“Focus,” Reka said, his voice a gravelly rumble.
Farsight. Heath squeezed his eyes shut, focusing on Merletta as Reka had taught him to do—not a memory of her, not a guess about her surroundings, but just her.
As it usually did when he was with Reka—his abilities enhanced by the presence of the dragon’s magic—Heath’s vision immediately changed. At once he could see Merletta, her image slightly murky in the way that indicated she was deep underwater.
He tried to push his sight outward to reveal her surroundings, as Reka had been training him to do, but he couldn’t see much beyond the girl herself. She filled his sight just as she filled his thoughts, to the exclusion of anything else.
“Do you see her?” Reka’s calm voice broke through Heath’s focus, but the image remained clear. “I assume it is Merletta whom you wished to see.”
“It is,” Heath confirmed. “And yes, I can see her. She’s…” He frowned, properly taking in her expression for the first time. “I think she’s upset.”
Again he tried to extend his bubble of sight, desperate for a glimpse of what was around her. She was swimming pretty quickly. Was someone pursuing her? Was she in danger?
“I can’t see what’s happening,” he told Reka, frustrated. “I can’t see much beyond her face.”
“Your farsight is narrow,” Reka responded. “But it will broaden. Try to see something else, other than Merletta.”
Heath hesitated, reluctant to pull his vision away from Merletta when he still hadn’t discovered the cause of her distress. He wanted to stay with her, to keep a finger on her pulse so to speak. But Reka was his only hope of properly developing his dragon-like magic. He knew he needed to listen to his friend’s instruction.
Still, he couldn’t bring himself to abandon Merletta altogether. She was too important, too central to his every thought. As he turned his mind away, he found himself leaving a strand of thought with her. He didn’t know how to explain it, but it felt like the mental equivalent of leaving one finger on a certain page while rifling through the rest of a book. Her image seemed to shrink but not disappear, stashed in a corner of his sight.
Reka had told him to pick a different subject. What else would he like to see? Vazula leaped into his mind, and he tried to visualize the island. Nothing happened. Heath frowned, and Reka picked up on the expression.
“You are not succeeding?”
Heath shook his head. “I’m trying to see Vazula, but nothing’s happening.”
The dragon nodded. “Places are more difficult than people, remember. Bring to mind our lessons about targeting your farsight. It is not a matter of trying to picture the subject by its physical appearance. Doing that simply invites your imagination to supplant the farsight. It is about dwelling on the essence of the person or object or place. That is why it is much easier to use farsight on someone you care about, or are invested in.”
Heath nodded. It was an explanation Reka had given before, and it helped explain why it was easy for Heath to see someone like Percival, or Merletta. Even Reka’s power wasn’t strong enough to see strangers he’d never met, which meant Heath’s certainly never would be, no matter how much he trained. There were ways around it, though. If you could picture a place, you could see the people who were there. Which was why it was worth attempting to master the skill of seeing locations.
It was a challenge, though. Merletta was easy to pinpoint. Her essence felt more familiar than it logically should, given she wasn’t even entirely human—on some level, Heath had felt a sense of kinship with her from the moment they’d set eyes on each other. But the island wasn’t as simple. How did you focus on the essence of a place? Heath paused, thinking of what Vazula meant to him.
Freedom, he thought. It meant freedom from the restrictions and the responsibilities of his normal life. And it meant Merletta. The two were inextricably linked in his mind. Unbidden, the mermaid’s image flashed before his eyes again, as if the small picture in the corner of his mind had suddenly increased to full size. She was wending her way through tall fronds of some kind of seaweed. Strange thing to find within a mermaid city, he would have thought.
He focused his mind back on the island. Vazula meant freedom and peace and adventure all at once, it was true. But those things were too general. He needed to be more specific. He kept his eyes closed, imagining that the crisp coolness of the autumn day had been replaced by the sticky warmth of Vazula’s air. He dwelt on small details—the cries of gulls, the smell of the salt, the sight of a coconut bobbing in the shallows. The flash of pearlescent green as Merletta’s legs turned into tail.
There it was. Vazula. The image was as clear as day in his mind, brighter and more colorful than his imagination could ever paint it. A stunning jewel—an emerald in the middle of a vast sapphire ocean. He could see it from a dragon’s view, but as he leaned into the image, it descended, until he was looking right at the beach he knew so well. The trees at the sand’s edge rustled, and he frowned at the movement, too big to be caused by wind. Was Merletta on the island after all? But he’d just seen her underwater.
Heath felt a flash of unease at the thought that someone or something foreign was on Vazula. The island had always been a safe haven, seeming to belong completely to him and Merletta, and—to a lesser extent—Reka. With the thought, the image cut off abruptly, the unfamiliar note seeming to dilute Heath’s ability to connect with the place.
He sighed, opening his eyes to see Reka watching him closely.
“You used significant power,” the dragon pointed out. “That seems to have been successful.”
Heath nodded. “For the most part. Places are still difficult, though.”
Reka’s nod was as regal as any gesture of King Matlock’s. “I used to find them so as well, when I was trained in the craft as a dragonling.”
Heath hid a smile at the lofty tone of the dragon who, for his kind, was more like an adolescent than an adult.
“Maybe I should try another person,” Heath mused. “Something a bit easier.”
Without waiting for Reka’s response, Heath turned his mind to his sister, Laura. Her essence was easy to picture. Heath had sometimes wondered if his sister’s cheerful nature was the result of her magic, or the other way around. She had the ability not only to sense others’ emotions, but to cheer those emotions. Many a time she had lifted the mood of the family with an effortless strand of magic. Her presence had been sorely missed in the household once she’d married and moved away. Particularly when Percival began resenting the crown’s growing uncertainty about the presence of magic in the kingdom.
As Heath dwelt on Laura as a person, her image popped immediately into his mind. She was draped across a fully made bed, in spite of the hour, her feet elevated. As Heath watched, a groan escaped her lips.
Are you all right, Laura? The voice of Edmund, Laura’s husband, emerged from somewhere out of Heath’s sight. The servants told me you’d gone back to bed.