Page 52 of Gryphon in Light

Firesong’s idea of reassurance is to tell me, “By the time it melts, you’ll already be incinerated, so it’s safe.”

“Even in high flux, force should order itself in line with its crystal structures. Crystalline iron! Think of it, Kel! The strength of iron for stability, the structure of a crystal! It couldn’t be more perfect for our purposes!”

Kel opened the book with a delicate talon hooked under the leather page-protector they were using as a bookmark. “I will feel happier when I can use the thing,” he replied grumpily. I am a creature of movement, yet I have scarcely moved for weeks. I am a creature of the sky, and it is still too dangerous for me to fly. So what am I now? If not for the roughly two dozen beings fully invested in this expedition—and he was fairly certain not all of them would have been able to conceal if it was actually all a ruse on Firesong’s part to keep his mind occupied and not brooding on how he should be regarded as a hero, and was instead regarded as a nuisance at best and a hazard at worst—he would have had words with Firesong shortly after they’d cracked this book.

Firesong straightened up. “Hertasi are setting it in a reference cage right now. It’s used to make acid, it turns out, so they had plenty on hand in a refining outpost. Let’s try something a little different,” he said. “It occurred to me last night when I was trying to get to sleep. Have you ever tried the body-control technique of concentrating on one group of muscles until you get it to relax, then moving on to the next?”

“Well,” Kel admitted, “no. A full belly usually is enough to get me to sleep.”

That answer didn’t discourage Firesong, it appeared. “Well, we have been trying to establish your own personal internal ley-lines as a single network, all at once. I think a more fruitful approach would be to start small. Very small. That’s why I asked Nightwind and Jefti to join us here today.”

That certainly got Kel’s attention! “Why—” he began, when the trondi’irn and his little friend appeared in the doorway, and something arrested his attention so much that it drove everything else momentarily out of his mind.

All the patches on Jefti’s face had been turned into painted artwork. Black curves and swirls enhanced the boundaries, and rather than separating the areas of dark and light skin, seemed to somehow unite and define them into a single coherent image. Jefti clearly read Kel’s surprise and approval, and grinned.

“Do you like it, Kel?” he asked . . . in good, unaccented Kaled’a’in.

“Verrrrrrry much,” Kel praised, drawing out the word “very” in order to emphasize how much he liked it. He nodded at Nightwind, who blushed. “Your art is, as always, amazing.”

“Well,” she temporized. “This is just temporary, and we are going to try more designs until Jefti fastens on one he really, really likes. I was thinking . . . if he does show ability at becoming a trondi’irn, we could try stylized feathers next. That would be very appropriate. And we can have Sharpthorn do the tattooing to make it permanent.”

Jefti nodded with enthusiasm. “I like this, though. Makes me look tough!” For the first time in Kel’s acquaintance with him, he was standing with a straight spine and a raised head. “Dunno what Ma’ll think, but . . . it’s my face, an’ I’m old enough to figure what I want to do with it.”

“You are fierce, Jefti. But what does this have to do with what you and I are doing?” Kel asked, turning his head to stare at Firesong.

“Well, the base mechanism for collecting free magical energy is in your feathers,” Firesong explained to Jefti by talking to Kelvren, which was confusing. “When your feathers move, especially the wing-feathers, you collect magic as they sift it out of the air, which is why I’ve told you not to fly, because unless you can adequately convert what you can’t personally hold into light, I’m afraid it will manifest as heat. So Nightwind is going to show Jefti how to care for your feathers, which will move them, but in a controlled manner. I want you to concentrate on the flow of that magic, one feather at a time. Isolate and observe. Continue doing that. Once you can See what is happening . . .” He paused. “I am very reluctant to ask you to try to cut that flow off. You’re broken enough as it is.”

Kel growled a little, involuntarily. I do not like being referred to as “broken” all the time.

Evidently he managed to keep the growl far enough down in his chest that no one heard it. Or at least, Firesong, who was nearest, politely pretended he hadn’t.

Instead, Firesong gestured to Nightwind and Jefti, who took cushions for seats. Nightwind had her kit of trondi’irn supplies with her, and she gestured to Kel to spread out a wing. He obliged, and she started with the innermost primary, nearest his body. He put his head down, closed his eyes to concentrate better, and prepared to enjoy himself.

“First, we make sure all the vanes are aligned and locked together,” she told Jefti, as she deftly smoothed the feather. “Feathers need to be a whole, both in order to fly, and in order to collect power without having it eddy around in the feather uselessly. Once all the vanes are smooth and locked, we take this particular oil—it’s very light, and it’s made from the seeds of a certain plant, and it is the closest thing to a gryphon’s natural oil in his preen gland. We take a brush made from badger hair, and we brush it along the feather shaft, like this—”

As she moved the feathers, he concentrated his mage-sight on his own body, and carefully traced how the particles of magic were flowing, from the vanes of the feather, into the shaft, then into the—

—wait—

I thought it was going to flow into my veins. But it isn’t. What is it flowing into?

At first, he couldn’t figure it out. It was going somewhere, moving along a path that did not correspond at all to the veins and arteries in which his blood flowed.

But then, young Jefti, being new to this and clumsy, jarred one of the newly growing feathers, and while the physical sensation was merely uncomfortable for a moment, a bit like an insect-bite, what the magic did was make a brief and extremely tiny explosion, then rush to where the momentary pain was, and speed away along—

Nerves? It doesn’t follow my nerves, but this channel parallels them. Personal ley-lines, was it? Fascinating!

Now that he knew what he was looking for, he could see it everywhere in his body when a feather moved. Merest motes of energy, like dust motes in sunlight, sped from vane to shaft, from shaft to nerve cluster at the base of the shaft, and from there to the physical organ that gathered his magic and stored it. And that organ was . . . well, it was rather full. Over-full, in fact, like his crop was now with breakfast.

He knew and understood what was happening within him now. When Treyvan had flooded him with all of what he now knew was an essential Heartstone energy, restarting that entire system the way a skilled Healer could restart a heart with a burst of Healing energy, Kelvren had, as he had told Firesong, instinctively taken the power that threatened to incinerate him and turned it to harmless light, the simplest—and thus cleanest—spell he knew. As he was still doing now, and at this point, he could See that the process had become ingrained, a kind of muscle memory that worked without him thinking about it.

Or maybe it is just because I was desperate but it worked, so now my hindbrain needs to feel anxiety so I can live? Oh, that would be a cruel joke for someone who wants peace!

And he understood, both empirically and intuitively, that Firesong was going about this wrong. Firesong thought the proper way to go about this was to establish the channels for powering a miniature Heartstone first, then lock the Heartstone into those channels.

But that was not what needed to be done.

Kel needed the primed Heartstone, mounted in whatever fashion Firesong had intended, close to his skin. Then he could establish the channels to run through it to be tuned, and turn the light spell into a charging spell. In other words, he needed to have the cistern in place before he could install the pipes to carry the water, and only then could he—