Flamecaster (Shattered Realms, #1)(20)

Ash thrust his stick into the soil with vicious jabs. “Teach me how to bring the dead back to life. Then I’ll stay and listen.”

That shut her up for a while. Finally, she said, “I may be gone when you return.”

“Really?” Ash frowned at her, thinking she must be bluffing, trying to persuade him to stay at school. “Where are you going?”

“It’s better if you don’t know,” Taliesin said, getting her own poke in. “A better question is why.”

“All right, why are you going away?” Ash said, gritting his teeth, knowing that Taliesin was right—she always had something to teach him, even when she was giving him a hard time. Especially when she was giving him a hard time.

Taliesin sat back on her heels, resting her forearms on her knees. “Something has changed. There’s danger here, like a noose tightening around us.”

“Not here at the academy,” Ash said.

“Yes, here. I don’t know that the gifted will be safe here for too much longer.”

“Really.” Ash found this hard to believe. With Arden on one side, and the vassal state of Tamron on the other, the academy at Oden’s Ford remained an oasis of neutrality—a real sanctuary from the ongoing wars. No doubt Mystwerk, the wizard school, presented a tempting target to Arden’s mage-handlers. And the Temple School had never toed the Ardenine line when it came to history and religion.

The reputation of the faculty kept outsiders away. The most powerful wizards, the fiercest, best-trained warriors, the cleverest engineers, the most skilled healers—many returned to the Ford to teach. The academic houses didn’t agree on much, but they all took a dim view of any attack on its sovereignty.

The Peace of Oden’s Ford had persisted for five hundred years. The war in the north barely merited a footnote in its history.

“Would you like some advice?” Taliesin said, lancing into his thoughts again.

“No.”

Like usual, she ignored him. “You have a rare talent, sul’Han, especially for a mage. I’ve never seen the likes of it. It’s a shame to waste it this way. This is not what I had in mind when I agreed to teach you.”

This is not what I had in mind for a life, Ash thought. Oh, well.

But Taliesin wasn’t finished. “Some creatures were made for murder—” Her hand shot out, into the row of carrots, and came up gripping a wriggling adder. She broke its neck and tossed it into the carry bag, too. “You were not. You cannot stand astride the line between good and evil, life and death, for long. It will destroy you.”

“Isn’t that what a healer does?” Ash said, drawn into the debate in spite of himself. “We follow our patients into those borderlands, where life and death meet.”

“Aye, we do,” Taliesin said. “And then we either turn them around, or gently help them across.” Her eyes narrowed and her voice sharpened. “We do not give them a push.”

“Aren’t you the one who always says that it’s easier to prevent a problem than to treat it?”

“I have said that,” Taliesin admitted. “But—”

“I was right there when my father was murdered,” Ash said. “I was right there, and yet there was nothing I could do. What I learned that day was that healing has its limits.”

“There is never a shortage of killers. Any brute with a club in his hand will do. But a good healer is hard to find.” Taliesin rose gracefully to her feet, settling the bag of vegetables on her ample hip. “You need to find a way to let go of your anger. Leave Oden’s Ford while you still can. Go home and be the healer that you were meant to be.”

“Right now there are advantages to being dead. No expectations, no obligations, no restrictions. It gives me the freedom to do what I have to do.”

“You don’t stop being who you are just because you’ve run away.”

“I’ll go home eventually.”

“If you live that long. Now. What is it you’ve run out of this time?”

Finally, the lecture was over. Ash had his list ready. “Gedden weed. Black adder. Sweet misery. Dollseyes and wolfsbane. Sweet forgetting.”

“Sweet forgetting?”

“For witnesses,” Ash said. “Despite what you think of me, I try to keep bloodshed to a minimum.”

“I don’t know why you always come to me,” Taliesin grumbled. “Your decoctions, infusions, and tisanes are as good as mine.”

“They’re good,” Ash allowed. “Just not as good. Besides, I’m in a hurry.”

“You are always in a hurry these days,” Taliesin said. But she’d already surrendered. “All right, then. Come with me.”

Ash handed her his carry bag and followed her into her cabin, breathing in the fumes from the pots that simmered on her wood stove all year round.

He wrinkled his nose at something new, a foul stench that made his eyes water. “Did something die in here?”

“Those are the eels I’m having for supper,” Taliesin said. “You’re welcome to stay.”

It didn’t take long for her to put Ash’s kit together, once she quit stalling. Still, by the time he left her cabin in Tamron Wood, following the road back to school, it was nearly dark. Though the weather was still warm, the sunny southern days were growing shorter. The scent of night-flowering spice lily hung like lust in the air, just one more sign that the season was turning.