“You’ve stopped listening, haven’t you?” Dain chided. “Oh, to have an enchantment that would make people pay attention when necessary.”
Kre’s head snapped up from his web of side thoughts. “Enchantments,” he echoed, thinking he could recover the thread of conversation if he repeated one of Dain’s words, “they seem like pretty neat kind of magic.”
Dain sniffed, wondering if the boy had indeed been listening. “Yes, well… enchantments are the basis for all magic.”
“Do Ylveryans use enchantments?” Kre asked.
The older man scratched at his cheek and sighed. “Yes? No… I mean, it’s very hard to explain. Ylveryan magic and Tehynshin magic have the same roots, I think, but our folks have really branched out in a way that they have never thought of.
“That said,” Dain added quickly, “they have a more delicate touch and a bond with magic than we have ever thought possible. Though it’s all born from the same roots, our two methods are so dissimilar that they might as well be unrelated entirely.”
Kre nodded, his face displaying an impressive amount of understanding for a lad that had been given quite a lot to process and who claimed to be inept at learning histories. “That’s like the twins from one of the outer farms. Born on the same day in the same hour, but one without the ability to see. By the time they were in their teens, you couldn’t tell they were of the same blood at all by their personalities, or really even their looks.
“Well,” he clarified, “except the nose. They definitely had their dad’s hooked nose.”
Dain didn’t know how to respond to that strange story, so he simply nodded. “Exactly so.”
“Is their way better? Better than ours, I mean.”
“I know what you’re asking,” Dain said softly. “And I wish I could answer that.”
He turned in his saddle to face Kre and his face took on a look of weariness that Kre hadn’t noticed before. “There are very few… exceptionally few Tehynshins that know about Ylveryan magic, like myself. Much of what you would learn from me could have you strung up on a gallows or burned at the stake if you were to try and share it without care. Those that teach Tehynshin magic have no love for the Ylveryan ways and would ignore you at best. At worst… well, remember boy that whether we admit it or not, our people are still at war with the elves.”
That he would use the Tehynshin slang in place of the proper name spoke more to how serious the situation was between the two magical factions than any threat of being killed as a heretic. Kre swallowed hard, trying to quell the unease that had begun to rise up at the mention of the conflict between his people and Kitalia’s.
Kre and his friends had been lucky to have an instructor as wise and as open-minded as Lowil Marxin. Not every child had that same upbringing and instead had their heads filled with the same poison that people like Braun brewed in their ignorant little skulls.
Those beliefs of Marxin’s had landed him in plenty of hot situations as well, most notably with some soldiers of Fort Cowl. Most of the soldiers in their area were simply interested in living their lives quietly and doing their military duty, like Kre’s parents, and bore no general ill will towards the Ylveryans. In every group though, there were always the obnoxious handful that caused enough trouble for everyone.