Chapter 119: The Wrong Kind of Easy

Chapter 119: The Wrong Kind of Easy

By the fifth morning, Silas could stop the bag every time.

He’d swing it, step in, start the Grasp while his foot was still in the air, and arrive on a target that was already slowing. His palm would rest on the canvas and the whole thing would hang there, still, as though it had never moved. Twenty times in a row. Thirty. He did it before breakfast and after classes and whenever he had ten minutes, and it felt wonderful.

Battle Evolution had gone very quiet.

He noticed that around the thirtieth repetition. He had stopped finding anything to correct. Pleased as he was with thirty successes, he suspected he was making this too easy.

"Nim," he said. "I’ll pay you extra."

Nim, on the pillow, opened one eye. "How much extra?"

"An extra measure of mana," Silas said. "I want you to pull the bag back and let it go whenever you like. Any side. Don’t tell me when."

Nim considered it with the gravity of a merchant, then climbed the shelf, hooked a paw into the bag’s top strap, and dragged it back toward the window.

Silas waited, loose.

The bag came from the left, a beat earlier than he expected, and he was already leaning right. He got the Grasp on it late and took the rest on his shoulder.

The next came from straight ahead, and he did better. The one after that, from the left again, and he was leaning right again before it had even moved.

He stopped.

That’s what’s been happening. Most of his practice had begun from the same side. He was moving before the release, trusting a familiar swing to meet him.

Thirty perfect attempts. Well done, idiot.

Battle Evolution woke up. He felt it settle over each attempt now, marking the lean, the moment his weight left center before there was any reason. He made himself wait, light on both feet, until the bag declared its direction. Then foot, Grasp, palm. Out of the next ten, he got four. It was the worst score he’d had in days, and the most useful.

Nim hauled the bag farther back for the next release. Silas checked the strain on the hook and asked him to ease it forward. He wanted an uncertain direction, not a broken fitting above his head. The smaller swing still caught him leaning the wrong way.

***

Alden came that afternoon and announced, before he’d taken his boots off, that he’d taken a touch off Leander that morning.

"I listened first," he said. "He dropped the blade a hair and I didn’t go through. I just stopped." He looked enormously pleased. "He looked at me like I’d cheated."

Silas left the existing recording alone and went to fetch the block.

They did the block again, and halfway through, without warning, Alden asked to switch. He wanted to be the one holding the block back while Silas pushed. "If I can feel when you’re about to go through," he said, "I’ll know what it feels like from the other side." Alden braced his hand against the block and soon began catching Silas before the lurch happened.

"There," Alden kept saying. "You just did it. There."

Silas swallowed a protest and tried again. He had invited Alden here to teach him, and now his friend was catching mistakes he could feel only after making them.

In between, the ordinary days went on. He sat through Sorel’s lectures and a field foundations class on knots that would have bored him a month ago and now had him taking notes. Every morning he misted the two pads and the old slate and checked the draft from the window, and one evening he caught Nim pressing his bead into the original moss so that it would grow.

***

Elyra came the next evening at seven, as agreed, and found him still at it.

"Five more minutes," he said, and saw her face, and amended it. "Two. I said seven."

Two minutes later he stopped the bag, wiped his face, and sat beside her. She put her folder between them and opened it.

"My advisor approved my study," Elyra said. "The settlement one. Where the wind ones collect." She smoothed a creased page. "But she says I can’t call it a study until I’ve kept a proper log. Thirty evenings. Same time, same place, wind direction, how many, where they sit."

"Thirty evenings on a freezing wall?" Silas asked.

"I’ve done six." She turned the page toward him, and it was covered in her small neat writing, columns and crossings out and a tiny sketch of the bell tower. "And they’re not where I thought. When the wind comes round, they don’t sit in the corner where it meets. They sit just past it, on the side where it’s calmer. Every time." She looked at him, bright and uncertain. "I was wrong. But I was wrong in an interesting way."

"What happens when the wind drops completely?" Silas asked, leaning over the folder.

"I don’t know yet," Elyra said. "It hasn’t stayed calm long enough while I’ve been watching. That’s one of the things I want to find out."

She showed him where she’d left space for it. He asked about another mark, and she began explaining why she’d crossed out her first description. When she paused to apologize for going on, he pointed at the page.

"You haven’t told me what was wrong with it."

Elyra looked pleased and went back to explaining.

Later, she closed the folder and said, not quite looking at him, "What did your mother think of me?"

"She liked meeting you," Silas said. "She told me at the coach to tell you so, and to tell you she meant it." He hesitated, then said the rest, because it was true. "And I liked seeing you both at my table. Very much."

Elyra took the first part with a small nod, as though she’d half expected it. The second made her go very still.

"Can this be ours?" she asked. "An evening. The same one. I don’t want to have to ask each time and wait to see if you say yes. I want to know it’s already mine."

He had been keeping those evenings free already. Hearing her ask still left him pleased enough that he had to take a moment before answering.

"This evening next week," he said. "And the week after. Sometimes I’ll get a field day or a class that moves, and then I’ll tell you as soon as I know, and we’ll pick another."

She considered that, as if checking it for loopholes.

"Tell me early," she said.

"I will," Silas said.

She smiled then, and leaned her shoulder against his for a moment before she got up to go.

***

Rovan caught him after the morning lecture the next day, ears forward. "Ferrow’s given us the retrieval frame tomorrow at two. Extraction, moving between marks. I’ll work the resistance. I want to see if we can do it without a whistle."

"Two," Silas said. His slot expired at three. He was close now, close enough to feel it, and not finished. "I’ll be there."

That afternoon he went down to Lower Market Row for more grit and a second tray. Pell was at the counter with a sheet of printed paper.

"You were at Harrowglass," Pell said. "This went up this morning." He turned it round.

AUTHORIZED HORTICULTURAL SALVAGE DAY. Harrowglass, outer service beds. Scheduled maintenance to follow: draining of the old outer conduit and removal of loose facing. Eligible registered collectors may salvage approved growth from the open areas beforehand. Inner conservatory remains closed. The date was three days off.

Silas read draining of the old outer conduit twice.

The vent under the hood. The damp that kept the thick silver heart alive. Once the conduit was drained, the shaded stone would dry out in a season, like the bare channel he’d found on the first day. Whatever was left there would die. The little cool presence sitting in the middle of it would have to find somewhere else, if it could.

"Half the commercial growers on the Row’ll be there," Pell said. "With proper carriers."

Silas bought his grit and his tray. Outside, he wrote to Alden and Dagna before he’d reached the end of the street.

Harrowglass salvage day, three days from now. Outer beds before they drain the conduit. I’m going. Are you in?

Then he walked home to finish a Talent before it ran out, already considering how many fragile slabs he could fit into a carrier he could actually lift.