Read Online Gift of the Unmage by Alma Alexander - Free Book Online Page A

surroundings—frustrated, thwarted, and often just plain furious.
    Cheveyo had asked her what the matter was on one morning when she emerged from a particularly fruitless Faele dream-chase.
    “I ask and I ask and I never get any answers,”she had muttered, as cryptic in her own way as he ever was. Part of her didn’t want to share these dreams; another part reminded her that he was her teacher, and if there was any chance at understanding what she faced, he needed to know about these nightly battles of hers.
    Cheveyo’s eyebrow had lifted eloquently, and Thea had tossed her head at the expression on his face.
    “I know,” she said, “I know. I am asking the wrong questions again.”
    “Sometimes,” Cheveyo said quietly, “I think it is more of a problem that you aren’t listening for the answers. If you aren’t told what you want to hear, you close your ears to the rest.”
    “But I want to understand ,” Thea said. “What’s the point of hearing things that haven’t a thing to do with what I want to know? The dreams…”
    “Don’t whine,” he said.
    He could be truly annoying. Thea ground her teeth in frustration at that gentle controlling tranquility.
    “But what if they…,” she persisted, in the face of that admonition.
    “The dreams will do what they need to do,”Cheveyo said, sighing. “Patience. Patience and wisdom. When will you learn to sit still long enough for these to come to you?”
    But it wasn’t only the Faele and the Alphiri who haunted her dreams. There were other things that came to her, and, by some instinct that she didn’t quite understand, Thea stayed silent on these dreams. They were woven around that melody that Cheveyo had hummed wordlessly on the first expedition to the Barefoot Road, the one she felt she was on the edge of recognizing if only she could keep hold of it long enough to figure it out. The one that Cheveyo had said was significant.
    The melody came to Thea in her dreams as something high and ethereal, as though played on a flute or a soprano recorder, soaring effortlessly somewhere in the sky, hanging between the stars, looking down on the world it had made. Thea thought that it wasn’t quite the same as Cheveyo’s tune, that the reason she had thought she recognized his version was simply that it had reminded her of this one, the real one, the pure one, the one that she knew that she carried within herself all the time. In these dreams, she would find herself wandering alone in a placethat was all clouds and billows of white mist—it swirled around her ankles so that she couldn’t even see her feet, couldn’t tell what it was that she walked on, or even if she walked at all or just drifted through this nothingness, a cloud herself. And then she would hear it start, the music, weaving in and out of the mists, shredding the clouds into streamers and then taking them away altogether, and she would see a patchwork landscape full of snatches of well-known things—something that would tease her senses although none of it belonged together in the same time or the same place. There would be the richly scented and magnificent fir forests of her home, and a glimpse of the paved straight streets of a city she recognized, and then it would all change and flow into the shapes of the hills that Cheveyo had started to make familiar to her with their tramps through the mesas sculpted from smooth rock and red sand.
    And through it all the melody would run, the melody that spoke to her of age and of a newborn power all at once— I am old and I am new and I was here before the world was born, I was the thing that the world was built on….
    She still didn’t know what it was, or what itsignified, and although she occasionally caught herself humming a snatch of it out loud she somehow never did so in Cheveyo’s presence. It was as though this was her own mystery, something that she herself had been flung to try to solve and, whatever else Cheveyo was there to teach