Chapter 102: Worth Leaving For

The strand was there in the morning.

Silas saw it before he’d finished sitting up. The light from the window gap fell across the slate at a low angle, and on the largest mat, at the same left edge where the tuft had lifted the night before, something caught it. He went over on his knees and put his face close to the stone.

It was a single thread, finer than a hair, rising from the gray growth in a shallow curve. It was pale, almost colorless, until he moved his head, and then the light ran along it like a scratch on silver. A little way along the same edge, a second one had started, shorter, barely a fleck.

He checked the two dry mats on the desk. Gray, flat, unchanged.

He checked the paper he’d written on the night before, as if it might have changed its mind. One tuft lifted. Now there were two threads.

Fine pale strands that catch the light. He didn’t need the copied page to remember that line.

Silas sat back on his heels and grinned at a piece of slate on his windowsill like an idiot.

He wanted to show someone the result. Yesterday he’d been wrapping rotten substrate in newspaper; this morning there were two threads catching the light on his windowsill. He turned the slate a fraction, carefully, until both showed at once. A refiner would still have to identify it properly, but at least there was something living to take them now.

“You’re smiling at dirt,” Nim said.

“There’s something alive in the dirt,” Silas said.

Nim came over, sniffed at the slate from a careful distance, and looked at the strand for a long time.

“It’s very small,” Nim said.

“It’s very small,” Silas agreed. “It’s still alive.”

Nim seemed to accept that this mattered, though not why, and went back to bed.

***

The field-instruction office was a long room with a counter and a tired clerk. Silas filled in the Harrowglass application at the end of it in less time than it had taken him to queue for flatbread.

Name. Class. Rank. Current field clearance, which he had from Ferrow. Role preference: he wrote collection support, then, after a moment, added or carrying. The clerk stamped it and gave him a place in tomorrow’s practical assessment. Final roles and marked areas would be posted after the full readiness review, which would take about a week.

“Marked areas?” Silas asked. “The map on the notice has a service court on the east side. Half open, half hatched.”

The clerk didn’t look up. “Marked areas get confirmed after the site survey. Things change every season. Don’t plan on anywhere until it’s posted.”

Silas wrote that beside the assessment time. If the channel remained in a restricted area, he needed to know before planning a collection there.

He walked back out into the cold, already sorting through what he’d need. His outdoor control was the obvious one: lifting and carrying while moving, on bad ground, without stopping, and without burning his reserve to nothing by midday. The east yard was the place for that. Then there was the plain problem of getting anything living home intact, which meant reading more than half a page and finding out what people actually carried moss in. And under all of it, slower, was Spirit Communion. It only worked inside his walls for now. If he ever finished it, it would come with him, and he had started to suspect that a place like Harrowglass would feel very different with it than without.

He could start with the handbook on collecting living specimens. There was still time to prepare properly.

***

Mara’s message came at midday.

I’ve written to Dr Kerr myself and chosen the second date. I’ve booked my own seat on the coach. The steward has signed the leave. I’m reading about flow plates on the stairs, where nobody looks for me.

Silas read it in the corridor outside the refectory and felt that same lightness again, catching him off guard.

He sent her a photograph of the slate, with the strand caught in the light.

I bought some very old dirt from a conservatory, he wrote. Something in it is waking up. It might be useful for cultivation incense if I can find more. I’ve applied for a field exercise to go and look.

Her reply took a few minutes.

You paid money for dirt?

Then, before he could answer:

I’m proud of you. That’s a strange thing to type under a picture of dirt. Don’t let it rot.

Already did once, he wrote. Fixed it.

Good. That’s the job.

***

He met Elyra by accident, late in the afternoon, on the library steps. She was coming down with an armful of books and a scowl, and when she saw him, the scowl went somewhere else.

“You look pleased with yourself,” she said.

“I’ve applied for the Harrowglass exercise,” Silas said.

She stopped on the step above him, which put her eyes level with his. “You applied,” she repeated. “To go somewhere. On purpose.”

“Yes,” Silas said.

“Outside,” Elyra said.

“For two days,” Silas said.

“Voluntarily.” She looked genuinely delighted, as though he’d done a trick. “I didn’t think anything could get you out of that room except an emergency or me.”

“It’s the moss,” Silas said. “One of the samples woke up. There’s a fine little thread on it. If there’s more of it at Harrowglass, I want to find it.”

“Show me tomorrow,” Elyra said at once. “What does a waking moss look like? Is it green?”

“It’s silver. When the light hits it,” Silas said.

“Huh.” She seemed to turn that over with real interest. “What made you think it would be there?”

“I read about the place,” he said, which was almost true. “It seemed like the sort of corner nobody bothers with.”

She shifted the books in her arms, apparently satisfied. Silas resisted the urge to add another explanation.

“My mother’s coming,” he said. “In a little over a week. For an assessment at the infirmary. She used to be a mana medic.”

“Your mother,” Elyra said. “What’s she like?”

He thought about it. “Brisk, when she’s working. Careful, at home. She’ll look at you once and know if you’ve skipped meals. She was a medic before I was born and she’s just found out she still wants to be one.”

“She sounds frightening,” Elyra said.

“She’ll like you.” He said the next thing before he’d quite decided to. “I’d like you to meet her. If the timing works.”

Elyra went very still on the step.

It wasn’t the stillness he’d spent weeks watching for. Her face didn’t go blank. It went the other way, if anything: her eyes came fully onto him, as if everything else on the steps had stopped mattering, and her arms tightened around the books.

“You want me to meet your mother,” she said.

“If you want to,” Silas said.

She looked at him for a long moment.

“Yes,” Elyra said. “I’d like that.” Then, quieter, almost to herself: “Nobody’s asked me that before.”

She went on down the steps a little faster than she’d come, and at the bottom she turned and lifted one hand, books and all, before she disappeared toward the seminar halls.

***

That evening, Silas sat at the desk and wrote the message he’d been composing in his head all the way home.

Tomorrow, seven? East gate flatbread. You can have the edges, I’ll have the pillows. Bring the paper you got marked down for. I want to read it.

Her reply came almost at once.

Seven. I’ll bring the paper and my thread. You’ve probably torn something else.

He laughed and put the communicator face down.

Then he pulled the reference copy toward him and the borrowed field handbook he’d picked up on the way back, and started reading about carrying living samples in shallow lidded boxes, damp but never wet. Every so often he lifted the dart’s case off the shelf with Remote Grasp and walked it slowly around the room and back without letting it tilt, just to feel the weight of something he didn’t want to drop.

On the windowsill, the slate sat in the cool draft from the frame. Each time he passed it, the strand caught the lamplight, thin and silver and still there.