THE STONE KING -- book two of The Chronicles of the First Age

Chapter Ten

Seven years before the founding of the first kingdom

Netac stared at the seed in his hand, focused on its schemas, searching for the inner pattern that would unlock its future potential as a stalk of wheat. He found it hard to concentrate with Corha sitting next to him, her knee rubbing up against his thigh, her scented oil smell tickling his nose. She was of an age to marry and had, without words, let him know over the last year that she might be interested in him. While seventeen was a good age for a girl to marry, Netac had always assumed he would wait at least another five years before he even started to consider marriage. Ironically, he'd always thought she was more interested in Garanth, than himself, but then Garanth had been busy over the last couple of years training as a warrior.

Karux sat next to him in his customary place in the circle. "Don't make this hard. This was Eiraena's first schema and she was seven years old when she performed it."

Eiraena looked up and snickered at the mention of her name. She also had changed over the last year or so. Though she still refrained from looking anyone in the eye, she seemed to be making an effort to pay attention to and interact with the people around her. She would even occasionally speak in a soft and halting fashion.

Karux gestured at Harkin. "Enough delay. Harkin, let's see what you can do."

Netac could feel Harkin gathering karis, but he tried to stay focused on his own seed. The patterns were amazingly complex, an entire plant coiled tightly in on itself. He could try to pull it apart, draw out the tap root and the leaves hidden curled inside, but he suspected the plant would resist that.

Harkin collapsed his schema. Silence followed.

"Well, that was certainly unimpressive."

Netac, still focused on the world of shapes, cast a nervous glance at Harkin's seed. It had become a tiny shriveled mass of broken patterns, further compressed than when he'd started.

"Netac, let's see what you can do."

Netac shifted his focus back to his own seed. He began summoning the karis, arranging the elements into long schemas and attaching them to parts of the seed's pattern he sought to change.

"Remember," Karux said in an encouraging voice, "It wants to grow. You just have to give it what it wants."

Corha's knee rubbed against his thigh.

Netac collapsed his schemas prematurely. The symbols fell into each other in a wave of shifting potential and the seed split in half with a small snap.

Karux sighed. "Corha?"

Corha had already constructed her schemas in tiny little spirals like they had grown out of the seed. She collapsed them and they were drawn inside, as if the seed had sucked them into itself.

The seed, glowing with energy, shoved out its taproot and flung out a stalk with unfurling leaves.

"Finally," Karux said. "Much of what we are doing to defeat the curse is this sort of work. The poles which I've constructed to hold back the blight do this on a much larger scale. If you are to help me, you have to learn how to promote nature's fecundity."

Netac looked at Corha who smiled sweetly at him.

Behind her, the elders Nesim and Tac'ha walked into the room.

"Elders." Karux said. Netac noticed that he never used the honorific for older men "adra" which meant father, or even the shortened form "dra" which was simply a polite way of acknowledging a male.