by Laure Eve
But instead all he had managed to do, like a bratty little child, was order her from the room. He had ordered her out and out she had gone, as if nothing had happened. He had watched her leave incredulously, and it had not been until much later on that his shock had turned to rage.
There was a knock at his door.
‘Come in,’ he said, pouring himself more Grenadon and diluting it with water. Everything just so on the platter, the water jug sparkling in the light, calmed him somewhat.
Frith eased his way around the door and shut it, making his way to the empty chair.
‘I presume you have heard about it,’ said White. He tried for casual, but it came out mangled.
‘I heard a version of it. Would you care to tell me what happened?’
White took a sip of the Grenadon, giving himself a moment.
‘She was rude and ignorant,’ he said eventually.
‘Aren’t they all?’
‘No,’ said White, ‘they are not. Because they understand the privilege of having a place here.’
‘Rubbish. Some of them are here because their father is well connected in government and Eldest Pride and Joy hasn’t quite yet worked out exactly how he’s going to waste his inheritance and his life.’
‘I talk about the poor ones,’ said White with delicate emphasis.
‘The poor ones expect little in life and are therefore amazed when they get an opportunity such as this,’ said Frith cheerfully. ‘Now, the Talented ones … that’s a different story.’
‘Rudeness does not equate to Talent.’
‘No. But Talented are often rude. Or lacking in social graces, if you prefer.’
White was silent.
‘Let me put it this way,’ said Frith. ‘What was it exactly about her manner that offended you?’
White tried to push his irritation aside, like a grown man should be able to do. He tried hard not to show the immaturity of the adolescent he worried was still inside him.
He thought about Rue. ‘She was arrogant. She should have been eager. She mocked me. What good is a tutor who allows his pupils to do that?’
Her face flashed in his mind. Her pretty eyes, narrowed at him.
‘Not much good at all,’ Frith agreed. His face was utterly neutral.
Even White, who thought he now knew Frith more personally than he knew anyone else, had trouble a lot of the time working out how Frith felt at any given moment. He was reactionless to a casual observer, and it seemed like a natural thing, but White thought privately that it had probably taken a lot of practice for Frith to acquire that level of skill in thinking one thing and demonstrating another.
‘This conversation is theoretical, in any case.’
‘How do you mean?’ said Frith.
‘I mean that I could not stop teaching her, if I even wanted to.’
‘There is always a choice,’ said Frith. ‘In this case, you could continue to teach her, or tell me that she possesses no useful Talent, and so stop teaching her.’
And there it is, thought White. Said in the friendliest of plain ways. Teach who we tell you to teach. Tell us if we have mistakenly seen Talent where there is none. Stop teaching if we agree. Don’t develop any free will. Or personal agenda.
‘You’re currently the only one here who can teach them,’ said Frith. ‘That’s why we need you so much. But your situation means that you are more indebted to us than we are to you.’
‘I am aware of that. I am always aware of that.’
‘Very well,’ said Frith. He unfolded himself from the chair. ‘I have dropped in on our impolite student and impressed upon her the importance of manners. But perhaps you could also try something.’
White waited.
‘Vela Rue is after the truth in any given situation. If you wish to gain her focus, tell her what you’re really thinking.’
‘I do not understand.’
Frith leaned on the doorframe.
‘Instead of being silent or dismissive when something is not going well or she speaks out of turn, say what you are thinking out loud.’
‘But that,’ said White, ‘is what you do when you are trying to anger a person.’
Frith smiled. ‘Try it.’
Rue pushed open the door, saw the same dimly lit view as before, and just managed to stop a short sigh escaping into the room beyond.
She could feel her heart pounding in her chest, and she grew annoyed at herself.
He was only a tutor.
‘Please come to the table at the end,’ said the irritating voice that had been echoing in her head for the entire week.
Rue began to walk. This time around she gave the surroundings her most penetrating stare. It was so stark. Apart from her tutor’s table and chairs, lamp and bookcases pushed in to the far end, there was nothing of anything much in the room at all.
‘Why is this room so empty?’ she asked when she reached White. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if you had a smaller room, if you only teach one student at a time?’
She was determined not to be embarrassed or angry by what had happened before, and tried to appear as she always did. She thought her voice sounded a little cooler than usual, but otherwise she had done all right.
White was sat in his chair, the lamp throwing stripes of shadow across his face. It was difficult to read his silence.
‘The nature of the Talent means that we require much space to work within,’ he said eventually. ‘Please sit.’
Rue sat, folding her hands on her lap.
She realised he would think her rude, but she couldn’t help staring at him. Everything about Mussyer White was unsettling. His face was the face of a marble statue. He avoided eye contact, but would occasionally favour her with a glance, and whenever it fell on her it was so intense that she felt as if he had actually touched her, not just looked at her; but the way he would touch a piece of furniture, not a living thing. His disinterest was what galled her the most.
He talked in his stilted fashion about what was expected of her, about what she would learn and how grateful she would be. Remembering what Frith had said, Rue tried to concentrate on the words, the keys this strange boy-man held to power.
He talked about hooks, about what he called ‘like-to-like’ threading and resonance of place. A hook was a feeling that you created out of yourself, a thing that was inherently you. With it you reached out to another place and gripped yourself there, and then used it to find your way back to where you had started. Resonance of place meant that you would more often be able to find another place that was similar to the one you knew best, that felt like your childhood home, for example. Like-to-like threading meant that you could move yourself more easily between places that were similar. If you were sat in a room made of stone, you could find another room made of stone somewhere else, much more quickly than you could find a meadow, or a street.
Gradually she began to understand what the Talent was.
It was moving.
It was peeling apart all that stood between you and a thousand miles, and treating it as nothing more than smoke. It was easier, apparently, to move your mind across distances, which is why most Talented people dreamed of other places they had never been. It was much harder to move your entire self to another place, which was the thing that they were really looking for, and that hardly anyone could do.
His words were complicated and fascinating and Rue thrilled to hear him talk like that about something she possessed. But he spoke with a dryness, even a disdain she found bewildering. What he spoke of, to her, was nothing less than magic, yet he seemed to have little taste for it. Perhaps it was because he was jealous? Perhaps he couldn’t actually do it himself, only teach it? That would certainly make her mad if she were in his position.
‘Now,’ said White, ‘I would like you to tell me in detail about your dreams of the past week. We will be talking of these in every lesson, and so you may wish to become familiar with noting them down yourself to report them to me.’
&nb
sp; Rue thought about it.
‘I had a dream about carrots,’ she said at last. ‘I kept trying to eat them but more would come up on my plate. I started feeling sick.’
‘I think we can ignore that dream,’ said White. ‘Carrots do not tell us much of interest.’
‘You said all my dreams. I don’t know which ones are important.’
She waited to see how he would take this.
‘That is true,’ he conceded eventually. ‘I ask you to tell me all of them because you would not know which is of importance. I apologise.’
Rue grinned, delighted. ‘I accept your apology.’
White shifted, looking uncomfortable. ‘Your dreams, if you please.’
‘I’m sorry about the carrots,’ said Rue. ‘I said it to annoy you.’
‘I know,’ said White. ‘Your dreams, if you please.’
Rue sighed.
As Vela Rue had opened his door, White took a breath and ran through the mechanics of his behaviour one last time.
It was a general assumption that those with Talent were all the same and therefore understood each other on some cult-like level unattainable to ordinary people. This attitude he knew too well, but it was simply not true. People were people, which included the Talented, and were as varied in temperament as any other set of individuals.
Frith was not in any way ignorant and couldn’t be accused of lumping all Talented together in such a fashion, but even he had sometimes assumed that they would understand each other and band together.
That was, of course, before all the trouble with Wren.
That whole thing was a knife in his heart. A continual ache there to remind him of how unaccountably, humiliatingly stupid he had been. Frith had never gone into the specifics, but after the first week of searching for the boy had turned up nothing, he had stomped into White’s room in a frighteningly foul mood one evening and told him flatly that Wren had defected to World.
It was easy to isolate himself after that. No more friends who could hurt. No more girls who could cause such trouble. No more disappointments and no more reasons for him to lose the precious gift of being allowed to stay.
It was something that neither of them cared to dwell on, and he was grateful that Frith had never since brought it up as ammunition against him. But the fault for what had happened lay with White, and he accepted it as a man should.
So Rue would be handled carefully, and White would do his best to heed Frith’s advice.
It was almost a shame about her spiky personality. There was something almost ethereal about her, as if she had one foot permanently stuck in another time, and she had the kind of unspoiled lovely face that the city women tended not to have. Life moved more easily for pretty women, and if Rue were possessed of a graceful, demure deportement she would soon find situations opening up like flowers for her, instead of the constant series of arguments she appeared to be in.
White watched her reach his desk, and then say something unconsciously rude about the size of his room. He held his temper in check. The encounter proceeded on firmer ground after that as he expanded on his basic theories of the Talent, growing more confident the more he talked.
They all started out this way. Like an eager sponge, greedily soaking up little pieces of validation of themselves – that they were special, that the Talent was special. But when Rue told him about the carrot dream, he became confused. Did she mean it, or was she playing with him? Mindful of Frith, he chose the former for safety. When he apologised, she smiled, and the most extraordinary thing happened to her face. It wasn’t just a smile, but a smile directed to him. He felt an unexpected sharp wave of happiness for managing to make her smile. Then he felt embarrassed; then angry about being embarrassed. The girl was like some sort of emotional conductor; why was it so difficult to be normal around her? Did she emit an airborne chemical designed to upset people?
When Frith came by his rooms that evening, officially for a drink but mostly to check up on how the lesson had gone the second time, White gave him the reassurance he needed and said nothing of the discomfort he felt around Vela Rue. What was there to say?
Their lessons continued, and he continued to be baffled by her. She was Talented, of that he had no doubt. Her dreams were nicely varied, which spoke of a goodly amount of raw ability, but how Talented she would become would depend on how disciplined and focused she was. Which, at the moment, was ‘not very’. She much preferred to pick at him and his private life than concentrate in their lessons together, and his disquiet mounted until he began to grow nervous moments before each time she was due to walk through his door.
She was a young thing, a silly thing. But sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes she would say something and her face would catch the dim light just right, and he would be utterly caught off guard at how wise she seemed, just then. Her body seemed to emit nothing but energy, energy; passion, raw passion; until he was exhausted just being near her. Areline hadn’t affected him like this. No one had ever affected him like this; not even Wren.
It wasn’t until the first dream he had about her a few weeks later that he realised what the problem was.
It began harmlessly enough. White felt that he knew, by now, which dreams were caused by the Talent and which were just dreams. This one seemed like it was just a dream, but calling it that diminished the effect it had on him. It stayed in his brain for days, echoing round and round again, destroying his ability to concentrate on anything else.
In the dream, he was with Rue, and they were in his classroom.
They were discussing Ancient Theory, something that was not usually included in their lessons. He was expanding on the now defunct branch of psychology, and she kept asking him questions in a quiet, serious fashion that was completely opposite to her usual playfully complicated manner. In dream logic they could of course communicate perfectly; his grammar was not bizarre, his accent normal and not cause for odd looks and mockery.
He told her of the old masters, now obscure, who postulated such things as parental influence on behaviour and the unbelievable theory of Elektra and Oedipus. Rue expressed amazement and laughed. Then she told him quite suddenly that she had never known her parents. Which was odd, when he thought about it afterwards, because she had never told him that before (why would she?) and he knew nothing about her previous life at all.
He asked her how she felt about that, and laughed at the joke. But she hadn’t understood it and looked only puzzled.
How I feel about you? she said.
Wait, that’s not what I meant, said White.
How do you want me to feel about you? Rue continued.
I want you to see me as your teacher.
But that’s not how I want to see you, she said.
They carried on with the lesson, but White could see her heart wasn’t in it.
Is something wrong? he said at last. You know that you can talk to me if you need to.
Unthinkable outside of the dream. He would never, ever ask her to tell him anything of a personal nature, even if she wanted to. That way lay danger. A student was a student, not a friend.
I can’t talk to you about it, said Vela Rue. You especially.
Why not? What is it about me that stops you?
I think about you, she said.
And then she added, Not as a tutor.
She was blushing and looking at the floor.
And then he couldn’t remember how he felt about that because the next thing was that she was underneath him and he was kissing her. She was pressing upwards against him. The flagstones were hard and cold against his knees. He was ripping at her clothes. Her skin was hot. He pinned her arms down, grinding them into the ground, and pushed his face into her neck. She was rippling and whispering something over and over in his ear.
When he woke immediately afterwards, his heart was trying to climb out of his throat and his skin glistened with sweat. There was a long lump in his bed next to him, and for just one terrifying, incredible moment he though
t that it was her. A brief examination, however, revealed it to be his pillow, which he had apparently been attacking.
The sensation of flat, rigid stone and her wriggling body on top of it stayed with him for days after the dream had ended. He would be teaching, or walking, in the middle of a sentence or a drink, and that feel of her would flash suddenly in his mind. He would remember every second of it, trying to prolong it, trying desperately to get rid of it.
People would talk to him but they sounded muted, as if he was cut off from them by a wall of glass; trapped in a dark, hot bottle of his own making. In the bottle he could be with the dream, as long as he wanted. He could watch her underneath him again and again.
And that was the beginning of White’s fall.
CHAPTER 19
ANGLE TAR
Rue
It had been a busy dream life for Rue these past few weeks.
Since her first dream featuring the silver-eyed boy, she had had several more. Each time she had one, they felt so real, and she felt so tired the next day, that it was as if she hadn’t been sleeping at all.
He seemed apart from her, as if he was just a visitor to her head, and now that she knew she had this phantom ability lurking somewhere inside her, she wondered if he weren’t somehow a product of that instead of her normal dreams. Mostly, he lurked in the background, catching her eye as she wandered around the landscapes of her mind, one blurred face in a crowd, or a figure whisking behind a building when she turned to find him.
In one dream she had, she found herself in the kitchen of Red House again, and there they were together, sat like old friends at the table. This time he had a bunch of grapes and picked them off their stems one by one, eating with obvious relish as they talked.
She tried to quiz him on who he was, but he wouldn’t tell her his name. When she asked where he came from, though, he talked of a place that sounded both beautiful and impossible. In this place, he said, people were never hungry. Food was never scarce, and appeared magically when you had the right token to make it do so. Everyone lived together in beautiful cities, and their souls were all connected as one living creature, and no one could ever be lonely. People thousands of miles from each other could talk and touch with their souls while their bodies stayed put. Everyone played games with hundreds, thousands of other people at the same time, and everything was easy. He called this place Life, and said that it was the only place worth living in.