Chapter 139: Before It Moves II

"You," said Daphne.

I held up my hand and put a Barrier over it, a flat pane about the size of a plate.

She looked at it the way she had looked at my wrist.

"Where does it go?"

"Where does what go?"

"When something hits it."

"Some of it goes sideways. I tip it." I tilted the pane to show her. "The rest I eat."

"Eat."

"Pay for. Stamina. Mana, if it’s a big one."

"After it hits."

"It’s a barrier," I said. "After is when things hit."

Daphne looked at the drop post.

The weight was already up, sitting in the catch at the top. I slid a clay tile underneath, stretched out on my side next to it, and set a Barrier over the tile, angled a little.

Daphne took the cord.

"Ready."

"Mm."

She pulled.

The weight fell the way weights fall, fast and flat and without any interest in anyone’s opinion. It hit the Barrier with a dull, solid sound. The pane held, tipped, and the weight slid off it into the sand beside the tile. The tile didn’t so much as rattle.

The cost arrived where it always did, a heavy pull somewhere behind my breastbone, like breathing out harder than I’d meant to.

Fine. Normal. I had done that a hundred times.

Daphne got up to haul the weight back to the top.

She took hold of the rope, and the weight went light, and she brought it up one-handed in long, easy pulls, like someone drawing up an empty bucket. It clicked into the catch.

I had been dreading that rope since the lesson began. I watched this with something close to reverence.

"Again," she said.

I put the Barrier back over the tile.

She pulled the cord.

The weight fell, and it was wrong.

It came down like something that had changed its mind partway about how badly it wanted to. It still fell. It just didn’t seem to be in any hurry about it. When it reached the Barrier it touched rather than hit, and the pane tipped it off into the sand, and the cost that arrived behind my breastbone was so small I had to go looking for it.

I sat up.

"You paid for that."

"Some."

"Less than I did the first time."

"Yes."

"How much less?"

Daphne thought about it.

"Most."

"How?"

"It never got fast." She looked at the weight lying in the sand. "Falling is the problem. Not landing. Landing is just where you find out how big it got."

I looked at the weight too.

My Barrier waited at the bottom of things. That was what it was for. Whatever came at it, however it came, the Barrier stood at the end and paid the bill. Every bill. All at once.

Daphne had gone in at the top, before there was a bill, and quietly made it smaller.

"Can I try?"

"Try what."

"Both. Barrier on the tile. Gravity on the weight."

She looked at me for a moment. Then she got up, hauled the weight back to the catch one-handed, and picked up the cord.

I lay back down beside the tile, held the Barrier over it with one hand, and raised the other toward the post.

She pulled.

I waited, because waiting is where I do things. The weight came down, and when it was close enough to feel, I reached for it and pushed.

The weight lurched. It tipped, came in crooked, and struck the edge of the Barrier at an angle that made the whole pane shiver.

I paid for the Barrier. I paid for the push. I paid, somehow, for the shiver.

"Ow," I said, although nothing hurt.

"Late," said Daphne.

"Mm."

"And pushing."

"I noticed."

From the next patch of sand, in pieces, over the creak of the pulley as Daphne hauled:

"...no, you tell him it’s due two days before it’s actually due, and then when he..."

"...lists. She hands me lists. On paper. She doesn’t say anything, she just..."

"...that’s worse."

"It’s so much worse."

Lying on my back, I began going over every deadline Penelope had ever given me, and then stopped, because that was going to be a lot of work.

"Before it moves," Daphne said. "Not after."

The weight sat in the catch at the top of the post, perfectly still, doing nothing at all.

Before it moves.

I reached up toward it. Not to push. To find lighter.

I found push. I set it down. I found push again. I set that down too.

Then something. Very small. Like the first give in a knot.

"Now," I said.

The cord went.

The weight fell, and maybe, possibly, it fell a little slower. I couldn’t have sworn to it. It hit the Barrier, and I paid for it.

I paid a little less.

Not much less. Some.

Daphne looked at the tile. Then at me.

"Better," she said.

"Better," I agreed, and lay down flat in the sand, because better was exhausting.

She let me lie there for a while.

Then she hauled the weight up again, but this time she didn’t let it reach the catch. She stopped it a little above head height, stepped back, and let go of the rope.

It stayed.

It didn’t swing. It didn’t turn. It hung in the air above the tile, completely motionless, the way the disc had sat in my palm, except that nothing about this looked calm at all.

"Still," Daphne said. "The expensive one."

I could see it was. Her voice hadn’t changed, but the rest of her had gone very quiet, and there was a line at the edge of her jaw that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

"Don’t look at the weight," she said. "Look around it."

I sat up.

That wasn’t enough. From the ground I could see the weight but not the air around it, not properly, so I got up, which was a considerable commitment, and took a step back to see the whole post.

My heel came down on the edge of one of the practice discs from earlier, half buried in the sand.

It tipped.

So did I.

I sat down.

That was all that happened. I sat down in the sand, a little harder than I would have chosen, with one hand out behind me, which, considering how much of the lesson I had already spent on the ground, was barely a change of plan.

Something heavy hit the sand. Something clay cracked.

And Daphne was there.

She had been four paces away, holding a weight still in the air.

The weight was in the sand under the post now, and the tile beneath it was in pieces, and she was here, down on one knee beside me, with her hand out.

I hadn’t seen her let go of the weight.

I hadn’t seen her cross the sand.

I had only seen the part where she was already here.

Her hand had been on its way somewhere. It had stopped a few inches short of my shoulder, and it stayed there.

I looked at it.

Then at her.

Nothing useful arrived.

Around us, the yard carried on. Three patches over, Lena had looked up at the noise, seen me sitting in the sand, and gone straight back to her partner. Nobody else had looked up at all. I had sat down. That was the whole event.

Nadia had looked.

She was on her feet on the next patch, turned all the way around, and her mouth was already open, the way it had been open all morning, halfway into something.

She looked at Daphne’s hand.

She closed her mouth.

She sat back down and said nothing at all.

Penelope was looking at Nadia. Whatever she saw there, she didn’t say anything about it either.

Daphne’s hand came down.

"The tile," I said.

She looked at the post. The tile under it was in three pieces.

"Yes."

She got up and went to fetch another one.

I stayed where I was a moment longer. Then I got up, brushed the sand off, and hauled the weight back to the top myself. I tried for lighter on the way up, got push, and ended up doing it the ordinary way, with both hands and a great deal of rope.

When she came back with the new tile, I had the cord ready.

"Again," she said.

"Again," I said.

\*\*\*

We did it five more times before Ferran called time.

Twice, I was fairly sure the weight came down slower. Once, I was sure it didn’t. Once I pushed without meaning to, and Daphne said, "Pushing," before I had finished noticing it myself.

"That’s enough," said Ferran from the middle of the yard, still reading. "Most of you have spent the morning finding out you’re worse at something than you thought. Good. That’s the lesson. It’s the only one I have. Tell me your one thing on the way out."

We filed past him at the gate. Ferran took us one at a time without looking at anyone, nodding at some answers and making small marks beside others that did not look encouraging.

"Gravity’s before," I told him. "Barrier’s after."

Ferran looked up. It was, I was fairly sure, the first time all lesson he had looked at an actual student.

"Yes," said Ferran. "Now do something about it."

He looked back down.

Greywall was leaving by the far side of the yard. Daphne passed me on the way without slowing.

"Before it moves," she said.

"Before it moves," I said.

She kept going.

Sanctuary went back the way it had come, in a long loose clump that Cedric kept trying to turn into a line.

Penelope wasn’t in it.

She was still in the yard with Nadia, the two of them standing a little apart from both classes, talking. Nadia was doing most of it, largely with her hands. Penelope was nodding the way she nods when someone is telling her something she already knows and is glad to hear said out loud.

I noted this and decided it wasn’t my business, which is one of my favorite decisions to make.

I drifted to the back of the clump.

On a normal Friday, walking back from Ferran’s yard, I would have been thinking about lunch, and Dream Haven, and possibly Dream Haven again after lunch.

I picked up a pebble instead.

Tossed it. Caught it.

Tossed it again, and at the top, in the moment where it hung and hadn’t yet decided to come down, I reached for it.

Not up. Not pushing.

Lighter.

I got push. The pebble came down at exactly the speed pebbles come down, and I caught it.

Again.

Push. Push. Something.

The pebble came down, and maybe, possibly, it took a little longer about it.

Mana Aegis was what I used for the worst of it. The hits that would otherwise have ended somebody. It stood at the very end of the worst thing that could happen and paid for all of it, in full, at once. That was the whole design of it, and until this morning I had never once thought of it as a design. I had thought of it as what a barrier was.

But if the strike arrived slower.

If some of the weight had already come off on the way in.

If part of the bill had been paid before it ever came due...

It wasn’t a skill. It wasn’t a plan. At level three, it wasn’t even a good idea yet. It was a pebble, coming down maybe a little slower than it should.

But I had been reaching for Gravity at exactly the place I reached for Barrier. At the bottom. At the end. When the thing was close enough to feel. Pushing back.

Like a second Barrier. A worse one.

I’ve been using Gravity wrong.

I waited to find out whether that bothered me.

It didn’t, particularly. Daphne understood Gravity better than I did. A great deal better. Which meant somebody had already done the hard part of working out how it went, and all that was left for me was the learning.

As problems went, that was my favorite kind.

I tossed the pebble.

At the top, before it moved, I made it lighter.

It came down a little slower.

Probably.