“Control and discrimination must become as natural as breathing,” said Kol. “With practice, it will.”
He jumped from a steep hillside, where he’d had me examining the movement of the soil sifting ever so slowly downward, and landed softly on the path far below.
I flattened myself to the scrubby ground and crept downward, my tired feet skidding—speeding the hillside’s centuries-long collapse.
When I joined my uncle on the path, pleased I had not slipped and broken my neck, he huffed scornfully. “Thou hast the capacity to jump as I do, if thou’lt but try. Drive thy spirit upward with the leap and hold it firm and soaring until thy feet touch solidly. It is will that counters the forces that draw us to earth.” Without waiting for me to so much as catch my breath, he marched down the path. “Next task: Tell me which elements key our shifts on the way down. Be attentive.”
After some half quellé of rocks and roots enough to make a goat stumble, Kol halted and asked me how many changes we had made since he had jumped from the hillside. The shifting exercise and the downward climb had sapped nearly the last of my endurance, and the wintry air had begun to penetrate the shield of warmth I had enjoyed since leaving Picus’s house. Unable to summon words enough to describe or even count what I’d seen, I sat on my haunches, cleared away the leaves and debris from a square of earth, and sketched out a map in the soft dirt.
The exercise helped refresh my mind. I pointed to an angled square that signified a rock. “You shifted here, where that squarish boulder hung out over the path. Again here…I think…where the pond was choked with dead leaves. And here”—I pointed to a split in the path—“or just beyond…I’m not sure. Here, perhaps?”
Kol looked from my face to the sketch and back again. “Dost thou mock me?” he said stiffly. “Thinkest thou my object is to shame thee, that thou must attempt the same?”
I blinked, entirely confused. “No…I’m sorry…what is it? You asked how many shifts. My head is too tired to think. I drew the map so I could show you.”
“Thou canst untangle such markings?” he said. “Like Janus’s papers? Picus’s books?”
“Read? Not words, no. I’ve never—” As the underlying sense of his question struck me, I understood his surprise…and his offense. I was both and neither, Osriel had said. “I cannot read words…books…the writing on pages as humans can. They appear naught but blotches and a jumble. However, the lines and patterns of a map, the pictures and symbols, those make sense to me. But you…and the others of your kind…can’t sort out those, either?”
“We see what lives. What moves. We understand bulk and shape and eating and purpose. Scratchings on beast skins or wood chips or dirt have no meaning to us.”
“And yet, your eyes can interpret these.” I held out my arm where pale fronds of sea grass twined my fingers.
His eyebrows rose. “Thy gards live—a part of thee, as mine are a part of me.”
I bowed to him in sincere apology. “Forgive me, vayar. I did not understand. Another lesson learned.”
He jerked his head and walked ahead. “Attend, rejongai…”
Feeling as lively and attentive as a post, I stayed close enough to follow Kol’s shifting paths the rest of the way, but was incapable of analyzing his moves or the terrain. When the woodland and Picus’s little garden vale came into view at last, I had fallen considerably behind.
Kol halted a little upstream from the monk’s tidy plots, and by the time I joined him, he had plunged his hand into a reed-shadowed backwater and pulled out a plump silver fish. As he stilled its flopping distress with a rock, I knelt beside the pool and plunged my head into the water. Though chilled already, I hoped the icy bath might set my sluggish thoughts moving again. I had so many questions I needed to ask, so many lessons to learn. I could not allow him to think me weak or foolish.
But when I sat up again, all I could think was how fine the sun felt on my back, and how soft the earth under my knees, and I could not help but sag into a formless heap on the stream bank, mumbling something to Kol about taking just one moment to consider all I’d learned.
Rosemary and basil. Fish. My stomach near caved in upon itself at the fragrant wood smoke. I blinked and stirred, grimacing at the twigs and pebbles embedded in my ribs. One numb hand prickled painfully as I raised my head. An odd coating of ash dirtied that hand, and I tried for a goodly while to brush it away before remembering that the livid marks were a part of me. I sat up quickly.
Thin blue smoke rose from a patch of sandy stream bank a few paces from my feet and dispersed slowly above a sea of yellow grass and the green islands of Picus’s garden plots. A bundle wrapped in blackened leaves sizzled in the little fire—the source of the savory smells. Though steep-angled sunlight sculpted the nearby slopes, deepening the colors of the meadow to ocher and emerald and highlighting the splash of dark trees to either side, iron-gray clouds obscured Aesol Mount and all else to the east and south of us. I stretched and shivered, then stepped closer to the little fire and sat on my haunches.
Kol danced in the yellow grass, or rather practiced, I guessed, as he repeated a particular spinning leap for the fifth time. I felt no stirring in the earth or magic in the still, cold autumn afternoon. He stopped, stretched out first one leg behind him and then the other, bent himself in an impossible arc to one side and then another while clasping his hands at his back. Then he began again. Arms set in a graceful upward curve, now step, leap into the air higher than my head, spin with legs straight together, land like a settling leaf. Shake out the tight legs. Step back. Pause. Arms up, step, leap, spin. Step back…Whatever difference might exist between one exemplar and the next was far too subtle for my judgment. How could a man force his body into such feats?
I rose onto my toes, then bent my knees and jumped as high as I could, doing my best to turn but halfway round as I did so. My leap might have cleared the height of a small dog, and my feet struck earth so hard I rattled my teeth and came near falling in the fire. How could one even begin without music?
I squatted and touched the earth, not seeking, so much as wondering…and laughing a little…at what strange byways my thoughts traveled nowadays. Not so long ago my mentor was tidy Brother Sebastian, and my worst trouble the good brother’s scolding me for a dirty cowl or discovering my inability to read. Danae did not read. Danae danced, healed, and moved, soundless and graceful, through the world like the bird that glided in circles high above the meadow.
“Hast thou failed in attentiveness and burnt my fish, rejongai?” Somehow Kol had come up behind me without my knowing.
I jumped up, my face blooming hotter than the coals. “I didn’t know you intended me to—”
But the arch of his eyebrow and a particular compression of his lips gave me to believe, of a sudden, that I had no need to defend myself against his charge. And in the moment I comprehended that, I understood a number of other things.
“You have bested me, uncle, I’ll confess it. All my claims of strength and endurance and learning crumbled at your assault. I suppose I’m fortunate that I didn’t step off a cliff. I could neither have walked one more step nor imbibed one more lesson, which, I’m coming to think, is one of those very lessons you wish me to learn. And if you truly relied on me to heed your cooking, you’re neither so wise a vayar as I’m coming to suspect nor so vigilant a guardian.”
“To recognize a body’s limits is surer protection than gards or human magic. I have pledged to ensure thy safety. The lesson had to be taught.” He retrieved a stick and arranged the coals piled about his wrapped fish. “In truth thou didst surpass every boundary I foresaw. And I am not sure what to do about that.”