A Succession of Bad Days (24 page)

Dove looks tired, still, but nothing worse than tired, talent-tired. Chloris is still somewhere special. Zora’s not looking tired, but is looking worried about Chloris. Halt, though,
Halt is eating, not just the scones of ceremony, it’s a very substantial breakfast. Three eggs doesn’t sound like that much to me if I just say it, even after being run over by the thirty-kilogramme chicken, but it is. Creeks don’t have specific little egg spoons.

Halt looks entirely cheerful, even if I am down last. Halt’s got a little jar of some sort of preserves open, and is passing it to
Dove. Dove gets a proper Dove grin, and stabs some with a fork, says thank you, hands the jar back, and eats the forkful.

Dove looks really surprised. Also much more awake. I can’t tell why, there’s something muzzy about my awareness of Dove.

Halt positively beams. “Dove, dear, you really might wish to consider that your…admiration of unstoppability in other persons is not found universally appalling.”

Zora makes a noise. Dove mimes bonking Zora with a spoon, the bowl of the spoon maybe a metre from Zora’s head when the striking motion happens. Then Dove looks at Halt, and nods. “Point taken.”

Chloris looks at Halt, and says, “Is Kynefrid going to be…successful?” having clearly discarded a few initial word choices.

Halt’s head tips a little, looks at Chloris over a raised teacup. Chloris goes
right on looking back, and doesn’t fidget.

“The future remains obscure, girl. Crane is strong and kind and suitably ruthless. It will suit Kynefrid better than the exercise of hope.”

Chloris sort of nods, looks down, goes right on looking somewhat unlike Chloris.

I set my breakfast down, sit down, look at it, slump a little. I’m not going to have any appetite unless.

“Halt? Do you know what that
was?”

“It’s dead now, dear.” Halt puts honey on the bacon on the butter on the toast, picks the toast up, and it just vanishes. It wasn’t a small piece of toast, there’s no apprehension of chewing, there’s certainly no noise, the big spider’s not anywhere manifest enough to have done it, and spiders, I’m pretty sure spiders don’t chew anything anyway.

“At the time of injury, a metaphysical toxin,
destructive to belief in ownership of flesh.” A roll with jam vanishes.

“Halt, just how fast did you get to Headwaters?” Dove’s more curious than it sounds, and Dove sounds curious.

Halt produces a mad pixie smile. “So swift as I was able.”

Dove thinks that’s as much answer as there is to be had.

“Was I that loud?” I say, looking at Halt.

Chloris and Zora are looking at me in disbelief. “I still
have the headache,” Chloris says.

“Not,” Chloris says, putting up a hand, “that you shouldn’t have shouted. I don’t think you knew how loud it was.”

Halt nods. “I shall be unsurprised if the Eighteenth makes report.”

Buttering my own toast only goes so far. Even eating it doesn’t add much time, trying to think of what to say.

“Do we learn how to do that properly?”

“Possibly.” Halt is still smiling.
“Properly depends on the student.”

Halt makes a sort of ‘as I was saying’ motion with a fork; the slab of egg pops off it, presumably into Halt.

“Yesterday, well. An immaterial predator. Against which you all did splendidly well.” Halt clearly remains pleased about that.

Dove isn’t. “No way to tell, is there.”

Halt’s head shakes, the hand without a teacup reaches out to pat Dove’s forearm.

Dove
looks sideways down at me, across at Zora and Chloris, then settles into a fixed look. “Near the end, I had Three Platoon to cover the artillery for Blossom while the Captain took the standard, Two Platoon, the colour party, and Halt into a Reems fortress.”

“We got piled into by a bunch of Reems infantry. The infantry had critters with it, like really spiky wolverines, and the spikes, the spines,
are what produced the injuries in everybody you saw in the hospital. So it could be that it went off today because I was the first sorcerer it saw after it — ” Dove grimaces, waves the hand that doesn’t have a spoon in it — “ripened, or because it was always trying to get me and just didn’t manage the first time.”

“Was there a One Platoon?” Zora sounds very tentative.

“One and Two and Four turned
into Two, after the second fight at the wall where we all wound up breathing solid despair.” I find myself putting an arm around Dove, I don’t make a decision to, the bleakness gets into my spine and my arm moves. “Three mostly came out of that fight.”

Dove’s mug gets picked up, set down.

“After that, One was the dead who stuck in the standard, so they went into the fortress, too.”

Chloris has
a bit of the what-is-happening-to-me look, but only a bit. “You were leading, and it was trying to get you specifically?”

Dove’s face twitches. “Blossom was leading, overall, but nobody’d try to get Blossom with critters. I’d have been the best available target.” There’s a pause, and Dove gets quieter. “They might really have thought I was making the ward, not just running it.”

“Dove.” Halt
pauses, patting with a napkin. Napkin? Didn’t see any anywhere else in the hostel dining room. “You won.”

Dove nods, still looking grim.

“I did not, Grue did not, various careful doctors did not, have the least suspicion. Persistent metaphysical toxin, yes, quite vicious.
Trap
did not cross my mind.”

Which means it’s beyond sneaky stuff. Was.
Was
beyond sneaky stuff.

“
Had
the word
trap
occurred,
I should have done something about it.” Halt sounds stern.

“As it is, well. Grue is invisible to the Power, Dove dear. A competent trap wouldn’t try me or Blossom. You were the next sorcerer to walk in. You didn’t die, despite having, most very deliberately on your teachers’ part, no idea what you were doing in that kind of fight. So perhaps it was still trying for you, yes, or perhaps it thought
it could win.”

“Like bloodroot never going for the bunnies.” Zora sounds very definite. “Bloodroot is barely a plant. It can’t be that difficult to stick
I can eat that
into even a really dumb critter, if someone got it into bloodroot.”

Dove smiles, a little. “Point. So I have to put this to dumb luck, not my incompetence.”

“Entirely, Dove dear.” Halt is looking round the table, and Chloris
passes, in succession, the biscuit basket, the wire caddy with the preserves jars, and a dish of larded potatoes. “Especially since you did the best thing you could have, pinning it like that. Edgar wouldn’t have been able to withstand its full attention.”

“Are the Line patients going to be all right now?” Zora says it tentatively.

Halt nods, tapping a folded piece of notepaper stuck under the
saucer-edge. “All well, as they would not have been, had you and Chloris not been so prompt.” Halt twinkles at that side of the table.

“Even when we have no idea what we’re doing, we’re useful.” Chloris wishes believing this was optional, but doesn’t feel like the knowledge is a burden. Day before yesterday, Chloris did.

“A thing Wake and I wished very much to prove.” Halt smiles beatifically.
“Finish up, children. Chloris still has some shopping to do — ” Halt’s hand dips into the knitting bag, and returns with Halt’s letter of credit, Chloris’ hand-written list of dyestuffs, Chloris’ mechanical pencil, and Chloris’ warm knit hat to Chloris, of course everyone knows where Halt is staying after the apprentices sprint out of the shop — “and then we have a barge to catch.”

Westcreek Town in winter gets a fair good deal of snow, half a metre or more on the ground, and winter’s colder here than Wending was.

I don’t much notice the cold. It’s, there’s an explanation, I understand the explanation, I can experimentally
test
the explanation, it’s obviously correct, and the whole thing renders me uneasy anyway.

Dove and I got the consonance sorted out, it had
tipped a bit between the Shape of Peace and the spiky-trap critter, getting tossed into that kind of fight when it was already a bit out of balance from being forcibly shut down by the Shape of Peace.

Wake, asked, produced the most completely dry explanation of energy circulation imaginable, so much so that it was two days before either of us figured out what the explanation meant. It was useful
as the dry description, we just had to get to the implications ourselves. Common, not merged, but certainly common, the way you can have your own room in a house and share the rest with someone who has their own room, metaphysical brain constructs eventually turn into something that’s got a metaphysical metabolism, just like the unshared metaphysical self-construct does. That was the first implication.
Only Dove and I have antithetical talent flavours, I’m apparent as a cloud of darkness with edges in it, and Dove’s, well, it’s not just a blazing scream of trumpets, there’s a lot more brass instruments in there now and a sense of heat, not just light.

I’d be bothered by the darkness if it seemed to be changing my character. My character’s changing, sure, sorcery school is supposed to do that,
but I can’t see any way it’s the darkness doing the changing. Growing a new brain not based on flesh would
have
to change something, even if I was doing nothing else. I’m not creeping out anybody, anybody with a regular amount of talent, any more than Chloris is. Zora sort of gives everybody response-whiplash, and both Wake and Blossom point out that life-mages are a lot less creepy for completely
irrational reasons, it being life-mages who can decide to alter your brain or heredity in undetectable ways. It’s life-mages who cure diseases and up crop-yields, too, and that’s what seems to stick, socially. Even for seventeen-year-old incipient life-mages with a penchant for illusory wings.

Dove isn’t creeping anybody out, Dove gives people a case of “Where are these battlements we’re storming?”
but everybody who’d know says Dove always did, it’s just gotten stronger.

So, anyway, crunchy darkness with tooth-like structures, brass orchestra on fire with glory. Shouldn’t work, as an energy balancing problem. Especially shouldn’t work because Dove’s lots stronger than I am.

Only it works just fine, because Dove’s half of the house becomes the metaphorical sunny, northern side, the paved
courtyard and the broad windows and the long slope to the river, covered in trees and clean fields. My half, we’re not counting the middle, shared, half, is the shaded, dim, south side. I was trying for backing on to the dim forest primeval, but I don’t believe in forest primeval, I don’t well remember the four days I spent in one being displaced, and even then anywhere you can get to on a road isn’t
truly primeval. So what I’ve got is a sunless sea. It’s dim and vast and quiet, and I, Dove too, we’re repeating “metaphysical rules” to ourselves and not trying, trying not, to sort out how the drainage could possibly work.

Well, except it does, because it’s purely metaphorical, it’s not actual water, it’s a personal understanding of the Power. Fire feeds over to me, darkness feeds round to Dove,
it’s working fine. You might as well call it convection and be done with it, only then you’d have to figure out if there’s heat, a temperature analog that applies to the Power, the Power as a thing, rather than using the Power. Using the Power, you get heat; work is heat.

Chloris had produced an emphatic nose-wrinkle at the explanation, incomprehension, not disapproval, well, disapproval of the
incomprehension. Chloris’d really, really like it if sorcery, metaphysics, talent, anything, had only one set of rules. I’d almost agree, even if it’s obvious we’re, the whole point of this particular class and teaching style is, to come up with yet another set of workable rules, only most, nearly all, of the existing sorcery rules are wretched. If there was only one set of rules, who’d take the
bet the rules we got were one of the numerically rare nice, or at least avoiding blood sacrifice, sets of rules?

Wake had looked calmly at Dove and I, after we’d tried to explain what we thought we were doing, still without anything much in the way of useful precise words, and said “Praise then darkness and creation unfinished,” as though quoting something.

Then Wake’d said “Praise then fire,
and the impulse of making,” and that was a quote, too.

Chloris says something, I can’t readily describe it. Tentative, and obviously words, but not a familiar kind of language.

Wake smiles, and repeats it, with no hesitancy at all, so it sounds like an incantation. “Hearing the original in undertone is excellent,” Wake says to Chloris, who still looks startled about it.

“Is that why Edgar did
so well with the fire elemental?” Zora says, and Wake does the back-and-forth head tip and said “It might be.”

It’s a viewpoint provided by a terrifyingly powerful necromancer from somewhere in the northern hemisphere, from a specific place so grim it was worth it to flee from it across half the world and find a pre-Commonweal Halt a reasonable choice of neighbour, seven or eight hundred years
ago.

Or, alternatively, the effective metaphor provided by a patient and caring teacher.

With the Power, how you decide to look at something really matters.

Rather like being formal students. On the one hand, you’re committed; succeed or die. This
reduces
Dove’s level of stress, which I don’t understand at all. I hear the point about taking the complexity out of it, I really do; it’s not like
we’ve got any major decisions left to make, even the own-work project’s a much smaller thing than deciding to go for Independent in this formal, irrevocable, submit-to-judgement way.

On the other hand, our teachers will now just tell us things. Not everything, but a whole lot more than they used to. And we’re our names a lot more, rather than ‘students’, unless it’s Halt. Halt goes right on saying
‘children’.

So Wake just told us, we didn’t have to figure it out, that Block is Steam’s teacher, formal,
heáhláreów
, teacher, and that Steam’s route to being an Independent was weirder than ours, Steam was in the Line, right tail of the main modality of the talent distribution, moved into a magical metabolism by accident as an alternative to dying of exhaustion. Never meant to be an Independent,
doesn’t like being one, but the basic definition is the magical form of life one. So Steam had to go back to school and learn all the other things you’re supposed to know, and was nearly done when we met in the early fall. All done now, but still in Westcreek Town, back serving with the Line. Which mostly means running training for hundreds of new recruits.

We see Steam a fair bit, on the other
side of the big training field the Line uses. It’s ostensibly clean land, but it won’t grow anything much, something about minerals and acidity. In the winter it isn’t muddy, Block says, and runs us through Power-handling drills. Complicated ones; toss the sphere over there, sprint to the other place, catch the sphere coming for you while you’re sprinting. Or manage three different Power manifestations,
keeping track of which is which, while running backward uphill in waist-deep snow.

Block thinks this is good for us, even when the weather doesn’t co-operate and it takes using the Power to pile the snow up so it’s deep enough in the right spots.

I think I shouldn’t be accompanied by a little wreath of mist. If I make the considerable mental effort to pause the Power circulation, the mist fades
away and I get cold.

Cold, and a small question from Dove in my head, wanting to be sure I’m doing that on purpose, not hurt.

Did that twice, and gave up. Has to be the same thing that kept, keeps, Kynefrid warm when actually doing something with the Power. Just have to get better at modulating it, so I’m neither cold nor melting a hole in the snow.

Block’s the only person I’ve seen who can effectively
spar with the Captain. They put on armour and use staves that are spear-shafts with an end cap at both ends. It’s impossible to follow what they’re doing with my eyes, and using the Power isn’t much better. Not for Dove, either, which is some consolation. Chloris can follow the individual events better, though not well enough to explain how, or what’s happening. It’s got something to do
with fatal implications. “It’s not that they’re trying to kill each other,” Chloris finally says. “They’re trying to be able to kill each other.” There’s a pause. In the winter, it’s not water, it’s buckets and buckets of tea. It’s usually only almost warm, but you need it, running around in dry winter air. “They mean the
kill
part. Just not this time.”

Dove and I can’t do the push-hands thing
anymore, none of the pair drills.

Well, strictly, we can, and it’s even a good way to raise Power. Doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do for training responses. We’re doing the one-mind-two-heads thing by the end of the first exhale. Got an actual change of expression out of Block, one eye got a tiny bit wider. Translated out of Block, that’s shouting and waving arms. Or Halt saying ‘Hmmm’, though
I’ll take most anyone else shouting, given the choice. Halt’s take on watching Dove and I do push-hands for Power raising was to ask if we could keep the Power strands distinct.

We can; we get a coiling thread of red-gold fire and one deep grey thread twisted of whispers. With a little practice, we got the twist even and started running more than one ply, so it looks like actual cable, multi-layer,
multi-strand rope. You don’t notice when you’re doing it, Dove doesn’t notice either, but it’s apparently very pretty; we got a look of positive glee out of Zora, wing-waving and all. Halt had produced a benevolent look; Wake had looked at us, the benevolent look, made the head shake of disbelief, and looked at us to provide a clear approving nod.

“Of course Halt’s up to something. To be Halt
is to be up to something.” Dove said that without any kind of concern. “We’ll find out what things we are sooner or later.”

I can do the push-hands thing with Steam. Much more experienced than I am, but about the right size, and I’m stronger, Power-wise. Steam’s stronger, physically, but not as much as I’d expected. I suppose all the running around is having an effect. It’s tiring, so I suppose
it must be good practice. “Just enough,” Block says, meaning not melting circular holes in the snow around ourselves. That’s tricky. I get better, Zora gets better, Dove, I shouldn’t be surprised, gets it apparently as a consequence of being told it’s a requirement of the drill. Chloris has days with perfect control and days where there’s a snow tornado.

“Death has many moods,” Wake said, and
Chloris took a deep breath and nodded and kept at it. Some of that has to be helping the temporary ghosts in the Headwaters hospital. Those Line patients, all of them, sent Chloris a letter of thanks, extremely formal, hand-done charter script by a trained clerk on parchment, actual sheep’s hide parchment, and they all signed it. Chloris took it out of its silk and thin smooth hardwood boards, read
it, put it back, then Chloris’ whole posture changed.
Got a lot more relaxed about the neck,
Dove says, and it’s stayed that way, though that’s not all of it. The letter itself is up on Chloris’ bedroom wall in a narrow frame behind water-clear corundum on both sides.

Zora got a thank-you from the medics, with a formally attested certificate that will count toward medical qualifications, and a
mantel clock jointly from both groups, a good one. “Not smitten,” Zora had said, grinning.

The fighting parts of the drills — “This is what I know,” Block said — are harder, it’s not a question of the Power, it’s a question of keeping the Power from leaking into what you’re worried about. Control is pretty easy when it’s ‘use the Power’ or ‘don’t use the Power’; ‘use the Power sometimes’ is hard,
and ’use the Power, sometimes, on very short notice', is harder still. Dove and I have a bunch of discussions about how to move the reflexes into the new brain, there’s no sense in leaving the best impulse to duck or dive out of the way in the flesh, but we’re different. Getting everything balanced so I don’t try to do anything that would take Dove’s strength and Dove doesn’t try to get out of
the way on the basis of my narrowness takes some work.

We mostly get it, and it improves. By the end of the winter we’re doing well enough that Dove and I can reliably toss a file, eight recruits, around. Can’t do it with more than four of the veteran troopers, and that not every time, but it’s still progress.

Actually hitting things yourself, especially with your hands, is something regular Commonweal
fighting classes tell you not to do if you can possibly help it. If it’s each other, you’ll do less harm wrestling, and if it’s a weed or a critter expecting to get your hand back is rash. Block explained all this before setting out to teach us how to punch “In a way that adjusts for these deficiencies.” Block doesn’t see ‘more harm’ as a deficiency. The first décade of punch drills makes
me think my arms are going to fall off; Zora grumbles, Wake has to tell Chloris to stop the first couple of days, before having more will than sense causes damage, and even Dove looks like it’s work. There’s five basic punches, according to Block; you pick up weights, five-kilo weights in my case, and you do a thousand, per hand, of each five. Then you do another thousand, per hand, of the straight
punches, and then you’re done that part of the warm up. Once you do the rest of the warm up, which involves some of that running backwards uphill in the snow while juggling different Power manifestations, you may actually train.

Did I mention that the passing-Power-spheres part of the training, Blossom started showing up some days and joining in, the very soul of cheer?