Dawnbreaker: Legends of the Duskwalker - Book 3 (32 page)

“If it’s somewhere I can see it, he’ll notice it for sure,” Wren said.

“He’ll probably notice it,” Haiku said. “But as long as it’s not distracting to you, he won’t mind. And if it is distracting you, he’ll teach you not to let it.”

“I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“You won’t. What do you think? Sounds fun?”

“Sure,” Wren lied.

“No it doesn’t,” Haiku said, smiling. “It sounds stupid. But if you’re willing to give it a chance, I think you’ll find that it helps you through the day.”

“OK, Haiku. I’ll do it.”

“Excellent,” Haiku said, and he closed his fist, made three quick circles with his hand, and thrust it forward towards Wren and opened it. Wren flinched, expecting the little yellow ball to come flying out at him. But no, there was nothing in Haiku’s hand now. A simple “magic” trick. Haiku mimed surprise at his own hand. “Look at that. Gone already. There’s no telling where he’s gotten to.”

“It’s in your lap,” Wren said. “Or your other hand. Whichever place you dropped it when you were doing the circles.”

Haiku smiled and then held up his left hand from under the table, and showed the yellow ball. “Kind of a stupid trick, huh? But that one doesn’t count. I’ll hide him somewhere better for today.”

“OK.”

“Don’t worry, Wren,” he said. “It was no mistake, you coming here.”

Light footsteps sounded in the hallway; Foe was coming up from the lower levels, or maybe down from the higher ones. Either way, Wren knew his training was about to begin. Haiku tucked the ball away as Foe entered the room.

“Did you get enough to eat, boy?” Foe said.

Wren looked down at his soup. There was still about a quarter of a bowl left, but he just couldn’t bring himself to eat anymore.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then come with me.”

Foe didn’t wait for him, just turned and exited the room again, the way he’d come in. Wren dutifully got up from the table, winced at the pain in his legs when he stood, and had to take a few quick steps to catch up. By the time he got out of the room, Foe was already on his way upstairs. Wren hurried up behind the old man, having learned his lesson the day before about responding promptly to Foe’s instruction. Foe had made several remarks about Wren’s “leisurely” response times; apparently the “rest” that Wren gained from his “dawdling” meant he could continue training even longer.

Foe led him up two flights of stairs to a small, mostly empty room; bare walls, bare floor, industrial blue-white lights. Off to one side stood some odd contraption that looked as if it’d been constructed without any sort of plan or purpose in mind. It was about six feet tall and had what appeared to be a small sack on top, plump, and made from some vaguely shiny textile that Wren couldn’t identify. A large spout or pipe jutted out from one side, over a dark circle on the floor, that appeared to be of the same material as the sack. Wren decided it almost looked like some of the showers he’d seen in wayhouses, except put together all wrong. In one corner of the room, a staff leaned against a wall. Wren did a double take. Not a staff. A broom. Beside it was a deflated sack like the one on top of the machine.

“Stand there,” Foe said, pointing to the circle on the floor. Wren walked over and stood in the center of it. The material was slightly squishy under his feet. Some kind of padding. He glanced up and noted the wide, bell-shaped mouth of the pipe opening above him. It was affixed to a bulb of pipe that looked like some kind of swivel joint, allowing the pipe to rotate to different angles without interrupting whatever was going to be flowing into or out of it. Wren still couldn’t tell what it was for, though the fact that he was standing under it made him imagine something unpleasant would be pouring over him soon.

“Catch only the red ones,” Foe said. Wren started to ask what Foe meant by
the red ones
but he suppressed the question. Another lesson he’d learned yesterday. Foe didn’t typically respond to questions when the answer was obvious, or would be soon. A moment later the contraption came to life with a clank and a whir. “Do not leave the circle,” Foe added.

Above Wren, the opening of the pipe started swiveling in lazy circles, first one way, then the other, and changing angle unpredictably. A few seconds later, a burst of white flakes coughed out and scattered, drifting to the floor in a chaotic current like a snowfall. It took a moment for Wren to recognize what they were; small leaves or possibly flower petals. He reached out for one, but stopped himself.
Only the red ones,
Foe had said. After the initial eruption, the petals continued to disperse all around him in a gentle trickle of three or five a second, falling slightly heavier wherever the funnel of the pipe was pointed.

“Missed one,” Foe said casually.

Wren turned and looked behind him, just in time to see a red petal come to rest outside the circle. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of color to his left. He turned and reached out for it, but too quickly; the motion of his hand interrupted the flow of the petals, chased the red out of his grasp. He stepped forward and managed to capture it just before it escaped, crushing it into his palm in his clenched fist.

“Do
not
leave the circle,” Foe said sharply.

Wren looked down and saw the toes of his left foot had crossed the border between the pad and the floor.

“If you cannot tell the difference between the floor and the pad, your senses are worse than I feared,” Foe said.

Wren pulled his foot back.

“Missed one,” Foe said again. And Wren looked up to see another petal reach the floor.

There weren’t too many petals in the air at any one time, but Wren felt himself stretched by all the things he had to keep in mind at once. Watching the petals, he’d forgotten about the circle. Thinking of the circle had distracted him from the petals. But Wren had already learned that Foe had a way of giving instruction without overtly telling him what he should be doing. The comments he made were sometimes hints, though it had taken Wren until the end of the previous day to recognize it.

“And another,” Foe said. “You do understand you are supposed to
catch
the red ones, yes?”

Wren ignored the remark. Foe’s comments were also sometimes meant merely to distract, and Wren had enough of that going on already. Like the Waiting Room, nothing in this room was an accident; each piece had its purpose. The feel of the circular pad was distinct under Wren’s feet, now that it had been called to his attention. He re-centered himself in the circle, rolled his feet around on the mat to get a better feel for it; heels, toes, balls of his feet. His feet would tell him when he was out of position, if he could remember to listen to them. And now, his eyes could focus on the petals alone. Scattered on the floor, the red petals were vibrant and easy to spot amongst the white, so it was surprising just how well they could hide in the fluttering chaos of the drift.

He took to turning a slow, continuous circle, scanning from side to side.

“Missed one,” Foe said.

Wren spotted a red petal drifting down from his right, turned and scooped his hand out underneath it, allowing the petal to fall into his hand rather than trying to snatch it from the air. He drew his hand back before any of the trailing white petals could join it.

He turned to Foe, showed him the red petal in his palm.

“What do I do with it now?”

“Missed one,” Foe said.

Wren tucked his lone petal into his left hand, kept it gripped there, and went back to work. One more thing to keep track of. He tried to tune out all else, focused on the drifting petals. Eventually, even Foe’s admonitions of his misses fell into the background. He found that by crouching slightly and keeping his hands raised just below his shoulders, he was able to react more quickly. Soon full minutes were passing without a miss.

For fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, Wren continued his watch over the gentle flow, carefully capturing the red petals he could spot, letting others pass when they floated too far. At some point, he fell into a state of consciousness that he’d not experienced before; an effortless awareness, where his mind seemed to disconnect from his body. Though he wasn’t consciously trying to keep track of whether he was completely on the pad or not, any time a toe or heel made contact with the hard floor, he immediately corrected his stance before Foe could reprimand him. The petals didn’t necessarily seem to fall less quickly or more predictably, and yet Wren felt himself anticipating and adjusting without trying to do so. For a few minutes, it felt like he could continue this bizarre exercise forever, and successfully.

Unfortunately, the feeling was short-lived. The room was warm, and the droning of the machine threatened to lull him into a daze. The lack of sleep from the night before hung heavy on his eyes; his vision was easily confused by the constant fall. Soon it became a battle of will to maintain his focus for however long it was that Foe kept him at it.

“Good,” Foe said, at some point long after Wren had lost his sense of time. The machine shut off. A last trickle of petals floated out as Wren stood straighter and let his arms hang at his sides. His shoulders were knotted and stiff, the muscles on fire from keeping his hands aloft for so long. And now that he’d stopped his slow circling, he realized he was slightly dizzy. Foe stood there watching him for a moment, then the old man’s eyes flicked to Wren’s left. Instinctively Wren followed the gaze and saw one last red petal floating to the floor. He made a grab for it, but too late. Foe smiled but, thankfully, didn’t comment. Wren opened his left hand, where his collection of petals clung to each other in a sweaty clump. He estimated he’d managed to capture a good fifty or so. He had no idea how many of them he’d missed.

All around him the pad was ringed softly with white petals, dotted here and there with the occasional red. Foe approached and held out his hand. Wren gave him the squished wad of red petals he’d collected.

“You seem to have finally grasped the basics,” Foe said as he dropped the petals into the pocket of his shirt. “We can begin training now.”

Wren tried his best not to show the crushing disappointment he felt. He’d hoped that maybe they were done with this ridiculous exercise, though based on his experiences yesterday he knew that he should always expect to continue a thing at least three times as long as seemed necessary.

“Catch only the red ones,” Foe said. “And do not leave the circle.”

Wren took a deep, settling breath. The machine clanked and whirred. The petals drifted down. Wren resumed his position. There were more petals falling than before. A lot more.

“See wide,” Foe said.

“I don’t know what that means,” Wren said.

“Missed one,” Foe replied. He was walking a slow circle around Wren, watching. “Expand your vision. Do not hunt. Observe. Notice.”

Wren still had no idea what the old man was talking about. He was too busy searching the fluttering cloud descending all around him to ponder riddles. There were glimpses of red amongst the flurry, and he did his best to collect the proper petals just as he had before. But Foe’s warnings came faster this time around, far more frequent, and Wren knew he was failing yet again. There were just too many of them in the air at once. There was no way he could see them all, let alone catch them.

“Missed another,” Foe said. “And another.”

“There are too many!” Wren said.

“There are not too many, boy. You are too slow.”

Wren clenched his teeth, swallowed the response he wanted to give. Talking back to Foe hadn’t yet proved helpful. He redoubled his efforts, swept his eyes back and forth through the cascade more quickly. That actually seemed to make things worse. There were too many petals.

“This is impossible!” Wren said, more to himself than to Foe. And in the next instant, the machine shut off.

Foe stood there with a finger raised, staring right at Wren with a stern expression on his face. The remaining petals drifted to the ground, and even though a red one fell between the two of them, Foe didn’t say anything about it.

“What was the first promise I made to you?” Foe said.

Wren had to think back for the answer, for the exact words from the conversation he’d had days earlier. No. No, it had just been yesterday. That, too, seemed impossible.

“That you would never ask me to do anything impossible?”

Foe continued to stare at him a moment longer and Wren thought the old man was waiting for him to continue or to provide a different answer. But then the machine started up again and Foe resumed his slow circling walk. Apparently he’d made his point.

Wren tried to reset himself. The pause had cleared the air, and now there were only a few petals falling. If he could just keep up, not get so behind this time, maybe he could manage it. But before the first minute was up, he could tell he was losing ground. The curtain of petals descended to the ground, the false snowfall unrelenting. He was soon again overwhelmed, but there was nothing else for him to do but keep at it, keep trying, until Foe ended the exercise. Talking about it certainly didn’t help. He shifted his eyes, started again from the top, giving up any red petals he’d already missed as lost.

There, to his right, a dash of color caught his eye.

And as he reached out for it, Foe took everything a step further. Just as Wren was about to catch the coveted red petal, Foe suddenly shoved his shoulder from behind. Not violently, but enough to cause Wren to lose his balance. He had to step forward and to the side to catch himself; he felt the hard surface of the floor beneath his foot. The petal floated away.

“Do not leave the circle,” Foe said, as if he hadn’t just pushed Wren out of it. Wren stepped back onto the mat, and almost immediately Foe pushed him again. “Missed one.”

Wren steadied himself with a big, deep breath. This was the game. He’d learned it yesterday in the Waiting Room. Foe would do everything he could to test Wren’s limits; to distract him, to throw him off, to anger him. It was all part of the test. And, Wren realized now, this was a test of focus.

In all ways, at all times, I master myself.