Competitions Read Online Free PDF Page B

delighted to share tea with you later, Adept Gerdol,” I answered in a way that would have made Jovvi proud of me. “Right now, though, I prefer to continue. Once all this testing business is behind me, my mind will be clear enough to concentrate on other things.”
    “Of course, my dear, I quite understand,” Adept Gerdol said as he took my hand and patted it. “We’ll continue on as long as you’re able, and then we’ll have tea.”
    He used the hand he held to lead me to the next cubicle, and I caught a glance of Soonen on the way. The woman had her lip curled into a sneer over the way Gerdol was behaving with my encouragement, which showed she didn’t understand the true state of affairs. She’d been the one to give me the idea about trying manipulation when she’d spoken about how men reacted to my “sort,” so it was completely accurate to say that she was directly responsible for everything I did.
    And that might even include my performance during the tests. I’d finally forced myself to admit that I wanted to
show
the woman, show her what I could do and that I wasn’t the helpless little toy she’d claimed. The second cubicle had a pull cord which released a wide spray of water from a tank overhead, and even as I yanked on the cord I heard a trill of avian support and encouragement.
    But by then I had the power flowing through me again, and the object this time was to burn the water without creating steam. Once again the feat required the use of a woven pattern in my very hot fires, but then that, too, was done.
    “Excellent, my dear, truly excellent,” Adept Gerdol said heartily with triumphant birdsong as a faint backdrop. “Two masteries one after the other. You’ll certainly want to try for the third, and afterward we’ll have our tea and discuss the best way to increase your precision.”
    I turned to the man again with a smile and a nod, but on the inside I was fuming. The oaf expected me to fail at the next exercise, just the way Soonen had almost certainly failed and possibly the way
he
had. The haunted part of my mind feared that they would prove to be right, but the rest of me was too bloody angry to even consider failure. But not to use strong words like “bloody,” at least to myself. I’d never said that word out loud, and probably never would.
    I walked to the third cubicle surrounded by the most calming birdsong I’d ever heard, so that when I stepped inside I felt less angered and more controlled. The thought came that it would be marvelous to be able to take that bird home and feed it seed and bread until it was too heavy to fly, but that wasn’t likely to become possible. The bird wasn’t really there to support me, I simply needed to believe it was.
    So I held to my beliefs as I looked at the pile of wood thrown one piece on top of another in the middle of the cubicle. The pieces were each about a foot in length and were carved into different shapes, an oval shape with a splotch of blue paint just visible in the pile’s middle. The piece with the orange paint splotch which had been there earlier had had to be replaced, and I’d done the replacing myself.
    Both Soonen and Adept Gerdol stood waiting silently for me to fail, undoubtedly thinking that I couldn’t yet be up to burning one single piece of wood in the pile without at least singeing some of the others. At first I hadn’t thought I could do it either, but then I’d tried it—and had discovered I already knew how to keep my flames from burning what they shouldn’t. Once or twice I’d had occasion to guard what surrounded my fires, like when Jovvi’s sponsor had come to the residence, and the woman’s two henchmen had tried to hurt Jovvi and me. I hadn’t considered that practice at the time, but apparently it had been nothing else.
    “The oval piece of wood, with the blue splotch of paint,” I said, naming my target, more than eager to get on with it and have it behind me. When Adept Gerdol murmured his