Renegade's Magic
It was the strangest sensation, as if I had flung myself onto the back of a galloping horse. I was there suddenly feeling the muscles move, feeling the jabs of pain from my abused feet. The body was mine, and not mine. I danced on, awkward and jolting, like a marionette whose strings have been seized by a child. I planted my feet, but my hands and arms flapped and waved. If I focused on holding them still, then my head wagged wildly and my errant feet began to slide sideways. Suddenly it was an all-out struggle between me and Soldier’s Boy as to who would control it. I felt him there, not as the twin of my mind, but as the body’s will. I clenched my body’s teeth and curled my hands into fists and held them there. I tightened the screaming muscles all along my spine, forbidding them to twist or sway or bow. I bent my arms into my chest and embraced myself, bent my head down to my chest and held it there. With a surge of resolution, I folded my legs under me. I crashed to the earth, falling hard, but still keeping my control. I rolled myself into as tight and still of a ball as my flesh would allow. I shouted stillness into myself and then realized my mistake. No, not my breath, not my heart. I pulled breath after deep breath into my lungs and tried to calm my leaping heart as if it were a wild creature I strove to soothe.
“Be still, be still, be still,” I whispered to every part of myself.
I had no sense of becoming one with Soldier’s Boy. I felt no encounter with some “other self” hidden in my flesh. Instead, I was besieged by a decade of memories and thoughts. They were mine, they were his, but they had belonged to both of us, and I had always been aware of my twin lives and experiences. I had always been me, never Soldier’s Boy, never Nevare, always me. Carsina had broken his heart as much as mine, and I had longed for Lisana just as deeply as he had. I loved the forest and he wanted to make his father proud. It was me the mob had tried to murder in the streets of Gettys, and I had every right to hate them for it. Those were my trees that they were trying to cut, the wisdom of my elders, and it infuriated me that no one would listen to me.
I danced out of the world and back into it, into its truer deeper form. Place no longer bound me, nor time. Instead, I moved through the magic, called by a series of unfinished tasks.
I danced up the many steps that spiraled up the tower. I danced on the tower’s top, and with my opened eyes, I could see the magic that held the spindle, like a string on a top. It was less than a string; it was a cobweb to me. I reached toward it. For a moment, I felt a shadow of a reservation about what I was about to do. Dewara had taught me, had been my mentor. Despite all the evil he had done me, did I not owe him something for that? And what of the wind-wizards, what of the other mages of the other Plainspeople? I sighed. They would have to go back to being individual mages, with each mastering only the power he himself could generate. The decision was made. With one hand over my head, I leapt, and my fingers snagged and tore that thread of magic.