Free The Hidden Icon by Jillian Kuhlmann Page B

be.”
    True to what I had observed of him thus far, Gannet did not rise to my attempt to bait him.
    “It’s not enough. I shouldn’t teach you, but things have changed. We don’t have the luxury of waiting.”
    I backed against the edge of the cot, sitting down in a slump of surprise.
    “And that’s all it took to change your mind?” I asked, thrilling at the thought of what secrets he might share, but surprised, too. He’d been so resolute against teaching me. If danger alone was the catalyst, surely he would have taught me something before we reached Re’Kether?
    “The world and my mind change every day,” Gannet replied vaguely, though I could not mistake the hint of a smile on his lips. I knew less of what to make of that than I did his change of heart.
    Gannet stopped pacing. It was ridiculous, really, when one could only take three steps in any direction.
    “You have no control over your thoughts, not in what you share or in what is shared with you,” he explained. This wasn’t news to me, and he knew it. “I would like to help you learn some measure of control.”
    I didn’t attempt to hide my surprise, because, as he said, he’d have known it anyway. He took a seat next to me, and I wondered at the attachment we had forged in the desert. Gannet was more like me than any of the others with whom we traveled, but there was so much that I didn’t know about him, so much that I was sure I would never know. In his company more than anyone else’s did I want for the comfort and closeness of my family, because I had been most intimate with him and it was such a sparse feeling I could hardly call it intimacy. He reminded me of everything I had lost, and even on occasions such as this one, how little I had gained in return.
    I dragged myself out of my thoughts at his words.
    “I want you to imagine that your mind is like a chain of mountains on the horizon,” he said, his voice still and hard. I read his eyes, black as a new moon and just as distant. I could see that he didn’t think that he would be a patient teacher, and I endeavored to do just as he asked.
    “The night and day come and go and are beneath your notice, neither rain nor snow nor wind can change you. On one side of you the sea is churning and crashing, and this is the world. On the other is a deep vale where you dwell, your thoughts, your wants, the things that you fear.”
    I gasped as a feeling like he had his hand on the pumping organ of my heart traveled through me, nothing at all like the little readings of me I knew Gannet had done in the time we had spent together. As invasive as the feeling was, I was keenly aware of just how gentle he was being with me, and this twisted in me, turning discomfort to a pleasure I could not understand. “You don’t possess the ability to keep me from your mind, not yet, anyway. But I do believe you can drive me away.”
    I had the strangest sensation of being in two places at once; I was sitting with Gannet on my cot, but I was also in an internal world, the one that Gannet had described. He was there with me. His presence was not threatening, but I knew that he did not belong there and I should drive him out. Strengthened by the context Gannet had given me, I imagined myself at the foot of a great mountain, but this was one of my own making: cragged and cliffed, a terrible wind stirring the sands into dunes at its base. Behind me there was an oasis with water and shelter enough for only one, and he was not welcome. I willed the wind at his back, my dream come to life, sweeping his feet out from underneath of him and hurling him like a seed on the air back over the mountain.
    My eyes snapped open and met Gannet’s, which flashed an emotion I could not read behind his mask before he looked away. I felt myself again, singular, my worries and wonders shapeless without his hand to guide them. I had to catch my breath, for I had been holding it, and my hands had tightened white on the cot’s