Gratuitous Epilogue : Touchstone Extras Read Online Free PDF

the care he needed, and also make
sure Zar had a chance to look to her own future as well as Deal's.
Zar's really interesting – she's not some angelic, self-sacrificing
type, but full of curiosity and with an excellent sardonic sense of
humour which matches Ketzaren's. I'd like to get to know her
better, but Deal pretty much stays attached to her leg, and doesn't
like her talking to anyone else – getting him to separate into age
groups at the school has been pretty difficult, and over the months
he's actually been getting more clingy, not less. Ketzaren says it
will be a slow process teaching Deal to feel safe with anyone else,
but she seems determined to succeed.
    Their third adoptee is
Ennanal, a ten year-old girl. Enna likes to dance about – she
reminds me of Sen when Sen's happy – and she also shares Sen's
tendency for terrible nightmares, though these are because she lost
her family, and because she found the journey through deep-space
particularly terrifying, not because of any Sights.
    After they'd had a few
days to settle in, we invited them and the rest of First and Second
over for a barbeque, having had a discussion with our four
beforehand to make sure they weren't too uncomfortable with the
idea of these children coming onto 'their territory'. They knew
them all already, of course, since they go to the same school,
though Zar and Shar are in the elder 'grade' and they don't have
much to do with them. Fortunately Fein is someone Rye already
seemed to think was okay, and he was quite keen to show off his
garden and parts of the island to him. Lira and Ys made it clear
that so long as no-one was allowed to go into their rooms, they
didn't care who we chose to have over, but they ended up politely
taking Enna around and keeping her entertained. They're not going
to leap into friendship with her, but they didn't freeze her out,
and I made sure they knew I was pleased with them for being
nice.
    Sen was having one of
her bad days, and ended up in my lap most of the time – which at
least made her match Deal and gave me a chance to chat with Zar.
Shar started out more like a visiting dignitary than a child – all
formal and polite and detached – but then we went down to the docks
so they could try out the canoes and he enjoyed that, and was
positively approving of the idea of canoes for Siriath after
everyone's passed basic swimming. It was fun noticing how pleased
Mara was by that. We're going to get a larger boat/flyer so we can
'carpool' the kids to school. Canoes and flying and the simple
six-person sleds are all dandy in sunny Summer weather, but won't
be much fun in the middle of Winter.
    Except for Zar, who has
a medium strength level, all the kids are extremely strong talents,
which of course is why they were in the talent school in the first
place. They're not on par with the Setari (Nuran or Taren/Kolaren)
because they haven't been pushed in the same way, and don't have
the expanded interface or ability to focus their connection to the
Ena. There's been endless discussions recently about teaching new
Setari the methods the Nurans use to become aware of the Ena link
versus cheating using me. More and more of the Taren and Kolaren
Setari are becoming able to enhance themselves, but many of them
still can't.
    Inisar described how
the Nuran Setari gain their strength, which sounds to me much like
a cross between Native American Spirit journeys and sensory
deprivation. When they were vetting apprentice Setari, the Nurans
started them off at around five years old, gave them mental
exercises about thinking about the world around them for nearly
eight months, and then put them through five more months of
'ordeals' where they try and focus their own connection, and if
they don't succeed by then they're finished as an apprentice and go
back to their former lives. It's a terribly young age to be doing
things like that. The Nurans believed that if you didn't learn very
young you would be incapable of learning,