The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card Page A

stuffed the new ones into the backpack, and ran barefoot back to where Eric and Tony were still waiting.
    â€œMan, the kid wasn’t kidding,” said Tony.
    â€œHis name’s Danny,” said Eric.
    â€œI don’t have to remember that,” said Tony. “I’m not going with you. I’m a working man.”
    â€œBFD,” said Eric. “Those clothes are great, Danny. You’re a natural.”
    â€œCome on, he’s a complete hick, that’s what those clothes mean,” said Tony.
    â€œBut he doesn’t talk like a hick,” said Eric. “He talks like he’s read a book in his life. He’ll be good company. I’ll teach him to beg and he’ll teach me how to make clean getaways. We’ll be such great brothers we’ll start thinking we really grew up together.”
    Eric and Tony said their good-byes and a half hour later, Eric and Danny were in the back of a pickup truck that was going as far as Staunton. Danny figured it was the luckiest thing in his life, that he walked behind those stores and not in front of them.

5
    T HE G ATE T HIEF
    King Prayard of Iceway was a Wavebrother—a seamage with the power to make currents flow where he needed them to.
    This was no surprise. The inhabitants of Iceway, lacking in good agricultural land, and so far north that the growing season seemed to pass in a few weeks, had long found that trade or pillage were essential to survival; and, rimmed with mountains as their lands were, the ocean provided the only means of accomplishing either.
    In such a land as Iceway, seamages were essential to making long voyages even when winds were contrary. A ship with a good stillsea mage aboard would never sink in a storm; a fleet led by a ship with a Wavebrother could always follow currents that led precisely where he wanted them to go. And if they had a Tidefather, the strongest of seamages, he could invest a portion of his outself in a particular current so that it would continue to flow exactly as he shaped it, for decades or centuries, no matter how long he himself remained alive. So long had Iceway depended on detailed maps of all the ancient currents made by the Tidefathers of the past two thousand years, and on the work of present-day Wavebrothers, that they had long since ceased to build their great trading and raiding ships with sails, or with any means of propulsion except the sea itself.
    In such a land, it was inevitable that great seamages would rise to political power, and just as inevitable that seamagery was the power most sought after. Thus most children were tested for seamagery, and if they showed even the slightest talent for it, they were trained to the extent of their abilities, however meager they might be.
    It was not that other mages were without value, for a Siltbrother could help improve the soil, a Galebreath could turn aside an unseasonable, crop-wrecking storm, a Cobblefriend could lead miners to productive veins of a desired ore, and a Meadowfriend could bring reliable harvests, and sometimes even spectacular ones. The people of Iceway were grateful for any such mages.
    But seamagery had become something of a religion with them. To have a child with such abilities was to be raised into a different rank of society; no social barriers stood in the way of a child who could flatten the sea or kindle a current in the desired direction.
    Kings of Iceway almost always married the daughters of seamages, or women who were skilled in seamagery themselves, for there was a strong belief in Iceway, and some evidence, that a predisposition toward seamagery could be inherited by children.
    There is a subtle distinction here: It was absolutely known and repeatedly proven that if both of a child’s parents were powerful mages in any discipline, their children were likely to have great power in whatever magery they found an affinity for. But in most of the world called Westil or Mitherkame it was considered just