The Wise Man's Fear

  “Yes, Shehyn.”

  She raised her hands, falling into the position where I had caught her before, midway through Heron Falling. “Make Thunder Upward. Where is my root?”

  I pointed to her solidly planted feet.

  “Where is the leaf?”

  I pointed to her hands.

  “No. From here to here is the leaf.” She indicated her whole arm and demonstrated how she could freely strike with her hands, elbows or shoulders. “Where is the branch?”

  I thought for a long moment, then tapped her knee.

  Though she gave no sign of it, I sensed her surprise. “And?”

  I tapped her opposite side under her armpit, then her shoulder.

  “Show me.”

  I came in close to her, set one leg close against her knee, and made Thunder Upward, throwing her to the side. I was surprised at how little force was required.

  However, instead of being thrown into the air to tumble to the ground, Shehyn gripped my forearm. I felt a jolt run up my arm and was pulled one staggering step to the side. Rather than being thrown Shehyn used her grip as leverage so her feet came down beneath her. She took a single perfect step and had her balance again.

  Shehyn looked me straight in the eye for a long, speculative moment, then turned to leave, gesturing for me to follow.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN

  A Liar and a Thief

  SHEHYN AND I RETURNED to the complex of stone buildings to find Tempi standing outside, shifting nervously from foot to foot. That confirmed my suspicion. He hadn’t sent Shehyn to test me. She had found me on her own.

  When we came close enough, Tempi held his sword out in his right hand, point down. His left hand gestured elaborate respect. “Shehyn,” he said, “I—”

  Shehyn motioned for him to follow as she entered the low stone building. She motioned to a young boy. “Fetch Carceret.” The boy took off running.

  Curiosity. I gestured to Tempi.

  He didn’t look at me. Profound seriousness. Attend. It didn’t reassure me that these were the same gestures he had made on the road to Crosson when he thought we were walking into an ambush. His hands, I noticed, were shaking slightly.

  Shehyn led us to an open doorway where a woman in mercenary reds joined us. I recognized the thin scars on her eyebrow and jaw. This was Carceret, the mercenary we had met while heading to Severen, the one who had pushed me.

  Shehyn motioned the two mercenaries inside, but held up a hand to me. “Wait here. What Tempi has done is not good. I will listen. Then I will decide what is to be done with you.”

  I nodded, and she closed the door behind her.

  I waited for an hour, then two. I strained my ears, but I couldn’t hear anything from the other side of the door. A few people walked past in the hallway: two in mercenary reds, and another in simple grey homespun. Each of them looked at my hair, though none of them stared.

  Instead of smiling and nodding as would have been sociable among barbarians, I kept my face blank, returned their small gestures of greeting, and avoided touching eyes.

  Somewhere past the third hour, the door opened and Shehyn waved me inside.

  It was a well-lit room with walls of finished stone. It was the size of a large bedroom at an inn, but seemed even larger due to the lack of any significant furniture. There was a small iron stove radiating gentle heat near one wall, and four chairs facing each other in a rough circle. Tempi, Shehyn, and Carceret filled three of them. At a gesture from Shehyn, I took the fourth.

  “How many have you killed?” Shehyn asked. Her tone was different than before. Peremptory. It was the same tone Tempi used during our discussions of the Lethani.

  “Many.” I responded without any hesitation. I might be thick at times, but I know when I’m being tested.

  “How many is many?” Not a request for clarification. It was a new question.

  “In killing men, one is many.”

  She nodded slightly. “Have you killed men outside of the Lethani?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why do you not say yes or no?”

  “Because the Lethani has not always been clear to me.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because the Lethani is not always clear.”

  “What makes the Lethani clear?”

  I hesitated, though I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do. “The words of a teacher.”

  “Can one teach the Lethani?”

  I began to gesture uncertainty, then remembered hand-talk wasn’t appropriate. “Perhaps,” I said. “I cannot.”

  Tempi shifted slightly in his chair. This wasn’t going well. For lack of any other ideas, I took a deep breath, relaxed, and tipped my mind gently into Spinning Leaf.

  “Who knows the Lethani?” Shehyn asked.

  “The windblown leaf,” I responded, though I cannot honestly say what I meant by it.

  “Where does the Lethani come from?”

  “The same place as laughing.”

  Shehyn hesitated slightly, then said, “How do you follow the Lethani?”

  “How do you follow the moon?”

  My time with Tempi had taught me to appreciate the different sorts of pauses that can punctuate a conversation. Ademic is a language that says as much with silence as with words. There is a pregnant pause. A polite pause. A confused pause. There is a pause that implies much, a pause that apologizes, a pause that adds emphasis....

  This pause was a sudden gape in the conversation. It was the empty space of an indrawn breath. I sensed I had said something very clever or something very stupid.

  Shehyn shifted in her seat, and the air of formality evaporated. Sensing we were moving on, I let my mind settle out of Spinning Leaf.

  Shehyn turned to look at Carceret. “What do you say?”

  Carceret had sat like a statue through all of this, expressionless and still. “I say as I have said before. Tempi has netinad us all. He should be cut away. This is the reason we have laws. To ignore a law is to erase it.”

  “To blindly follow law is to be a slave,” Tempi said quickly.

  Shehyn gestured sharp rebuke, and Tempi flushed with embarrassment.

  “As for this.” Carceret gestured at me. Dismissal. “He is not of Ademre. At best he is a fool. At worst a liar and a thief.”

  “And what he said today?” Shehyn asked.

  “A dog can bark three times without counting.”

  Shehyn turned to Tempi. “By speaking out of turn you refuse your turn to speak.” Tempi flushed again, his lips growing pale as he struggled to maintain his composure.

  Shehyn drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The Ketan and the Lethani are what make us Ademre,” she said. “There is no way a barbarian can know of the Ketan.” Both Tempi and Carceret stirred, but she held up a hand. “At the same time, to destroy one who has understanding of the Lethani is not correct. The Lethani does not destroy itself.”

  She said “destroy” very casually. I hoped I might be mistaken as to the true meaning of the Ademic word.

  Shehyn continued. “There are those who might say, ‘This one has enough. Do not teach him the Lethani, because whoever has knowledge of the Lethani overcomes all things.’ ”

  Shehyn gave a severe look to Carceret. “But I am not one who would say that. I think the world would be better if more were of the Lethani. For while it brings power, the Lethani also brings wisdom in the use of power.”

  There was a long pause. My stomach knotted itself as I tried to maintain a calm appearance. “I think,” Shehyn said at last, “it is possible Tempi did not make a mistake.”

  This seemed a long way from a ringing endorsement, but from the sudden stiffness in Carceret’s back and Tempi’s slow, relieved exhalation, I guessed it was the news we were hoping for.

  “I will give him to Vashet,” Shehyn said.

  Tempi went motionless. Carceret made a gesture of approval wide as a madman’s smile.

  Tempi’s voice was strained. “You w
ill give him to the Hammer?” His hand flickered. Respect. Negation. Respect.

  Shehyn got to her feet, signaling an end to the discussion. “Who better? The Hammer will show if he is iron worth striking.”

  With this, Shehyn pulled Tempi aside and spoke to him for a brief moment. Her hands brushed his arms lightly. Her voice was too soft for even my finely tuned eavesdropper’s ears.

  I stood politely near my chair. All the fight seemed to have left Tempi, and his gestures were a steady rhythm of agreement and respect.

  Carceret stood apart from them as well, staring at me. Her expression was composed, but her eyes were angry. At her side, out of sight of the other two, she made several small gestures. The only one I understood was disgust, but I could guess the general meaning of the others.

  In return, I made a gesture that was not Ademic. By the narrowing of her eyes, I suspected she managed to glean my meaning fairly well.

  There was the high sound of a bell ringing three times. A moment later, Tempi kissed Shehyn’s hands, the peak of her forehead, and her mouth. Then he turned and motioned for me to follow.

  Together we walked to a large, low-ceilinged room filled with people and the smell of food. It was a dining hall, full of long tables and dark wooden benches worn smooth with time.

  I followed Tempi, gathering food onto a wide wooden plate. Only then did I realize how terribly hungry I was.

  Despite my expectations, this dining hall didn’t resemble the Mess at the University in the least. It was quieter for one thing, and the food was far better. There was fresh milk and lean tender meat that I suspected was goat. There was hard, sharp cheese and soft, creamy cheese and two kinds of bread still warm from the oven. There were apples and strawberries for the taking. Saltboxes sat open on all the tables, and everyone could take as much as they liked.

  It was strange being in a room full of Adem talking. They spoke so softly I couldn’t make out any words, but I could see their hands flickering. I could only understand one gesture in ten, but it was odd being able to see all the flickering emotions around me: Amusement. Anger. Embarrassment. Negation. Disgust. I wondered how much of it was about me, the barbarian among them.

  There were more women than I’d expected, and more young children. There were a handful of the familiar blood-red mercenaries, but more wore the simple grey I’d seen during my walk with Shehyn. I saw a white shirt as well, and was surprised to see it was Shehyn herself, eating elbow to elbow with the rest of us.

  None of them stared at me, but they were looking. A lot of attention was being paid to my hair, which was understandable. There were fifty sandy heads in the room, a few darker, a few lighter or grey with age. I stood out like a single burning candle.

  I tried to draw Tempi into a conversation, but he would have none of it and focused on his food instead. He hadn’t loaded his plate nearly as full as mine and ate only a fraction of what he took.

  With no conversation to slow things, I finished quickly. When my plate was empty, Tempi quit pretending to eat and led us away. I could feel dozens of eyes on my back as we left the room.

  He took me down a series of passages until we came to a door. Tempi opened it, revealing a small room with a window and a bed. My lute and travelsack were there. My sword was not.

  “You are to have another teacher,” Tempi spoke at last. “Do your best. Be civilized. Your teacher will decide much.” Regret. “You will not see me.”

  He was obviously troubled, but I couldn’t think of anything to say that might reassure him. Instead I gave him a comforting hug, which he seemed to appreciate. Then he turned and left without another word.

  Inside my room, I undressed and lay on the bed. It seems like I should say I tossed and turned, nervous about what was to come. But the simple truth is that I was exhausted and slept like a happy baby at his mother’s breast.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWELVE

  The Hammer

  I SAT IN A TINY park composed of nothing more than two smooth stone benches, a handful of trees, and a small path running through the long grass. You could walk from one edge to the other in a minute. There were cliffs close on two sides, sheltering it from the wind. Not out of the wind, mind you. There didn’t seem to be anywhere in all of Haert entirely out of the wind.

  As Vashet approached, the first thing I noticed was that she didn’t wear her sword on her hip. Instead she slung it over her shoulder, just as I carried my lute. She walked with the most subtle, solid confidence I have ever seen, as if she knew she ought to swagger, but couldn’t quite be bothered.

  She had the same moderate build I’d come to expect from the Adem along with the pale, creamy complexion and grey eyes. Her hair was lighter than Tempi’s by a fine shade, and she wore it pulled back into a horsetail. When she came closer, I could see her nose had been broken at some point, and while it wasn’t crooked, the slight crimp looked strangely incongruous on her otherwise delicate face.

  Vashet smiled at me, a wide pink smile that showed her white teeth. “So,” she said in flawless Aturan. “You are mine now.”

  “You speak Aturan,” I said stupidly.

  “Most of us do,” she said. There were a few lines around the mouth and the corners of her eyes, so I guessed she was perhaps ten years older than me. “It’s hard to make your way in the world if you don’t have a good grip on the language. Hard to do business.”

  I remembered myself too late. Formal. Respect. “Am I correct in assuming you are Vashet?”

  The smile tugged back onto her mouth. Vashet returned my gesture broadly, exaggerating it so I couldn’t help but feel I was being mocked. “I am. I am to be your teacher.”

  “What of Shehyn? I understood she was the teacher here.”

  Vashet arched an eyebrow at me, the extravagant expression startling on an Adem face. “In a general sense that is true. But in a more practical sense, Shehyn is far too important to be spending her time with someone like you.”

  I gestured, polite. “I was quite happy with Tempi,” I said.

  “And if your happiness were our goal, that might matter,” she said. “However, Tempi is closer to being a sailboat than a teacher.”

  I bristled a little at that. “He is my friend, you realize.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Then as his friend you may fail to realize his faults. He is a competent fighter, but no more than that. He barely speaks your language, has little experience with the real world, and, to be completely frank, he is not terribly bright.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Regret. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “Don’t show me humility unless you mean it,” she said, still looking me over with narrow eyes. “Even when you make your face a mask, your eyes are like glittering windows.”

  “I am sorry,” I said earnestly. Apology. “I’d hoped to make a good first impression.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I would rather you thought well of me.”

  “I would rather have reason to think well of you.”

  I decided to take another tack, hoping to steer the conversation into safer water. “Tempi called you the Hammer. Why is that?”

  “That is my name. Vashet. The Hammer. The Clay. The Spinning Wheel.” She pronounced her name three separate ways, each with its own cadence. “I am that which shapes and sharpens, or destroys.”

  “Why the clay?”

  “That is also what I am,” Vashet said. “Only that which bends can teach.”

  I felt a growing excitement as she spoke, “I will admit,” I said. “It will be pleasant to share a language with my teacher. There are a thousand questions I have not asked because I knew Tempi could not understand. Or even if he did, I wouldn’t be able to make sense of his answers.”

  Vashet nodded and sat down on one of the benches. “Knowing how to communicate is also the way of a teacher,” she said. “Now, go find a long piece of wood and bring it back to me. Then we will begin the lesson.”

  I headed off into the trees. Her
request had a ritual air about it, so I didn’t want to run back with any odd branch I found on the ground. Eventually I found a willow tree and snapped off a supple branch longer than my arm and big around as my little finger.

  I returned to where Vashet sat on the bench. I handed her the willow branch, and she pulled her sword over her shoulder and began to trim the smaller nubs of the remaining branches away.

  “You said only that which bends can teach,” I said. “So I thought this would be appropriate.”

  “It will serve for today’s lesson,” she said as she stripped the last of the bark away, leaving nothing but a slender white rod. She wiped her sword on her shirt, sheathed it, and came to her feet.

  Holding the willow branch in one hand, Vashet swung it back and forth, making a low whop whop noise as it skimmed through the air.

  Now that she was closer to me, I noticed that while Vashet wore the familiar mercenary reds, unlike Tempi and many of the others, her clothes weren’t held tight with leather straps. Her shirt and pants were bound snugly to her arms and legs and chest by bands of blood-red silk instead.

  She met my eye. “I am going to hit you now,” she said seriously. “Stand still.”

  Vashet began to walk around me in a slow circle, still swinging the willow rod. Whop whop. She moved behind me, and not being able to see her was worse. Whop whop. She swung the rod faster and the noise changed. Viiiip. Viiiip. I didn’t flinch.

  She circled again, moved behind me, then hit me twice. Once on each arm just below the shoulder. Viiiip. Viiiip. At first it merely felt like she’d tapped me, then pain blossomed across my arms, blazing like fire.

  Then, before I could react, she struck me across the back so hard I felt the impact in my teeth. The only reason the rod didn’t break is because it was supple green willow.

  I didn’t cry out, but only because she had caught me between breaths. I gasped though, sucking in air so quickly I choked and coughed. My back screamed with pain as if it had been set afire.

  She came around to the front of me again, giving me that same serious look. “Here is your lesson,” she said matter-of-factly. “I do not think well of you. You are a barbarian. You are not clever. You are not welcome. You do not belong here. You are a thief of our secrets. Your presence is an embarrassment and a complication this school does not need.”