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Fionnuala sat still while Emrys paced, shaking out his burning hands.
She said, “Concentrate.”
“Am.”
“You are not.”
Emrys rounded on her. “I am!”
“If you were then your hands would still be cool and the hay would be aflame. Yet we sit here in the dull glow of a near gone fire. Need me to show you again?”
Emrys bit his lip to keep from shouting again. The anger roared through him. He felt out of control. He hated that. Hated to feel that he belonged to his emotions rather than the other way. Mastery. He’d read about breathing techniques that allowed one absolute control over the self. Control so complete and acute that even one’s heartbeat and body temperature were changeable. He tried to remember where he left that pamphlet and if it had enough information to even teach him anything. Taking a breath, he held it in for a moment, then let it out. “Sorry.”
“Do not apologize.” She gestured to the dry, unburnt hay piled on the floor between them.
He took another breath and tried to focus like she told him but everything spun away from him. Staring at the hay, he thought of fire. A flame. No. A single spark. That’s all he needed. A single spark to start the fire. It would be simpler and once the energy burst forth, he could take hold of it. He’d see it, not only with his eyes, but with his heart, like she told him. He’d begun to feel it when she did magic.
“Would it help if I wove it into the image of your father?”
Clenching his teeth and taking another breath, he chose not to react. To hold in his anger. Suppress it. Hold it down.
“Use it, idiot.”
He took another breath. Clenching his fists, he tried to focus his thoughts there. Bring forth the fire in his hands, the way she had. No, not a fire. Only a spark. A single spark.
“I feel nothing but your anger. It surrounds you like a fog but one you can ignite. Do you think I try to make you angry only for my own amusement? It is another tool. Harvest your emotions. Love. Hate. Mirth. These are powerful forces. Where do they rise from? Where do they go?” She fluttered her fingers while stretching her arms up over her head and then out. “They haze away once they are beyond you. But when they are within you it is like a dam filling with water. You are building a reservoir of potential energy and your solution is to let it trickle away.” She slapped her hands together. “Break the dam, Emrys. Shatter it and make this hay burn.”
“Will you please shut up.” He held it in. Held onto it. His anger flashing through him, coursing. He could not remember the last time he was so angry. Could not remember the last time he yelled or showed anyone what he truly felt.
“You are boring me, Emrys the fool.”
Felt it swelling inside him. His chest full of it. So loud, his heartbeat pounded rapidly. The rush of blood roaring in his skull.
“Use it!”
Grinding his teeth, eyes unblinking as he stared hard at the pile of hay, his fists clenched at his side. He took a breath and focused.
“No, let it out. Stop pushing it down. Let it out, you absolute idiot!”
He opened his mouth to scream at her to shut up, to get out, to leave him alone because she told him to focus, to concentrate, but he belched a flame instead. He blinked at the puff of smoke twirling up and away from where the small ball of fire burned for the briefest instant.
“Well done,” Fionnuala laughed. “That was very cute. My hay is unharmed but that was good. Perhaps we should rest.”
Wide eyed, he stared at the space where the fire had been. “I did it.”
She bobbed her head from side to side. “Sort of.”
“I made a fire.”
She shrugged. “You will get better. In a few days, you will be embarrassed to tell anyone of this. That is good. We should be embarrassed of our early attempts. The more we master, the farther we move beyond who and what we were. It is like aging. You produced your first squalling infant. In a day or two, you will have a toddler. Perhaps in a year or a decade, you will be able to produce an adult.”
The astonishment didn’t leave his voice. “What can you do?” The vagueness of the question made him laugh but he didn’t even know how to ask what he wanted to know so he simply asked it again.
“Come, sit.” She patted the chair beside her in the room where he had recovered.
He sat.
“At a certain point, it is not something you will measure.”
“Was this how you started?”
She laughed, shaking her head. Taking the loaf of black bread from the table, she broke it in half and gave one half to Emrys. She ignored the butter on the table and took a bite from her bread.
He pulled a chunk from his bread and dipped it in the creamy butter. “Who taught you?”
“It is hard to say. My first attempt was accidental. Some would call it tragic.” She giggled. “Nearly drowned the village. No one knew what happened. I did not know what happened. Only knew that the flood coincided with anger like I had never felt before.” Turning to Emrys, she shrugged. “Was only a girl. I was not accustomed to thinking deeply about cause and effect. I simply lived and dealt with the many consequences of existing.
“After a few such experiences, I began to understand and began attempting to do it on purpose. When I had to abandon my village, I understood the dangers of letting this run wild. Met a witch of the wilds who taught me control.”
“You’re not teaching me control.”
“Exactly. You have too much control. It is a problem with teaching adults.” She sized him up. “You have unusual control, Emrys.”
“My own form of survival.”
She snorted. “It is more than that. I have watched you. Few children keep so many others at such a distance. Even your friends remain on the perimeter of your heart. It is not good. It is not healthy. You must understand, my fool, that life is a balancing act. Too much control is as bad as too little. One strains your heart. The other strains the heart of everyone you know. The goal is to be like water.” She lifted her other hand and waved it through the air, mimicking a snake or the flow of a river or both. “Water moves freely. It fills a container. It seems to give no resistance, flowing gently over rocks and skin and the landscape.
“Water carves through mountains. It creates valleys. Try to stop the flow of a river. Build that dam. Then watch what happens when water breaks through. It crashes with so much force that the countryside drowns beneath it.”
For the first time, her words seemed to penetrate into him. He felt it. Like a key sliding into a lock. “Be like water.”
“Fire is too wild. Too violent and unpredictable. Same with the storms of the skies. Water.” She nodded. “Be like water, my fool.” She took another bite of the bread.
Emrys spent the next day with this ringing in his head while he wandered the hills surrounding his father’s longhouse. Fionnuala dominated his days spent in that room with the halflight of day filtering in through the single, small window. The fire warming the room shed as much light as the sun while he tried to learn magic.
The evenings were his and he quickly returned to his familiar wandering, though never as far as before the lord of bone.
He feared even getting close enough to see it in the distance.
“Birdie!” A woman’s voice, familiar.
He turned and for a moment believed Cerys approached through the night. Too much like a painting. Her walking towards him with a moon over either shoulder while his heart trembled in his chest and he held back telling her that he loved her, that he would give up anything, everything, if she promised to take him far away from his life.
Aeronwen said, “Where you been?”
“You talk to your brother?”
“He’s always with the girl you lot saved from the gods of the forest.”
“Rhian.”
She sighed. “Rhian. So frail. So beautiful.”
“Are her sisters still here?”
“Cousin too. Mum’s never been so pleased. A whole house full of women! You’d think she only had sons from the way she’s carrying on.” She cocked her head. “You well?”
“Besides the almost dying, not so bad.”
“Birdie,” she breathed the pet name. “What you doing out here? Planning another deathmarch to the forest gods?”
“No.” He meant to match her jovial tone but fear gripped his throat, causing him to choke out the word. “No. I would not return to the forest for anything.”
“You look hungry.”
“Just skinny.”
“Same thing to mum. Come on, you can meet the girls again.” Without waiting for him to accept or reject, she took him by the hand and led him down into the valley.
Emrys invented conversations in his head, trying to anticipate what Cerys might ask him or what he might ask her. All the permutations of conversation—if he could prepare himself then perhaps—
He didn’t follow that line of thought. Could not allow himself to be so vulnerable, even alone in his thoughts.
Water.
The image rose within him. The flowing river. The still pool. The crashing waves. The falling rain.
Be like water.
Instead, he asked Aeronwen what she was doing out there at night.
“Looking for you, dummy. Rhian said you were walking the moors alone and that you needed a friend.”
“She knew I was out here?”
“Well, didn’t believe her. But Alwyn did.” She rolled her eyes. “Believes everything she says like she’s a druid or some kind of wandering mystic. That’s why they’re still here, but don’t let Sian and Rhosyn hear you say as much. They’ve been arguing with Rhian ever since Alwyn brought them home.”
“They want to go home.”
“And Rhian won’t let them.”
“Why?”
Aeronwen shrugged. “Why do petite pretty girls always make demands of everyone?” She didn’t wait for him to provide his own answer. “They get away with it. Ah, dinner’s just about ready. Mum made a bunch of rolls for the stew.”
The smell seemed to wrap round Emrys, lifting him up and carrying him the last dozen steps to his aunt’s door.