Kaylar normally would have approached someone as distressed as Rosalea was and attempted to physically console them, but in Rosalea’s case, he was not sure what impact that might actually have on her. “It is all right,” he said a couple more times as he waited and watched her. Did magically burning her actually cause this problem? He wondered, looking at the still hissing and molten hand prints on the new completely crystalline barn floor. Even with a burn, are humans able to produce more magic than their bodies and spirits can hold? But, as he traced that thought, he realized that even if she was not wholly human, he did not think that elves or dwarves could overflow with magic if restrained. He also saw that even with a big expenditure of her magic, it hovered in the environment in a surprisingly broad radius around her, giving information about everything from plants and animals to moisture and temperature. He could not imagine what it would be like to live with that much going on, but she seemed relieved… even if she was crying.
She stopped. He found a cup and filled it with some clean water from one of the pumps and floated it over to her. “There.” He summoned from one of his gems a warm towel, and he floated that to her as well, “For your face. I am going to bring Rhainnon here, all right? I will explain.” He felt her surge of panic. He cleared his throat, “I will explain that I thought I was helping you when I was actually hurting you. Your other paranoia about her parents I will allow you to continue to keep to yourself.“
She looked at her scarred left hand and breathed out, “Do not do anything to them,” she said in tones that were all croak since she had just been sobbing.
“I reserve the right to run my towns as I please, but for your sake, I will not do anything too harsh about how you have been treated.” Kaylar said.
She looked up at him with eyes that were a little bloodshot, and he was surprised by the intensity in them. She was willing to fight him on this point. Is it because they are Rhainnon’s parents? Or did they treat you kindly at some point? Or are you just contrary to me? He decided he did not want a fight, and he changed the subject. “After Rhainnon comes, I am taking you back to the castle. You and I are going to spend some time learning about magic.”
He was pleased as that distracted her from looking for ways to challenge him. Even better, Rhainnon also arrived with good timing, though she looked and felt frantic. “What happened?” she asked with giant eyes as soon as she stepped on the floor.
***
Rosalea stared at the floor. What do I even say? I was so mean and impatient with her.
However, to Rosalea’s surprise, even before Kaylar started talking, Rhainnon rushed over to her. “Rosalea, are you all right?” She crouched down near her, though she avoided the still cooling molten prints on the ground that still smoked a little. “What happened?” As she got down to Rosalea’s level, she made an upset little noise, “Oh, you’ve been crying? I’m so sorry!”
***
Rosalea tensed as Rhainnon wrapped her arms around her shoulders, pressing her chest against the top of her head, hugging her just like that in that awkward position. “I am also very sorry,” she said. Her eyes itched a little, but she felt pretty cried out for one night. She was aware of how awkward this position was, but she almost didn’t dare move and disrupt the moment.
“It is okay; you were a little right. I was pressuring you.”
Rosalea tried to think what to say back, but the dragon spoke, “I am somewhat at fault. In trying to help Rosalea by keeping a seal on her magic, I was causing her some harm. Obviously Rosalea was not comfortable telling me that, but I have cleared it up. I want to take her back with me tonight and teach her some more magic.”
Rhainnon let Rosalea go, and Rosalea slowly sat up. “That is great news! You will get better now, right?” she reached out and put her hand on Rosalea’s head. Her fingers felt cool, and Rosalea felt flustered by all the sudden touching. But, she nodded yes, she would start to feel better. “I can come visit?” Rhainnon asked Kaylar.
“Of course. I have every intention of bringing Rosalea back here when we both understand her magic better.” Rosalea held in a small noise as Rhainnon leaned over and hugged her again.
“I am so sorry; I guess I didn’t understand either. I just… I started thinking you’d poisoned yourself… and… I…”
Rosalea did not want her to talk about it any more. “You were worried,” she validated Rhainnon’s feelings and the girl nodded, squeezing her harder and then letting her go. I had to tell a lie and maybe a little I was giving up… but she didn’t finish the thought as she remembered the dragon could always be listening.
Rhainnon sighed and stood up, offering a hand up for Rosalea. “Do you know what you are?” she asked. Rosalea tilted her head, taking Rhainnon’s hand up, but then she realized the moment she was on her feet the level of fatigue she was feeling as her head literally swam. “You are entirely too nice and just… just wild… shy? I think I want to say for someone as tough and stand-offish as you are, you are way too patient and nice.”
Rosalea thought about Taigan saying something similar, but she did not think she was all that nice. It was much easier to see herself as Ulric and the dragon saw her; stubborn and foolish. “I am sorry for what I said.” It had been petty to bring up her parents or to suggest that Rhainnon should choose. She felt guilt all over again for leaving Nerric after all the times she had forced him to choose between getting along with Ulric or supporting her.
Rhainnon just grinned at her.
“Rosalea, you are tired, so I am going to take you home now,” was all the more warning she got before she was surrounded by green once more. If I was not going to end up in the same position I was in here, I would lay down, Rosalea though tiredly.
A moment later, she was out. She had a feeling that gem time did not pass the same as normal time. It would make sense, if it was similar to the “earth storage” the Uyrans used, then she had seen hot things disappear, only to be summoned back days later still hot. She was faced with a rather familiar room. Her books had been cleaned up, the bed had new blankets and sheets, but she recognized the rugs and wall hangings immediately.
“Do not look quite so sour. Tonight, I will not lock you in. In the morning, you may wander within the castle or through the gardens,” Kaylar rumbled. Rosalea relaxed the muscles in her face immediately in an attempt to conceal her emotions. She was a little relieved to hear that there would be no efforts to lock her in again. “I will send someone with soup soon, and you should rest as much as you can.”
She bowed politely to him. He nodded to her and left, and she listened for the door to lock, but it did not. For an instant, after the doors shut, Rosalea saw what looked like pale silver manacles flash on her arms and legs, but then they disappeared. That must be the spell he puts on everyone to keep them here, she thought, once she was certain she no longer felt the dragon in her head. He must have adjusted them so I can move around here. She had run into the barrier and felt it out in Mire and in the fields. She wished she knew how they worked.
She sighed. She couldn’t bring herself to like him, but despite herself, she found herself liking him a good deal more. As promised, soup came, and Rosalea was able to eat it and go straight to sleep.
She woke a little after dawn, as she was used to doing after working in the shepherd field even after this short amount of time. She sat in quiet silence for a while, and then got dressed. Oralee had left another pale blue dress for her. Rosalea wasn’t sure that she liked pale blue much. It reminded her of ice with her white skin and silver hair in it. Still, who was she to complain? She brushed her hair and put a nice braid in it. She was hungry, and she felt relief because it was more normal than she had felt for awhile. She spent time meditating and cleaning up her magic, which still felt over-full, but not like it was overflowing. She was looking forward to a chance to go outside and use some of it.
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Oralee arrived shortly after she finished tidying her inner river, and seemed surprised to see her up. “Hungry?”
Rosalea nodded. “That is good. I have brought food. Kaylar asked me to come get you up; he intends to return here after visiting Rhainnon.” Oralee set the platter down on the table, setting it down with a clatter of quite a few dishes. “You are already up though, so you will be ready in plenty of time. Let me know if you need anything else.”
Rosalea nodded to her again. It was a relief to find that she had been brought more than normal portions because she felt capable of eating it all. When she finished the whole meal, and still felt a little hungry, she was even more relieved. To her, it meant that her body was able and willing to get better now, and that she was finally passed those moments of failing.
Kaylar arrived soon after she had polished off everything that had been set before her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, relaxing and feeling a bit fuller once she had stopped eating. He immediately looked to the empty dishes.
“I am glad to see that you were able to eat well,” the dragon said as she bowed to him. “This seems to be a good sign for your recovery.” She nodded slowly, not that surprised that he agreed with her, as she cautiously watched him.
He shifted a bit on his feet, turning to leave the room again. “I have concluded that I need to teach you better control of your magic. I should hate for something else to happen that would endanger you or someone else again. The first thing that I noticed was that you had to vent off that extra magic in bits, each relating to the magic that had been stored up. Do you not know how to use your magic as a whole?”
She had never even heard the term before. She shook her head slowly. Kaylar was watching her. Expecting… something. “I have not had many teachers,” she said after a moment. “I have been best trained in the use of weather magic. I do not understand my changer magic very well…”
Kaylar was intrigued looking. “I suppose that explains partially why you did not know how to heal.”
“I had been taught changers cannot heal unless they have liana.”
“That is ordinarily true,” Kaylar allowed. “The original human shapeshifters could use both mind control abilities and heal, up until the split between Iesha and Urye. You have magic on your own that is well developed, so you will only grow more powerful when a liana arrives. You cannot add more magic types to yourself, you already have them all. Who taught you? Where did you come from before you came to Mire?”
Rosalea looked down. “Right before Mire, I came from a Uryan camp. I learned a little from the liana there. I learned a little from a weather mage named Nerric. The rest have been acquired through different books.” Rosalea tried desperately to still her emotions, since she was deliberately making an omission about where she really came from. Which was what he had really asked, despite her literally answering his question.
***
Interesting evasion, Kaylar thought as she told him she had come from Uryan camps. She was clearly raised Ieshan, but desperate, it seemed, to hide that portion of her story from him. “Well, it seems then, that your education has been patchy at best. Let us see how you do. We shall head outside for this.” He noted that she seemed relieved and even happy to be going outside. If he had realized cold open air was going to be her thing, he would have used it as a reward well before now. Most humans he knew wanted to avoid late fall weather and stay where they were warm.
They went outside into the garden. He took her to the fish and duck pond, which was looking fairly frosty. “Here is some water and sunlight. You should have both the major materials related to your weather element. Show me what you can do.”
She started with the basics. First she motioned with her hands, and a thin stream of water rose out of the pond. She flexed and shaped with her fingers, and he saw it form the shape of a wolf. She did not move her lips, which told him she was quite a powerful mage. The wolf ran in place as she wriggled her fingers. I used to tease Annie… she broke off, trying not to think about whatever it was she remembered. She clenched her fist, and the wolf dispersed into tiny little droplets.
She made gathering motions, and the water droplets gathered together. It surprised him to see a small little storm cloud form, that then rained down a moment later. She brought her two hands together; the water condensed again between her two hands. She had lost a lot of the volume in shaping, dispersing, and raining it. She focused on it, making clawing motions with her hands. The water soon began bubbling and steaming. She turned her hand, suspending the boiling water just above it. She made a shove motion at it with her hand, stopping just short of the surface of the water. The steam hissed out of it and the boiling stopped. She did that several more times, and it turned to ice.
He noticed she was showing signs of physical fatigue, though she had plenty of magic to spare. She was sweating a little, as she dropped the ice ball into the pond. She looked up at the sunlight, made a fist with her hand. Light gathered in it. She opened her hand and had a reasonably formed ball of light that lasted about five seconds before she lost her grip on it.
“So, you are very good at manipulating water and temperature, have some skill manipulating light. Have you ever handled lightning?”
“I- called lightning once. It was cloudy at the moment. I didn’t have a good grip on it, and it struck me.”
Kaylar was impressed. Even weather mages were not invulnerable to lightning strikes, though their power resisted it. It was a testament of how powerful she really was. “I understand it is difficult to do either of these things. Did the weather mage you learned from know them?”
She shook her head no. I barely spent any time learning directly from the weather mage. Kaylar decided it was probably because she was lucky there was a weather mage to teach her at all in the Uryan camps.
“Very well then. Show me what you can do with plants.”
She made a motion, and he realized that she was going through a motion of putting something down and picking something else up. Not only does she not know how to use her magic together, she goes through the motions of switching focus. That is going to be messy to unlearn. She looked at a plant in the pond, “That one tells me it is a certain type of water lily, and that it prefers to sleep in the fall.” She looked at some of the grass beneath her feet. She made gestures with her fingers that brought the blades wriggling to life and enhanced their thickness and size.
She stood slowly, now she looked tired. She had no discipline using her magic, if it wore her out this soon. “Is that all you can do?” She shook her head no. “I can levitate myself on the air and move things with it. I can harden earth, force it to move a little, and pull things down to it.” She braced herself for a demonstration.
While he loved seeing her trying to actually cooperate, he put a stop to it. “No, let us pause demonstrations here. You are still recovering, and I can see you are tired. Do you understand essa magic?”
“A little. I do not really have much, and I have not tried to use it.”
“What of your changer magics, what can you do?”
“I can hear animals,” she opted for verbal, not willing or not able to demonstrate. “I recently learned to heal because of you.”
“Mind control?” he persisted.
She looked away.
“I am not judging you. Mind control?”
“Memories can be made using it,” she answered. “Or taken away.” And what you do to listen in.
Kaylar chuckled a bit as she called him out. She tensed for a second, but he reassured her, “Yes, I also have the ability to get into minds; I am just not usually noticed. What about the Death Knife?”
“I will never use that.”
“I did not ask you to use it. I only asked whether you knew how to use it.”
“I have never used it, but I know how.”
“So, we need a lot of work in plant magic, terra magic, essa magic as well as some of the magic that goes with it. Come with me.” He walked her toward a gazebo, encouraging her to sit. She seemed a lot more at ease just at the moment, like she had forgotten how upset she had been with him earlier. She seemed content to be day dreamy out in the garden if he would let her. She likes learning things that are taught to her, though judging on how little she read the books Oralee brought for her, she does not like learning them for herself. Perhaps that is why so little of it transferred to her. Or, the books were limited and poorly written. I am still intrigued as to why the Uryans ever let her go, let alone the Ieshans. She has all five magics. If she had all the human races present in her, she would be the One of their legends. She didn’t look like someone who had all the races to him. But if she is the One, I must let her leave. Dragon law or not.
That was a little embarrassing. He was the one who wrote most of the law, and that would make him the first he knew of it to make an exception for it.
Since they had been settled for a while, one of his maids with terra magic levitated stone dishware out to them. There was warm tea, fruit, and biscuits.
Rosalea was very grateful to the maid for the food and drink. Kaylar smiled and for a moment, he enjoyed the peaceful atmosphere. “Thank you for demonstrating for me. I am giving you the afternoon to yourself, which will give you time to recover so we can do some more. You have a lot of room to grow, and I look forward to it.”
She almost… almost smiled at him. But saved herself from such a mistake against her feelings only at the last moment, as she remembered how much she did not like him. She bowed to him, and thanked him with the most heartfelt tone he had heard out of her yet. Excellent, I understand you. I just need a little time to make things right and learn more about you.