Lashan feels the men she's shot become more 'real' as they die, their minds appearing to her other senses just in time to lose coherence and slip past her grasp. That'd be the shielding spell going, but she can pick up on some other magic in there too, hazing out to nothing. Just what that is, or at least, one thing, becomes more clear after Guts wrestles his prey down. She doesn't approach immediately, scouring the camp with an eye to Thistle and an ear to the woods. The horse's ears and nose are keener than her own. What she's afraid of is that all this is a diversion and the Enclave is going to be attacked. They'll have to contact her if a force shows up in their fields and that will be faster if there's light.
Thistle makes a displeased noise in his chest and shakes his big head, making his tack click, as the smell of the man Guts caught enters his sensitive nostrils. He still carries Lashan closer so she can see and click her tongue as she recognizes what's happened. In stories told to scare Plains children, breaking blood-oath always means catching fire or exploding. In reality the expenditure of magic energy it takes to lay an oath that did that is extravagant, something hardly anyone would commit.
She tells the lightly battered boy, "Bad contract. If anyone ever hires you and wants a drop of your blood for it - probably to press a bloody thumbprint on something - you ought to refuse. It needs a kind of consent to work."
Blood-oaths are a more immediate cousin of what Vena tried with him on the stable roof. There is no inherent compulsion to most oaths and promises. They're just words, the only rules about them are in peoples' heads. A mage can change that. Lashan has put people under blood-oath, in her desperate past. She doesn't like this evidence that someone - Heshain? - knows the technique.
"You good? Think there'll be more action before we're done."
no subject
Thistle makes a displeased noise in his chest and shakes his big head, making his tack click, as the smell of the man Guts caught enters his sensitive nostrils. He still carries Lashan closer so she can see and click her tongue as she recognizes what's happened. In stories told to scare Plains children, breaking blood-oath always means catching fire or exploding. In reality the expenditure of magic energy it takes to lay an oath that did that is extravagant, something hardly anyone would commit.
She tells the lightly battered boy, "Bad contract. If anyone ever hires you and wants a drop of your blood for it - probably to press a bloody thumbprint on something - you ought to refuse. It needs a kind of consent to work."
Blood-oaths are a more immediate cousin of what Vena tried with him on the stable roof. There is no inherent compulsion to most oaths and promises. They're just words, the only rules about them are in peoples' heads. A mage can change that. Lashan has put people under blood-oath, in her desperate past. She doesn't like this evidence that someone - Heshain? - knows the technique.
"You good? Think there'll be more action before we're done."