Chapter 105: The Half Hour Between

Chapter 105: The Half Hour Between

At ten past four, Silas was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his eyes shut, and for about a minute everything worked.

The visitor had come in a little before four. He’d let his thread out thin and level and found the two presences in the room exactly where they should be. Nim was on the pillow, quick and bright and close. The visitor was on the far shelf, small and cool and faint. Then Nim jumped down and padded toward the kitchenette, and the visitor drifted to the windowsill, and Silas kept them apart. Near and bright. Far and faint. Then Nim stopped, and the visitor came closer, and for a moment the faint thing was nearer than the bright one, and he still knew which was which.

Then the visitor turned along the sill, moving faster than before, and he felt it start to slip away from him. Without thinking, he leaned after it. He pushed more mana down the thread, meaning to hold on tighter.

His own mana crowded his senses. The thread swelled and roughened until he could no longer distinguish the small cool presence on the sill, like losing a whisper beneath a shout. Nim he could still feel, because Nim was always loud to him. The visitor he couldn’t find at all.

He opened his eyes. The pale speck was sitting on the sill, glowing quietly, as if nothing had happened.

It didn’t go anywhere, he thought. I drowned it out.

He tried twice more and failed, because he was annoyed now and kept pushing. At twenty past four he gave up.

At half past, the copy ended.

[Spirit Communion — temporary recording expired. Assimilation retained.]

The second layer of the room went quiet. This time he didn’t sit and feel sorry about it. Nim was still Nim, watching him from the counter. The visitor was still a pale speck on the sill. The room was only a room again for a while.

He moved the dumplings onto a plate, because the delivery box made them look like a punishment, and put the flatbread under a cloth to keep warm. He found he was humming.

He checked the clock once while arranging the food, then left it alone. There was enough time to rinse the cups and find the napkins Nim had pushed behind the basket.

"You’re making the face again," Nim said.

"Which face?" Silas asked.

"The not-dropped-food one. The other one," Nim said.

Silas didn’t ask what the other one was.

***

Elyra arrived at five past five, slightly out of breath, with a roll of paper under her arm and mud on her boots.

"Sorry," she said. "The seminar garden is mostly puddles."

She stepped over the threshold. The reading came, and beneath it, waiting in the slot he’d left empty, the prompt.

[Record Soul Talent: Spirit Communion?]

He accepted it while she was setting the roll of paper down on the table.

[Spirit Communion recorded to temporary slot. Duration: seven days. Previous assimilation retained.]

The second layer opened again, quiet and familiar. He let out a breath and took her coat.

"Harrowglass," Elyra said, before she’d even sat down. "You saved it. Tell me."

He told her how he and Rovan had got the pail out, and how much of it had come home in his boot. By the time he reached Rovan’s admission about his tail, she had set her tea down to laugh.

"You’re qualified to carry things?" Elyra asked. "Even after that?"

"Two-thirds arrived in the pail," Silas said. "Ferrow measured it."

"And the rest arrived in you. Very thorough," Elyra said.

He laughed despite himself. She asked about the last obstacle, and he explained the longer route. When he described Ferrow putting his name down, she reached across the table and briefly squeezed his wrist.

"I’m glad," Elyra said. "You wanted this."

"I did." He turned his cup by the handle after she let go. "I still do, even with the wet boot."

Still smiling, she unrolled the paper. "My turn. This is what I did with my afternoon."

It was the beginning of several drawings: a small rounded body done carefully in pencil, then a second outline beside it, slightly different, then a third with legs that hadn’t been there before, then a fourth where the legs had been scribbled out and replaced by something like fins. Around the edges, she had rubbed out lines hard enough to thin the paper.

"Field sketching," Elyra said. "We each had to draw one of the little ones in the seminar garden. Mine lives in a puddle under a bench. And every time I finished a part of it, it changed that part." She jabbed a finger at the fins. "I’d draw its legs, and it would look at me, and grow fins instead. I’d draw the fins, and it would put the legs back. I’m fairly sure it was doing it on purpose."

"Was it?" Silas asked.

"It was enjoying itself. I could feel that much." She glared at the paper. "I spent three hours on it. I hissed at it, at one point. Out loud. Leander was sketching the bench next to mine and he moved his stool."

Silas found it unreasonably delightful that Elyra Thale, who could pull a guardian’s head off with a shadow, had been defeated by something that lived under a bench.

"I like it," he said.

"It’s terrible," Elyra said.

"It’s very honest," Silas said.

She narrowed her eyes, then laughed and pushed the sheet aside for the dumplings.

***

It was Nim who started it, later, without meaning to.

Elyra had decided she needed practice drawing something that held still, and Nim was asleep on the pillow, which seemed ideal. She took a fresh corner of the sheet and began. Nim woke up halfway through, looked at her, and turned around so that his back was to her.

"No, stay like that. Just for a moment," Elyra said, coaxing. "Nim. Please. The other way."

Nim lay down with his back even more firmly toward her.

"I’ll give you a feather," Elyra said.

Nim curled into a ball.

Elyra sighed. "That’s exactly what the puddle one did. The more I asked, the less I got."

"Does that happen a lot?" Silas asked. "With spirits."

She thought about it while she rubbed out a line.

"It happens," she said. "Not with all of them. Some like attention. But a lot of the time, if you keep calling and reaching and insisting, they just turn away. Or they stop answering. Or they go somewhere you can’t follow." She shrugged. "People think if you put more into it, you’ll get more back. More power, more effort. It doesn’t work that way most of the time. You have to stay where they can find you and stop shouting."

Silas thought about the windowsill, and the thread he’d thickened, and the visitor disappearing under it.

"That sounds hard to remember," he said, "when you want something."

"It’s very hard to remember when you want something." She picked up the pencil again. "I hissed at a puddle today. Clearly I haven’t learned it either."

On the pillow, Nim uncurled, yawned enormously, and rolled over so that he was facing her after all. Elyra drew very fast and very quietly, and neither of them said anything until he moved again.

***

She left at nine. At the door she said, "The day after tomorrow, perhaps? I’ll bring a better drawing," and he said yes before she’d finished asking.

When she was gone, Silas sat back down on the floor.

The visitor was on the bookshelf. He let his thread out, but narrower this time, thinner than he’d ever made it, and kept it level. He didn’t reach after the visitor when it moved. He let it move and adjusted his own attention to follow, the way he’d turn his head toward a conversation in a crowded room instead of shouting across it.

He followed it from the shelf to the desk. From the desk to the edge of the bed. From the bed, slowly, toward the window. It was the longest he had ever kept hold of it while it moved, and he didn’t push once.

At the window it turned sharply into the fold of the curtain, and he lost it. He felt the urge to push and didn’t. He waited, and after a long moment he found it again, faintly, behind the cloth.

He opened his eyes, pleased with the recovery. Earlier, losing the visitor had ended the attempt. This time he had found it again without starting over. If he could keep that steadiness through the turn, he might not lose it at all.

He wrote it on the back of the moss notes.

Steady through the turns.