Chapter Five — Astral Beginnings

He woke up looking at the sky.

That was how mornings went now. The bed — a real bed, low, arrived the week he turned eleven months, after a campaign of climbing out of the crib in front of witnesses — sat under the window, and the window gave him sky first thing. Pale blue. Two clouds. A bird going somewhere with great confidence.

He lay there and watched it a while.

There was no reason to. That was the point. Lying still for no reason was something you could do here. Nobody came to find out why.

After a while, he got up.

Dressing himself now took four minutes. It used to take nine.

The buttons were the enemy. Eleven of them, all the way up the front, each one the size of a lentil. But he'd practiced them the way he practiced everything, and now his fingers did them on their own while he thought about other things.

He was thinking about other things.

Today was the day. He'd checked the feeling twice, lying under the sky, and it hadn't gone away.

He opened his own door and stepped out into the corridor.

Loretta was there, halfway along it, with an armful of linens. She looked at the small dressed person who had just let himself out of his own room, and she didn't drop anything, and she didn't shriek. The house had used up all its shrieking on him months ago.

"Oh my," she said. "Look at you."

"Morning, Loretta."

"Good morning, he says! Like he's the lord of the house already." She came over, shifted the linens onto her hip, and looked him up and down. Collar. Buttons. Hair. "You dressed yourself? All by yourself? All eleven buttons?"

"Mm."

"And one of them's even in the right hole."

He looked down.

They're all in the right hole. I counted.

"They're all right."

"I know, I know. I'm teasing you." She checked both ends of the corridor, then bent down and kissed the top of his head, quick. "One year old today. One whole year! And you're up and dressed before I've even put the sheets away. What am I supposed to do with myself now?"

"Sheets."

"Sheets!" She laughed. "Yes. That's my job now, is it? Sheets."

She was still bent down. The corridor was still empty.

He used it.

"Retta."

She straightened up so fast the linens nearly went. For a second she just looked at the far wall.

"...Go on," she said. Her voice wobbled in the middle. "Your mother's still asleep. But Marta's up."

He went.

The kitchen heard him coming.

"That'll be him," said Marta, without turning around.

"Morning, Marta."

"Morning, my lord!" She was elbow-deep in dough. Nina was at the far end, drying bowls, watching him the way she still did. "Birthday boy's up early, huh?"

"Smelled bread."

"Ha! You hear that, Nina? He smelled the bread." Marta threw up her floury hands. "One year old and he already knows the most important thing in this house. Sit, sit. And don't you tell your mother."

He sat there.

She cut him the heel off the fresh loaf, still too hot to hold properly, and put it in his hands.

Nina put a bowl down too hard and got looked at. He ate the bread and listened to the two of them argue about the pastry, and about the six people who had opinions about the pastry, none of whom had ever made one in their lives.

"Rufo said—"

"Rufo can come and say it to my face!"

"He said he doesn't want to."

"Smart man, that Rufo."

The yard door stood open. Out past it, Rufo was crossing with a bucket, and Beso trailed him with the seriousness of a dog on salary.

"Rufo."

"Morning, my lord." Rufo lifted the bucket an inch. "Beso, wait, don't—"

Beso did not mind anything. Beso came over at speed, put both paws on the doorstep, and shoved his whole face into Avon's chest.

He stood there and let it happen. One hand on the dog's ear.

There had been a dog before.

He scratched the ear he had.

"He really likes you," said Rufo, who said this every time.

"Mm."

"He doesn't like anybody, you know. Not even me."

"He likes Marta."

"He likes Marta's leftovers."

From inside the kitchen: "I heard that!"

The library was on the ground floor, at the quiet end, and it was his.

Nobody had said so. A few months ago somebody left the door open, and he walked in, and Loretta came to get him and found him sitting on the floor with a book, quiet, not moving. She stood in the doorway a long moment and didn't take him out.

The door had been left open ever since.

He went in, past the tall shelves, to the low table by the window. Checked the room first. He always checked the room first.

Empty. Sun on the floor. Dust doing its slow work in the light.

And the other thing in the air, which was not dust.

It had started in the crib.

The air had stuff in it. He'd noticed it early, in the long flat hours when there was nothing to do but look. He'd figured it was his eyes. New equipment, bad fit.

It hung everywhere. It drifted. It moved when nothing else in the room moved — slow currents of almost-light, more of it by the window at dawn, and more of it around Marika all the time.

He'd noticed that last part and hadn't known what to do with it.

Nobody mentioned it. Not Loretta, who mentioned everything. Not his mother, holding him at the window through a whole sunset with the air going gold and thick around them both.

So either everyone could see it, and it was so normal that nobody thought it was worth a word.

Or nobody could see it but him.

He'd sat with that for months. Then, a few months ago, on his stomach on this floor, working along the bottom shelf, he'd pulled down a thin grey book with the binding half gone, and the first line under the title had named it.

All the world is filled with mana.

He'd gone very still, the way he did.

The book was called Astral Beginnings. Old. Plain. Shelved low down between two huge ledgers, where nobody would look for it and nobody had, in years.

He'd read it four times that first week. All of it he could get at.

The last dozen pages were stuck. Damp had got into them some winter long before he was born, and they'd dried into one block at the corner. He worked at them for a week with baby fingers, tore an edge, and stopped. Wrecking the only copy would have been the stupidest thing he'd ever done.

He left them. He had the front of the book, and the front of the book had the method, and the method was the only part he needed.

That was the reasoning. He'd been satisfied with it at the time.

What it said, roughly, was this.

Mana was everywhere. In the air, in the ground, in living things.

Most people never felt it. A fish has no opinion about water.

But a body could learn to take it in. And a body that took it in, and held it, and kept at it long enough, could build something out of it.

The book called that an astral body.

A second frame, grown inside the first. Not flesh — something laid down alongside the flesh, out of gathered mana, layer on layer.

Few reach it. Fewer reach it young. Those who do are written down.

He read that line twice and moved on, because the next part was the useful one.

What you got for it.

Plenty of people had an affinity for mana. Mages had it. Some of them were very good. Almost none of them would ever build an astral body.

The few who did were different. Mana didn't just answer them. It came to them, the way it came to nobody else.

Then the rest, which the book hurried past and he went back to.

The frame didn't sit quietly inside its owner. It fed him. Strength. Wind. Wounds closing early. The senses going sharp. All of it rising on its own, without training, without permission, for as long as the frame lasted.

The least of its virtues, the book said.

He'd disagreed on the spot.

Then came the part he read the most.

The younger, the better.

A body drank mana fastest while it was growing, and a human body grew fastest at the very start. Every year after that, the intake slowed. Nothing brought it back.

The book didn't put numbers on that. It didn't have to. Everyone who ever tried this had started too late, and the book knew it, and said so in the tone of a man writing about weather.

Then it wandered off into something it called an argument, which it clearly did not expect anyone to use.

An infant would be the ideal vessel. Body and mana would feed one another, each pulling the other along. In theory, nothing built later could stand beside it.

Then, one line down:

An infant cannot practice. Cannot hold a stance. Cannot direct the mind. And so the ideal hour passes unused, in every life, in every generation, without exception.

He'd looked up from that page. A baby, alone on the library floor.

Without exception.

He smirked.

Well.

He'd started that night.

The stance in the book was for adults — feet so, hands so, spine so — and he'd scaled it down through trial and error to something a small body could hold. The gathering itself was simpler than the book made it sound and harder than anything he'd ever done. You reached for the stuff in the air. Not with your hands — with your attention. And you had to hold it there without grabbing at it. That took him a month to learn, and he could still lose it by thinking about anything else.

The first month, nothing came.

The second month, something came. A thread of it, drifting in, settling somewhere behind his ribs and staying.

After that it built the way everything he trained built. Every night, in the dark, after the house went down.

Threads first. Then streams. Somewhere in the winter it stopped feeling like reaching and started feeling like breathing — like the stuff had been looking for a way in the whole time, and he'd finally stood in the right place.

The book said gathering was slow. The book said the early years were a patient laying-down of silt.

For him it came like a tide that knew his name.

He didn't examine that. It went in the column with the growth, and the column stayed shut.

The body kept up its end.

He'd been hearing the house for months before he understood what it meant. Lying in the library at the quiet end of the ground floor, with two doors and a corridor between him and the kitchen, he could follow the whole argument.

"—it's my oven, girl."

"I only shut it for a minute—"

"A minute."

"It was going to burn—"

"Out. Out of my kitchen."

He could hear which one of them set a bowl down. He could hear Beso's tail going against the yard step, and a horse shifting its weight in a stall he had never once been inside.

"Marta's yelling at Nina."

Loretta looked up from her mending.

"Hm? Is she?"

"Mm."

"How could you know that? The kitchen's three rooms away." She tilted her head, then went back to her needle and answered herself before he could. "Ah — you must've heard a door slam. Sound travels in this old house."

"...Mm."

It wasn't a door.

He didn't mention it again after that. He listened instead.

The rest of it he'd measured at night, alone, the way he measured everything.

Strength: past the crib, which had been retired anyway. He'd moved on to the wardrobe. He could take a corner of it off the boards and hold it, slow up and slower down, for a count he'd stopped bothering to finish.

Wind: he ran the lengths of the room in the dark, silent, on the balls of his feet, and stopped only because the sky started going grey.

Skin: that one he found by accident. He went down on the stones in the yard, hard, the kind of fall that takes the knee off a child — and got up with nothing on him. No blood. No mark. Grit to brush off, and Loretta coming across the yard with her apron up to fuss over a boy who wasn't hurt at all.

"Let me see it."

"There's nothing."

"You went down like a sack, my lord, there's something—"

There wasn't. She'd turned his leg over twice looking for it.

He put his own hand on his own forearm that night and pressed until it should have hurt.

It didn't.

He had two things to measure against, and both of them were from before.

Himself, first. He knew exactly what that boy could lift and run and take, because all of it had been written down, and he'd learned his own numbers by heart the way other kids learn songs.

He'd gone past those in the winter and hadn't thought much of it. A body grows.

Then the grown ones.

He'd never had numbers for them. He'd only ever had the size of them in a doorway.

He was past those too.

He checked it three times, because something like that should have been wrong.

It wasn't. He was one year old, in a house that thought his biggest achievement was walking early, and he was stronger than anyone he could remember from his first life.

He lay in the dark with that.

The place he came from spent his whole life making a weapon out of a boy. It took a building and a lot of iron.

This house did it in a year, with bread and pastry, and had no idea it had happened.

It wasn't only him, either. It was the whole place.

He'd worked that out slowly, because it was hard to notice. Nothing here was hard. That was the whole problem with noticing it.

Back there, the air had been something you got through. You took a breath because you had to and it did what it had to and that was the end of the transaction. Cold air hurt. Warm air sat on you. Everything cost something.

Here he could lie on the floor of the library and breathe, on purpose, for no reason, and it was good. Not pleasant. Good, the way water is good when you've wanted it. The air came in cool and went out and something in him wanted the next one already.

Sunlight was the same. He'd sat in the window square with his eyes shut and felt it soak into him and come out the other side.

Food. Sleep. Cold mornings.

All of it clean. All of it worth having. Every ordinary thing in this world came at him like it had been rinsed.

He'd assumed at first that he was simply young, and that being young was pleasant, and everybody knew it but him. Then he'd started watching the others. Marta didn't shut her eyes in the sunlight. Rufo took a lungful of morning yard air and thought about the buckets. Loretta ate her bread standing up, in about four seconds, without noticing she'd done it.

They didn't feel it.

They'd been swimming in it their whole lives.

So it wasn't him being young, and it wasn't the house, and it wasn't the bread.

It was the stuff in the air.

He couldn't prove it. Nothing in the book said a word about it. But the stuff was in the air and in the ground and in the food that grew out of the ground, and it was in the light, and it went in and out of him every time he breathed and he could see it doing it.

Mana. It had to be mana.

He stood in the middle of the library and took the stance.

Feet apart. Hands loose. Back straight.

Then he reached.

The room moved.

The light in the air turned toward him — from the shelves, from the floor, from every corner at once — and poured in.

Fast. Faster than it had ever come.

Because last night, something had finished.

He could feel it now. A second body inside his own. Made of light instead of flesh. It moved when he moved. It breathed when he breathed.

And it was drinking. All on its own.

An astral body.

He'd built one.

He stayed in the stance longer than he needed to. He just wanted to feel it a little longer.

...Good.

It was the best word he had. He was very, very pleased with himself.

Then he remembered the stuck pages.

He went and got the book. His hands were stronger now. The pages he couldn't open a few months ago came apart easily.

A few pages of tables. Then a heading.

ON THE CANDIDATE.

He read the first line. Then he stood up without meaning to.

The book wasn't a beginner's book at all.

It was a guide for people trying to become an Archmage.

There were eleven requirements. The astral body was number one.

The other ten were things you could study for. Spells. Years of service. Research. Hard, but possible.

The astral body wasn't.

Most who complete it, the book said, have held the title thirty years by then.

He read that line twice.

Thirty years?

He frowned at it. The astral body was the first thing on the list. So why did it take people thirty years after they already had the title?

...Weird.

He looked at the top of the page. Archmage. It was printed at the top of every one of the stuck pages. It had been sitting in his hands for months.

...Huh.

He'd done the hardest one first.

Ten left. And all of them were just work.

He was good at work.

He turned the page.

Which was when the giggling started.

He turned around.

The library was empty.

The library was not empty. Behind the low table, sticking straight up over the edge of it like a flag over a fortification, was a small dark ponytail.

The ponytail was vibrating.

The giggling came from directly under the ponytail, loud enough to carry to the kitchen, from somebody who was completely sure she couldn't be seen.

He looked at it for a while.

"Mari."

The giggling stopped. The ponytail dropped an inch — a tactical adjustment — and stayed there.

Silence.

"Mari. I can see you."

"No," said the table.

"I can see your hair."

A long pause. She thought about it.

"...No."

He walked over and looked down behind the table. Marika Guesclin, one year old for three weeks now, was crouched down there with both hands over her own eyes, on the theory that the world ran on looking and could therefore be switched off.

"Found you."

She took her hands off her eyes, looked up at him, and laughed the whole-body laugh, the bell going down the stairs, delighted with him, with herself, with the game she'd invented and lost in under a minute.

"Avu found me!"

"Yeah."

"Again!"

"No."

"Again! Again again again!"

"You always hide behind the same table."

"Again," she said, with the confidence of somebody who has exactly one idea and thinks it's the best idea in the world, and put her hands back over her eyes.

He stood there.

The ponytail was new. Miss Guesclin had started tying it up the week the girl learned to run, because if she was going to move like that, somebody had to be able to see her going. It stuck straight up off her head like a handle. Like something you'd grab to carry her by, which was probably the idea.

She was waiting. Hands over eyes. Absolutely certain.

He counted to five and said it to the room.

"Where's Mari?"

"Not here!"

"Hm."

"Not here," said the table again, in case he'd missed it.

He walked the long way round the shelves so she could hear his feet.

"Where did she go?"

"Not here!"

"Is she under the chair?"

"Not here!"

"Is she behind the curtain?"

"NOT HERE!"

She was shouting it now. Every question got the same answer, faster each time, from the same table, at a volume that could be heard in the yard.

He stopped in the middle of the floor and let the room go quiet.

"I can't find her anywhere," he said. "I'll go look upstairs."

He took three steps toward the door.

Behind him the table exploded.

Shrieking. Laughing. Both feet drumming on the floor. She had won, and she wanted the whole house to know it.

He turned around.

The hands were still over her eyes.

He found her four more times after that. Same table, every time.

He did think about it, afterward, while she sat on the sunlit floor stacking his decoy picture books into a tower.

She'd been in the room.

He didn't know how long. She moved quietly when she was hunting a hiding spot. It was the only thing she did quietly.

And he'd been standing in the current with everything he had pointed at it, and a whole small person had walked in behind him and set up a fortification, and he'd caught none of it.

She might have watched the stance. Watched him stand still in the middle of the floor doing, as far as anyone could see, nothing at all.

He looked at her. She had three books stacked and was working on the fourth with her tongue out.

"Mari."

"Mm."

"Did you see me? Before?"

"Avu was standing."

"...Yeah."

"Standing standing standing. Like a tree!" She put the fourth book on very carefully. It fell off. She stared at it like it had betrayed her, and started over. "Avu was a tree. Mari was hiding. And Mari winned!"

That was the whole report.

There was nothing in it. A boy stood still in a library. The only witness was one year old and had scored the morning as a win for herself.

Let them watch the girl, he'd thought once.

He watched the girl. She got the tower to five and knocked it down herself, right away, with both hands, shrieking, which had apparently been the point the whole time.

Miss Guesclin found them at midday, the way she found everything: on the first try, silently, from the doorway.

He felt the doorway change and looked up. She was leaning on the frame with her arms folded, and there was no telling how long she'd been there. There never was, with her. He'd decided it ran in the family and left it alone.

"There you are," she said. "Do you know half the house is looking for you, young lady?"

"Mama! Avu couldn't find me!"

"Oh? He couldn't?"

"I hid and hid and hid and he couldn't!"

"I found you five times," said Avon.

"No."

"Behind that table."

"No." She didn't even look up from the books. "Mari hided. Mari winned."

Miss Guesclin looked at the table. It was four feet from where she was sitting, and there was nothing else in the room to hide behind.

"Five times," she said. "Behind the same table."

"Winned," said Marika, and went back to the wreck of the tower.

Miss Guesclin came in. She didn't come in the way the others came in — the swoop, the scoop, the running commentary. She crossed the room like ground she'd already checked, and stopped by the low table, and looked down at the two of them, and then at the room. The shelves. The sun on the floor.

The thin grey book, back in its place on the bottom shelf, between the two enormous ledgers, exactly where it lived.

Her eyes went along the shelf and didn't stop anywhere. He watched them not stop.

"Happy birthday, my lord."

"Thank you, Madam."

There was a small pause in the room.

He'd made the change a month ago.

Marima was a word a baby built out of two other words and no grammar. He had grammar now. A baby's word coming out of a one-year-old who could talk was a flag stuck on top of a hiding place.

It was the right call. He'd checked it twice.

Miss Guesclin had never once asked about it.

"One year old."

She said it flatly. Like a number off a page.

"My father says the first year tells you everything about a child. If you know how to read it."

"What?"

He asked it in a small voice, the way a child would. One word was safer than any question he could have built.

She didn't answer right away.

She looked down at him — and there it was again. That look. He'd seen it at six weeks. He'd seen it at five months. Every time it stayed on him a little longer than the last.

"That's the question, isn't it," she said.

Then she bent down, took her daughter by the ponytail handle and the middle, and swung her up onto one hip in a single practiced motion, over loud objections.

"Come on, you. Say goodbye. You'll see him again at the party tonight."

"Bye bye, Avu!"

"Bye, Mari."

"Avu never found me—"

Her voice went off down the corridor, still winning, and Miss Guesclin's footsteps went with it and made no sound at all.

He sat in the sun a moment longer.

Then he got up, went to the bottom shelf, and pushed the thin grey book half an inch deeper into the shadow of the ledgers, until the spine didn't catch the light.

Just housekeeping.

CLANG.

He looked up.

It came from a long way off. Past the stables, out where the ground was beaten flat and nothing was planted.

Nobody else moved. The dust went on turning in the light.

CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.

Steel on steel. Two of them at first.

Then four. Then more than he could count.

He put the book down and went to find it.

By the time he got to the kitchen door it had grown loud enough that even Marta had stopped to listen, and by the time he was across the yard, Loretta had given up on stopping him and come along instead.

"Ten minutes! Ten. And then it's bath time, my lord, and no complaining."

"Okay."

"And you stay right here at this fence. You don't go one step past it."

"Okay."

"Are you even listening to me?"

He'd already stopped listening. He'd got to the fence and put both hands on the bottom rail and forgotten every other thing in the world.

House guards. Twelve of them, stripped to the waist in the cold, going at each other in pairs with blunted steel.

That was what Loretta saw.

What he saw was that all twelve of them were full of light.

It moved.

That was the first thing, and it took him a while to get past it. The mana in the air drifted. The mana in these men ran — down the arms, into the hands, out along the flats of the blades, and it went faster when they went faster and flared white where the steel met steel. Not stored. Not sitting anywhere. Circling, the whole time, like something being pumped.

He'd spent months pulling that stuff toward himself in a dark room, one thread at a time, holding still as a post to do it.

These men were running with it.

Then he remembered. The book had a word for this. Two pages, near the front, that he'd skimmed past because they weren't about him.

Mana moved by the body. Pulled in and run through the muscles, or just grabbed out of the air and pushed around with muscle and motion — the way you'd push water with your hands.

Pneuma.

So this was what it looked like.

"That's Corin," said Loretta, following his eyes. "The big one. He's from up north, same as my mother's family. Strong as an ox. About as clever as one too."

"Corin."

"And that one's Faro." She pointed, then pulled her finger back like it might get her in trouble. "He's popular with the maids. Don't you ever learn anything from Faro, you hear me?"

A blade came round in a flat arc, wrapped in a shine that only he could see, and the man taking it turned it aside with his own and the shine went out of both for half a breath before it came back.

It's a fuel.

He held the rail and worked on that.

Then two of them stepped back out of the ring, and one put a hand out flat, and the air in front of it went the other way.

It stopped.

Everything he'd watched for the last ten minutes had been mana in motion. This was mana being held — pulled in and pressed down and packed into something the size of a fist, tighter and tighter, until it stopped looking like light at all and started looking like a fact.

Then it was fire, and the fire crossed the yard, and it hit a straw butt and took the top off it.

"Oh, of course they're doing that now," Loretta huffed. "Showing off, every single one of them."

The other one crouched by a man who was sitting out with his forearm held against his chest, and put a hand on it, and did the same thing in reverse — gathered, stilled, packed, and then let it go into the arm, slow, over a count of about twenty.

The man flexed his fingers and swore and got told off for it in front of the young lord.

Two things, then. Not one.

Moving, and still.

He'd had half of it for months and hadn't known there was another half.

Then his father came out.

He came out the way he came into rooms — no announcement, no run-up — and rolled his sleeves, and somebody threw him a blade and he waved it off.

"Sir? Your sword—"

"I'll use my hands."

"...Yes, sir."

They looked at each other, the twelve of them. Then Corin, the big one, the one who wasn't half as clever as he thought he was, stepped up and set himself.

"Whenever you're ready, sir!"

Corin came at him with everything he had. The light went down his arms and out into the steel and lit the whole blade white, and he was fast, faster than anything Avon had watched all afternoon, and he swung like a man being paid by the pound.

His father caught it.

Not blocked. Not turned aside. Caught — one open hand, closing on a moving weapon, and the sound it made was wrong for a hand and a sword.

And then he pushed, without any hurry, and Corin went back three steps in the dirt and had to work to keep his feet.

"Again."

Corin came again, low this time, a cut at the hip that would have taken a man's leg off him if the steel had been sharp.

His father moved his hip.

That was all. Four inches, maybe. The blade went past and his father's hand came down on Corin's wrist on the way and stopped it there, and Corin's whole body arrived a moment later and had nowhere to go.

"Faro."

Faro was already coming in from the left.

His father let go of Corin, turned, and caught Faro's blade on the flat of his palm — took the edge of a swing that had a grown man's shoulder behind it and shut his fingers on it like a door closing. Faro pulled. It didn't come. Faro pulled with both hands and his boots slid in the dirt.

"Both of you."

They came together after that, one high, one low, and it went on for a while, and Avon stopped breathing somewhere in the middle of it and didn't notice.

Because he could see it.

The guards burned bright. Light ran down their arms and into the steel every time they swung, and went thin when they got tired.

And they were breathing hard. He could hear it from the fence. Big, ragged breaths, in through the teeth and out in a rush. Every time a man sucked in air, a little more light came with it. Every time he blew it out, a little went.

In, bright. Out, thin. In, bright.

His father didn't burn at all.

His father barely seemed to breathe.

Slow. Long. In through the nose and out again, like a man sitting by a fire. Avon almost missed it.

Then he saw what it did.

Every breath his father took, the air around him shook. A low hum, too deep to hear, and the mana in the whole yard shivered with it and leaned toward him — off the ground, off the fence, off the guards themselves.

One breath. The yard leaned in.

Another breath. It leaned in again.

The light in him sat still. Deep, like water in a well. He took what he needed off the top, and every breath filled it back up before the level could drop.

Corin swung with everything he had and lit up like a lamp doing it.

His father caught the blade and stayed dark.

The men were spending. His father wasn't.

"Look at him," Loretta said quietly, from somewhere above him. All the fuss had gone out of her voice. "Every time. I've watched him do this a hundred times and I still can't breathe."

"Papa's strong."

"Your papa's very strong, my lord." She laughed a little. "Just don't tell him I said so. He'll go all quiet and pretend he didn't hear."

Then a third one went in.

Avon saw him come. A lean one, off to the right, who had been standing out of it for a while and watching where the hands were — and both hands were busy. Corin had one. Faro had the other. His father stood in the middle with a blade shut in each fist and nothing left over.

The lean one ran three steps and swung at his back.

He can't.

That was all Avon had time for. Both hands were full. He could see that they were full. There was nothing there to stop it with.

Something stopped it.

The sword went into the air above his father's shoulder and stayed there. It didn't slow down and it didn't get knocked aside. It stopped, dead, a foot short of him, and hung, and the man holding it came up off his heels.

Avon looked at what was holding it.

Nothing was holding it.

Nothing he could point at, anyway. There was something in the air around the blade — not light, not bright, nothing like what ran in the guards. A shape. A place where the air had made up its mind. It had fingers, more or less. It had a thumb. It was the size of a cartwheel and it was closed around the sword the way a man closes a hand around a stick.

Then it pushed.

The lean one left the ground. He went back across the yard without touching it, landed on his shoulder in the dirt, rolled twice, and came to rest against the fence four feet from where Avon was standing.

The shape was gone. Avon had not seen it go.

The yard was very quiet.

"Sir!" the lean one said, face in the dirt. He sounded thrilled.

Corin let go of his sword and burst out laughing.

"Eight months, sir! Eight months, and we finally got one behind you!"

"You didn't get anything behind me."

"But we got close, sir! You had to use it!"

His father unclosed his hands. He looked at the two blades in the dirt like he'd only just noticed he'd been holding them, then walked over and got the lean one up by the forearm and set him on his feet.

"Your footwork's better," he said. "All three of you. Faro — you finally stopped telling me where you're going with your shoulders. That only took you four years."

"Thank you, sir!"

"Corin."

"Sir!"

"You still swing like your sword is angry at somebody." His father brushed the dirt off the lean one's shoulder, twice, without thinking about it, the same way he fixed Avon's collar. "But you got behind me. Which means someone's been thinking. Good. Try it again Thursday — and don't tell me whose idea it was."

The yard erupted. Twelve men cheering, shoving, slapping each other's backs like they'd won a war.

Avon watched them until his father called it and they went off to the trough, arguing about Thursday.

I'm not the strongest thing in this house.

He turned that over.

He'd spent the morning standing in the sun feeling like the answer to something. He'd been the smallest fastest strongest thing in every room he'd ever been put in — back there, where it mattered, where it was measured — and then here, where nobody measured anything, he'd gone quietly past every man he could remember.

And then he'd come out to the fence and watched his own father stop a sword with a hand he didn't have.

Not close.

He waited to see what he'd do with that.

Back there, finding out somebody was stronger than you was information you used. You worked out the gap, and where the gap could be got at, and what it would cost you to be standing on the right side of it.

He waited for that to start.

It didn't come.

What came instead was that he wanted to see it again tomorrow.

He held the rail and looked at the empty yard for a while longer, and the feeling didn't go anywhere, and he ran out of names for it and stopped looking for one.

"Right. Bath," said Loretta.

"Tomorrow."

"Eh? Tomorrow what?"

"Can I come again tomorrow?"

Loretta stopped with her hand halfway to him.

"...We'll ask your father," she said, in a strange, soft voice.

That night, after the party. After the pastry that six people had opinions about and one person actually made. After Loretta went through her list of who'd said what and in what tone.

After his mother held him at the window for the sunset, and his father stood in the doorway with a wooden horse he said the stable-master had carved, holding it out with both hands like he was handing over papers at a border.

After all of it, he lay in his low bed under the window and didn't train.

There was nothing to train. The frame was built. It was building itself now, in the dark, thread by thread, out of a whole room's worth of slow bright current, and it would keep doing that every night for the rest of his life whether he watched or not.

He watched anyway, for a while.

The sky came back through the window. Different stars in it now.

One year old. Everyone had said it all day, in every voice the house had. One year. A whole year. Loretta cried twice and denied it twice.

He'd sat in the middle of it getting handed from lap to lap, and somewhere in the evening the thought turned up and just stood there:

He'd been here a year. Nobody had come.

And somewhere down the corridor was a man who could put his bare hand around a sword swung by somebody trying, and who had spent the evening in a doorway holding out a wooden horse with both hands like he wasn't sure it would be accepted.

There was a long way to go. That was new. He'd never once had a long way to go.

But they'd sung. The whole staff, badly. Marta flat, Nina sharp, Loretta louder than both. Marika standing on a chair conducting nothing. And his mother's voice under the whole mess, low and steady, holding the tune for everybody the way she held everything else.

Nobody had ever counted his years before. Where he came from, a year was a line item.

Here it was a pastry, and an argument, and a song sung badly by people who all knew his name.

He turned it over once, and put it in the column that had no name either, and slept.