There was nothing to be done for it. It was my suggestion to take her back, and I knew I didn’t have it in me to make her suffer out there for another two months.
Why do I keep offering to help people when it only gets me into trouble?
The unfairness I felt as I trudged back to Hubli only brought up my resentment towards Avis; and Khea–I imagined pounding my boots into her ribs instead of the crunching snow. She was the last person I’d helped and it cost me a full season of letting Avis rip me to shreds.
It took three days to hike back, and when we arrived, Rhada was so thankful for the stones beneath her feet she nearly bent down and kissed them. I was more grateful that we’d made it in before the evening chill could settle in earnest. Rhada made her way to the baths, and I continued down the corridor towards my room.
“Welcome back,” a small, blonde girl said to me as I walked past. She sat on a snow-covered bench, buried in her thick coat that looked to be made for someone twice her size.
“Thanks,” was all I could muster for a disheartened reply. I didn’t want to be back at Myxini–and I certainly didn’t want to see Khea. She participated in my captivity over last summer. It was unfair of me, but I just didn’t want to see her.
“Lark, I–”
“Just go away,” I muttered, and continued on to hall of doors.
At least I’ll get to sleep in a nice feather bed again.
I was ready to throw myself in my room and sleep off my anger for a few days, but opening the door revealed Avis waiting for me. “What are you doing here?” I asked, my words laced with venom.
“Don’t you think I should be asking you that?” he replied with a smirk.
“What do you want?”
“Well since you don’t have to put on the who’s-the-best-tracker show anymore, we can get down to the real work.” I was sure my mouth fell open. It was the first time he mentioned that my Tracker rate was a façade.
“You didn’t really think I didn’t know, did you?” I wasn’t sure what I thought, but Avis had been my mentor for well over a year, and that was the first I’d even thought about it.
“Why do you think Lheda assigned you to me? There aren’t many Readers, and even fewer who are fit to mentor the younger students.”
It hit me like a blow to the guts. Avis was a
Reader
? He had been privy to my every thought and whim since the first day I met him? Every silent jab and heated insult, every bit of humiliation when I lost to him in a fight. He had known and felt it all in the moment it happened. My paranoia subsided when I realized that I didn’t really spend much time with him. He was prone to long disappearances and sudden re-emergences, so maybe it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. “So what do you want me to do?”
“Eat.” I rolled my eyes, already frustrated that Avis had shown up again.
Why couldn’t he leave me alone?
I remembered to check my thoughts around him, and sure enough his face held a hint of a smirk.
Great.
He must have planned it intentionally; the dining hall was completely stuffed with students chilled from the recent snow. We were served a thick venison stew with potatoes and carrots made specifically to thaw a person to their bones, and it did the trick.
I ate mechanically, vaguely aware that Avis spoke to me, but I didn’t hear a word of it; the mental volume was far too high. There were too many students packed in one room, and it would be a lie if I said I hadn’t been spoiled from the near perfect quiet of the Creekmont.
“Lark, will you listen?” Avis shouted at me.
“Huh? What?”
“Try to concentrate. Block them out.”
Oh really Avis? Why didn’t I think of that? Just make all the voices stop. Just get the thoughts of nearly a hundred students to just go quiet. Sure, why not?
“It’s not impossible, you just have to try.” Thankfully, I was almost out of stew anyway and made a quick decision to sacrifice the last few bites in exchange for the sanctuary of my room. Avis followed behind me. “Well that was pathetic.”
“Just leave me alone.”
“Are you going to cry like a child? Go on, then, cry,” he chided, clearly intent on angering me.
Well, it worked.
I lunged at him and, just like the hundreds of times before, Avis caught my wrist well before I could reach him and spun me onto the ground.
Dammit!
“Don’t you get it?” he said as he left and closed the door behind him.
Get what? That I can’t beat you?
I lay in bed that night but didn’t sleep. I was angry for a lot of reasons, but I could feel it boiling closer to the surface. I was angry that I couldn’t be out tracking with the one person who might actually be a real friend, that I was trapped in this school yet again, that I couldn’t beat Avis no matter how hard I tried, and that he had been listening to my thoughts all that time.
On some level I knew it was unfair to despise him for it; he only did to me what I had done to everyone else for years. And why was I so angry with Khea? At one point, I had felt an insanely strong need to protect her. Maybe that was still inside me somewhere, just buried in a tomb of frustration. She didn’t ask me to attack Shaz, and she didn’t even know the real reason; she never knew what he planned for her.
My recognition of the illogical nature of my anger did little to soothe it. Once again, I was isolated with Avis and there was nothing I could do to protect my innermost secrets.
In fact, he probably already knows each and every one of them.
~~~~~~~~~~
In the morning, I knew I would have to address the situation with Rhada. I couldn’t let her be punished because of my suggestion that she leave the Tracking group early, and it was an excuse to avoid Avis. When I reached the Headmistress’s chambers, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see Avis there. He leaned against the stone wall looking bored. I knew he was aware of what I wanted, but old habits required me to voice my concerns. “I need to speak with Lheda about Rhada.”
“Of course,” he replied with an infuriating smirk. Not in the mood to play his games, I reached out for a handle before he said, “She’s away.”
I sighed and dropped the arm that seemed to suddenly weigh a hundred pounds. I just couldn’t seem to get anything right lately. “Where is she?”
“Away from the grounds.”
“For how long?” Avis just shrugged and smiled, clearly pleased with himself. “I need to talk to someone about switching Rhada from Tracker to–”
What? Is there a name for Sparks that deal with animals like hers?
“Handler.” Avis offered.
Oh, for once you’re being helpful.
“She’s not a Tracker. She should be a Handler then. What about the Headmaster? Where are his quarters?”
“Oh, Mathias doesn’t like to be bothered with the mediocrity of running the school. He much prefers keeping an eye on his favorite students.”
“Mathias is the Headmaster?”
Could that possibly be true? The same Mathias that mentors Khea?
“The very one.”
No wonder she was so reluctant to disobey him.
I wasn’t sure what to do with the new information.
Avis was nearly laughing outright by the end of the conversation.
He planned to tell me this today. But why? And now what would happen to Rhada? Would she be unable to move on because she came back early? Would she start over at Round Three with a new rate, or would she have to start all the way back from Round One?
“I’ll take care of it. Right now, you need to eat.”
Oh no, not the dining hall again.
“If you hate it so much, the block out the thoughts you don’t want to hear.” By the time we arrived, there were only about ten students involved in several small conversations over some piping hot waffles with berry jam. “Just turn off your mind to them.”
Thanks.
I sat for several minutes in concentration while my waffles grew soggy and cold. Still, I could hear a Striker girl’s nervous thoughts about her Round Six test, and the boy next to her who didn’t want her to move on without him. Even the cook thought what spoiled brats we all were for not realizing what a treat berry jam was at that time of year.
“It’s not working. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do.”
“You’re not trying hard enough then.”
For the rest of spring, Avis tortured me with his insistence that I be the first to arrive at the dining hall for every meal and the last to leave. I quickly became the butt of all kinds of jokes, both aloud and in thought. “Has to learn to eat before he learns to track” or “Too skinny to make it through the winter” were some of the most popular varieties, but there were worse ones, too. “Parents didn’t love him so he eats to fill his empty heart” was particularly cruel.
All he would say was, “That’s not good enough” or “Why don’t you try for once?” or whatever useless, unhelpful badgering came to mind.
By the start of my fourteenth summer, all my time in the dining hall at least earned me a new set of brown pants that were several inches longer, as well as some substantial meat on my bones, if not any actual accomplishment in terms of my Spark. Avis was about as useful as a cart with a bad wheel.
Micha and Iseut returned from the Oakwick a week later. They had grown close in their months in the wilderness, and each of them was significantly improved in their tracking. I left my vexing session with Avis in the dining hall to meet them at the gate when they arrived, surprised at how good it was to see them again.
“Damn you smell,” I told Micha and laughed; it felt like a long time since I’d seen him.
“You spend four months sleeping outside and bathing in frozen creeks and see how great you smell.” In Micha’s thoughts were something else, something he didn’t know how to process. He had started to think of Iseut as more than just a fellow tracker.
I was sure Micha was about as good a friend–and as good a man–as there could be. He had known my secret for a few years and was perfectly loyal; he had never considered telling anyone. I hoped things would work out for him, whether with Iseut or someone else. He deserved it.
As I headed back to my studies in the dining hall, leaving Micha to the baths, I noticed Khea at the end of the corridor. It had been a long time since I’d seen her, and I wasn’t sure if we were even still friends anymore. I had talked to her so infrequently since we arrived at Myxini that it seemed impossible we had anything in common; she slipped away without a word, and I knew she recognized it as well.
Unlike Micha and Iseut, who were promptly promoted to Round Four, I was stuck–stuck with Avis, stuck in the dining hall, stuck with no progress.
It occurred to me one day that Spirituals probably had a particularly challenging learning process due to the evanescent nature of their Sparks. Elementals could see fire or water or earth to manipulate it, although Puffers probably had a little bit harder time the wind. Naturals could look at a trail or a tree or an animal and sense things about it.
But what could I do with thoughts?
They were as momentary as anything could be.
It was that line of thought that led me to imagine I could see the thoughts that streamed out of someone’s head and moved towards mine. The first few times I tried it in the corridor or out in the gardens where I could practice on students one at a time. At least I felt a little more in control if I could picture what was happening when thoughts invaded my head.
One day in the middle of the summer, as I sat in yet another futile session with Avis, the thoughts of the dining hall were occupied mostly by something called the Moonwater.
“Don’t worry about it. Concentrate.” I did as Avis told me, though I just ate my dinner and pictured the stream of silken threads of thought float to me from all around the large room. The little bit of visualization allowed me to eat my meals at a normal pace.
There’s no water on the moon. What is that supposed to mean?
It didn’t make any sense.
“Lark! Concentrate.”
I’d like to put you on the moon.
“Fine, it’s a festival, at the end of every third summer, to celebrate the harvest moon as it falls over the lake. Lheda just announced it this morning.” I wasn’t interested in festivals. Wine and silly flower hats wouldn’t help me graduate my rounds before I died of old age. “Right. So concentrate. I like what you’re doing with the threads.”
I had the threads pictured in my mind, tiny spider-silk lines that connected me to each student. But that was it; that was as far as I could go. I could only picture the threads. And then it hit me. Again I imagined each thread as it sent the thoughts of the Moonwater to me. I selected a thread and cut it as if I wielded a sharp knife. Nothing.
“Keep going,” Avis urged.
I continued with my mental knife, and sliced through the threads one by one. When I was about halfway through, the volume in my head quieted significantly, which made it easier to control the process. Less than a minute later, I could hear my own thoughts in a way that only happened when I went tracking alone.
My thoughts were finally clear. I could feel the vibration of my breath and actually use my ears to hear the conversations going on around me. I hastily ate a bite of turkey, closed my eyes, and savored it in a way I hadn’t been able to in years. When I opened my eyes, Avis was gone and my third black stripe lay across the table.
Obsidian
My newfound mental quiet had several unanticipated effects. After a few quick snips I was able to eliminate the thoughts of students who wandered at night and interrupted my sleep. No more excited thoughts about girls in night clothes or wondering if they would get caught sneaking around; just nice, peaceful sleep.
At meals, I could concentrate on eating, what my food tasted like, and the topic of the conversation. The start of Round Four was when I started to gain some serious weight and inches, and by the end of my sixteenth summer, I barely resembled the thin, dirty boy that left Lagodon. I was taller than nearly every other boy my age; my shirts had become so tight that Avis traded them in for some that would accommodate my broader shoulders.
Initially, it seemed like Round Four would be the quickest and easiest of all the rounds. I had mastered archery at a young age and was better than the other students by far. I was reminded that my Spark dealt with hunting, at least in part, and archery was the method I had culminated the most. It seemed that having a Spark wasn’t the only factor in a student’s success; we had to work to learn about ourselves and control our abilities, just as Iseut had done in the Creekmont.