Beguchren lifted his shoulders in a minimal shrug. “I’m certain you are already doing everything I might suggest. Warmth, rest… the company of a friend…”
“King Iaor made me leave.” Mienthe blushed slightly, remembering the king’s blunt impatience. You’re too thin, Mienthe. How will it help him if you wear yourself to bone and nerve? Go for a walk, go for a ride, see the sky, have something to eat, have a nap, don’t come back here until dusk. Trust Iriene to watch over him. That’s an actual royal command, Mie. Now go away. Though she suspected that Iaor had not actually meant for her to ride down to the Casmantian camp and visit Lord Beguchren.
“Undoubtedly wise. It serves nothing for you to fall ill yourself. Once you are both entirely recovered, I wonder whether you might care to visit Casmantium.” Beguchren picked up another cluster of berries between his finger and thumb and gazed at it. “How very like a string of garnets! You might like to wait until your berrying season is past, perhaps. But I would be pleased if you—and Tan, of course—would visit me in Breidechboden. I would like very much to investigate the precise nature of your gift. I believe it is certainly a gift rather than any form of magecraft. But certainly an exceedingly odd gift. I wonder what other odd gifts we may find emerging now that the world is no longer subject to the constraints placed on natural law by Linularinan mages.”
Mienthe thought she would be perfectly ecstatic if her gift, whatever it encompassed, never woke again. Drawing that last double spiral had left her with a persistent and not altogether comfortable sense of increased depth in the world. Well, that was an odd and entirely inaccurate way to describe it. It was more as though everything in the world was now attended by a faint reverberating echo—well, not precisely an echo. Mienthe frowned and ate a berry. The sharp sweet-tart taste seemed just a little bolder or darker or more distinct than it should have. She put the berries down and sighed.
Beguchren said gently, “Is it so very unpleasant?”
“Oh… it’s not unpleasant, exactly.” In fact, Beguchren’s curiosity almost made her curious herself. “What other anomalous gifts?” she asked. “You really think other people might—might—” She waved a vague hand.
“Have gifts similar to yours? Or perhaps unique to themselves? Certainly. Why not? You demonstrate the possibility, and I do not believe the new law will constrain such gifts.” Beguchren regarded her with a calm, detached interest that, oddly, made Mienthe feel more comfortable with her strange gift rather than less. He murmured, “I would like to see what you might do in the high mountains. I suspect your gift may be as closely related to wild magic as to the ordinary magic of the earth—an odd notion, and yet I do suspect so. I am curious to see what you might do with the winds. And perhaps with the sea. One might well understand both the winds and the sea to contain”—he made a circular motion in the air—“circles and spirals. Yet we have ordinarily envisioned the sea as allied to earth and the winds as allied to fire.”
“Have we?” Mienthe, distracted by an odd thought, had barely heard him. She said instead, “I wonder whether, if a mage’s power smothers the inborn gift and if you’re no longer a mage—” She stopped. Looked up, with some trepidation. She had not meant to wake old sorrows.
But Beguchren was smiling slightly. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “But, yes. I wonder that as well.”
“If you—” Mienthe began hesitantly.
A Casmantian soldier, ducking his head in apology as well as to clear the low tent roof, came in, and she broke off, trying to decide whether she was glad or sorry for the interruption.
“Lady,” the young man said to Mienthe, and to Beguchren, “my lord, the Arobern asks you to attend him. Immediately, he says, if you will forgive me.”
Mienthe jumped to her feet. “I should go—”
“Not at all,” murmured Beguchren, rising more slowly. “We may well value your advice, Lady Mienthe. Please accompany me.”
“The Safiad has sent for me,” the Arobern told them both. He paced nervously from one end of his much larger tent to the other, then spun to glare at Mienthe. “What will he say? What will he do? I am certain Erich is safe—” Nearly certain, suggested the stiffness of the Casmantian king’s shoulders. “But what will he demand? An apology? An indemnity?” His deep voice dropped further, into a rumbling growl. “A longer term for my son to be held as a hostage at his court?”