Knowing where the order came from and where it was going was imporant, he could see that now. The katzh-dashi had lacked direction after the Breaking, lost its history, and finally things were getting back in the direction they were supposed to go. It would be thousands of years before the number of Sorcerers were enough to cause another Age of Power. Perhaps next time there was one, they'd have the wisdom of experience to not cause another Breaking.
It was a very strange thing to wake up with memories that weren't there when one went to sleep. That meant the lore of the Weave as much as it did regaining all the memory he had lost to the curse placed on the Firestaff. But his memory was whole again, beyond whole, and it was senseless to dwell on it for very long. It was over, it was done, he had been graced with knowledge beyond the scope of his awareness, and what was more important, he was Were once more.
He looked at his paws again, looking at the fetlocks on his wrists. Now that he had his memory back, now that he could look into his own feelings, he had to admit it to himself. Miranda was right. Given what he knew now, were he still human, he would have chosen to be turned again. The memory of himself as a human seemed strange, bizarre, almost frightening. He had been so weak. So dependent on others, so limited. He would never have been happy like that, not so long as the memory of what he had once been was with him. Despite the pain he had suffered, despite the terrible things he had done as a Were-cat, he knew that the change had been absolute. He was a Were-cat, and always would be, in mind and sprit if not in body.
But that did not justify what had been done to him. Despite the fact that he would have chosen to be Were, it did not make this alright. He had been denied the one thing the Goddess herself wanted for him, the right to choose his own future, his own fate, for good or ill. He had been violated at the core of his being, in the most intimate manner possible, and he meant to find out who did this to him and unleash his wrath. Someone had changed him back, had done it against his will, and what was most outrageous, had done it in the most cowardly way imaginable. The culprit didn't even have the guts to look him in the eye and bite him. No, this person had put Were-cat blood in the potion or had spat in it, not wanting him to know who had done it.
The possibilities were rather obvious. Of everyone involved, Jesmind and Kimmie had the most at stake. But that didn't mean that one of them did it. It could have been any of the females, even Jula, though he had the feeling that it wasn't her. Jula would never deprive him of the one thing she herself probably wished was hers. The right to choose. Jesmind certainly was capable of it, and so was Kimmie. Spiking the potion would be more Kimmie's approach than Jesmind, since she'd probably just bite him if she meant to change him back.
Whoever it was, she was going to be very sorry she did it. He didn't care who it was who did it. First he was going to beat her to within an finger's breadth of her life, then he probably wouldn't speak to her again for a very long time. As angry as he was, he was more than capable of even thrashing Kimmie, who was pregnant with his child. Not even that would protect her from his vengeance if it turned out that she was the one who did this to him. He wouldn't kill whoever did it, but she'd be on his bad side for the next few hundred years. It may take that long for her to heal from the thrashing he intended to lay down on her.
Standing up, feeling the lightness and total freedom that was his once again, the freedom to jump incredibly high, to run faster than a horse, feeling his unnatural Were-cat strength flow through him, he padded over to the chest and pulled out one of the shirts that the tailor Cassiter had made for him. It was too small for him now, but that was easily fixed. As if the time as a human had never happened, Tarrin wove a quick spell to enlarge the garment, feeling full and complete control over the Weave once again.
Strange. The Goddess said he wouldn't have the height, but she was wrong. He was just as he'd been before the Firestaff stripped him of his Were nature, eye to eye with Triana. And he felt exactly the same as he had before that happened to him, as if being a human had never happened. All he had was the memory of it, and the influences of that time on his outlook now.
Whatever became of this, he knew it had to be fast. The return of his memory meant that the weight of the mission was again heavy on him, and he knew that the Tower was not a safe place. He could spend no more than three days here. That was all. Three days to make sure there were no lingering side-effects of the turning and the potion, and three days to track down the culprit and punish her in the most brutal manner possible without killing her. After those three days, whether he found her or not, he had to leave. It was only two months before the Firestaff activated, and summer would soon be winding down into fall. If he wanted to travel, it would be best to get out there and get a jump on the autumn storms, and give him as much time as possible to lose any pursuers and disappear with the Firestaff. Time was of the essence now, both for him and for anyone who intended to try to take the Firestaff away from him. He needed time to escape, and they needed the time to find him.
He already knew exactly where he was going to go. The one place in all of Sennadar no man, no matter how desperate or insane he was, would dare set foot. The Desert of Swirling Sands. It was also one of the few places on Sennadar where a man could hide from an army with a reasonable chance of getting away with it. The brutal heat and rugged terrain would work to his advantage, and his magical abilities would allow him to draw those pursuers deeper and deeper into the Holy Mother's deadly embrace and let the desert do the killing for him. And then there were the Selani. Even without them, the desert was the ideal place to hide, but not even the most fanatical army was going to risk a confrontation with the Selani in their homeland. They'd get annihilated, and they knew it. With the Selani and the desert itself to protect him, he knew that he could do what the Goddess needed of him, and that was keep the Firestaff away from everyone else.
It wouldn't take him long to get there, and it would be a very short trip if he could get Ianelle to teach him how to Teleport. If he could learn how to do that, protecting the Firestaff was going to be a very simple affair. If he found himself threatened, he could jump halfway across the Known World in the blink of an eye. He'd like to see them follow him after he did that.
No, wait… he already did know how to Teleport. That was right there with the memories, and with calm surprise, he realized that the vast majority of the spells that had been lost to the human katzh-dashi lived on within him now. He had absorbed them when the magic potion sucked in all the memory of the Weave, and the Goddess had not bothered to erase them from his memory. He knew how to Teleport, he knew every spell that Auli had used in her rampages of troublemaking through the Tower, he knew the spells that Syllis and the old Council had used to control the Sha'Kar. He even knew spells that they did not know, such as how to safely Transmute into certain known forms. Shapeshifting. Shapeshifting through Sorcery, an art lost since before the Breaking, before the Sha'Kar, an art lost with the Blood War.
Touching a finger to his temple, he sorted through this new knowledge quickly yet thoroughly, understanding each new spell and how it worked, and how it could be altered to conform to a given situation. There were hundreds of them, myriads of possible alterations of those weaves
Those spells, added to the ones he had figured out on his own and the ones Spyder taught him, gave him a truly vast command of the Weave, and tremendous versatility. It helped that he was sui'kun, that a great many of them required High Sorcery in order to be used, and that he could use them by himself when he needed them.