The Shifter by Jean Johnson

Author:Jean Johnson [Johnson, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101569146
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

“You really are different, you know?”

The comment from Traver’s younger brother, Tellik, snapped Kenyen’s eyes open. No longer sleepy, he worried over what the boy meant. The candles had long since been blown out, leaving their attic room dimly lit at best from the glow of the hearthfire embers down below. Mentally checking his disguise, he asked in Traver’s voice, “Uhh … how so?”

“Liking Solyn so much. Not complaining about your chores. And cheese-making.”

The disgust in Tellik’s voice amused Kenyen, relaxing him a little. This wasn’t quite as serious an accusation as he’d feared.

“Maybe I’m growing up,” Kenyen offered softly. Navigating the hazards of living another man’s life was a difficult task. He didn’t want to lie, but the real Traver’s life depended upon it. He also didn’t want to leave awkward questions behind, if he could escape with his deception undiscovered. And if it was …

Silence stretched between them. Kenyen felt the pull of sleep again, only to be awakened by another question.

“Traver?”

“Yes?”

“How do you get a girl to like you?” Tellik asked.

That question took him back a dozen years, back to when he was barely fourteen and his brother Kodan was a more worldly sixteen, almost seventeen, old enough to visit the earth-priestesses and start the courting rituals of the Plains. Only Kenyen’s question had ended, “… to like you, when you only have a few shapes?”

Many shapes were favored over fewer, since that was how a man displayed his strength down on the Plains. Constantly being in his brother’s shadow, able to shape half the number that Akodan now could … At the age of sixteen, Kodan hadn’t yet proven he could shape and hold ten pure forms, the requirement for a multerai, so his advice from back then had been less confident in such things, but more practical in other directions. Kenyen tried to shape his older brother’s advice for Tellik now, since the real Traver wasn’t here to play the part of the older and presumably wiser man.

“Women … girls young and old … want to be respected,” he stated slowly, dredging up the right words. He didn’t want to sound too Shifterai-ish, but there were certain things that surely applied to all cultures. “When you give a girl your attention, listening to what she has to say and respecting her ideas and beliefs, this is very flattering—it’s like how you feel when someone gives you that same kind of respect.”

Tellik snorted, shifting on his pallet. “I’d like to have more respect. I’m still just a kid in everyone’s eyes—and that’s another thing where you’re different. You don’t treat me like a little pest anymore.”

Kenyen chuckled. “You still are, but if you think about it, whatever you expect of a person, they’ll live up to it. Or down to it. If I treat you like a pest, you’ll act like one. If I treat you like a young man, you’ll try to act like one, too. Girls aren’t that much different. They do think differently. More caring, more cooperative.

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