Competitions Read Online Free PDF Page A

was the one who practiced, while they stared into a cubicle for a while and then walked away.
    I sipped at my tea in an effort to calm my annoyance, which now threatened to get out of hand again. It hadn’t been much of a problem while I’d been practicing, not with all the strength I’d been expending, but lunch had done a good job of restoring my energies. And being outdoors seemed to help as well. I enjoyed being outdoors, but…
    But I was far from being happy. I sipped tea as I looked around again, wondering for the tenth or twentieth time if everyone else there was the same sort of incompetent want-to-be that I suspected Soonen was. My Adept guide had proven to be an arrogant idiot much like Beldara Lant, the woman who shared my aspect and had shared my residence until yesterday. Beldara was convinced she was the best at Fire magic ever to have been born, but she hadn’t yet been able to justify the claim with actions.
    Soonen claimed to be an Adept, but she’d spent her time calling me useless and helpless, and hadn’t even been able to demonstrate the third exercise I was supposed to do. The woman had seemed to be trying deliberately to make me lose control of both my temper and my talent, and I couldn’t understand that. If the testing authority didn’t want us to qualify for the competition for High practitioner, what were they after instead?
    Any possible answer to that was one designed to make me shiver or tremble, so it wasn’t a great disappointment not being able to think of one. Simply knowing I walked a very thin line with various disasters waiting on all sides for a misstep was enough to keep my insides in a permanent twist, at least when I stopped to think about it. What I’d tried to keep in mind instead was the agreement the others at the residence and I had come to: keep moving forward. Nothing about our situation was certain, except for the fact that falling behind would bring immediate disaster, while moving forward at least postponed the time of trouble.
    I took a deep breath to ease the fluttering in my middle, and saw Soonen rise from the table she’d shared with two other women. That table had been near one filled mostly with men, but she hadn’t even glanced in their direction. Now she made her way toward me, tall and imposing with her arrogant stride, the beginning of a sneer on her plain, undistinguished face.
    “If you’re through stuffing yourself, it’s time you got back to practicing,” she said as she stopped beside my table to look down at me. “You don’t have forever to make your pitiful attempts at testing, you know, so you’d better get moving.”
    “If I don’t have forever, then I ought to make my pitiful attempt right now,” I answered, using my nervousness over the test to counter rising annoyance. “Who did you say I had to speak to about watching me?”
    “Gerdol is your examiner,” she responded automatically, then shook her head as if to dismiss the entire idea. “But that’s ridiculous, you can’t possibly be ready after only a single morning’s practice. If you think I intend to bother Gerdol for nothing, you have another think coming.”
    “Either
you
can call him, or I will,” I stated, flatly refusing to let her get a rise out of me—at least where she could see it. “If I can’t do it, we’ll all soon know.”
    “Yes, yes we will,” she said, brightening with the idea of my failure. “And then I’ll be rid of you, so it’s worth bothering Gerdol after all. I’ll be right back.”
    Her enjoyment and happiness were clear as she made her way toward the table holding mostly men, but by the time she reached it she’d lost a good deal of both. Even though there were more women than men in our aspect, she’d said, the only ones who could be examiners were men. That arrangement was an old story, but she acted as if it were brand new—or could be changed by complaining about it. Her complaints had about as much chance to change things as