Free Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover Page A

lazy,
spineless puppet lord: Kithin, fourteenth Duke of Thorncleft. Raithe
could see even the stitching on Duke Kithin’s shirt of maroon
and gold; with that as a mental anchor, he swung his perception to
see the room as Kithin saw it. Now, for the first time, he could get
a good look at the faces of the elves.
    He didn’t trouble to study these faces too closely; elvish
features lack the creases that time and care paint upon human
physiognomy, and thus reveal nothing of their character. Elves, in
Raithe’s experience, looked very much alike.
    He was rather more interested in what had brought them to Thorncleft,
and so he studied the silent motions of lips and tongue; though he
spoke little Primal, they would be conversing in Westerling for the
benefit of Duke Kithin, and lipreading is easy, when practiced
through the pristine vision of his mindeye.
    His mindeye had always been one of his most useful talents.
    Raithe had been only a boy when he’d discovered his gift:
thirteen years old, barely into adolescence. One golden morning he
had lain in bed, in his room above his father’s tiny smithy,
slowly awakening from a dream. In the dream, he’d kissed Dala,
the raven-haired sixteen-year-old girl who sold sticky buns on the
corner of Tanner and the Angle; as he lay in bed fingering the
erection this dream had given him, he’d imagined her rising for
the morning and pulling her nightdress off over her head, imagined
her round, swelling breasts bouncing free, her nipples hardening as
she splashed herself with water from the pitcher beside her bed. In
his mind, he saw her stand naked before the mirror, braiding her hair
in a new way, coiling it into a gleaming black helmet instead of the
long strands she usually allowed to trail down her back; he imagined
that she chose her oldest blouse to wear that day, the one he loved
the best, its fabric so worn and supple that it clung to her curves
and gave a hint of the dark circles of her nipples.
    Sheer fantasy, of course: the vivid daydreams of an imaginative boy
in lust.
    But when he’d gone that morning to buy buns for his father’s
dinner, blushing so that he hardly dared even to look at her, he’d
found that she was wearing that very blouse, and she had chosen that
morning to coil her hair up in a new style, tight and shining around
her head—exactly as he had imagined it.
    That had been Raithe’s first hint that he was destined for
greatness.
    Mastering his gift had not come easily. In the days and weeks that
followed, as he spied on Dala’s naked body at every
opportunity, he found that his vivid imagination was more hindrance
than help. Too often, his mental image of her would lift hands to
breasts, to fondle and squeeze them as he wanted to do. Too often, he
would fantasize one hand creeping down to the silky nest between her
legs . . . and the vision would scatter into the random eyelights of
total darkness. He discovered that clear imaging required a certain
coldness of mind, a detachment; otherwise, his sight became murky,
clouded with his own desires, with ghosts of wish-fulfilling
fantasies.
    Those wish-fulfilling fantasies had a power of their own, though, as
he discovered one day when Dala met his eye with a shy smile, when he
gazed at her while he held a perfectly formed mental image of their
naked limbs entwined in a tangle of sheets—and she reached out,
took his hand, and led him to her room on a clear, hot summer’s
afternoon, and took his virginity with exactly that same shy smile.
    That had been the sweet brush of his destiny’s lips, as well.
    He’d entered his novitiate at fourteen, using the advanced
education available only at the Monastic Embassy to sharpen his
powers; the Esoteric training of both body and mind gave him the
self-discipline to ruthlessly strangle those desires that crippled
his gift. Now he used his mind as another friar might wield a