Page 26 of Into the West

She rolled over and looked at the sky, waiting for the pain behind her eyes to ease, and grateful that it was cold and the chill could soothe the ache. She had used her Gift more since she had joined the Scouts than she had in all the time she’d lived with Kordas and Isla. Thankfully, when she had explained that using her Gift too much made her head ache and she sometimes needed to lie down and rest, everyone had understood.

Am I that desperate not to be thought to be slacking?

She stared at a puffy little cloud.

Well, yes. She was that desperate. Because she wanted everyone here to actually want her here. She wanted to be thought well of for herself, to be thought of as a valuable part of this expedition. She wanted them to think of her first as herself, and not as the Baroness’s sister.

And if Kordas sent me along to get me out from underfoot . . . I want them to think that if they’d had a choice, they would have asked me along themselves.

Because as they had all been camped around the lake, practically in each other’s pockets day and night, it had become increasingly obvious, at least to her, that something had changed between Kordas and Isla. They weren’t acting as they had at home. In fact, if she’d been forced to put a name to things, she’d have said they were in love with each other. They weren’t just friends and partners anymore.

And surely one of them had noticed her feelings about the Baron. She probably wasn’t any good at hiding her feelings . . .

A face interposed itself between Delia and the sky. “Rested up, yet?” Briada asked, with a half smile.

“More or less. Do we need more wood?” She clambered to her feet. Briada stepped back to give her room.

“Good gods, no. I was just curious about something. That thing you do—can it push as well as pull?” Briada tucked her thumbs in her belt and stood in a deceptively relaxed stance as she waited for Delia to reply. Delia knew it was a “deceptively relaxed stance” because Delia had seen the woman go from this exact pose to ready to take someone apart in barely the time it took to blink.

But Delia had to take a minute to work out what Briada meant. “Um . . . I’ve thrown stones with it?” she finally said.

Briada considered that, as wavelets lapped against the hulls of the barges, and the steady, dull clopping of hooves on the bank marked their continuous passage. There was an actual path here, which suggested that people used the riverbank as a sort of road, but so far none of those people had put in an appearance.

“Well,” Briada said, finally. “What I had in mind was . . .” Her face screwed up as she sought for words. “Could you magic an arrow into a target? Guide it, or shove it there or something.”

Delia did not correct Briada to say that what she did was not precisely magic, at least not as the mages practiced it. Over the last few days she had at least learned not to over-explain things. The Fairweather cousins made no attempts at concealing their thoughts or feelings, and their exaggerated expressions of boredom when she started to explain something had soon cured her of doing so. Instead she shrugged. “I’ve never tried,” she admitted. “It’s called ‘Fetching Gift,’ not ‘Arrow-Guiding Gift,’ after all.” She eyed Briada with speculation. “You want me to try it, don’t you?”

“Well, hell, if we ran into trouble, you could do us all a hell of a lot of good if you could send an arrow into a target no matter how much it dodged,” Briada pointed out—inadvertently adding another layer of difficulty to what Delia had proposed. But what could she do? She didn’t actually know what her capabilities in that regard were, and saying she couldn’t do it without first trying would be—

—well, it would probably sink her in Briada’s eyes.

“When would you like me to try?” she temporized. “And where?”

“You could move back to the rearmost barge, I can give you a hand-crossbow, and you can plink at trees. I’ll retrieve your arrows—”

“No need,” she said, with a slight smirk. “I can Fetch them back myself, remember?” And the more she thought about this idea, the more she wanted to try. It was one thing to contribute to the scouts in a sort of passive way; it was quite another if she could actually be of use in a fight.

“Well then, I’ll just get you a hand-crossbow.” Briada chuckled, and hopped barges until she got to the supply barge. She was remarkably agile, and the bobbing and swaying didn’t seem to trouble her even a little bit.

For the remainder of the afternoon, Delia perched on the four Gate uprights strapped to the top of the barge and experimented with the lightest of the hand-crossbows. She didn’t want the bolts to stick too deeply into the trees she was shooting at; just as there was a limit to how much she could Fetch, there was a limit to how hard she could pull.

At first her results were no better than just aiming, but she had a kind of . . . pulling or reaching sort of feeling, the kind she got whenever she tried something new that actually was going to work. Like when she had first tried assisting at the difficult birth of an animal on the manor farms. In that case it had been a lamb, and eventually, after a lot of sweating on the parts of both her and the shepherd, she’d gotten the little creature out before something dire happened.

So she persisted, sending the same crossbow bolt into trunk after trunk, while the horses clopped along up ahead, Hakkon and Jonaton brought up the rear, and the three Fairweathers perched on the middle barges with heavy mankiller crossbows in hand.

About the time that Ivar and Bay came back from scouting ahead to let them know he’d found a good spot to tie up for the night—

Something in her just felt like a tile falling into place. And in the next moment, she planted the bolt exactly where she wanted it to, in a barely visible canker in the bark of what looked like a walnut tree. She yanked it back into her hand, riding on a surge of elation, and picked a new target.

She’d managed to repeat her shot a little less than a dozen times when she felt the pressure-bordering-on-pain that meant she needed to stop if she didn’t want to regret it for the rest of the night.

At that point, Alberdina was slowing the horses so as to bring the barge-string to a gradual stop, and Delia hung the crossbow beside its quiver on her belt and ran to help set up the land side of the camp for the night.

It was only when they were all enjoying Sai’s fish around the cookfire that Briada cocked her head and said, “I asked Delia to see if she could use that magic of hers to think an arrow into the target this afternoon.”

“But that’s not m—” began Venidel, when Sai elbowed him.

“Don’t go off on a meaningless tangent,” Sai scolded him, then looked to Delia across the fire. The last light was just leaving the sky and the temperature had dropped down to the point where Delia’s nose was definitely getting unpleasantly cold, so she answered the question before Sai could answer it.