Free Flamecaster by Cinda Williams Chima Page B

I’d have no quarrel with them.”
    â€œPoison is such a scattershot technique,” Taliesin said. “You never know where your bolt will land.”
    â€œI know that, but I’m careful. And I’m good at what I do. I had the best teacher.”
    If he’d thought he was offering an olive branch, she slapped it away. “I did not teach you to travel about, leaving death in your wake,” she snapped. “I thought you intended to heal yourself by healing others.”
    â€œI do heal others—three seasons of the year. As for the rest, that’s a public health measure. Consider how manypremature deaths I’m preventing. The lives I take are balanced by those I save.”
    â€œYou should stay here and work with me,” Taliesin said. “You may not think it, but you still have much to learn.” She paused for a response, but he said nothing. “The time will come when you will wish that you were a better healer.”
    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.”
    â€œReally?” Ash frowned at her, thinking she must be bluffing, trying to persuade him to stay at school. “Where are you going?”
    â€œIt’s better if you don’t know,” Taliesin said, getting her own poke in. “A better question is why.”
    â€œAll 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.”
    â€œNot here at the academy,” Ash said.
    â€œYes, here. I don’t know that the gifted will be safe here for too much longer.”
    â€œReally.” 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.
    â€œWould you like some advice?” Taliesin said, lancing into his thoughts again.
    â€œNo.”
    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 weremade 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.”
    â€œIsn’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.”
    â€œAye, we do,” Taliesin said. “And then we either turn them around, or gently help them