Yet he had never really felt the wind until now, today, as he stood in this gentle wind on a grassy hill in Westil. He felt it shape itself around the standing stones and sensed all the eddies within the circle. He was aware of the play of the breeze in the wool of the nearest sheep, and the sweep of it through the grass exhilarated him.

It’s not the breeze of Westil that’s different, Ced realized. It’s me. I’ve been through the Great Gate, and now I have all the awareness of the wind that I ever wanted. Now I’m the mage I always was in my dreams.

He couldn’t resist the temptation now; it wasn’t enough to feel the wind. He had to shape it. He had been studying with Norm Galliatti, an Orphan Galebreath in Medford, Oregon, and he had raised his abilities from making tiny whirlwinds and raising a slight breeze on a still day to the point where he could direct a breeze, narrow it like a dart, blow out a candle from a hundred yards, change the flight of a ball in midair.

But here … just by thinking of doing it, it happened. A whirlwind rose all around him, spinning inside the circle of stones, whipping his hair and clothing, and it was so much larger and stronger than anything he’d ever been able to do before that he laughed aloud, then cried in joy. Oh, Mother, can you see me? O Bird of my Youth, O my Hummingbird, Calliope, are you watching now? See what I can do!

The whirlwind created so much suction inside it that he rose up into the air, but he was in no danger. This was no tornado, snatching up creatures and flinging them here and there, randomly. No, the air that spun around him knew him, cared for him, carried him. The wind rejoiced in him as much as he rejoiced in it. Here you are, it was saying. We are sheep too long without a shepherd, cows with udders full and no dairyman to ease us, till you came.

Carry me, he thought. Carry me away from here. Show me this world.

The whirlwind raised him higher and he could see now over the nearby groves of trees. There was a shepherd’s hut just beyond the river, and out of it stepped the shepherd, looking upward at Ced as the whirlwind bore him along the river’s course, downstream because that’s what Ced felt like, but the wind might have carried him anywhere.

Now I know why people called us gods, if we Mithermages of Westil could pass through Great Gates and to this. When they painted Hermes with wings on his feet, was it a windmage like me that they remembered?