Druid Training Begins
Chapter 11 is a quieter one. No poison. No midnight crises. Just Pavek grinding through druid lessons and slowly building a life at Quraite. But Abbey packs so much character detail into this chapter that it ends up doing more heavy lifting than the action scenes.
Old Habits Die Hard
Pavek walks the hard ground between the village and the groves, and his sandals make a familiar sound. Like cobblestones. Like Urik. He finds that reassuring. This small detail tells you a lot. He’s adapting, but he’s still holding on to what he knows.
He splits his lessons between Telhami and Akashia on alternating days. His magic hasn’t progressed much. Tiny spheres of conjured water that evaporate fast. Fire spells that are more smoke than flame. But he’s building something else. A mental map of Quraite.
The village sits at the center, surrounded by cultivated fields, then wilderness, then the Sun’s Fist salt plain. At least twenty groves dot the wilderness, each belonging to a different druid. He’s figured out which faces at supper belong to grove-tending druids. He can read the subtle differences in ground color and texture that mark the paths between groves.
And he’s done all of this without asking a single question.
That’s the detail that kills me. Pavek doesn’t ask questions because in the templarate, honest answers create debts. You learn something from someone, you owe them. Ten years in an orphanage and ten years as a templar beat that instinct into him so deep he can’t shake it. Everyone at Quraite keeps saying “speak your mind” and “we value your thoughts.” He doesn’t believe them.
He watches Telhami and sees everyone bow and scrape at her feet. They call her Grandmother and smile, and she smiles back. Very polite. Very civil. He’s seen the exact same routine at a hundred Urik festivals where children laid flowers at King Hamanu’s feet. The king smiles. The king says thank you. And nobody has a moment’s delusion about where the power lies.
That comparison is so sharp it hurts. Pavek can’t stop seeing hierarchy even when people tell him it isn’t there. Because in his experience, the people who say there’s no hierarchy are always the ones at the top.
Two Teachers, Two Styles
He prefers Telhami’s lessons. She’s quiet. She doesn’t ask personal questions. She just tells him to seek the guardian and lets him try.
Akashia is the opposite. She can’t contain her curiosity. She wants to know about the city, about templar life, about his life. She asks him to compare her teaching to Telhami’s. As if a third-rank templar would ever share opinions about one superior with another. That’s how you get reassigned to latrine duty. Or worse.
But here’s the thing. He actually makes more progress with Akashia. She presses her hands against his during invocations and rough-shapes the guardian’s energy before it reaches him. She’s gentler. More hands-on. With her help he summoned water, fire, and a songbird. He wanted to practice until the moons rose.
He just can’t bring himself to enjoy it because she keeps asking questions.
I love this tension. Pavek learns better with the teacher he’s uncomfortable around. His progress is held back not by lack of talent but by his inability to be open. Every time Akashia gets close to something real, he shuts down. Classic response from a man who learned early that openness gets you hurt.
The Moonracers Arrive
A dust cloud appears on the southern horizon. Pavek’s first panicked thought is Elabon Escrissar coming for him. But it’s the Moonracer elves, Ruari’s kin through his elven mother, arriving with their kank herd and barrels of honey-ale.
The farmers scramble to stake ropes around their fields because the elves refuse to confine their animals. Freedom is their thing. If Quraite wants Moonracer friendship, the farmers do the work. Pavek hesitates for a moment, then grabs two bundles of stakes and a maul without being told. Small moment. Big deal. He’s starting to do things for the community without waiting for orders.
He drinks two mugs of honey-ale and watches Ruari try to impress his elven relatives. It goes badly. The kid loses every footrace and barrel-leaping contest. The victorious elves mock him openly. Ruari keeps trying to leap when he should duck. He’s so desperate to be an elf that he ignores his actual strengths.
Pavek recognizes the pattern instantly. He’s seen it on templar training grounds. Someone falls in love with a fancy obsidian sword and ignores the simple flint-studded club that would keep them alive. Ruari wants the acrobatic leap instead of the ground-hugging tuck-and-roll.
Then Pavek turns that observation on himself. Is druidry his flashy obsidian sword? Is he chasing something he’ll never master?
He sees Yohan sitting in Telhami’s hut making decisions alongside the farmers. A man can be important in Quraite without being a druid. But Pavek wants magic. It’s all he lives for. He memorized every scroll down to the smears and inkblots. When Telhami says “seek the guardian,” he holds nothing back.
The same way Ruari plays elven games. Games that Ruari can never win.
He pours his ale into the roots of a tree. An offering to the guardian. A prayer that he’s not as foolish as that half-wit kid.
Accidentally Human
Pavek falls asleep under a tree and wakes up sunburned with Akashia shaking him. She’s worried because nobody knew where he’d gone. And then something weird happens. He makes a joke. An actual joke. He calls it templar humor: “Templars do that, you know. It’s part of our training. Keeps us from killing each other when there’s no rabble-scum around to harass.”
Akashia stares at him like he’s sun-struck. He tries to stand and his legs are completely numb. He collapses with an embarrassing thud.
Then he calls her Kashi. Her familiar name. He immediately realizes his mistake and tells her to forget everything he’s said. She starts checking his mug for poison. He tells her Ruari’s got nothing to do with it. Then accidentally mentions that Ruari spent the day “playing the fool for his mother’s respectable relations.”
The mug rolls out of Akashia’s hand.
“Just forget I said that, too.”
I love this scene because it shows Pavek being accidentally human. He’s terrible at it. Every time he lets his guard down, something real comes out and he immediately wants to take it back. He doesn’t know how to have a normal conversation because nobody ever taught him.
The Laq Spreads
The chapter ends with some serious news from the Moonracer elders. Laq was being sold in Nibenay’s market until the Shadow-King found out and burned every stall to the ground. The elves traced it back to Urik. They’re shutting down trade with both cities.
Pavek grasps the strategy immediately. Escrissar isn’t selling poison for profit. He’s trying to set the surviving sorcerer-kings against each other. If Nibenay blames Urik for Laq, war follows. Any war between Urik and Nibenay draws in Gulg. Three sorcerer-kings fighting. Total collapse across the Tablelands.
He gives Akashia his honest assessment. Burn every zarneeka seed, bush, and stalk. Then pray Escrissar doesn’t already have enough Laq stockpiled.
Akashia pushes back. The common people of Urik need Ral’s Breath. They can’t afford real healers. It’s not right to let them suffer. There has to be another way.
Pavek says ask the common people which they want: a bitter yellow powder or war.
“I thought you’d know a better way,” Akashia says. “I thought that’s why you left Urik and why you wanted to master druidry. So you could help.”
He can’t meet her eyes. “I’ve given you all the help I can: burn it and pray.”
She fires back the hardest line in the chapter: “You are a templar. You’re a templar in the blood and bone. You’re broken and will never change.”
He walks away in silence and gets in line for supper.
What gets me about this chapter is watching Pavek start to care about Quraite while insisting he doesn’t. He hauls stakes without being asked. He worries about Ruari’s self-destruction. He pours ale for the guardian. He tries to warn them about Escrissar. And when Akashia calls him broken, it clearly lands because he doesn’t argue back. He just walks away.
The man is starting to see this druid community as something worth protecting. He just doesn’t have the words for it yet. And honestly, that might be the most realistic thing about him.
The Brazen Gambit by Lynn Abbey, Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas, Book One. ISBN 1-56076-872-X.