Brightly Burning by Mercedes Lackey Page A

little anymore. Maybe when this last pupil was thoroughly grounded and it was time to hand him off, Pol ought to volunteer for field duty again. There were never enough Heralds for all the work, and eventually Ilea would be back again.
    Time never stood still; both of Elenor’s sisters had grown up and gone off on their own, after all. Kaika was somewhere north of Haven, a Bard making the same sort of rounds that a Herald did, but with the difference that she was the collector and disseminator of information and entertainment. Or rather, information disguised as entertainment. She’d gotten her Bardic Reds a good three years ago. Her sister Amaly had gotten her Greens three years before that, and a husband to boot. She and Ranolf were raising their own brood and tending to the hurts of a fairly sizable village in the southwest. Both of them had their own lives now, and in the not-too-distant future, so would Elenor. He couldn’t guide and protect her forever, no matter how much he wanted to.
    You’d think that after two of them growing up and flying away, I’d have gotten used to the idea that children never remain that way, he thought with a physical pang. He bit his lip to still the quiet ache in his heart. But, oh, how I wish they did. . . .
    :It’s never easy to see them go, Chosen,: came the soft words in the back of his mind. :We both have reason to know that.:
    Pol sighed and wordlessly agreed. Satiran had more reason to worry and grieve over his own offspring than Pol did; his eldest had come to a premature end, with his Herald, at the hands of the Karsites.
    He turned his mind out of that path before he started to worry about Ilea. The Karsites didn’t kill Healers, they weren’t that barbaric, but they made major efforts to capture them. And Pol knew Ilea; she had a heart like a warrior, and never let danger keep her from rushing to the aid of the injured. He only hoped that Elenor’s good sense was inherited from Ilea’s side of the family as well as his, and that Ilea would know she would cause more harm than good by going into danger.
    The water was cooling, and he thought briefly about running more hot water in—
    But that would be slothful, and he pried himself up out of the tub, feeling unaccountably much heavier than when he’d gone in, and got himself dried, clothed, and presentable. It was nearly time for dinner; he’d have just about enough time to dry his hair before he had to join the courtiers.
    And after dinner, provided his pupils left him in peace—he did have responsibility for more than just his little Animal Mindspeaker Kedd—he wanted to see if he could follow up some odd indications he’d felt over the past few weeks. It had felt like the first stirrings of a Gift, but if it was, it was a Gift unlike anything he had encountered before.
    Pol was the one Herald who was at all sensitive to the odder Gifts, thanks to his own abilities, but since his strength was minimal, he couldn’t reach much outside the walls of Haven, and about half the time, nothing much came of these vague sensations. Just because a Gift began to stir, it didn’t follow that it would actually wake to full flower. Children often lost the use of Mind-Gifts as they entered puberty. The owner might successfully repress it and wall it off. Life changes might send a Gift into limbo again, particularly tragedy.
    Still, Pol felt he had to follow up where he could, identify what the Gift he sensed was, if possible, and even find the owner. Usually, though, the Companions beat him to the last.
    Pol sat in the open window of his room and combed his hair dry in the waning sunlight; he had a fastidious dislike of going out in public with wet hair. It was a comfortable little room, neat and well-ordered, shared most of the time with Ilea. With so much of white and blue surrounding him, and so much of green surrounding Ilea, Pol’s personal tastes broke out in a