Wizard's Heir (A Bard Without a Star, Book 1) by Michael A. Hooten Page B

his ears had been stuffed with
cotton before, but Math had pulled it out. He heard whisperings of men, true,
but he also heard the voices of the air itself, teasing the earth and tickling
the trees. Just as he went through the doors, he wondered if he would be able
to sleep with all the noise.
    The hall was bright and crowded
as usual, but the wind here was different. It had a fat and stuffy voice that
knew little of outside. It smelled of beer and smoke, and lapped at the roast
on the table. Gwydion heard it murmuring to its mother, the fire, complaining
that it wanted to see the world. And he felt tendrils calling from the roof as
they fulfilled that dream.
    “Gwyd!”
    The hand on his chest stopped
him, and he followed it to his cousin’s face. “Oh. Hello, Gil.”
    “What’s the matter with you?
First you’re gone for over a month, and now you walk the length of the hall
like you’re in a dream.”
    “Don’t you hear them?”
    “Hear who? Everyone’s talking
at once.”
    “The winds.”
    Gil took him firmly by the
shoulder and steered him to a table in one of the wicker partitions. He pushed
Gwydion down into a chair, and sat next to him. “Look,” he said, “Everyone
knows you’re going to be the full on designated heir in a few months. And
everyone knows you spend hours locked up with Math and Goewin. But if you
start talking about hearing the winds, people will hate you all the same.”
    “What?” Gwydion said. “Gil,
you’re not making any sense.”
    “Oh, yes I am. It’s like this:
Math is respected and loved for his abilities, because... well, because he’s
Math. But you’re not.”
    Gwydion turned the words over
in his head, wondering where he had heard something similar. It clicked in his
mind and he said, “They’re jealous.”
    “Frightened is more like it,”
Gil said. “Damnation, I’m your best friend, and it still gives me the willies.”
    Gwydion smiled. “Ah, now you
get to find out why you shouldn’t have beaten me with that claymore.” The way
Gil paled made him laugh.

    Gwydion watched how people
treated him over the next few days, and used his growing abilities to hear the
whispers that they didn’t want him to hear. He could only hear people in the
same room with him, but he went through all of the common areas at one point in
the day or another. Many wondered if he was under some kind of enchantment,
and Math encouraged this idea, as well as the fact that it would wear off after
some time. It loosened many tongues to speculate. And the wind brought it all
to his ears.
    All around the caer, they
pointed and spoke about what he was becoming, and there was hope mixed with the
fear, and not a little envy. The kitchen lasses giggled and speculated who he
might pursue next. The arms masters mumbled about having to teach a spoiled
brat. The charioteers remained confident that their skill was still beyond his
reach. Gil bragged about him, and made his abilities out to be more than they
were. The farmers who worked the fields just outside of the caer walls looked
at him in the courtyard or while eating in the hall, and wondered to each other
what kind of leader he might be.
    Only Bethyl said nothing, which
made it hard for him to fathom what went on behind her eyes.
    Gwydion also noticed the
changes in himself, trying to match what he heard with what he felt. Some
days, he thought that he had somehow grown beyond his own body, and become one
of the winds. Other times, he felt very insignificant, as though his
experiences had made him somehow less instead of more. He knew he did not act
the same as before, and yet he didn’t feel all that different. He still
enjoyed watching all the young women, some of whom courted him almost openly,
but he just shook his head at their advances. He accepted every criticism from
the arms masters without complaint, but inwardly weighed both their words and
their intentions. At the same time, he was kinder to those who had escaped his
notice