Kared's Children - Chapter 14

She’d come across Xeter at his camp in the foothills of the Black Mountains. Though she hadn’t known it yet, he just had begun to slip noticeably into the sickness that would take his reason. He still could behave somewhat coherently in the daytime, but his language patterns were slipping and his reflexes were taking on the vague windblown movements of a flower stalk or a leaf of grass.

She’d encountered him talking loudly in a clearing, gesticulating wildly, surrounded by insects of all kinds, a thick, multi-colored and noisy crowd, that seemed to be his audience. He’d appeared to be trying to give them instructions. She’d watched him and seen butterflies, after certain gestures he kept repeating and then ruining with spasms, alight on his fingers and then flutter away again when his fingers shook. She’d recognized him for what he was. But not who he was. That part had come later.

That Esthen’s healer was known to the Elown, who normally paid little attention to the doings of other races, hadn’t seemed to surprise him. Nor had he seemed particularly surprised when she’d told him her name. He didn’t know her father, he’d said, but knew of him. And he’d known she was coming since she’d left her home.

That part surprised her, and she’d have dismissed it as typical Karedian bluster except for who he was. And subsequent conversation revealed he knew details of her wandering passage that no one else could have known. In time, she learned that Xeter had been more in touch with the world around him than anyone she’d ever met. It had given him a perspective she’d hoped to find among the Elown, but which she’d found nowhere except in that aging healer who was going mad.

As she sat and let Damon vent above her, she remembered that she’d welcomed Xeter’s company and felt honored by his friendship. Not since she’d left the Elown had she encountered anyone who seemed to think about the same things she did-though no doubt he thought about them far more clearly. His querulousness she’d put off to age and the regret Karedians seemed to allow to accumulate over years. But among Karedians and the other Southlanders, she’d found few enlightened enough to understand that everything had its place in the world, every creature, from plants on up to the highest intelligences-which she’d evidence enough to comprehend weren’t those that lived on the physical plane-and that magic merely was one way by which those creatures enforced the fundamentals of their existences upon each other. That everything did that, she didn’t question. She knew it to be true. That nonsentient existences did the same she would have recognized even in the impact of a single drop of rain upon the soil.

To find one among the Southlanders, though, who understand such hierarchical dependence was almost impossible. She’d accepted, long before, that the Elown Elders had been right-at least, about one aspect of the Karedians: their educational systems were abysmal. But they weren’t dumb, these Karedians. Barbaric and lazy, perhaps, but when forced, they could think intelligently. The difficulty in dealing with them lay in convincing them that intelligence was to their advantage. They tended to act so often as though it weren’t.

Though Xeter had seemed to share her views of the Karedians, he’d thought of them with more compassion than did she. At first, she’d attributed that compassion to his identity as one of them, but as time passed and they’d talked more of such things, she’d begun to think somewhat differently: that his patience, his understanding, and his love arose from the wisdom she’d found in him. She’d seen in his sorrow, a sorrow that seemed to have caused his affliction far more than had any curse, his great love for those less developed intellectually or emotionally than he. He’d had great love in him, that old man. Great enough to make her start trying to be more patient.