Telhami's Summons
This chapter opens in the middle of the night with Akashia bolting out of her hut because Telhami summoned her in a dream. Not on purpose. Telhami was asleep and her subconscious worries reached out through the guardian’s magic and dragged Akashia out of bed. That’s how stressed the old woman is about Laq.
When Akashia arrives, Telhami is slumped against a pole looking half-dead. For one horrible moment Akashia thinks she actually is dead. But no. Telhami wakes up confused, doesn’t even realize she sent the summons. That’s the creepy part. Her fears are so deep they’re leaking out of her dreams.
Akashia Takes Over Teaching
Akashia offers to teach Pavek for a few days so Telhami can focus on figuring out the Laq problem. Telhami hesitates. Not because Akashia can’t handle it, but because Pavek is a grown man, not a child. And here Akashia gives one of the most honest character assessments in the whole book.
She says Pavek isn’t good or evil. He’s empty. His memory is full of terrible images but his spirit is hollow. Like something that never grew. Like “the shape of a man, but the spirit of something broken.”
Telhami corrects her gently: “The spirit of a templar.”
That line hit me. Every templar is broken somehow. They couldn’t survive the system if they weren’t. Some break toward cruelty like Ruari’s father. Some break toward numbness like Pavek. But broken is the baseline.
There’s a funny exchange where Telhami asks if Akashia has feelings for Pavek. Akashia is so offended she practically spits. “Do you think I’d be blinded by the first stray man that stumbled across my path?” She genuinely doesn’t get why everyone keeps asking this.
The First Lesson in Akashia’s Grove
Akashia takes Pavek to her grove the next morning. Her grove is a meadow of waist-high wildflowers, and it’s her favorite place in all of Athas. She’s full of joy just being there.
Pavek is not.
He stops at the edge of the grass and says: “Where’s the path? I can’t see my feet. I might step in the wrong place.”
That tells you everything about this man. He needs rules. Structure. Permission. Akashia tells him there is no wrong place and challenges him to race her to the center. He refuses to move until she frames it as a command and a lesson. So she does.
She’s fast but he nearly catches her. She dives into a pool at the last second to win. Then she looks back and he’s bent over at the edge, pale and gasping. “Water’s deep. Can’t swim.”
A city kid from Urik who never learned to swim. Of course.
What I appreciate here is that Akashia immediately recognizes she was being unfair. She teased a man who doesn’t understand teasing. He doesn’t get angry though. He just asks “Should I leave?” with this sad slope to his shoulders. He thinks losing the race means he doesn’t deserve a lesson.
She pulls him to the pool and explains that druidry has no rules. It’s flow and change. Like nature. And Pavek, bless his broken brain, says: “Druidry’s like fighting?”
That comparison actually helps him. By the afternoon he’s conjured small spheres of water and fire and called a songbird down from the trees. Real progress. He even grins. First smile she’s ever seen from him. She notes he’ll never be handsome, but a smile takes the menace out of his face and balances it nicely.
Ruari’s Poison
Here’s where it gets dark. That evening, Pavek collapses in the fallow fields. Black froth bubbling from his lips. Poison.
Telhami and Akashia heal him together. Akashia channels the guardian’s power while Telhami invokes the healing spell. They pull four dark beads from his throat. Telhami identifies the poison as kivit musk. Concentrated, dried, and smeared inside a bowl.
Akashia’s thoughts race to the obvious conclusion. Ruari collects kivits in his grove. Ruari dries their musk for the farmers. Ruari was scrubbing a bowl earlier that evening and ran when she caught him.
He didn’t steal food for orphaned kittens this time. He lined Pavek’s bowl with poison.
It works because Pavek made himself predictable. He always comes last to supper. He always takes the last bowl. He always serves himself. He mops up every drop with bread. Every drop of poison, too.
Akashia lies to Telhami about what she suspects and goes looking for Ruari. She finds him sitting in the shadows behind a hut with the bowl in his lap. Waiting to be caught. He doesn’t deny any of it. He’s furious and jealous. He saw Akashia come back from the grove with wet hair and a smile. He convinced himself Pavek was poisoning both women’s minds.
Then it hits Akashia like lightning. Ruari isn’t just protecting Quraite. He’s jealous. He cares for her. Not the way she cares for him, as a temperamental younger brother. But in the way Telhami feared she might care for Pavek.
If the moment wasn’t so charged with betrayal, she would have laughed.
She reaches for his arm, tries to reassure him there’s nothing between her and Pavek. Ruari punches her across the chin. Yohan appears out of nowhere and throws Ruari against a wall.
Akashia tells Ruari he has to leave Quraite. Murder isn’t tolerated. The guardian won’t allow it.
The Templar’s Mercy
And then Pavek shows up. Staggering, covered in vomit, barely standing. He looks down at Ruari and does the most templar thing possible.
He reframes the whole situation. He says a druid who knew about poisons wouldn’t have used too little. A half-wit with kivits everyone knew about couldn’t be that stupid. Therefore it wasn’t attempted murder. It was a warning. Pavek says he’d swear to that in a Urik court.
“My word against his. My warning against his murder. And my word would prevail.”
He’s using the logic of the templarate to save Ruari’s life. The same legal tricks that keep corrupt templars out of trouble, turned around to protect a kid who just tried to kill him. He even throws in a killer line: “It’s a sorry state when the Beast of Urik has more mercy than a Quraite druid.”
Akashia sees it now. She sees the templar armor Pavek wears. Crude, disgusting, vomit-stained, cold as anything. But effective. And, once again, this templar is giving Ruari’s life back to him.
Ruari gets the last word: “I intended murder. My only mistake was that I failed.”
Pavek responds in the coldest voice possible: “Your word against mine, scum. I heard a warning. You won’t get a second chance.”
The druid community politics in this chapter are something else. Telhami worrying so hard she summons people in her sleep. The guardian wanting to destroy all the zarneeka while Telhami insists there has to be a better way. Akashia caught between loyalty to her mentor and concern for Pavek. Ruari driven by a jealousy he doesn’t even understand. And Pavek navigating all of it with the only tools he has: templar logic and sheer stubbornness.
Nobody fully trusts anyone else here. Even in a druid commune surrounded by wildflowers and songbirds, trust is complicated. That feels very real to me.
The Brazen Gambit by Lynn Abbey, Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas, Book One. ISBN 1-56076-872-X.