Chapter 204: When I Come Back

(Alash Vortex POV)

Renn was the one who moved first. I was beginning to think it was his job.

"Are they connected?" he said. "Your seals, and Halden."

The Hermit took his time.

"I think the same five people being at the centre of two things I can’t explain is worth looking into," he said. "That’s as far as I’ll go."

"That isn’t very far."

"It’s further than I’d go for most people." He lifted one shoulder. "Five children shaking my illusion doesn’t tell me why something came out of the ground at a princess, months later, a long way west."

He looked at the fire.

"Five cores going up together doesn’t prove they’ve found some clever way of cultivating that nobody else has thought of. I can’t explain either of them. Explaining one with the other would only give me two things I can’t explain, tied together with string."

"Then what does it tell you?"

"That they keep happening to the same five people," said the Hermit. "And that I’d like to know why."

"Medically," said Valerian, "it tells me nothing."

The Hermit glanced at him.

"Their cores are C-Black," said Valerian. "I’ve checked them myself. That’s real. And their bodies are where they were, which is behind. Their channels didn’t advance with their cores, and they won’t catch up because anyone wants them to. Whatever happened to them didn’t heal anything. It made them stronger than they can carry."

He glanced at Sorel, and back.

"If you want a medical explanation of why five cores moved together, I don’t have one. Neither does Healer Sorel. I’d rather say so than invent one."

"I’m not asking you to invent one."

"Good."

"The advancement was real," said the Hermit, "and the injuries weren’t removed. I’d noticed."

"Then notice that they’re still injured," said Valerian.

"I have."

He said it without heat. I think, for him, it was nearly a concession.

I watched him the whole time. I couldn’t help it.

He was dangerous, and not because of his core. He was dangerous because he was coming at the truth from a direction I had never thought to guard. Everyone else who had ever wondered about me had started with me: the pillow, the three Constitutions, the healing, the way I knew things. He had started with his own illusion, and worked outwards, and found us standing in it.

But he hadn’t found the Key. I made myself look at that squarely, because I wanted very much to be frightened, and being frightened of the wrong thing is a waste of a night.

He didn’t know what we carried, or that there were five pieces of anything, or that I had a voice in my head that knew more about it than I did. He had a shape. He didn’t have what made it.

He had found a problem. He hadn’t solved it.

Neither had I.

***

The Hermit stood up.

"That’s enough for tonight," he said, as though he had been the one deciding. Sorel’s mouth went thin, but she let it go.

"Where will you go?" said Renn.

"West."

Renn went very still. "Where in the west?"

"The ridge. The lookout. Whatever’s left on the slope." The Hermit looked at him, faintly impatient. "I’m not going to chase it across anybody’s border, Commander, if that’s what your face is doing. I’m going to look at some rock."

"The Crown’s officers have been over that ridge."

"I’m sure they were very thorough."

"They documented the site." Renn didn’t let it go. "The slope down to the foot is Crown ground. The valley beyond it is the first country the joint patrols are meant to walk together, and they haven’t walked it yet. Nobody searches it alone, from either side. The Crown and the Speakers both have that in writing."

He held the Hermit’s eyes.

"If you go past the foot of that slope, you go as yourself. Not as anything to do with this convoy, or this Crown, or those students."

"I’ve never gone anywhere as anything to do with a crown."

"Then don’t start in that valley."

The Hermit looked at him for a long moment.

"You find that very tiresome," said Renn.

"Extremely."

"I’d rather you found it tiresome than started a war."

"So would I," said the Hermit, and that seemed to be all the agreement either of them was going to get, and all either of them needed.

He turned toward the door. Then, with his hand already on the latch, he stopped and looked back at the five of us, like a man who has remembered something he meant to mention and very nearly didn’t.

"When I come back," he said, "I’ll train you."

Nobody said anything.

"All five," he added, in case it had been unclear.

I thought I had misheard. I had had a long day, and my chest was tired, and some of my hearing had been spent on Sophie not breathing.

"Train us," said James.

"Teach you. Myself." He made it sound like an unpleasant errand he had agreed to run. "I don’t mean look you over once and write something to your instructors, or give you a lecture. I mean teach you."

Sophie had both hands over her mouth. There was frost on the edge of the blanket over her knees, a thin white line of it, and Sorel looked at it, and then at Sophie.

"That one had a fright behind it," said Sophie, through her fingers.

"I’ll allow it," said Sorel. She leaned across and laid two fingers on Sophie’s wrist for a moment, and took them away again. "Warm. If your hands ache tonight, you wake me."

"Are you serious?" said James.

The Hermit seemed to take the question as a mild insult. "I’m very seldom anything else."

"Teach us what?" said Daphne.

She had come off the wall. It was the first time all evening she had moved.

"How large you are," said the Hermit. "Where your edges are. What you can feel, and what you only think you can." He looked at her. "Most people never find out. They spend their whole lives walking into the furniture."

Daphne considered that. She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no.

"How?" said Elizabeth. "Through whom? Zenith has a Headmaster. We have a timetable. You’d need..."

"Your Headmaster spent four months finding me, so that I’d come and look at a hall full of first-years," said the Hermit. "I imagine he’ll survive being agreed with."

I didn’t say anything.

My first thought, I’m ashamed to say, was that somebody had just volunteered to interfere with my sleep on a regular basis, and that this was a man who had never once in his life been made to stop.

My second thought took longer to arrive, and it was much heavier.

In Theoran’s office, months ago, I had said the word help out loud, and very nearly taken it back. I had asked him to find me a way to SS, without destroying my channels, in about four years, because there was a countdown in the corner of my status that I couldn’t show anyone and couldn’t make slower.

Theoran had said there were records, and Selene, and my father’s archives. And then he had said: there is the Hermit.

He had written. That you asked for help, he had told me. Nothing about the countdown, or my potential. Only that. When I asked him about it, five months later, there had been no reply.

I didn’t know whether this was the reply. I didn’t know whether the Hermit had ever read the letter, or read it and forgotten, or read it and decided to come and look at me on a road for himself. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know yet what the answer would cost.

But the only human in recorded history with an SSS core had just stood in a doorway and offered to teach me. Kings had tried to summon him. Theoran had spent months finding him. People had spent whole lifetimes hoping for an hour of what he had just thrown at five injured children over his shoulder, with his hand on a latch.

I knew exactly how large that was. I didn’t make a joke.

Valerian did not make one either. He had gone very quiet, as he does when something matters too much to be loud about.

"What kind of training?" he said.

The Hermit looked at him.

"I don’t intend to break them," he said, "before I’ve learned anything useful from them."

"That isn’t an answer."

"It’s most of one."

"Then here’s the rest." Valerian came forward a step, until he stood between the row of us and the door. "No intensive cultivation while their channels are like this. None. No forcing any of them toward the next stage because you’re curious what happens."

The Hermit opened his mouth. Valerian didn’t stop.

"Nobody tries to make that connection happen again, by any means. Nobody puts them back inside a shared illusion to see if it shakes. And every exercise you set any one of them is approved by whoever’s treating that one. First, not afterwards."

"That’s a great many conditions."

"It’s five patients."

"You find that tiresome," said Renn, from the side.

"I do," said the Hermit. He looked at Valerian for a long moment. "Very well."

"Say it properly."

The Hermit’s eyebrows went up. I don’t think anyone had told him to say anything properly in fifty years.

"I’ll keep to your conditions," he said. "Since you seem to be the person who’d notice if I didn’t."

"I would."

"And the Headmaster," said Sorel. "Their care goes back to him when we reach Zenith. So does their schooling. Nothing starts until he’s agreed to it, and their healers have agreed to it, and they have." She looked along the row at us. "Each of them. Separately."

The Hermit sighed, the long sigh of a man being made to fill in a form in triplicate.

"Fine," he said.

It wasn’t an agreement to begin. I understood that. It was an agreement that one day, if a great many people said yes, something might.

But it had been said. In front of Renn, and two healers, and the five of us. He couldn’t unsay it, and I didn’t think he wanted to.

I didn’t fool myself that he had offered out of kindness. Nothing in his face was kind. He had found something he couldn’t explain, and it kept happening to the same five people, and the surest way to watch it happen again was to stand next to them for a long time.

We weren’t his students. Not yet. We were the most interesting thing he had seen in years, and he intended to study us properly.

I could live with that. I had been studied before. At least this time I knew it was happening.

***

"That’s all," said the Hermit, and opened the door.

He didn’t say when he would be back. He didn’t promise to find the creature, or to bring anything back from the ridge, or to have answers by any day of the week.

"Anything you find on Crown ground," said Renn, "the Crown would like to hear about."

"I’m sure it would."

"I mean through the proper..."

"I know what you mean, Commander," said the Hermit, and went out into the passage.

Renn sent one of his men after him, down to the gate, with the book.

The man came back a few minutes later, holding the book open, with the expression of someone who has had an unsettling evening and expects it to go on.

"He didn’t come past me, sir."

Renn closed the book.

"No," he said. "I don’t suppose he did."

***

Sorel took Elizabeth away for one more check before bed. She had examined her before supper, as Renn had promised, but the evening had run longer than any of us had been told to sit up, and Sorel was clearly holding that against all of us. Valerian checked my chest without asking, said nothing at all about what he found, and sent me to bed.

James went out to look at the horses, which is what he does instead of saying things. Sophie went with him, and I felt the two of them go down the yard together, side by side, and stop.

Daphne was the last to leave the room. She stopped in the doorway with her back to the passage, as she had at Halden.

"You told him," she said.

"Some of it."

"You told us too."

I didn’t answer that. She didn’t seem to need me to.

"It’s a start," said Daphne, and went.

I lay down on the narrow bed in the room they had given me, put Dream Haven under my head, and looked at the ceiling.

I felt a great many things at once, and none of them was sleep.

Relief, because the Hermit had gone. Suspicion, because he would come back with better questions. And a small, reluctant interest that I didn’t approve of at all.

The other four didn’t know what bound the five of us together. I did. I knew what we carried, and that it had been one thing before it was five, and whose chest each piece was in.

What I didn’t know was how it worked: why it had moved our cores two stages and left our bodies behind, why it still told us where the others were, or what it had been doing under the Hermit’s illusion. I knew what, and not how. For most of my life, that had felt like enough.

The next time we sat in front of him, we would have to decide again what to give him, and decide it together. I had agreed to that this afternoon, and I had meant it. I already suspected it would be the hardest thing I had ever agreed to.

And somewhere at the end of this road, Theoran was waiting, with an order I had broken in front of witnesses and hadn’t yet answered for. He hadn’t forgotten it. Theoran doesn’t forget things. He files them, and takes them out again at the moment you least want him to.

There wasn’t going to be a quiet homecoming. I hadn’t really expected one.

I had come into this world with one ambition, and it had been to sleep.

I had been doing it very badly lately.