”
“High-level power?” Arvin echoed. He shook his head. “All I can do is make people like me. I have no control over it. Sometimes it works… and sometimes it doesn’t. And once, no, twice ever in my life, I was able to distract-”
“You could learn more. If I taught you-which I would, if you prove that you’re worth the time and effort.”
That startled him. Zelia was a psion? Arvin had always assumed his mother had been the only one in Hlondeth-maybe in all of the Vilhon Reach. But here, it seemed, was another.
That surprise aside, did he want to be trained? He had dim memories of his mother talking about the lamasery, far to the east in Kara Tur, that she had been sent to in the year her woman’s blood began. The discipline and physical regimen she’d been subjected to there had sounded every bit as strenuous as that imposed by the orphanage, but strangely, she’d spoken fondly of the place. At the lamasery, she learned the discipline of clairsentience-an art she’d used in later life during her work as a guide in the wild lands at the edges of the Vilhon Reach. She’d been in great demand in the years before Arvin was born.
Yet her talent had come with a price. Some of Arvin’s earliest memories were of being startled awake by a sharp scream and trying to comfort his mother as she sat bolt upright in the bed they shared, eyes wide and staring. She’d muttered frightening things about war and fire and children drowning. After a moment or two she’d always come back to herself. She would pat Arvin’s hair and hug him close, reassuring him that it was “just a bad dream.” But he’d known the truth. His mother could see into the future. And it scared her. So much so that she’d stopped using her psionics around the time that Arvin was born and had spoken only infrequently about them. Yet despite this, her nightmares had continued.
“I don’t know if I want to learn,” he told Zelia.
“You’re afraid.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to see my own death,” Arvin answered.
Zelia’s lips twitched. “What makes you think you will?”
“My mother did-though a lot of good it did her. She thought the vision would help her to avoid dying. She was-”
“Clairsentient?” Zelia interrupted.
Arvin paused. That wasn’t what he’d been about to say. He had been about to tell Zelia that his mother had been wrong in her belief that even the most dire consequences could be avoided, if one were forewarned. He’d been about to tell Zelia about that final night with his mother-about seeing her toss and turn in her bed and being able to make out only one of the words in her uneasy mutters: plague. The next morning, when he’d nervously asked her about it, she’d tousled his hair and told him the nightmare wasn’t something to be feared-that it would help keep her safe. She’d given him his cat’s-eye bead and left on the expedition she’d only reluctantly agreed to guide. Later