As Avis had said, several sets of clothes were placed in the drawers of the oak dresser, dark green tops to go with brown bottoms. I laid my bow and quiver against the stone wall in the corner then folded and put away the clothes I wore from home. I wished I still had my father’s ring to place there as well.
He would be so disappointed if he knew.
I returned to the dining hall and observed the other students: where they got their bowls, what they said to the woman, where they sat. The magnitude of thoughts in the room was enough to significantly distract me, but I managed to get an idea of what it would take to get some food.
I managed to mimic what I’d seen the other students do, grabbing a tray, plate, and some silverware from a table in the corner, and stood in line. The woman stared at me for a long moment, as if she wanted to decide whether or not to toss me out, but poured me a bowl of stew all the same and sent me on my way. By then, I came to the last part.
Where do I sit?
Everyone seemed to be part of their own little group, but I didn’t see Khea or Micha anywhere, so I sat at one of a few empty tables
. It’s better this way, I doubt I could carry a conversation for long anyway.
I’d barely had time to enjoy the hearty potato stew–the woman might have been an old bag, but she knew how to cook–when I was put to the test.
“So you’re a Tracker?” A boy said as he sat across from me.
“Huh?”
“Your coverings are dark green. That’s the color of a Tracker.” I noticed he must have been a Tracker as well, but the concentration of thoughts all around me made me unsure which were his. “I’m Jhoma. Round Three Tracker. You?” As he spoke he pointed to two black strips of fabric that wrapped around his left sleeve.
“Uh, Lark. I’ll start Round One tomorrow.”
“You haven’t even started yet? Damn you’re fresh! Who’s your mentor?”
I sighed when I was forced to remember, “Avis.”
“Man, that sucks. No one’s graduated from Round Ten with Avis, as far as I know.”
“He doesn’t look that old. How many students could he have had?”
“If you burn out your students as fast as he does, you have time for a lot. Sorry to hear that, man. Where you from anyways?”
“Just a village.”
A fishing village on the west coast that is too insignificant to even make it on the map.
The discord in my head at least helped to block the unpleasant memories of home. I didn’t want to think about it since I had started to learn how little success I was likely to have at Myxini.
“Hey, don’t be so down. Give it a few days, and–you know what, if you need help, just come by and I’ll do what I can. My door has a little piece of red fabric tucked between the stones. Can’t miss it.”
Jhoma stood and moved to put his bowl on another table that was stacked high with dishes. It seemed like he had eaten quickly, but in reality I just ate that slowly. It took considerable concentration to finish my soup and head back to my room. Thankfully, it was far enough from the dining hall to offer some escape.
After an hour of boredom, I was too frustrated to stay put any longer, so I decided to search for Khea and Micha. Hopefully they’d fared better than I had, and hopefully they weren’t in the dining hall. I didn’t want to spend more time there than absolutely necessary.
If I knew Micha at all, he would be with the animals, so I headed for the only ones I could sense. I wasn’t as nearly skilled as Micha, but they were clear enough to point me in the right direction. I found the stables on the southern side of the grounds fairly quickly.
Sure enough, Micha stood in dark green coverings like my own and stroked the nose of a horse. “Micha,” I shouted. I remembered how I must have looked when he saw me and his thoughts became concerned. “My mentor and I got off on the wrong foot,” I explained.
A bit of an understatement, but oh well.
“Really? I like mine a lot.” Micha pulled up the image of a middle-aged man named Edmon. He’d be tutored in his abilities to track and communicate with animals. From what I could tell, Edmon was kind-hearted, and Micha was excited to learn from him.
That’s how it’s supposed to be.
“He seems great,” I said honestly.
“Have you seen Khea?” he asked me, though he thought it well before he spoke aloud. I was more than a little disappointed; I had hoped he would be able to tell me where she was.
“No, you’re the first I’ve seen. Did she go back to the common room after I left?” Micha shook his head. She never came back. His curiosity about where she was and what type of Spark she had paled in comparison to my relentless fear for her safety.
Where could she be?
“I’m going to go look for her. Do you want to come?” Of course, Micha wanted to stay with the horses; he felt better there. “Never mind, you should stay,” I added when I sensed his answer.
“You sure?”
“Yea, I’ll see you around. Let me know how it goes with Edmon.”
“I will.”
I glanced around the open area that surrounded the stables before I left. She was possibly the smallest person at the school, which reminded me of Mother’s old idiom about needles and haystacks, though I wasn’t sure what it meant exactly. Either way, I knew I had my work cut out for me. I walked the grounds, always keeping track of how to get back to my room since each corridor looked much like all the others.
At one point, I came upon a large open area where several students engaged in combat training. Some were as young as nine or ten summers. They wrestled in pairs, some even going so far as to tumble on the ground like angry siblings. Older kids fought each other with knives or swords and, for all intents and purposes, seemed ready to kill each other. They wore no protective gear, and their blades seemed sharp enough to cause serious damage if one of them made even a single mistake.
Past another set of corridors, I found an open lake, densely surrounded by trees on three sides. I moved the other direction; it was all I could do to avoid my urge to run back to the woods. The next few hours passed slowly, and I found just about everything except for Khea. Myxini was far more vast than I could ever have imagined, filled with botanical gardens, libraries, an archery range, and countless other rooms meant for study or training. I didn’t see Khea anywhere.
I managed to make my way back to my room by dusk, though I’d failed to find the girls’ quarters. Without the daylight, there was little more I could do. I was starved, so I hoped, of all places, I’d find her in the dining hall. I dreaded the thought of going back, but I had to eat sooner or later.
I was relieved to find the dining hall far less crowded than it was at lunch. There was a considerable amount of mental chatter, but it was a vast improvement. Micha didn’t appear to be anywhere, let alone Khea, so I went through the process and sat alone with a plate piled with roast duck and steamed cabbage. I tried not to think of Khea, or Avis, which just pushed me toward Edmon and how I wished I had a mentor like him. Instead of an instructor that wanted to teach me to control my Spark, I managed to be assigned to one that apparently wanted to kill me. I hardly wanted to think about what awaited me in the morning, but once I thought of it, I couldn’t think of anything else.
~~~~~~~~~~
A strong arm pulled me straight from bed and dropped me to the floor. Pain shot through my shoulder and rattled my fogged brain. “You have twenty minutes to get dressed and fed. Meet me at Latinia’s Library. Don’t be late.” I’d barely gathered my wits by the time Avis casually walked out into the hallway and disappeared.
My first night was rougher than I imagined it would be. A feather mattress and half a dozen comfortable pillows seemed like the recipe for a good night’s sleep, but I hadn’t anticipated the other students. There were rules against sneaking out after dark, or so I’d learned from the numerous boys who snuck out for one reason or another. Many of them were exhilarated just to break the rules, so their thoughts were loud in my head. It was even worse than Lagodon.
I had no choice but to slip into my coverings as fast as I could, pull on my boots, and run to the dining hall. It was packed full, as luck would have it. Apparently breakfast was a busy time, and the intensity of the thoughts made it hard to even walk. I winced, grabbed a plateful of food, and quickly darted back to my room.
I shoveled eggs down so fast I could hardly taste them; I promised myself I’d return the plate later. I didn’t want to risk Avis’s wrath if I showed up late, nor did I want to learn what the punishment for that would be. My face was still swollen from the last time.
The smaller library, Latinia’s, was located in the far northeast corner of the campus. It had the largest collection of books I’d ever seen aside from larger one, Latimeria’s Library, on the western side. I entered, out of breath, and found Avis near a table piled high with books.
“Round One requires you to master the geography and history of Madurai. You will read these texts and study the maps.” He pointed to a second pile of rolled papers as he spoke. “When you think you are ready, I’ll let you know that you’re not.”
“But–”
He was already headed out. He left me alone behind a carved wood chair with a mountain of books before me.
But I can’t read
.
Somehow I didn’t think he would have cared. Maybe that was his plan. Maybe he knew I couldn’t read, so he wanted to throw me into history without any help as a way to get me to quit. I’d have to teach myself, or go home, and there was no chance of that.
It took me multiple trips to get all the maps and books to my room, no easy feat since Latinia’s was all the way across campus.
I bet he did that on purpose just to spite me.
With that thought in mind, and my study materials secured, I took a moment to return the dishes to the dining hall. It surprised me to notice how few people occupied the room, and I made a mental note to arrive at breakfast late every day if possible. I jogged back to the boys’ dorms with one small thing on my mind:
Where’s the red fabric?
He said it couldn’t be missed, but perhaps he meant if I’d already known where it was. I ran up and down the hallway three times before I found it; even then it wasn’t as obvious as he’d made it seem. I knocked quietly, unsure whether he’d even answer the door. He’d said to come back in a few days, and there I was the next day at his door, helpless under the weight of the assignment that had been given to me. He appeared in the doorway with an expression that said he wasn’t all that surprised to see me, “That didn’t take long.”
“I need your help.” He was curious about what kind of help I would need less than an hour into my first day.
“Come on in.” Jhoma only wore his brown pants, and his hair was still tousled from sleep. He slid a green shirt over his head as he asked, “What’s Avis done this time?”
“I have to read a lot of books.”
“Right–geography and history. You’re just going to have to suck it up and get it done. There’s no way around it.” He assumed I didn’t want to read the books because the pile was intimidating. It didn’t even occur to him that someone wouldn’t know how to read.
“It’s not–” I began, then realized I had no idea how to phrase what I needed to say, so I just outright spoke my mind. “I need to learn how to read.”
Jhoma broke out into a steady stream of hearty laughter, which would have sent me to my room if I hadn’t been able to tell why he laughed. He thought it was a joke. In his village, all children were required to learn, as all the villages of the Calloway required. To him, it was impossible that a person of my age wouldn’t know how.
“Can you teach me?” I asked, and he stopped his laughter to consider me.
He doesn’t sound like he’s lying
, he thought, and he had a solution in mind before he’d fully accepted the possibility that I could actually be illiterate.
“Uh, well, you’ll need some paper and ink. They’re both in the study rooms, usually by the window. Bring me at least two sheets and I’ll give you enough to get started.” I wasn’t gone more than three minutes. “I’m going to have to leave for a few days before the snows hit, but I’m going to write down each of the Madurian glyphs for you, and the sounds they make. Study them while I’m gone, then come see me. We can put them into words then, but I have to warn you: this is a slow process.
“There are ten glyphs in Madurian writing, and the written language is completely different from our spoken language,” Jhoma said as he filled a sheet with complex symbols paired with descriptions of their sounds and their uses. He also included intricate explanations of their relationships. There were dozens of combinations, it seemed, and the worst part was that there was no set way to tell what combination was meant to be used–or when. Overall, I was beyond thankful that I could hear Jhoma’s thoughts; without the two years of experience I could access in his mind, I would have been in over my head.
An hour, or maybe longer, passed by, and Jhoma began worry about being late for a lesson. I felt guilty that I’d kept him from it, and even worse that I hadn’t noticed his worry over it earlier. I also knew he wouldn’t say anything because he was kind and really, truly wanted to help me to learn. I made my excuses and left.
Back in my room, I grabbed the first book from the stack. There was no structure to the assignment, and I had no better way to begin than to simply jump right into it. I laid the book next to the sheets Jhoma gave me, and another blank one beneath them, then began the arduous process of translation. Within ten minutes, I had it narrowed down to reveal the title ‘Hurgada’s Fall’. It was hardly a surprise; it made perfect sense that the study of Madurian history would include our single proudest moment.
My heart welled when I realized that I’d read my first words. I was the first in generations to have done so, and yet the accomplishment seemed so small when compared to the large pile of books I had yet to decipher. With a sigh, I opened up to the first page and was grateful that the author’s handwriting was neat and careful, unlike the cramped segments of Jhoma’s notes. Besides that, I was daunted by the first sentence. It was one thing to work through two words, but a whole string of them would be a separate beast entirely.
This is going to take a while.