Because I have so many of them, I'm not entirely sure what to do with them, so here is where my collection of drabbles and ficlets will come to rest. All reviews are welcomed and highly appreciated!
All characters mentioned herein, and the world they live in, are the creation of Tamora Pierce.
Competition doesn't have any particular time scale - it fits in roughly between EM and RotG - before Midwinter anyway.
Competition
It's strange to think that when the pair of them tire themselves out so much in battle, they treat the length of time they are asleep for as a competition. Whosoever sleeps the longest wins; but in all the years of this silent game, he is not sure what it is they compete for.
Whoever sleeps the longest can stay up for longer the next day, does not need to go to sleep again quite so quickly; but it is also a sign that more of their magic was used up, a sign of how much closer they were to death.
Numair thinks all this as he watches his student sleep. She has bested him by more than eighteen hours now, and for sixteen of those he has been sitting by her bedside, waiting for her to wake; soon he will have to give in to his own desire to sleep. The noises of the Rider Barracks continue about them as life moves on, but in here, all is silent. Nobody else seems as concerned as he; Baird, as chief of the Palace healers, has come by only once; Thayet stopped for an hour by her bedside, and was joined by Onua, who, in all honesty, seemed more concerned with making sure Numair was eating than with the welfare of her young assistant. He knows, in his head, this isn't entirely true, and that most likely they are all as concerned as he, but have other tasks to attend to, or feel Daine is safe as long as Numair is watching her.
But he wonders. He wonders if his friends would all be so complacent if they had been there to see what happened. If they had seen her in battle, claws slicing, eyes flashing after her arrows had all been neatly dispensed.
Numair realises he is waiting to see a glimpse of his student again, to see whether she will return to humanity. He doesn't like the feral beast she becomes in battle, even when that beast is standing between him and a group of sneering spidrens, with hurroks wheeling above. Her wild magic may be an extraordinary gift, and he knows how privileged he is to have found her (in both professional and personal terms), instead of some northern hedgewitch who didn't understand the extent of her powers, or a zealous priest who burned her at the stake. It's just that, sometimes, he wishes her wild magic wasn't quite so ferocious when threatened. The trait goes hand in hand with the magic, of course, but it doesn't mean he has to like it.
If they had seen the way she had collapsed to the ground after their battle, the way he had had to coax her into talking whilst they waited for Numair's distress call to be answered. If they had seen the way he had sat beside her, clutching her in his arms as he tried to roughly bandage her wounded arm, leg, fighting his own exhaustion in order to make sure she was safe.
Would they be sitting there with his magelet too?