Tom's Study, Vauquelin House
Bittersweet, Anetol said, too, and Nkemi felt the word somewhere in her chest. She touched her cheeks again; the tears had stopped, and, too, she felt she would have known if she had still cried. Both were true, Nkemi understood; there was no conflict between them. She thought she could feel Anetol smiling, although she knew, in truth, she could not.
“It takes practice,” Nkemi agreed, smiling a little more. “It was a long contact, I think. When we are first taught, we go in only long enough to make brush against the vestibule, and come back out.” She – all of them – had watched Professor Halasa urging the mona, precise but quick, to guide a student back to his body; Nkemi remembered the faint tinge of blue lips and fingernails, and the shuddering gasp as Koladhi had opened his eyes.
“I felt it,” Nkemi said, and there was a little smile in her voice. “It was very vivid,” she said. “Vivid is good – it helps to keep the borders clear.”
Nkemi knew how to hold on to the image. It was a part of prefect training for anyone intending to use clairvoyant casting in prefect work; passing examinations in clarity of memory was, too, a prerequisite for any magristrate to consider your evidence. Those long hot days had passed in an odd sort of daze; cast after cast, Nkemi remembered, mind after mind, and each time as she had emerged, she had done as she was trained, and recited what she had seen in her mind, first, and then aloud as soon as she dared speak – all the details she could remember, careful only to describe, and never to interpret, and more careful, still, not to speak where she was unsure.
She did not repeat to herself what she had seen in Anetol’s mind; she left it trickle like water between her fingers, so she was left with a damp palm: the smell of sage, a feeling of laughter, and the coolness of a breeze through rain-heavy air. Even that was already fading, replaced with the warm-bright light of the study, and the scratch of the branches at the window.
“I felt very well your nudge,” Nkemi said, smiling. They had discussed it, a little, abstractly, before the first cast. It was the wholeness of it which mattered, Nkemi had said, seriously. There were no set words or rules; there was no precise squeeze or thought which was intended. What was to be offered was a deliberate, controlled push – not a shutting of the opened door, which would force another caster out, but a squeeze all around.
It is something an untrained mind cannot do, Nkemi had offered, quietly. That is why it is a symbol to a caster of another caster’s mind, for errors do happen, for contact is, sometimes, made where it is not meant. She did not describe for Anetol the feeling of an untrained mind trying to refuse a connection, though she knew it well. It was a desperate, panicked flailing; like a man being held down, and squirming and bucking desperately; the difference between them could not be mistaken, once felt.
Then, quietly, “it was a beautiful place,” Nkemi said. Her hand went and took his once more, resting small on top of it. “I am sorry,” Nkemi said, carefully, “for your loss.”