Page 54 of Silverbow
Colm waved at a bored looking serving maid and tapped his empty mug. She looked intent on ignoring him until he flashed her a warm smile. Suddenly, her steps quickened. Oryn couldn’t hear over the din, but he was certain her heart had just done the little leap that Colm’s smiles often provoked in mortal women. She was at the table in a flash, refilling his drink, but when the girl turned her attention on Oryn, she flinched and skulked away.
Colm chuckled into his cup. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
“Whatever it is that’s been troubling you.”
Emotion was easy enough to read with their keen senses - a tightening of a jaw or a flick of an eyebrow, the pounding of a heart or fluttering of a pulse – said much that words often didn’t. And where ear and eye failed, the strongest emotions could often be read in scent, but Colm… Colm could read more without trying than any man had a right to know, even when he wasn’t wielding his gifts. He justknew.
“Nothing,” Oryn growled.
A knowing smile turned up the corners of the spirit wielder’s mouth. He took a sip of his ale and reclined back, letting a bulky arm sprawl across the back of the empty chair beside him. “Look, the lads want to know if we’re going to ride all the way to Drozia with you bristling like a black daggertail.”
“I am not-” He started to object, but the broad grin that split Colm’s face cut him off.
“You knocked the lad off his horse.”
Oryn did regret that, if only a bit. He’d let his temper get the better of him. “He talks too much.”
Colm laughed. “Yes, but that is not new, Oryn. You clotheslining the boy off his horse is. Next time you want to joust like a common knight, perhaps you ought to let your opponent know you’re jousting.”
He stared at the man in stony silence. Colm, immune to his glare, swirled the ale in his mug and studied the common room a moment, letting the silence between them stretch. “What happened between you and the girl?”
Colm didn’t feel the need to specify. They both knew which he meant.
“Nothing.”
“That’s the root of it, is it not?” Colm asked. When Oryn didn’t deign to reply, his companion chuckled again. “I was half surprised the man didn’t chase us all the way to Millford Green, the way you were staring at his daughter.”
Oryn rolled a copper between his fingers, shifting his gaze over Colm’s shoulder to stare at nothing. He didn’t understand why, but the whole thing was…unsettling.
“And then when the lad offered hiscommentary, you went and unhorsed him.”
Oryn shrugged. “He should have kept it to himself.”
“It wasn’t his commentary that set you on edge.”
Oryn sighed. Colm really wasn’t going to let it go. “I couldhearit.”
“The hum.”
They had been over this. No one else heard a thing.
Oryn nodded stiffly. For years, he’d been hunting the godsung gifts, but never had heheardone before. It had been so loud, he’d hardly heard the man ask after Kiawa. And when he pulled her scent to him on a whisper of wind, his air gift exploded from him in a torrent he hadn’t intended to wield and Oryn had to slam his damper down to cut it off.
That had been a shock. Never had his gifts spun out on their own accord. They usually sat within him, waiting to be sung into the world like the refrains of old, sacred songs. But he hadn’t called for those songs, hadn’t crafted those wieldings. It was as if the gods themselves had. He sometimes felt they were trying to speak to him, but reading their will from the essence of the elements often left him guessing at interpretations.
The girl that smelled of lavender soap, smoke, and all the finer parts of a stable seemed to set his gifts surging, especially Mosphaera’s. Or perhaps that was just because he was strongest in air. He had thought the smoke marked her a fire wielder. Air was sometimes drawn to fire, but none of them could feel a wielder’s spark within her. None of them could sense a godsong resonating with their own, but there remained the matter of that strange hum only he could hear.
“I can’t help but feel she was trying to tell me something.”
Where most could only see the essence of gifts they possessed, the godsongs they were attuned to, Colm, strong in spirit, could see the essence of all five when called forth. He had seen Oryn’s wielding spiral. He knew whichshehe meant.
He drummed his fingers on the table. “Should we go back for her?”
Oryn ground his teeth as he felt his air gift stir. He felt it try to surge in his chest, straining to be let out. He splayed his hands on the table and grimaced. Never had he battled for control like he had these last days.
“And what?” Oryn asked when he quieted the Goddess of Air enough to speak. “Add kidnapping to our repertoire?”
