V
“Now, Emergent yos’Galan, one has seen quite clearly that you are the bearer of a large and, forgive me, unruly talent.
“Of course, we may none of us take credit for the nature or strength of our gifts. These things are as the gods, and genetics, will have them. We may, however, discipline ourselves, and show respect to our fellows. That is why the very first lesson taught an Emergent, no matter her strength or her station, is control.”
“I had controlled my gift,” Padi said, as one would who was merely imparting information. She was reasonably certain that she did not sound sullen. “That technique very nearly proved fatal.”
Actually, it had proved fatal, to two persons who had been trying to kill her, but that was surely a fact that Healer Osit did not need.
Indeed, it may have been well not to have spoken at all. Healer Osit positively frowned at her.
“If I have understood your attending Healer correctly, you had not controlled your gift so much as you had confined—even denied!—it. Our talents may not be denied, and they cannot be confined. They are, however, subject to discipline. Your gift is not your master; it is an additional aspect of yourself. As such, it is your responsibility to act with discipline, integrity, and respect with regard to your gift, as with all other aspects of your nature. Which brings us to the core of your problem, Emergent yos’Galan.”
Padi arranged her face into the expression of faint good humor which, as a trader, she had found suited her character and her talents far better than Father’s look of affable stupidity. She said nothing, merely leaned forward slightly, as if breathless to hear what Healer Osit had to say…
…which was not quite a sham. She did want to learn what this stranger thought the core of her problem was, with regard to her stupid so-called gift. While it seemed unlikely to her that this mediocre person was capable of insight beyond that available to Father, Lina, and Priscilla, it was true that she was new to his eyes. An irregularity familiar to, and passed over by, her intimates might be obvious to him.
She waited.
Healer Osit’s mouth pinched and he drew himself up, straight and stiff, directing a hard glance directly into her eyes.
“You, Emergent yos’Galan, are spoilt.”
She did not laugh. She was…reasonably certain that her face did not betray her.
Healer Osit, however, had access to other senses, and he was impolite enough to use them.
“You’re amused?” he asked icily.
“Healer, I am,” she answered politely. There was clearly no point in lying.
“And yet you have been much indulged. We will leave aside that you are a member of what was until very recently the Highest of the High Houses seated upon the homeworld. Not even the fall into clanless outcast has diminished your pride or your expectations that everything will go as you wish.”
“I am not,” Padi said, when the Healer paused to take a breath, “clanless. Only the delm may dissolve a clan, and Korval has not done so. We are—” she held up a hand, forestalling the Healer when he would speak again—
“We are banished from Liad, forbidden to trade or to settle any of our business or our blood there, but we remain Clan Korval.”
The Healer’s eyes were angry, and his face was somewhat pale. He took a moment, and a visible breath.
“We wander from our topic,” he said. “Which is that you have not learned to master yourself, or to regard the circumstances—or the persons—of those who are exposed to you.
“Even in this matter of the arrival of your gift, you have been indulged. You have not been taught the most rudimentary lessons, nor have you been schooled in the respect that is owed your elders. You will be found much more pleasing to those elders who are constrained by their own gifts and oaths to train you, when you have mastered shielding. Why this was not taught you immediately, I cannot venture to say. I suppose it is possible that you are inept. But, in the case, Healer Faaldom ought to have shielded you.
“Now, attend me. Open your Inner Eyes. Tell me what you See.”
Padi bit her lip.
Using her Inner Eyes made her dizzy, at best, and most of the time she didn’t know what she was looking at. Father—she had seen Father’s wounds clearly, and had known exactly what he had needed. But the patterns and other subtleties that Lina had several times asked her to view with her Inner Eyes might as well have been meaningless smears of spinning colors. She did not, however, explain this to Healer Osit, who, she felt certain, would merely have sneered at her for providing yet more proof that she was too spoilt to put her hand to hard work.
“Well?”
She closed her…well, her Outer Eyes, she supposed they were, and opened those Others.
“I see an expanse of hull plate,” she said, and her heart quailed in her chest, recalling the room in which she had imprisoned the tentative beginnings of her gift. A room that she had, in her naivete, thought imaginary, and which she now was beginning to understand had existed in some reality available only to the new senses that had been forced upon her.
“Very good. Observe it closely. This is what a shield looks like from the outside. I will now demonstrate what a shield feels like from the inside.”
The hull plate ran, widened, and curved. Padi started back, but it followed her; a panicked glance showed that it was sweeping around, about to seal her inside, and—
Padi pushed.
— # —
Shields wide open, Shan threw himself against the closed door. What he might have done, had it been locked—but it opened, and he was through, into and past a wall of bitter cold, the air tasting of hull plate. He paused, rapidly Sorting through terror, anger, dismay—
“Padi!”
“Father!”
She was there, she was safe. Dismayed and determined, but unharmed. He put a hand on her shoulder—
The screaming had not abated.
“Osit!” cried Healer Ferin, clearing the door belatedly. She stopped on the threshold, her hand clutching the front of her robe.
Shan followed her horrified stare, found the younger Healer, his eyes wide and not so merry as previously, back flat against the wall directly across from Padi, arms and legs wide, all of him seemingly pinned firmly to the wall.
He was, Shan calculated, about a meter off of the floor. Screaming. Well, and who could say that it was an overreaction, though he seemed in no imminent danger of falling.
“You are,” Shan said sternly, “upsetting my daughter.”
Healer Osit stopped screaming.
“Thank you. Padi, what has happened here?”
“Father—he was; it was a trap. He was going to, to enclose me, and I”—she swallowed and looked slightly shamefaced—“I pushed.”
“And held, or so it appears.”
“I don’t want him near me.”
“Perfectly understandable. I wonder, are you able to release the Healer, if he will grant your safety, and promises not to attempt to entrap you again?”
“I—” she hesitated, which was perhaps not as comforting to the Healer as one might wish, and whispered. “Yes. I—think so.”
“Very well, then. Healer Osit!”
“Sir?” the Healer answered faintly.
“My daughter desires your good word as a Healer that you will not attempt to imprison her, should she release you to the floor and your own will.”
“I give my word, Healers. I will attempt nothing.”
“Excellent. Healer Ferin?”
“Healer yos’Galan?” Her voice was ice cold. Shan felt the tremor of her fury in his bones.
“My party and I are leaving. Pray grant us safe passage to the garden so that we may gather up our security and be gone.”
“The House grants safe passage. The House, in fact, insists that you leave and never return.”
“I believe that we have an accord. Lina?”
“I am here, Shan, unthreatened and ready to leave as soon as our arrangements are fixed.”
“Excellent. Padi, please release Healer Osit from your displeasure. Do try to release him gently.”
She swallowed, and nodded, and he saw her hands, which were fisted as her sides, begin to relax. Across the room, Healer Osit slid slowly down the wall.
The fact that he did not land on his feet was due entirely to his own lack of coordination, in Shan’s estimation. That was understandable, as his nerves appeared to be entirely in disarray. He sat on the floor, tears running down his cheeks. His colleague went to him and knelt at his side.
“We go,” Shan said, and took Padi’s hand, pulling her with him toward the hallway.
Lina led the way to the front door, which was opened by a wide-eyed doorkeeper, and out into the front yard. Dil Nem and Karna were just rounding the corner of the building, and the five of them exited via the gate, Karna hurrying ahead to the curb, to wave down the approaching omnibus.