Distant tales of the Dichotomy

By the time the sun went down behind the glass vault of the Guild Wards, the Seven Sorrows had washed eleven windows, beaten the dust out of nine curtains, and discovered, in the cellar, a barrel of something that Brannoch had sniffed once and gently put back.

It was a great deal of work. It was also, Fel found to his surprise, a kind of happiness. He had a rag in one hand and a bucket at his feet, and he was standing on a ladder in the great hall with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, scrubbing a hundred years of soot off the underside of a hammerbeam, and there was a smell of soap and wet stone and woodsmoke in the air. Somewhere above him, Thara was singing a very rude song about a bishop. Somewhere below, Orrin was humming a counterpoint, in a quiet, grave, perfectly pitched voice, and the dust fell down around him in the lamplight in slow gold flakes. The fire in the hearth, which Brannoch had lit with a single log the size of a canoe, threw a red glow up the black rafters, and the whole old hall was warm, and loud, and alive.

“Left a bit,” said Veyra, from below.

“Here?”

“A little higher. There is a patch on the carving. The owl.” She was standing on the table with a long-handled brush and her hair tied back in a green scarf, with a smear of grey across one cheekbone, and the sleeves of her shirt rolled up past the elbow. In the firelight she looked about fifteen years old. “You are doing very well.”

“I’m doing a terrible job.”

“You are doing a terrible job carefully. It is a different thing.”

The old man had not lifted a finger.

He had come in with the rest of them, at noon, with his hat in his hands and an expression of mild public spirit, and he had been, ever since, a model of presence. He had carried a chair to the hearth. He had told Thara where to put a bucket. He had stood at the foot of the stair for a good hour with Maude across his shoulders, in the posture of a man supervising, and said at intervals, with approval, “That’s the way,” and “Nice work, lad,” and, to Brannoch, who had just lifted a table over his head with one hand, “Mind your back.” And then, at about the time the lamps were lit, he had settled himself on the end of a bench by the fire, with his boots toward the flames and his hat tipped over his eyes, and had allowed his head to fall slowly back against the stone.

“Torren,” said Nerissa.

She had come down the stair with a basket of linen on her hip, and stopped, and looked at him. It was a very quiet look.

“Hm?” said Torren, from under the hat.

“Are you cleaning?”

“I’m resting my eyes,” said Torren. “I’ve been supervising.”

“I see.”

“It’s a very important job. It’s a skilled job.” He pushed up the brim of his hat with one thick finger and fixed her with an expression of great and injured sincerity. “The truth is, Nerissa, I’m not good at this sort of thing. You know that. I never was. Do you remember the barracks? I tried to sweep the barracks once. I swept it very hard. The roof came down.” He sighed. “I make more mess than I get rid of. It’s a gift, almost. I could take a clean room and make it dirty by looking at it. It would be a kindness to everyone if I just sat quietly, and didn’t touch anything.”

“Is that so.”

“Besides,” said Torren, warming to his theme, “I’ve got an assistant. A very good one. That’s what he’s for. Boy!” He raised his voice. “Brek! He’ll do my share! He’ll do it twice! He’s a very strong lad, and he doesn’t talk, and I’m told it’s good for a young man to have a bit of honest labor. Aren’t you, lad?”

There was a pause. Then, from the far end of the hall, where the boy had been quietly beating a carpet against a pillar for the past three hours, there came a flat, level, entirely unhurried voice.

“I go home at supper,” said Brek.

The old man’s mouth opened. It closed again.

“Mother Ashbrindle said.” Brek did not turn round. He gave the carpet another whack, and a cloud of dust billowed out. “It’s in the contract. It was in ink. You said it was reasonable.” Whack. “I’ll be back at dawn.”

“So I did,” said Torren, faintly. “So I did.”

“Oh, no,” said Thara, from the gallery. She had leaned out over the rail with her chin in her hands and a look of exquisite happiness. “Oh, no, no, no. Oh, I think you’re in a bit of trouble.”

And she was right.

It was very quiet. It was the quiet that had fallen in the ring, when the old man had said something unwise to the little thief, and it spread outward across the hall like frost on a pond. Nerissa put the linen basket down, very gently, on a chair. Orrin stopped humming. Brannoch, who had been mending a shutter, turned his great head and looked at the Guild Master with no expression at all.

And Veyra, on the table, lowered her brush.

She did not say anything. She did not need to. She stood quite straight, with her arms at her sides, and fixed on the old man the long, level, violet gaze that Fel had last seen directed at a company of mercenaries on a burning road, and her face had the stillness of a drawn bow. Nerissa was looking at him too. And the look, in her case, was gentler, and far, far worse, a look of cool and boundless disappointment, like a mother’s, with a faint glitter of ice around the edges.

The two of them did not say a word. They did not move. They just looked.

Torren Ballast, Diamond, First Tier, Anchor of the Gate of Brass, who had once stopped a Tide of Bone with a doorway, felt his whole spine go cold from the nape to the base. He felt it in his teeth. His hat, which he had been about to settle back over his eyes, stayed exactly where it was, in mid-air, in his hand.

“Although,” he said, in a high, thin, remarkably reasonable voice, “on reflection, a Guild Master shouldn’t clean. It’s a matter of… of dignity. It sets a bad example. And I’ve got a lot of, ah, preparatory duties. Teaching duties. A pupil. I have a pupil. I promised the boy a lesson.” He rose, quite fast, for a man of his size, and seized Maude, and stood with the staff in front of him like a shield. “Fel! You’ll come with me! Now! Directly! There’s no time to lose!”

“Me?” said Fel, from the ladder.

“You. The lad. Gravitas.” He was already moving toward the door. “I said I’d teach you, and I’m a man of my word. We’ll go now. Tonight. It’s best to begin at night, it concentrates the mind. Are you coming?” He glanced back, and lowered his voice, and said out of the side of his mouth, with real feeling: “Please.”

Fel looked at Veyra. She had not lowered her gaze. But there was, at the very corner of her mouth, a minute twitch, and it was not entirely severe.

“Go,” she said. “Learn. He will be useless here in any case.”

“Do come back in one piece, dear,” said Nerissa, with a smile like a drawn blade. “And Torren.”

“Yes?”

“We shall be speaking of this tomorrow.”

“I look forward to it,” said Torren Ballast, in the voice of a man being led to the scaffold. And he went out of the door, with Fel after him and Thara’s wild laughter ringing in their ears, and did not draw a full breath until they were halfway down the street.

* * *

It was a small walled garden at the back of the Wards, behind a wrought-iron gate that had not been locked in living memory.

Ember Court was what the dwarves called it, and it was not so much a park as a pocket of something that had been forgotten. It sat at the foot of the mountain, in the corner where the glass vault met the living rock, and the pale daylight of the Wards did not quite reach it. It was lit instead by lanterns, a few of them, on iron posts, burning low and golden, and the air in it smelled of leaf mold and old stone and something sweet and dark that Fel could not place. There was a dry stone pool. There was a bench with a missing slat. And at the center of it, rising out of a ring of mossy cobbles, as tall as a three-story house, there stood three trees.

They were the strangest trees that Fel had ever seen.

They were black. Not the black of burnt wood, or of night, but a rich, deep, glossy black, like the skin of an eel, and their trunks were smooth and broad and faintly warm under the lantern light, as though they held some small, banked fire within. Their branches rose high, high above the lamps, into a canopy that vanished in the dark, and there was a rustle in it, a great slow whisper of leaves like heavy silk. And on the grass, in the lamplight, around their roots, lay a scatter of broken things, half-hidden in the leaves: round black shells the size of a man’s fist, split open, with the shining red inside already dull and sticky and drying.

“CoalHearts,” said Torren Ballast.

He had stopped at the edge of the ring, with his hand on Maude, and his voice had changed. It was lower. It had the careful, almost reverent quality of a man who has come, after a very long walk, to the door of a house he has not entered for years.

“They don’t grow here,” he said. “Not in Dun Vurrim. Not by nature. The Raskian forests are the only place. Some dwarf botanist got hold of three saplings, a hundred years ago, the gods know how. He had to build a special furnace to keep them warm.” He smiled, rather crookedly. “I’ve been coming here for forty years. When I’m in the city. I’m told they’re the only ones outside the Republic.”

“Why?” said Fel.

“Why do I come? Oh.” Torren laughed, softly, and let go of the staff, and sat down on the cobbles with his back against the nearest trunk, with a long, creaking, relieved sigh. “Sit down, boy. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you the whole of it, and then you can tell me whether you still want to be my pupil.”

Fel sat. The cobbles were warm.

“You’ll have noticed,” said Torren, “that I’m a Raskian.”

“I noticed.”

“You’ll have noticed that your friend Brek is a Raskian, as well. And what do you know about us?”

Fel thought. “Not much. That you’re… big. That you’ve got a republic. That you’re strong.”

“That we’re strong.” The old man smiled, and it was not a happy smile. “That’s the whole of it, lad. That’s all there is. We’re strong, and we’re big, and we’re proud, and we’ve never made anything in the world but muscle.” He rubbed his beard. “I grew up in a country where everything was about force. Who could lift the biggest stone. Who could hold a door the longest. Who could hit hardest, and take it, and hit back. You were measured from the day you could stand. There were rings, in every village, and children fought in them from the age of six. You were put in a rank, and you stayed there. And the strong ruled the weak, and the weak did what they were told, and nobody asked what came after.”

“That sounds awful,” said Fel.

“It was home, boy.” Torren’s voice was quite gentle. “It’s a different thing.” He looked up at the dark canopy. “And I was born a frail one.”

Fel stared at him.

“Oh, yes. Don’t look so amazed.” The old man gave a small, dry laugh. “I was big. I was always big. I was taller than most boys in my year, and heavier, and I could lift a good deal. But I was average. That’s the word. In a village of giants, I was the least giant of all. I wasn’t a runt. I wasn’t weak. I was just…” He spread his hands. “Ordinary. And for a Raskian, that’s the worst thing there is. They didn’t even beat me. They just looked through me. I was put in the lowest ring, with the cripples and the weak, and told to be grateful.”

The CoalHeart leaves whispered above them. A thin red drop fell from a broken shell, and hung, and fell.

“And I liked books,” said Torren.

“Books.”

“I loved them. I found one when I was seven, in a ditch, a little water-stained thing about the stars. I couldn’t read a word of it. I carried it about for a year before I found a hedge-priest who’d teach me. And I read it, and then I wanted more.” He shook his head. “Do you know what we called a man who read, in the Republic? A soft. And a man who read about magic…” He chuckled. “There was no word for it. It was too low to name. It was a thing that happened to weak men, and women, and elves. A Raskian who studied the arts was a disgrace to his blood. They’d burn the book. They’d beat the boy. And the boy was supposed to be ashamed.”

“Were you?”

“Terribly.” He looked quite serene about it. “For about a month. And then I learned to hide.” He patted the bark behind him. “I used to come to the forest. It was an hour from the village, in a valley where nobody went. There was a stream, and a great old stand of trees, and the trees were these. CoalHearts. They were as big, then, as the mountains.” He spoke the name with a warm, wry, startling tenderness. “I’d sit under the biggest one, every afternoon, with my back against it, and I’d read. It was the only quiet place I knew. The only place where nobody was looking at me. I loved that tree, lad. It was my friend.”

Fel found that he was smiling. He had not meant to.

“And then it hit me on the head,” said Torren.

Fel laughed. He could not help it. It burst out of him, and he put a hand over his mouth, but the old man only grinned, a great gap-toothed grin, and held up a finger.

“Wait. You’ll want to hear this.” He leaned forward, and lowered his voice, and began, in the slow, coiling, thoughtful tone of a man at a very old fire, to tell it.

“I was twelve. It was autumn. I’d been in the forest since noon, with my back to the trunk and a book about the moon in my lap, and I was just coming to the interesting part. And I heard a little creak, from above. And I thought, that’s odd. And I looked up. And that was when the fruit fell on my head.”

He rapped his skull with a knuckle. It made a hollow tock.

“You’ve seen them. You’ve seen how they grow. They hang up in the canopy, a hundred feet in the air, and they’re as hard as a stone, and they come down all at once. They’re meant to. The fall is how they open. The shell hits the ground, and cracks, and all the sweet red jelly inside spills out, and the animals come for it, the deer and the squirrels and the little black foxes. And they eat the fruit, and swallow the seeds, and carry them away through the forest, and that’s how a CoalHeart makes a wood.” He grinned. “A very clever bit of engineering. Wasted entirely on me.”

“It knocked you out?”

“It knocked me sideways. I went over like a skittle. The book went one way, and I went the other, and the fruit hit the ground beside me with a crack like a snapping bough. It split, and a wave of red juice went all over my head and my face and my best shirt. I lay in the leaves for a good minute, with my ears ringing, and a spray of little black seeds in my hair, and I thought, well.”

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He stopped. He looked, for a moment, rather like a boy.

“And then I thought, how?”

“How?”

“How could a thing that was made to be soft hurt me so much?” Torren’s voice rose a little, with the curious, quivering, delighted indignation of a man who has been waiting forty years to say this to somebody. “It was a fruit. It was a fruit, boy! It was built to make more fruit. It’s full of sugar! It’s got a heart of jelly! What business has a thing like that, to weigh as much as it did? How does it grow? How does it get so hard, and so heavy, up there, with nobody touching it? Where does the weight come from? And how, in the name of all the gods, did it know to fall on me?”

Fel was laughing again, helplessly.

“I was furious,” said Torren. “I was a boy of twelve, with juice in my ears. I got up, and I walked straight to that tree, and I hit it. I punched it. With my fist.” He held up one huge bronze hand, the knuckles scarred and thick as walnuts. “I hit it as hard as I could, and I grabbed it with both hands, and I shouted at it, in a very rude way, in front of the gods and the squirrels. And I felt something.”

The laughter stopped.

“It was very slight,” said Torren. “I almost missed it. A kind of beat. A pulse, under my hands, deep in the wood, like a heart. It was so faint that I thought I’d imagined it. I stood there, with my hands on the bark, and my head still ringing, and I waited. And it came again.”

He had stopped smiling. His eyes, in the lantern light, were fixed on something far away and a long time ago.

“So I took my hands away. And I put them back. And this time I didn’t shout. I just held it, and I closed my eyes, and I listened.” He drew a breath. “And then it was as if the whole world had a second skin on it. A thread. Hundreds of them. Thousands. I could feel them, boy, running through my arms, and my chest, and my feet, like fine strings, like the hairs on a spider’s web, invisible, shining, pulling gently. They went into the tree. They ran up the trunk, along every branch, into the very tips of the leaves, and down, down, into the roots, deep into the earth. And along every one of them there was something moving.”

“Moving,” said Fel, in a whisper.

“A flow. A kind of energy. It was quite steady. It was like a river.” He held out his hand, and moved it, slowly, in a long, falling curve. “Like an endless river, running down a mountain, into the sea. And then up, as mist, and then down, as rain, and round again, and round, in a circle that had no beginning and no end. And it ran through the tree, and the tree ran through it, and I was standing in the middle of it all with my hands on the trunk, a small, soft, ordinary boy in a forest, and for the first time in my whole life, I did not feel ordinary. I felt…” He searched for the word. “Connected.”

The lanterns hissed. A leaf fell between them, and lay on the cobbles.

“It was mana,” said Torren. “I didn’t know that, then. Nobody had a word for it, not in my village, and I wasn’t going to ask the priest. I just knew that it was there. That it ran through everything. And that I could feel it, and nobody else could.” He smiled. “I stood there for an hour. And then, because I was a boy, I thought, what happens if I push?”

“Push?”

“I felt the line between myself and the tree. I felt the energy running out of me, in a thin thread, into the wood. And I thought, what if there were more? So I did. I reached down, inside me, to wherever it was that the thread came from, and I gave a shove. I poured more of it down the line. A great deal more.” He opened his hands. “And I followed it. With my mind. I followed the energy all the way up. Up the trunk, and out along a branch, into the tangle of the canopy, and I came to a fruit.”

Fel did not breathe.

“I saw it, lad.” Torren’s voice had dropped almost to a whisper. “I saw it through the line. As clear as I’m seeing you. I saw the stem, thin as a straw, the cord that held it to the branch. I saw the black rind, thick and glossy, and the little veins of light running through it. And I saw inside. I saw the jelly, and the seeds, round and black and tiny as pinheads, floating in the red like stars. All of it. As if the whole fruit were a lantern, and I was inside it.”

“And you…”

“I kept pouring.” The old man’s hands closed slowly into fists. “I’m not sure why. I wanted to see. I poured and poured, and the fruit began to change. It grew. It got bigger, a little, and denser, and I could feel the weight of it in my mind, getting heavier and heavier, like a stone in a sling. And the stem was thin. It was so thin. And I felt it begin to strain…”

He opened his hands.

“It snapped.”

There was a long, quiet pause.

“It came down like a dropped anvil,” said Torren Ballast, softly. “I heard it. All the way down. A great black rushing thing, through the leaves, through the branches, and it hit the ground twenty feet from where I stood with a thud that shook the whole valley. I ran to it. I could hardly believe it. Do you know what had happened? It had hit with ten times the force of the first. Ten times, at least. It had driven itself into the ground, a hand’s breadth deep, like a thrown spear. And it hadn’t cracked. It was perfectly whole. It was just sitting there, in a little crater, smoking.”

“Ten times,” said Fel.

“And that was the first thing I noticed.” Torren held up a finger. “The second was this. At the instant that fruit began to grow, at the moment I started to push, I felt my own body go light. All at once. As though a pack had been lifted off my back. I’d lost thirty pounds, boy, just like that. Thirty pounds, in the space of a breath. I’d felt my feet come off the ground, a little, on the toes.” He shook his head. “I thought I was going mad. And I let go of the tree, in shock. I just let go. And at the very moment that my hands came away from the bark, my weight came back.”

Fel stared.

“All of it. All thirty pounds. It came down on me at once, like a hammer. And the fruit, the one in the crater, the one I’d made so heavy, it burst. It couldn’t hold. It went off like a burst barrel. Juice, and seeds, and bits of shell, a hundred yards in every direction. I stood in the middle of it, drenched from head to foot in sticky red mess, shaking like a leaf.” His eyes shone. “And I was the happiest boy that ever lived.”

Fel had been very quiet. He said now, slowly, “You gave it your weight.”

“I gave it my weight. That’s it. That’s the whole secret, in a nutshell.” Torren pointed at him with an enormous finger. “The mana carried it. I’d sent it along the line, and it had taken some of what I was, some of my heaviness, and put it into the fruit. And when I stopped, it came back. I didn’t know it, but I’d found the first and simplest law of the thing. What goes out, comes back.”

He fell silent. The lamplight wavered across his broad, lined, shining face.

“And that was where I made my mistake,” said Torren. “Because I was twelve. And I thought, what happens if I do the opposite?”

Fel felt a cold prickle go up the back of his neck.

“I took hold of the tree again. And this time, I didn’t push. I pulled. I reached down the line, with my mind, to the tree. I took hold of its weight. The great, slow, ancient weight of the whole thing, the trunk, and the roots, and the earth around the roots, and I thought, come here. I pulled it into me.” He drew a ragged breath. “I wanted to know what it felt like.”

“What did it feel like?”

“It felt like being buried.” The old man’s voice was quite flat. “I went down like a stone in a well. I didn’t even have time to cry out. One moment I was standing in the leaves, and the next the ground just opened, and I was in it, up to my knees, and then my thighs, and then my waist, and I sank, boy. I sank a whole yard. A yard. As if the earth were water. And all the while I could feel the weight pressing on me, on my bones, on my back, on my lungs, as if the sky itself had fallen on my shoulders.”

His hand had gone, without his knowing it, to his thigh.

“And I let go,” said Torren. “Naturally. Anyone would have.”

“And?”

“And that was when I learned the price.”

He said it very quietly.

“My legs broke. Both of them. In dozens of places. In the thighs, and the shins, and the ankles, and the little bones of the feet. It was the weight that had been on them. It had been held, you see, and when I let it go, the strain just…” He made a small, dry, crackling gesture with his fingers. “They went like kindling. I’ve never known pain like it. I lay there in that hole, in the roots of my friend, with my own bones in pieces, and I screamed for three hours. And in the end, a woodcutter came, and carried me home, and I lay in bed for a year.”

“A year,” said Fel.

“I read a great many books,” said Torren Ballast, and, to Fel’s astonishment, he began to laugh.

* * *

It was a good while before either of them spoke again.

The lanterns had burned lower. The shadows had drawn in around the three black trees, so that the whole court seemed to be a small round room walled with night, and somewhere, high in the invisible leaves, a CoalHeart creaked, once, in its long and patient growing. Fel sat very still, with his arms around his knees. He found that he was looking at the old man differently. He had thought, that afternoon, that he understood him: a drunk, a legend, a fool. He had been wrong about all three.

“I kept at it,” said Torren. “Of course I did. I’d found something, and it was mine. When I could walk again, I went back to the forest. And I studied. Year on year. I was careful. I never went near the opposite again, not for a long time, and when I did, I did it properly, in small, small steps. I learned the price. I learned how much I could carry, and how, and what the body does with it. I learned that I could do it to anything.” He looked at his hands. “A tree. A stone. A sword. A man. Anything that I touched, living or dead, I could feel the weight of, and take, or give, or move, so long as I was willing to pay.”

“The price,” said Fel.

“Everything has a price, lad. That’s the second law.” He held up two fingers. “The first is what goes out comes back. The second is what is taken from one place must be put in another. The weight isn’t made or lost. It’s moved. And the only road that it can travel, is me. I’m the bridge. I’m the pipe. I’m the conduit, and if I’m not strong enough, or careful enough, or quick enough, the whole thing comes down on my head.” He smiled. “Or on my legs.”

“Gravitas,” said Fel.

“It’s what I call it.” Torren seemed to take a certain private pleasure in the word. “It’s an old, grand, dusty word, from a dead language, and it means weight. It’s mine. I made it. Nobody taught me, because nobody knew. There are a few who can do a little of the same, here and there, with other names. But the art itself, the way I do it, the whole of it, from the first thread to the last…” He tapped his chest. “There’s only me. And you, if you want it.”

He stood up.

It took him a moment. He was an old man, and he had been sitting on cold stone. But he stood, with a long creak of his knees, and walked a little way across the cobbles to where, at the edge of the lamplight, half sunk in the moss, there lay a huge grey boulder. It was about the size of a barrel. It had been set there, long ago, by some dwarven gardener, as an ornament. He stood beside it for a moment, and looked down at it, and cracked his knuckles.

“Watch,” said Torren Ballast.

He laid one hand, flat, on the top of the stone.

Nothing happened. For a moment the whole court seemed to hold still around him, and Fel thought he saw a very faint shimmer in the air, a quiver, as of heat on a road. Then the boulder moved.

It did not rise. It was not as simple as that. It lightened. There was no other word. It seemed to lose its grip on the earth, all at once, as a child might lose its hold on a hand, and it shifted, and trembled, and the old man lifted it, one-handed, to his shoulder, as lightly as a loaf. And at the same moment, the cobbles under his own boots gave a small, sharp groan. The moss flattened. The stones sank, with a gritty crackle, an inch, two inches, into the soil, so that the old man stood in a shallow, perfectly round dish of pressed earth, his heels braced, his face quite calm.

“That’s the price,” he said, over his shoulder. His voice was perfectly steady. “The rock’s weight doesn’t vanish. It goes through me, and down. Into the ground beneath. I’m lifting it with the earth. And the earth is complaining about it.” He rolled his shoulder. “Now. Stand back.”

Fel scrambled out of the way.

Torren drew his arm back, like a man about to throw a stone into a pond, and hurled the boulder.

It left his hand with a soft whoomp, and flew, light and silent as a feather, a full thirty feet across the court. And at the top of its flight, at the instant that the old man’s fingers let go of it, he made a small, flat motion with his wrist, and the weight came back.

The boulder fell like a thunderbolt.

It hit the far wall of the garden with a noise like a falling tower. The stone shattered. A great piece of the old brick wall, the size of a cart, simply crumpled, in a roar of dust and flying fragments, and a cloud of black soot rose up out of the CoalHearts, and a flock of startled sparrows shot out of the dark. When the dust settled, there was a hole in the wall, a ragged, smoking hole the height of a man, and in the middle of it, half sunk in the rubble, a broken lump of grey rock, with a crater around it, and a deep, perfectly circular dent in the ground at the old man’s feet.

Torren Ballast dusted off his hands.

“Two prices,” he said. “The first when it goes up. And the second when it comes down. You’ll want to remember that. Nothing is free.” He grinned at Fel’s face. “Oh, don’t look so stricken. I’ll pay for the wall. Probably.”

Fel was not stricken. He was staring at the ruined wall, and at the hole, and at the old man, with a feeling in his chest that was something like terror, and something like joy, and something that he could not name at all.

“I want to learn it,” he said.

“I know you do.”

“How?”

“The same way I did. The slow way, and the hard way.” The old man wiped his hands on his coat, and came back across the cobbles, and put one large heavy hand on the trunk of the nearest tree. It was warm. It gave a soft, answering thrum, like the hum of a sleeping beast. “You’re going to stand here. You’re going to put your hand on this. And you’re going to feel for the lines.”

“The lines.”

“The threads. The flow. You’ll not find it tonight. You’ll not find it this week. It may take you a month, or a year, and I’ll not lie about that.” He looked down at the boy. “But you’ll do it every day. Every single day, for as long as it takes. You’ll hold on to this tree, and you’ll shut your eyes, and you’ll try to see the whole of it, from the roots to the leaves, the way I did when I was twelve. And when you can feel the lines, you’ll push. A little. Just a thread. And you’ll follow it up, with your mind, to the very top of the tree, and find a fruit.”

“And then?”

“And then you’ll make it fall.” Torren Ballast smiled. “With nothing but your mana, and your hands, and the tree. That’s the first lesson. It’s the only lesson, for now. When you can drop a CoalHeart from a hundred feet by wanting it to, and nothing else, I’ll teach you the second.”

“Mana,” said Fel. He said it slowly, the way a man tests a thin plank. “I’ve… I think I’ve felt something. Once or twice. When I fight.”

“That’s your aura. A different thing, though kin to it.” The old man waved a hand. “It’s what makes your blade bite. But what we’re doing tonight is the source. You’ll want both, in the end.”

“How do I train the aura, then?”

“Oh, that.” Torren’s face lit with a kind of dreadful cheer. “The good old-fashioned way.”

Fel waited.

“The Old Raskian Republic,” said Torren, with relish, “Royal Army regimental body conditioning. Eighteen weeks. It’s what they used on me. It’s what they use on all of them. And I’m not going to tell you a single thing about it, lad. Not one. Not a word.” He patted the boy’s shoulder, rather hard. “I’m not a cruel man. I’d like you to keep your spirit. I’d like you to come to it fresh, and have no idea what you’ve let yourself in for. It’s the only way it can be done.”

“That,” said Fel, “is the most frightening thing you’ve said yet.”

“It’s not close.” The old man turned him by the shoulders, and set him squarely before the tree, and pressed his palm against the black bark. “There. Now. Hand flat. Eyes closed. Breathe. Think of it as a river. A sea. A web. A forest of threads. I want you to stand there, and feel, and see, and I want you to stop asking me questions.”

Fel stopped asking questions.

He stood there. The bark was warm, and smooth, and faintly alive, and under his palm he could feel, or thought he could feel, a very slow rhythm, a beat, like the long breath of something sleeping. He shut his eyes. He tried to see. He saw the inside of his own eyelids, red and dark. He saw a single dim spot, floating, that might have been a lantern. He tried to think of a river. He thought of the river at home, brown and slow, with the ferry on it, and the willows.

Nothing happened.

* * *

Nothing happened for a very long time.

Torren talked. That was the trouble. He talked from the first minute, in a low, comfortable, endless rumble, sitting with his back against the next tree and his feet stretched out and a leather flask that Fel had not seen him take out and that was, it appeared, full of something that was not water. He talked about the lines. He talked about the flow. And he said, by way of helping, that it was a bit like making soup.

“You start with the broth,” said Torren. “That’s the roots. Then you add the vegetables, that’s your trunk, the big bits. Then the herbs, which are the little twiggy things, and then you stir. You stir, you see, and it all comes together, and when you’ve got it right, it’s got a smell. You can’t see it, but you know. You’ve got to smell it with your mind.”

“I don’t,” said Fel, with his eyes shut, “think that’s…”

“Or an eel. An eel in a bucket. You put your hand in, and it wriggles. You can’t see it, but you know it’s there, and you feel it slide, and you say, ha, there you are. That’s what it’s like. You’ve got to be very quiet. You’ve got to be very slippery.”

“An eel.”

“Or a goat. I had a goat once. Terrible animal. It could tell what I was thinking. It would look at me, and I’d look at it, and we’d have an understanding. That’s what the lines are like, lad. They’re a goat that looks at you.”

“A goat that looks at me,” said Fel.

“Exactly. You’ve got it. Do you want some of this?”

“No,” said Fel.

“Wise. It’s terrible stuff.” The flask gurgled. “Or, think of a wedding. A very big wedding. With a lot of guests. You’re the groom, and you’ve got to find your mother in the crowd, and she’s wearing a hat…”

It went on like that for a very long time.

The lanterns burned down. A cold air came creeping through the gap in the wall, and Fel’s arm began to ache, and then to go numb. Hours passed, or what felt like hours. He stood with his hand on the black trunk, and his eyes shut, and his forehead against the bark, and tried to find a river, a web, a goat. Sometimes, for a heartbeat, he thought he felt something: a flicker, a tingling in the palm, like the first prickle of a sleeping foot. And then the old man would say, with great interest, “Or a duck,” and it was gone.

Once, near the middle of the night, he opened his eyes and looked round. Torren was asleep. He was lying on his back in the leaves, with his hat over his face and his hands folded on his stomach and the flask upright on his chest, and he was snoring in a long, whistling, happy snore, and still, from time to time, in his sleep, he said, quite clearly, “…and then you add the onions.”

Fel looked at him for a moment. Then he closed his eyes again, and put his hand back on the tree.

He did not stop. He did not know why. It might have been stubbornness. It might have been the slow gathering silence of the court, or the warmth of the bark, or the thought, never very far from his mind, of the white bow in a dark doorway and the way Veyra had looked at him that afternoon. You were watching the ground. He thought of Pim. He thought of all the things that he had not been able to carry, and all the people he had been too small and too slow and too ordinary to hold, and a stubborn, quiet, unreasonable heat rose up in his chest, and he pressed his palm to the CoalHeart, and tried.

The night went by. The lanterns guttered, and went out one by one. In the east, over the great black wall of the mountain, there came a very thin, very grey, very distant line of light.

Nothing had happened.

“Master Ballast,” said Fel, at last, in a hoarse voice.

“Mm?” The hat had not moved.

“It’s morning.”

“Is it?” The old man sat up, with a groan, and the flask fell off his chest and rolled. He looked at the sky, and at the three black trees, and, for rather a long time, at the boy standing rigid before the biggest of them with one hand still flat against the bark. His face did something complicated. “Hm. Did you get anything?”

“No,” said Fel.

“Nothing at all?”

“A… a tingle. For a second. About midnight. I thought it might be a cramp.”

The old man got to his feet, and came over, and looked at him for a good long time. There was no disappointment in his face. It was a broad, quiet, level look, and there was something in it that Fel could not read.

“That wasn’t a cramp,” said Torren Ballast.

He picked up the flask, and shook it, and put it away.

“Come on, lad,” he said. “They’ll have the kettle on. Let’s see what they’ve done to the house.”