I felt stupid immediately. I’d assumed he didn’t like being alone without remembering I enjoy solitude very well, thank you, and certainly don’t need pity or condescension or some well-meaning person “helping” me out of it. But Sai Aleynten turned to look at me again, his eyebrow raised, and said, “I would not want to intrude on your time.”
“I wouldn’t offer if I thought it was an intrusion,” I said.
He smiled again, and said, “No, you would not,” and I think he was making a joke! “I would enjoy that,” he said. “There is a reading room down the hall, if you’ll join me.”
It was a comfortable room. There were four well-padded chairs, and a low table perfect for drinks, and while I settled myself into one of the chairs, Sai Aleynten disappeared and came back some minutes later with a tray holding a metal pitcher and two glasses. This time he poured the conventional way, and rather than water the pitcher held a pale yellow liquid that looked like lemonade, and it was. We talked for a few minutes about things that were the same in both our worlds, not that there are many of them, and then I read aloud for a while.
I had to keep stopping because the book referred to places I didn’t know, and Sai Aleynten (big surprise) was familiar with all of them. It was an interesting book, though we’d been right in thinking it had no bearing on our research.
At some point we put the book aside and Sai Aleynten told me more about the government of Castavir—I don’t know how we came to that subject. It was clear there were things he was skirting around, primarily the God-Empress issue, but if the God-Empress is as dictatorial as I think she is, it would make sense that he wouldn’t want to criticize her out loud, even to an otherworlder who’s unlikely to repeat his words to anyone who might care.
Anyway, I now feel I have a slightly better grasp of Castaviran politics, though my understanding of politics in general has never been strong; ground-level enforcement of the law has always had more of an effect on me.
And I told him—I still can’t believe I did this—I told him about some of the things I’ve had to do to gain access to the books I needed. That led to me explaining I’d had to steal to survive for most of my life. I didn’t talk about Bridie or Roda or Mam, and I didn’t try to explain about the politics that lost my family its social and economic standing when I was no more than a baby (not that I understand them myself), just that Dad died when I was nine and we became destitute. He listened, and at the end he said, “No wonder we could never keep you locked up.”
“No, that was the mind-moving pouvra, though it’s true I need to understand locks to know how to move them correctly,” I said, and then we both realized that although I’d told him about the pouvra, he’d never seen me do it. So I showed him how I could raise the tray with its pitcher and glasses, though only an inch or so, and then I worked the lock on the door a few times, and he showed his astonishment in his usual ebullient way, which was to raise one eyebrow until it threatened to climb off his forehead.
“The fine control to work that lock is beyond me,” he said, “though I think my capacity for moving larger objects is greater than yours,” and he wiggled his fingers and made one of the chairs, thankfully not the one I was sitting in, lift into the air until its back struck the ceiling. This time, I was watching his hand more closely, and I swear I saw traces of amber light following the movement of his fingers.
“Definitely,” I agreed, “though it makes me wonder something.” I concentrated on my glass, which had about half an inch of lemonade still in it, and the liquid flowed up the sides of the glass and emerged to make a pale yellow sphere that I flew around the room.
“That is truly astonishing,” Sai Aleynten said. He traced a th’an on the side of his glass, which was fuller than mine, and the liquid quivered, but stayed in the glass. “It seems I have practicing to do.”
“So do I,” I said, laughing, and he smiled. I wonder if he ever laughs. I wonder why he never relaxes. Well, he was relaxed then, but his relaxation still looks like someone else’s rigidity.
Right then my stomach rumbled, and I laughed again. “I think I should have dinner,” I said, and then I didn’t know what else to say. It felt rude to walk away, but I didn’t think it would make either of us comfortable for me to invite him to eat with me in the refectory. And, honestly, I can’t picture him eating in there. No one would dare to joke or laugh or even speak. Except me, possibly.
Sure enough, he said, “Then I will speak with you in the morning. Or in the evening, if you prefer, when you may have something to report.”
I said, “Then, good evening, Sai Aleynten, and thank you for an enjoyable afternoon.”
He nodded, but when I had my hand on the knob and was realizing I’d left the door locked, he said, “You should not call me Sai.”
“But everyone calls you that—did I misunderstand?” I said. I was embarrassed again. I hate looking like a fool, and if I’d been calling him Sai Aleynten when that was wrong—that’s as bad as calling him by his praenoma when I wasn’t invited—but that’s not what happened.
“‘Sai’ is not only a title,” he said. “It implies a relationship…not exactly of obedience, but of obligation. You are under no obligation to me.”
That made me feel better, though still embarrassed. “Do I call you Aleynten, then?” I said.
He paused for a long time, then said, “My given name is Cederic. It would not be inappropriate for you to call me that.”
That still makes me feel horribly embarrassed. Like I’ve written before, in Balaen names are important. We used to have a surname before Dad was stripped of power and he lost that along with everything else. And Sai Aleynten sharing his given name with me, when we don’t really have a close relationship…that’s an intimacy I’m sure he didn’t mean, and I couldn’t tell him that without embarrassing him too. He said, later, he was the only one who could invite me to use his given name, so I guess names do mean something to them, but nothing nearly so personal as they do to me.
So I’ve resolved never to be in a position where I have to call him anything. I don’t know what I’ll call him in the pages of this book. I kept writing Sai Aleynten because that’s how I thought of him, right up until he gave me his name, but obviously I shouldn’t do that anymore. It’s stupid of me to be so sensitive, but I’ve already lost my whole world and almost all of my customs, and I feel as though I need to cling to something in order to stay myself. Also, how awkward will it be if I’m the only one calling him Cederic? That’s the sort of thing that gets noticed!
Which is more or less what I said next, though it came out as, “That’s not too informal, when everyone else calls you Sai?”
He smiled, and said, “You are not everyone else, and they know it. I think you will find they are happier when you, an outsider, do not presume upon the obligation all of them have earned.”
“You mean they’ve all been cringing every time I refer to you as Sai Aleynten?” I said. I’d noticed my talking about him made them uncomfortable, but I’d assumed it was because I was always so critical of him. I thought I’d been embarrassed before, but now I didn’t think I could face the refectory and all those people who thought I was…I don’t know. Presumptuous, maybe?
Sai Aleynten Cederic He shook his head. “I imagine none of them knew how to correct you without embarrassment. And none of them would feel comfortable giving you the freedom of my given name.”
“I understand,” I said, “though I’m surprised you didn’t correct me earlier.”
“It never occurred to me,” he said. “And you never address me directly.”
“I don’t know whether to apologize for that or not,” I said, “but I think most of our conversations haven’t been the kind where our names are important.”
“True,” he said. He’d been sitting this whole time, and now he stood and said, “I think you will discover the door is still locked.”
“I know,” I said, and quickly unlocked it. “Thank you…Cederic.”
> He inclined his head to me. “Thank you for the reading, Thalessi.”
And I have no idea why I did what I did next, which was to say, “My given name is Sesskia.” It just came out. I suppose it was partly because I felt so awkward about him giving me his name that I wanted to restore the balance between us, and partly because something about him makes me tell him everything, even against my better judgment. But I did, and now I can’t take it back. I hope I don’t regret it.
So he said, “Then thank you, Sesskia,” and we went our separate ways, him presumably to his room, me to the refectory. It was an uneventful dinner, probably because everyone had exhausted their stores of fun and was ready for an early bedtime and back to work in the morning. And now I’m finishing this record for the night.
I’m looking forward to studying the book in the morning. I still don’t know if I can call him Cederic, particularly to his subordinates, but I suppose Sai Aleynten is out of the question now. At least I don’t hate him anymore, because there are serious taboos about using the personal name of one’s enemy. And he’s certainly not my enemy.
26 Senessay
It’s definitely a pouvra. If I hadn’t had ten years of experience learning pouvrin from ancient, barely legible texts, I wouldn’t have recognized it. I had to go to the refectory for a glass of that bitter pink juice that I hoped would clear my head, because my brain kept trying to cling to concepts it could barely understand until it whirled around like a dust devil, whipping up a storm that only made things worse.
This is what I know so far:
1. The book is nothing but speculation about magic. If I were a Castaviran mage, I would dismiss the author as a madman.
2. The madman who wrote the book had access to other fringe texts, some of which pointed him in the right direction.
3. The madman believed pouvrin shaped what he called residual magic, something thrown off by kathanas.
4. Completely by accident, he worked out a pouvra that conceals the user from sight.
I had to get up and pace the room again after I wrote that, because I’m so excited I can barely breathe. It’s not invisibility, more of a powerful suggestion that the observer not see you, but how can that not be the most useful pouvra I’ve ever learned! When I think of all the times I was caught, or nearly caught, because I stepped into the light at the wrong time—there, I had to take a pacing break again.
All right. I’m calm again. Not really, but calm enough to apply myself to this book. I only made it about a third of the way into the pouvra book before I got to number 4 up there, and then I had to tell someone. Sai Ced This is ridiculous. I can’t keep writing “he.” I’ll have to get used to calling him Cederic, at least when I’m writing. Anyway, Cederic was busy with one of the groups, so I collared Terrael and made him answer my questions. His answers:
1. Yes, there are other books in this vein, and yes, Castaviran mages think the authors are insane, because nothing they write of has ever been proven effective.
2. Terrael had heard of one or two of the texts the madman refers to, but has never seen them. Still, he estimates the book is well over four hundred years old. Which is impressive, since it’s barely faded or foxed, though the pages are too brittle to be handled easily.
3. There is no such thing as residual magic. Terrael was emphatic about this. Magic is constrained by th’an and either flows into an object or is consumed by the th’an or kathana. He offered to show me proof, but I declined on the grounds that I wouldn’t appreciate it.
4. Upon being shown the relevant passages, Terrael admitted that what I said hinted at a pouvra was meaningless to him, but the way the madman constructed th’an was unusual and bore further examination.
5. There was a bit of a tussle that ended with me rapping Terrael on the knuckles and telling him to find another book to examine, because he couldn’t have mine.
I decided to write all this up before going back to studying, to give myself time to calm down. Later, I have to tell all of this to Sai Cederic. I think he will have a better idea of why the madman came to the conclusions he did—whether it was coincidence, or whether he actually did stumble on some secret we might be able to use. And tonight I’m going to start learning that pouvra.
Chapter Eight
27 Senessay
I was so caught up in trying to learn the concealment pouvra I didn’t take time to record the rest of yesterday before I went to sleep. I’m so tired this morning I’m having trouble concentrating on anything. I took my discoveries to Cederic after lunch yesterday, and he insisted (politely, he’s learning) that I read out certain passages. Then he told me things to look for, key words and phrases, and I read those too.
By the time we were both ready for dinner, I’d read myself hoarse and Cederic was pacing back and forth across the circle, fingers of one hand pressed against his forehead. Finally, he said, “I think we should leave this for now. There is a book that might reveal something of what this author claims, but I would prefer to come at this fresh, in the morning.”
“But you’re going to read that book tonight,” I said.
He raised his eyebrow at me. “And if I do?”
“Do you believe in rest at all?” I said.
“I find that amusing, coming from the woman who intends to stay up all night learning the concealment pouvra,” he said.
I sputtered at him indignantly, but in the end I had to laugh. “It’s a disease,” I said, and he nodded, smiling.
“Well, I think we can both agree to have enough self-control to be able to function in the morning,” I said. Except I don’t think I did. I have no way of keeping track of time, here under the mountain, and I didn’t fall asleep until I was so exhausted my eyeballs ached, which had to be only a few hours before someone banged on my door and shouted something about breakfast. They’ve taken to doing that, now I’m so engaged in research, and I appreciate it most of the time. Just not when I’ve had only a few hours of sleep and my head is pounding. I didn’t go to breakfast immediately, but wrote all this in the hope that my headache would go away. I think it got worse. Maybe food will help.
After breakfast
Still headachy. I’m going to forgo a bath this morning—and no, that’s not going to make me stinky, I bathed yesterday and I can afford to miss one day—so I can write more about the pouvra. I haven’t come close to mastering it yet, of course, and I didn’t expect to. It has a strange shape, much more angular than the others, and I think it’s because the madman who described it was working from all manner of wrong assumptions.
But I know it will work. I can feel it, deep inside, where my magic responds to the pouvrin and my will bends to meet them. What’s interesting is that part of what the madman did makes the underlying reasoning behind the pouvra more obvious, which means I’ll probably learn this one more rapidly than the others, all except the fire-summoning pouvra, of course.
I’ve written so often about the process of learning a new pouvra that I don’t know that I need to do it here—but then, I’ve lost the other five books, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever get them back. And although I don’t intend anyone but myself to read it, there’s always a chance this could end up important to historians in some far distant time—hopefully a far distant time, I don’t want Cederic ever to see some of the things I wrote about him, assuming he learns to read my language—so I might as well be thorough.
The first step is to know a pouvra exists. I don’t know how the first pouvrin were created, but as far as my experience goes, it’s not enough to simply wish to be able to do something; you have to have a shape for it. But the shapes aren’t physical, though I always describe them in those terms because they are able to affect the physical world. They’re more like…no matter how often I explain this, I never do get it exactly right.
They’re like the memory of a place, a room, for example. You never only remember the size of the room and the things that were in it, you also remember how it smelled and what the lighting was
like and, most importantly, how you felt when you were there. And some memories of places are so strong that when you remember them, it’s as if you were there once more.
Every pouvra has a different form that’s multidimensional in that way. In my mind, they have texture and color and taste and smell, though they never have a sound. They’re like physical things that only exist because your mind and your body make them real.
I suppose it’s possible to create pouvrin, I just don’t know how. All the pouvrin I’ve learned have been shapes laid down by other mages. But—think how hard it is to describe a place so well that the other person sees it accurately. Impossible, maybe. Then think of describing an object whose characteristics are completely non-physical and yet have a tangibility in memory. That’s so much harder.
So it’s not as simple as one mage writing a description that another can read and understand. All pouvrin are described figuratively, like poetry, and understanding them is a matter of learning the language of that description. I’ve written that I’ve read hundreds of books over the last ten years—well, only a few of them actually described pouvrin. The rest taught me how to understand those few.
Some of them I read and moved on, others I stole and hid again, with clues, in the hope that some other mage might find them one day. This is how I could tell the madman’s book contained a pouvra; there’s a consistency to the language that’s like a clue for other mages that here is something worth knowing.
My stomach’s growling at me again. I’d better go eat something before I have to get to work. I hope Cederic isn’t dragging as much as I am.
27 Senessay, evening
Today was a near-total loss. Cederic was every bit as exhausted as I was, and irritable in a way I wasn’t until I started talking to him, and we had an argument that was more of a squabble, in which he was sarcastic and I was rude. We managed to cut it short and apologize to each other, but neither of us meant it. Finally, he said, “This is pointless. Have your lunch, and take a nap, and let us see if we can salvage anything of this day after that.”
The Summoned Mage (Convergence Book 1) Page 10