“I can make a tisane to give him a lift,” Harile suggested.

“Many thanks.” I felt Gilmarten stir beside me. “I was wondering, do you ever have mage-born among the Folk?” I asked casually. “It shows itself about the age Drianon bloods a girl, among the outdwellers at least.”

We followed Harile to a fire where he swung a battered kettle over the hottest flames. “We tend to notice it hereabouts when Trimon breaks a boy’s voice. With girls it’s any time after Larasion brings them into bloom.”

“What do you notice? What exactly signifies magebirth to you?” Gilmarten tugged absently on his tuft of beard.

“Some are an utter nuisance anywhere near a hearth until it passes. Fire either burns through half a night’s fuel inside a few moments or just dies away and refuses to be relit.” Harile paused in mixing pinches of herbs in a beaker. “You get some who don’t leave a footprint for half a year, and there’s always the story of one lass who got rained on from Solstice to Solstice, just her, you understand, no one else.” He laughed. “But I’ve heard that tale from a handful of folk between here and the southern sea, all saying it happened to a friend of a friend, so I think that’s just wind in the long grass.”

“Let me take that to Usara.” I reached for the cup and Gilmarten walked with me. He scratched his head, perplexed. “I’ve never heard of sympathy with an element just going away.”

“Can you tell if someone is mage-bom? Is there some test?” I set the cup down next to Usara and we went back to Harile, who was mulching some leaves into a poultice.

“There are methods of determining where the principal sympathy lies,” Gilmarten answered, “when the effects are first manifesting themselves.” He looked concerned. “Is it possible that if a sympathy is not trained it is lost?”

“Not if Sorgrad’s any guide,” I said with determination. “Harile, do you know of anyone here who once showed signs of magebirth? They might be able to help our wizards defend your sick and elderly.”

Harile set his bowl of pulpy mess down at once. “Come with me.” He led us to a fire no more than a few embers smoldering in a nest of feathery ash. Those sitting around it were somewhere between youth and adulthood, with little more than a blanket and a few salvaged possessions to cling to. None had anything like blithe confidence I had come to expect from Forest Folk.

“This is Sarachi.” Harile indicated a youth with Forest red hair over a face that should have been following a plow in Caladhria. “He showed magebirth, as far as we could judge.”

“What of it?” The lad had a hint of spirit left.

“This wizard thinks you could help him.” Harile indicated Gilmarten.

Sarachi started to get to his feet but Gilmarten waved him to sit again. I perched on a stump and watched quietly. Gilmarten lit a twig from the last glow of the fire.

“Concentrate on the flame.” He handed it to Sarachi. “See if you can make it smaller.” To my eyes, the feeble yellow flicker didn’t vary in the slightest until the flame threatened his fingers and Sarachi dropped the spill.

“I need a cup of water.” Gilmarten looked around as if he expected to see a potman. One of the girls wordlessly handed him a carved wooden beaker. “Cup your hands.” Gilmarten poured a little water into Sarachi’s hollowed palms. “Keep it there as long as you can.” Disappointment was audible all around as the water trickled out from between Sarachi’s fingers, despite the effort whitening his knuckles.

“No matter.” Gilmarten sounded as if he meant it. If he didn’t I’d finally met a wizard to challenge to a game of Raven. The Soluran scraped up a handful of earth, picking out fragments of long rotted leaf and then dusting it lightly with ash from the fire. He pressed this into Sarachi’s open palm. “See if you can lift the ash out of the earth. Concentrate, visualize the gray moving out of the brown and being carried away on the wind.”

Sarachi frowned with effort and in the next instant the whole handful spiraled upward into the air. We all looked up and then cursed as specks of dirt fell in our open mourns and wide eyes.

“An air sympathy,” said Gilmarten happily, “or affinity as they would call it in Hadrumal.”

“But you told me to concentrate on the earth,” objected Sarachi.

“Bluffing, wizard?” I teased.

“Something like that. An untrained sympathy can hamper itself; combined trials get around the problem.” Gilmarten looked around. “Does anyone know someone else who showed signs of magebirth?”

A thin girl with lank brown hair raised a bruised and dirty hand. “Castan did.”

We found this Castan at a hearth on the far side of the hollow, a no-nonsense woman with red-rimmed eyes. The notion that her previously disregarded magebirth might help protect her three young offspring set the fire raging beneath her cook pot. Gilmarten explained, we doused the conflagration and moved rapidly on to the next potential wizard.

By the time we returned to Usara, we had seven in tow. Sarachi was joined by a lad whose fuzz of a beard only showed where it caught the light and a tired-faced man in his middle years. Castan was leading three younger women, all smiling nervously and variously encouraged or teased by their friends. We left behind five others, some disgruntled, some relieved, when Gilmarten had pronounced them either never mage-born or with a sympathy so faint it could not be trained.

“Darni is one of those, an affinity too weak to work with,” I told the Soluran quietly as we left one disappointed man crossly poking his recalcitrant fire with a vindictive stick.

“I didn’t know that.” Gilmarten looked thoughtful. “Still, that means we can bespeak him with fire and metal if he’s elsewhere.”

“He doesn’t have to be an actual wizard for that? Just mage-born?” The next step was an obvious one.

Gilmarten made it. “No, and that means we could contact your friend Sorgrad, if he is willing to acknowledge his sympathy to that extent.”

“I’ll see if I can talk him into it.” Sorgrad might not want to be a mage on Hadrumal’s terms, but if he didn’t see advantages in having wizards keeping us informed about what they could scry out, he wasn’t the man I knew. Of course, there would be disadvantages as well, but we’d find ways around those.

Usara looked up from his bowl as we reached him. He eased his stiff shoulders, each giving a crack that made me wince. “Well?”

“Seven,” Gilmarten’s excitement was understandable. “One each with earth and air, three with fire, which is most unusual, and two with water.”

Usara’s tense face lightened considerably. “That’s two full nexus groups!”

Gilmarten tugged at his beard. “That’s not a way we are accustomed to work in Solura, but perhaps we can manage.”

“We could do without all this noise.”

Darni came over, parchments in hand, ’Gren and Sorgrad behind, heads close in conversation. The gentle song of a lute was blending with a pipe somewhere the far side of the dell, underscored with voices here and there. The melody swelled as everyone united in the same measure for a few moments and ebbed with descant and counterpoint floating in from different directions.

“I like it,” said ’Gren with simple honesty. A single clear voice lifted a new tune, others repeating it a few measures later, doubling and redoubling into a round song.

“If your countrymen have an ear for a tune, it’ll lead them straight to us,” pointed out Darni. I held my breath and my tongue.

“I can use air to cap it?” Gilmarten offered. “I’d be loath to forbid it since they do seem to find some healing in the music.”

Usara shot me a suspicious glance that I returned with a bland look of innocence. I wasn’t about to admit to a hand in this outbreak of singing, not until I had some way of judging whether my speculation was paying off.

Darni grunted. “So what have you found for us?” He smiled at the nervous would-be wizards with all the charm of a man-trap.