The Talented Read online

  “I picked up on that.”

  “He disapproves of their selection process, mostly. Blacksmiths were one of the last groups they tried.” Louella shook her head. “I reckon they thought smithing took more brawn than brain, but Pieter has plenty of both.”

  “He doesn’t seem to have a problem with soldiers,” Adrienne commented.

  “Pieter’s father was a blacksmith in one of the soldiering camps to the north,” Louella told her. “And I don’t have a problem with soldiers either, at least not universally. I began my apprenticeship as a healer when I was twelve. I’ve helped all sorts of people in all sorts of professions. There are good people and bad people making up the world, and I don’t think any job has more of one kind than the other.”

  “Even healing?” Adrienne asked. It was one thing to hold that opinion of people in other professions, but much harder to look into your own profession and see that unsettling truth.

  Louella smiled weakly. “My heart wants to say no, but my head knows better. People become healers for all sorts of reasons, not just because they want to help people and ease their pain.”

  “The same with soldiers,” Adrienne said. “Not everyone joins to serve and protect, and others want nothing more than to do just that.”

  “May I ask how your training is coming along?” Louella asked, her blue eyes gently probing as she changed the subject. She seemed very different from the intense, almost demanding woman who had been studying a bowl of pig’s blood not an hour before. More personable, and much more kind. “Ben is training you, correct?”

  “Yes. My training is progressing slowly,” Adrienne told her with a weighty sigh. “I can achieve Oneness, but I have trouble consistently reaching the level of awareness of my surroundings that Ben says is necessary.”

  “You’ve reached Oneness already?” Louella asked, her eyes growing wide. “It takes most people weeks. Months, even. How did you do it?”

  “I read the book before I ever got to Kessering, so that sped the training up,” Adrienne explained. “And this ‘Oneness’ thing is something I’ve been doing since I was young, I just didn’t realize it at the time.”

  “Really?” Louella asked. “The scholars must have been in a frenzy. After waiting so long to begin training a soldier, it must come as a shock that you’re progressing faster than any of us did.” Louella seemed pleased by the situation, and Adrienne suspected Louella liked the idea of the scholars being caught off guard.

  “I wish I could figure out how to become aware of my surroundings more consistently,” Adrienne told her. “I hate that it can be so unreliable.”

  “You’re probably over-thinking the whole thing,” Louella told her. “Quit trying so hard, and it will happen.”

  ••••••

  After an hour of trying and failing to achieve the deep level of Oneness she had first experienced in Ben’s office, Adrienne left her small room at the inn and crossed the square to the building where the commission met and Ben lived, though neither were part of her destination today.

  Today she was interested only in the library.

  The library in Kessering was vast, much larger than Adrienne would have expected of such a small city. Most of the books were organized in an orderly fashion, and there was a man who worked in the library who kept track of where the books were and what could be found in them. It was an amazing skill that Adrienne thought could probably rival Ben’s Talent. Yet when it came to the older books that were kept on the lower levels, the librarian had little knowledge.

  Her Talent continued to allude her, and both Pieter and Louella had duties that took up much of their time, so Adrienne had taken to haunting the library rather than sitting in her room or wandering streets filled with people who feared her. She stuck to the areas that held the oldest books, hoping to find another book or journal that referenced the abilities she was trying so hard to develop. Ben had shown her a few others, but they were all written after Asmov’s journal, when Talents were already fading into the things of story and legend. Surely Asmov’s journal could not truly be the best reference.

  So far she had found no mention of Talents or anything that might relate to them, but something else had caught her interest the last time she was in the library. The books that she had pulled out were written in Old Samaroan, and she doubted anyone had picked them up in decades except perhaps to dust them off every decade or so, but to her they were infinitely more interesting than any of the newer books. They predated the rift between Samaro and Almet, but something about the writing suggested that tension had been brewing between the two countries even then.

  There was a table down at this lower level, long-forgotten but still solid, and Adrienne had piled books on it. She had brought candles with her, as the torchlight was too dim to read by, and she picked up the first book. It was something of a journal, but it was written in a different style than Asmov’s had been. This journal, though personal, was more focused. It did not contain the wild anecdotes and tangents that Asmov’s had. Instead, it seemed to have been written by the personal servant of one of the Fuiron princes, and focused almost entirely around political events and other things that the writer had deemed important on a large scale. The writer had seemed more interested in chronicling events than capturing his own thoughts, and despite the fact that the dialect was different from what Adrienne was used to, she was interested enough to work through it.

  There are rumors coming out of Almet that are troubling. Prince Zuka has confided in me that his father is worried, but that the king would not tell him why. It is not my place to ask, or to try to out-guess the prince, but I suspect it has something to do with the slaves. One of the girls went missing the other day, and there were more questions asked about it than is usual for a runaway slave girl of little consequence.

  I mentioned this to my uncle, and he reminded me of the slave uprising some months ago in Almet. It is amazing to me that slaves would rise up and cause the damage that is said to have occurred as a result, and I expressed my concerns, but he said that it is unlikely to happen here. The Almetians are said to treat their slaves like animals, which is no doubt the reason for the uprising and consequent damage.

  I tried to ask my uncle more in hopes of satiating my curiosity about why there would be so much interest in the disappearance of one young slave, but he told me not to ask so many questions. He reminded me that it is not our place to wonder why our betters do what they do, but instead to serve.

  I will listen for more clues from Prince Zuka, however. I do not always plan to be a servant, and knowledge could make all the difference.

  Adrienne had never read a text that explicitly talked about a time when Samaro still had slaves. It was strange to read of it, and to think that people had compared the practices of how two countries had treated their slaves and found one side favorable, when to Adrienne the practice itself was abominable. She wondered how long after this journal entry slavery in Samaro had been abolished, and put the journal into a pile to be read further. She opened another book, and found that it seemed to be a history. The language was formal, not the dialect of an intelligent servant, and the words were drier, but it was the content that had her narrowing her eyes in concentration.

  King Ignatio Fuiron decided today, the sixty-seventh day of the eighteenth year of his rein, to confront King Eunice Bell of Almet about the armies amassing just north of the border. The armies are said to number upwards of ten thousand, and some reports say that the soldiers seem to be afflicted by a terrible plague. Three pigeons have been sent to the Almetian king to arrange for a meeting, and a rider has gone out as well, should the pigeons fail to reach their destination.

  There is speculation that the armies are linked to the figure the common people are calling the Dark Mage, and that is the matter that King Fuiron will discuss with King Bell at their meeting. At this time, who or what the Dark Mage is remains uncertain, but there has been an unusual amount of migration from Almet into Samaro, a larg
e number of them escaped slaves. This has resulted in King Fuiron temporarily suspending the law that all Almetian slaves are to be returned to Almet if they are found and captured until such time that he can discover the reason for the mass escape.

  Rumors that those close to the Dark Mage die in high numbers are unconfirmed but will be addressed by King Fuiron.

  It is believed at this time that the Dark Mage is a separate entity from the ruling body of Almet, and King Fuiron has expressed his belief that the situation will be resolved peacefully between the two nations.

  The name Ignatio Fuiron was vaguely familiar as one of the Fuiron rulers, but it was not that which had her frowning. She had never heard of the Dark Mage before, and despite her schooling on the conflict between Samaro and Almet, she had never heard of Almet raising armies before the rift between the two countries had formed.

  She set that book aside with the page’s journal and began looking through the other books for more mention of Ignatio or the Dark Mage. She was just setting aside the third book which seemed unlikely to yield anything interesting when she heard footsteps coming toward her. She looked up and saw Ben coming around the corner, a look of consternation on his face.

  “What are you doing down here?” he asked in a tone that was dangerously close to accusatory.

  “Reading.”

  “No one reads these books,” Ben said. “They’re written in Old Samaroan.”

  Adrienne didn’t bother to sigh or to point out—again—that she could read Old Samaroan as well as any scholar, perhaps better than some after all of her study in the library basement. “I wanted to see if anything else was written about the Talented—about people with abilities,” she clarified. For some reason she did not fully understand, she was reluctant to tell Ben about what she was finding in the histories. She did not know if he knew anything about the Dark Mage, but something kept her from asking.

  And the lie was true enough. It was one of the reasons she had come back to this section in the first place, though it was no longer the driving force behind her study.

  “There’s nothing else down here,” Ben told her. “The commission looked through all the books before we began training anyone.” He picked up the book she had just put down and thumbed through it. “And this book is too recent for mention of abilities anyway.”

  “I didn’t realize,” Adrienne said, though she had known that any mention of the Fuirons would have postdated the original Talented by centuries. “Maybe I’ll see if I can find some older books.” She would rather let him believe the lie than explain the truth.

  It was clear that Ben thought that was a waste of time, but he didn’t say anything. He was probably grateful that she wasn’t out threatening people in the streets. “Fine,” he said. “Just put the books back when you’re finished.”

  When Ben had left, Adrienne opened up another book, scanning for mention of slaves, Zuka, Ignatio, or the Dark Mage. She saw fragments here and there, oblique mentions of the situation that seemed to be building. These books, like many others written at the time, had not been written for reading by someone unfamiliar with the what was happening at the time. There were no introductions or explanations to what was written, and Adrienne was forced to make inferences about events that had taken place nearly a millennia ago.

  She flipped a page in a book that seemed promising and a folded piece of paper fell out. The paper was yellow and fragile along the lines it had been folded, but it held together. She moved it into better light, but was stumped by what she saw.

  The language was not Samaroan, Common or Old. It was strange to her, with only the vaguest similarities between it and Old Samaroan. Yet it had been tucked away in this book, and Adrienne could not ignore the feeling that it could be the key to understanding what she was reading.

  She gently placed it back between two pages of the book and reached for another book on the stack. She would come back to it later.

  ••••••

  The edges of the sword were razor sharp and pierced the skin of Adrienne’s thumb when just the slightest pressure was applied. Adrienne grunted in approval as she stuck her thumb in her mouth to remove the blood before she began to test the balance of the newly forged weapon. She swung the blade around, testing the resistance, the heft and range of motion.

  It felt as comfortable in her hands as her own sword.

  Adrienne whipped around and swung the blade deep into the trunk of an old stump. She pulled it out, and it came as smooth as silk from the tough wood without any catching or binding. The strange bluish metal was unblemished, the edges still just as sharp. It was perfect.

  “Hmm,” she said, examining it once more, narrowing her eyes and looking for the slightest sign of weakness, the slightest imperfection in the long blade.

  “You won’t need to sharpen it,” Pieter told her in his deep voice, breaking into her careful inspection of his work.

  “Ever?” She looked up into the brown eyes of the blacksmith who had come to be her friend over the weeks since their introduction.

  Pieter shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I never had to sharpen one of my blades yet,” he said. “Not since I started using my Talent, anyway. The whet stone does no more to it than that old stump did.”

  Adrienne ran her fingers up and down the smooth face of the sword blade. Despite the color, which had made her doubtful at first, it was a beautiful sword, perfectly balanced, and apparently indestructible. She looked into Pieter’s watchful brown eyes. “It’s incredible,” she said honestly.

  “I’m glad you like it,” Pieter told her.

  Adrienne liked and respected professional pride, and had no trouble offering praise where it was due. “The sword I have now was a gift on my fifteenth birthday, when I was officially acknowledged as a soldier. It was forged by one of the finest swordsmiths in Samaro.” She examined the blue tinged blade once again. Pieter had told her the color was due to the fact that he had used his Talent to forge the weapon, and that the color came along with the other special qualities his Talent lent to his work. “This sword is as good.”

  “Better,” Louella argued, crossing her arms over her breasts.

  Adrienne would not know that until she had used the sword against a proper opponent, but she did not argue the fact. If Pieter’s Talent had manifested in such an incredible way that he could forge a remarkable sword with no prior practice, she was content to be happy with that and welcome whatever surprises might accompany it.

  “Well, this sword is also a gift to you, as you are nearly one of us now,” Pieter said.

  Adrienne had hardly dared to hope that the sword would be hers, although he had used her old sword as a model, but now that he was offering the weapon to her she did not think she could accept it. “This weapon would sell for a small fortune,” Adrienne protested. “I can’t accept something of this worth.”

  “I have money,” Pieter said. “And I don’t want to sell it. Besides, I was thinking of you as I created it. It won’t work as well for anyone else as it will for you.”

  Pieter correctly interpreted the confusion on Adrienne’s face. “When I use my Talent, the tool or object I am creating functions better if I think about the person who will be using it, but it won’t work as well for anyone else as it will for its intended owner.” He looked as puzzled by the strange side effect of his Talent as Adrienne was.

  “What if you don’t think of anyone?” Adrienne asked. It seemed that there were limitations and strange turns with just about every Talent she had learned about so far. No one could do quite the same thing in the same way with the same result. It was frustrating, and Adrienne was as fascinated by it as Louella was with blood particles. Every new thing she learned only served to make her more anxious to discover her own Talent.

  “My tools still work if I don’t concentrate on anyone as I shape them,” Pieter said, “and they don’t break, and knives and such don’t require sharpening, but people tell me they aren’t as easy to use as even regu
lar tools unless I fashioned the tool with the user in mind.”

  “The knives in particular cause problems,” Louella said. “I’ve had to mend cuts from a few of his knives that slipped unexpectedly.”

  Adrienne knew that knives slipped, but she sensed that the incidents were more than the typical accidents that tended to occur with the use of sharp objects. “Have you gotten any of the tools back?”

  Pieter laughed. “Dozens. Now I know to think of the user, and I have made replacements for the people that wanted them. It’s all a matter of discovering your Talent and all of its effects.”

  Most of the Talented besides Louella and Pieter avoided Adrienne, including Maureen, so Adrienne spent much of her free time helping Louella with her studies or with Pieter, sharing with him the little she knew about weapons-making while learning more herself.

  Studying with Ben took up several frustrating hours a day, and Adrienne had begun teaching Thom basic fighting moves to alleviate some of that frustration. They used no weapons, just hands and body and feet, and Thom had none of the talent Jeral had promised almost from the first, but it was a fun diversion from the rest of what Adrienne was doing in Kessering. Although she had told herself at the beginning that it would be good for the boy to know how to handle himself, she acknowledged now that she got a twisted pleasure from teaching someone in Kessering how to fight.

  Thom had been sworn to secrecy when it came to their training sessions, and Adrienne believed he would keep quiet. She had made it plain that the sessions would stop if anyone found out, and the boy liked the lessons too much to jeopardize his chance to learn more.

  Adrienne genuinely enjoyed the sessions with Thom. He was bright and entertaining, and his enthusiasm for training helped Adrienne to ward off some of the loneliness she had felt since leaving Kyrog.

  She spent a few hours a day working on Oneness, and tried her best to keep busy. Studying the books from the library helped. Whispers about the tension growing between Samaro and Almet and hints at the Dark Mage were intriguing and occupied her mind even after she’d left the library.