Sometimes a nobleman hired me. Sometimes it was a concerned father, a distraught mayor, or a bumbling constable.
Most of the time I saved a pair of girls. Sometimes only one, sometimes there were three. They were best friends. They were mother and daughter. I heard one story where there were seven of them, all sisters, all beautiful princesses, all virgins. You know that sort of story.
There was a great deal of variety as to who exactly I was rescuing the girls from. Bandits were fairly common, but there were also wicked uncles, stepmothers, and shamble-men. One story, in an odd twist, had me rescuing them from Adem mercenaries. There was even an ogre or two.
While I did occasionally rescue the girls from a troupe of traveling players, I’m proud to say I never heard a story where they were kidnapped by the Edema Ruh.
The story generally had one of two endings. In the first I leapt to the battle like Prince Gallant and fought sword on sword until everyone was dead, fled, or appropriately repentant. The second ending was more popular. It involved me calling down fire and lightning from the sky after the fashion of Taborlin the Great.
In my favorite version of the story, I met a helpful tinker on the road. I shared my dinner, and he told me of two children stolen from a nearby farm. Before I left, he sold me an egg, three iron nails, and a shabby cloak that could render me invisible. I used the items and my considerable wit to save the children from the clutches of a cunning, hungry trow.
But while there were many versions of that tale, the story of Felurian was more popular by far. The song I’d written had made the journey west as well. And since songs hold their shape better than stories, the details about my encounter with Felurian were moderately close to the truth.
When Wil and Sim pressed me for details, I told them the whole story. It took me a while to convince them I was telling the truth. Rather, it took me a while to convince Sim. For some reason, Wil was perfectly willing to accept the existence of the Fae.
I didn’t blame Sim. Until I saw her, I would have bet solid money Felurian didn’t exist. It’s one thing to enjoy a story, but it’s quite another to take it for the truth.
“The real question,” Sim said thoughtfully, “is how old you really are.”
“I know that one,” Wilem said with the somber pride of someone desperately pretending to not be drunk. “Seventeen.”
“Ahhhh . . .” Sim held up a finger dramatically. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
Sim leaned forward in his chair. “You went into the Fae, spent some time there, then came out to discover only three days had passed,” Sim said. “Does that mean you’re only three days older? Or did you age while you were there?”
I was quiet for a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted.
“In stories,” Wilem said, “boys go into Fae and return as men. That implies one grows older.”
“If you’re going to go by stories,” Sim said.
“What else?” Wil asked. “Will you consult
Sim gave an agreeable shrug.
“So,” Wil said, turning to me. “How long were you there?”
“That’s hard to figure,” I said. “There wasn’t any day or night. And my memories are a bit odd.” I thought for a long moment. “We talked, swam, ate dozens upon dozens of times, explored a bit. And, well . . .” I paused to clear my throat meaningfully.
“Cavorted,” suggested Wil.
“Thank you. And cavorted quite a bit as well.” I counted the skills Felurian had taught me, and then figured she couldn’t have taught me more than two or three a day. . . .
“It was at least a couple months,” I said. “I shaved once, or was it twice? Time enough for me to grow a bit of a beard.”
Wil rolled his eyes at this, running his hand over his own dark Cealdish beard.
“Nothing like your marvelous facebear,” I said. “Still, mine grew out at least two or three times.”
“So at least two months,” Sim said. “But how long could it have been?”
“Three months?” How many stories had we shared? “Four or five months?” I thought of how slowly we’d had to move my shaed from starlight to moonlight to firelight. “A year?” I thought about the wretched time I’d spent recovering from my encounter with the Cthaeh. “I’m sure it couldn’t have been more than a year. . . .” My voice didn’t sound nearly as convincing as I would have liked.
Wilem raised an eyebrow. “Well then, happy birthday.” He lifted his glass to me. “Or birthdays, depending.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-SIX
Failures
During spring term I experienced several failures.
The first of these was mostly a failure in my own eyes. I had expected that picking up Yllish would be relatively easy. But nothing could have been further from the truth.
In a handful of days I had learned enough Tema to defend myself in court. But Tema was a very orderly language, and I’d already known a little bit from my studies. Perhaps most importantly, there was a great deal of overlap between Tema and Aturan. They used the same characters for writing, and many words are related.
Yllish shared nothing with Aturan or Shaldish, or even with Ademic for that matter. It was an irrational, tangled mess. Fourteen indicative verb tenses. Bizarre formal inflections of address.
You couldn’t merely say “the Chancellor’s socks.” Oh no. Too simple. All ownership was oddly dual: as if the Chancellor owned his socks, but at the same time the socks somehow also gained ownership of the Chancellor. This altered the use of both words in complex grammatical ways. As if the simple act of owning socks somehow fundamentally changed the nature of a person.
So even after months of study with the Chancellor, Yllish grammar was still a muddy jumble to me. All I had to show for my work was a messy smattering of vocabulary. My understanding of the story knots was even worse. I tried to improve matters by practicing with Deoch. But he wasn’t much of a teacher and admitted the only person he’d ever known who could read story knots had been his grandmother who had died when he was very young.
Second came my failure in advanced chemistry, taken under Mandrag’s giller, Anisat. While the material fascinated me, I did not get along with Anisat himself.
I loved the discovery chemistry offered. I loved the thrill of experiment, the challenge of trial and retrial. I loved the puzzle of it. I also will admit a somewhat foolish fondness toward the apparatus involved. The bottles and tubes. The acids and salts. The mercury and flame. There is something primal in chemistry, something that defies explication. Either you feel it or you don’t.
Anisat didn’t feel it. For him chemistry was written journals and carefully penned rows of numbers. He would make me perform the same titration four times simply because my notation was incorrect. Why write a number down? Why should I take ten minutes to write what my hands could finish in five?
So we argued. Gently at first, but neither of us were willing to back down. As a result, barely two span into the term we ended up shouting at each other in the middle of the Crucible while thirty students looked on, openmouthed with dismay.
He told me to leave his class, calling me an irreverent dennerling with no respect for authority. I called him a pompous slipstick who had missed his true calling as a counting-house scribe. In all fairness, we both had some valid points.
My other failure came in mathematics. After listening to Fela chatter excitedly for months about what she was learning under Master Brandeur, I set out to further my number lore.
Unfortunately the loftier peaks of mathematics did not delight me. I am no poet. I do not love words for the sake of words. I love words for what they can accomplish. Similarly, I am no arithmetician. Numbers that speak only
