Colors of Chaos

XCII

THE BREEZE FROM outside the small cot was warm already, even though the sun was barely above the horizon. Cerryl could hear someone feeding the horses and the clanking of a cook pot. His eyes dropped to the screeing glass upon the time-worn wood before him, and he leaned forward on the bench, slowly sketching from it what he could on the rough map beside the glass. He paused and dipped the quill in the traveling inkstand once more, then added another dashed line that represented a narrow trail. His maps suffered in accuracy, but making them was another way beside riding every cubit of trail and road to learn more about Spidlar. He particularly tried to follow and note on his crude maps the narrow trails that were not exactly roads. Those were the ones that an experienced lancer leader might well use against someone-like Cerryl-who did not know the land, especially in dry weather.

He shook his head and went back to screeing. Finally, after his fingers began to tremble, he let the image of a patch of land to the northwest of his encampment fade, and he put his head in his hands, closing his eyes for a time.

A bit later, he smiled and reached for another place. Leyladin’s image swirled through the mists, and a puzzled look crossed her face. Then came a smile, a broad smile, and her fingers touched her lips. Behind her, Cerryl could see the green silk hangings of her room.

After a moment, Cerryl let the image fade, a wistful smile upon his own lips. While he could sense when someone used a glass to scree him, he still wondered how Leyladin could sense he was the one looking at her, but, in a way, she’d known him first through the glass and had always recognized his screeing. What else has she always known?

He frowned and studied the blankness before him on the rough wooden trestle table. The glass showed him no riders in blue, no armsmen in each of the hamlets he screed-those within a day’s ride of the road between Axalt and the staging town where he and his small detachment of lancers were based. His screeings did not mean that his lancers might not face ambushes, only that there were no large bodies of armsmen that near.

They’re all making Jeslek’s advance difficult, that’s why. Cerryl wiped his forehead, damp with the effort of working with the glass, then took a swig from his water bottle.

He concentrated again, thinking about the smith in distant Diev, whose focused order radiated across the kays separating them.

The red-haired smith was beside his forge, drawing wire, and Cerryl could sense the order in that wire even through the glass. Like Leyladin, Dorrin glanced up as his image strengthened in the glass before Cerryl. Unlike the blonde healer, the smith scowled, but briefly, before returning to drawing wire.

“Ordered black iron wire,” murmured the gray-eyed mage, shaking his head. What Dorrin was doing would cause great troubles for the White forces moving toward Elparta, even if Cerryl did not yet understand how. That he could feel. Does Jeslek know? Or care?

Cerryl stood and packed the mirror back into its carrying case.