Instead she sat down under the trees past the garden, where the wood took back the clearing, and watched the fireflies winking at her, appearing and disappearing in unexpected places. She thought about Max being a true student.
As hard as she could, she tried to put her mind to sticks flying up, and pieces of air, and peaches and water and all the things the others could do so much more easily than she could. She wished she understood things the way Max did. Then she could look in the big books and know all the answers and they could be home, away from the awful noise down in the valley. Maybe if she were better at things, she could help open the window, but right now all she could do was sit and listen to the mist grumble and mutter as the sky faded to denim, and after a while Susan called her in for dinner.
By the end of that first week, even Jean could make her stick, or pebbles, or leaves, fly. Still, she’d lose interest rapidly, and whatever she’d sent up would rain down on them, sometimes knocking one of them on the head if they failed to pay attention.
“It’s hard to keep thinking of it,” Jean said by way of apology.
It didn’t get easier for Kate, though she did learn to think a little more of the one thing and not the others, and could hold on to it longer, until one day she lifted Laysia a foot or so and sent her laughing, in a sudden flurry of waving arms, several paces across the clearing.
It was easy, during days like that, to forget that they were waiting. But at night they knew it. As they walked toward Laysia’s house through the rose gold of evening, the light turning the leaves to silk and the tree trunks to velvet, they could hear the low static of the mist and feel the pressure of it like the weight of the sun on an August afternoon. And they remembered.
They were waiting for Max, and he didn’t come.
After the first day, Susan and Nell had stopped arguing about it. But their silence bothered Kate more than the talk had. Some nights, when the others were sleeping, Kate saw Susan go to the window of the small bedroom that looked out into the black of the wood and peer through it. Or she’d go to the table in the big room, where Laysia sat bent over her books. Kate couldn’t hear their whispered talk, but once she heard Susan’s voice rise.
“Yes, he would ask for us!” she said. “He will.”
Kate wanted to go and join them, to ask Susan how she could be sure. But she knew Susan wouldn’t welcome the interruption. She’d only say not to worry, that Kate wouldn’t understand, that she’d take care of it. Susan thought Kate was little. She wouldn’t change her mind even if Kate could make sticks fly. Even if she could lift Laysia herself.
Halfway through the second week of lessons in the clearing, a drizzle cut the day short. The four of them had spent the morning making fire and dousing it, but the dull persistence of the rain sent them home. Nell asked why Laysia couldn’t push it away, the way she did the wind, and she said that it would be wrong to deprive the ground of nourishment.
“Rain is part of the pattern, made by a far greater mind than mine,” she said. So they went back. Kate lingered for one more look at the far-off ocean, an iron line in the faded landscape, before following the others. She hated to leave the wide-open space and retreat through the damp wood, slogging along as the trees closed in. The gray light and dingy sky reminded her of the mist, and she began to feel hopeless. The scholars were stronger than Susan, than Laysia, than anyone. They could shut the world down faster than rain.
Nell must have been thinking the same thing, because when they’d gotten back, and all Kate could do was watch the rain pebble the windowpane, she heard Nell ask Laysia how the Genius had managed to beat the scholars in the first place.
“They could demolish him. Why didn’t they?” she asked. “They could have pulled the guns right out of those red cloaks’ hands! Light the air on fire around them! Why didn’t they win?”
Laysia set lamps on the table in front of Nell and watched them a moment, until flames sparked and leaped behind the glass globes.
“So say all the young watchers when they begin. So said my brother when he first took the watcher’s oath. To see and defend, they say. But if I can make fire in this room, or in the clearing, does it mean I can do the same when the threat comes? If one man runs at me, thinking his own violent thoughts, shouting them to make himself fierce and give himself courage, what about me? Don’t I hear him? What does it do to me to hear him?”
Nell looked steadily at Laysia. Kate saw her open her mouth to say something, then decide against it.
Laysia saw. “You understand, I think. That’s the secret of the mist. It seeps through all the cracks; it can outshout your own thoughts. You can be very strong and still hear. Maybe the strongest hear it most of all. And meanwhile, fear bewilders you. The scholars were not prepared
