Arms-Commander by L. E. Modesitt

Author:L. E. Modesitt [Modesitt, L. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Epic, Fiction, General, Fantasy Fiction, Recluce (Imaginary Place)
ISBN: 9780765363534
Publisher: Tor Fantasy
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

As she rode on, Saryn’s thoughts still drifted back to her encounter with the white mage. Although he might only have been a hedge mage, his fire- bolts had come uncomfortably close to turning Saryn and some of the guards into charred flesh and ashes. While she’d seen Nylan and even Ayrlyn create order shields, she’d tried that approach over the past few days, and it didn’t seem to work for her, possibly because neither order nor chaos seemed static to her, and it took far too much effort to try to erect any sort of barrier.

Abruptly, she tried to squash one of the biting yellow- and- black flies that seemed to pester her more than anyone else, but the fly buzzed off, circling around her head for yet another attack. She’d been able to change the junctures in rock. Were there similar junctures or nodes in the air? Ones that she could shift to create a barrier against things like pesky flies? Or at least create a bit of a targeted breeze to blow it away from her face and neck?

She glanced at the fast- moving cumulus clouds, puffy with shades of gray, moving slowly across the eastern sky, then tried to sense the flow or interplay of order and chaos within them, but they were beyond the range of her senses. What about the air around you?

She concentrated, just on feeling, sensing the air, all too quiet at the moment. There were eddies that were not exactly junctures or nodes but mixed the tiniest bits of order and chaos.

After several moments, she tried to smooth one of the eddies somewhere above her left shoulder. The eddy dissolved, and a slight puff of warm air ruffled her too- damp hair, hardly enough to push away a pesky fly, and too hot to be exactly cooling. Still... it was a beginning.

Oh well . . . you’ll have a few more days on the road to practice... Even with that thought, Saryn wondered if she’d ever gain a fraction of the control that she’d seen in Nylan or even in the hedge mage.

LVII

Late on eightday afternoon, Saryn and Zeldyan had just seated themselves on the north porch of Lord Deolyn’s hilltop mansion, looking at a meadow that sloped down to a small pond created by an ancient rock- and-mortar dam. Beyond the pond was another hill, covered in straight rows of apple trees whose fruit was showing signs of crimson, reminding Saryn that summer was fleeing, and that she seemed to have accomplished comparatively little.

Deolyn was unlike any other Lornian lord. His short blond hair, interspersed with silver, lay in tight ringlets close to his scalp. His bright green eyes almost seemed to bulge over a narrow nose and a small, silver, brush mustache. His face was deeply tanned and lightly wrinkled, and he was barely Saryn’s height. He wore a green tunic with yellow trim, the colors of his holding.

The three sat in a semicircle around a low table that held two carafes and three blue- tinted crystal goblets.

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