For a long time, I avoided the rune book.
I didn't admit it, of course. I had reasons, or told myself I did. The primers were more urgent; I needed to understand the people around me. The histories mattered; I needed to understand the world. The herbal was practical; I needed medicine, for Berta. There was always some other book that looked more pressing than the slim grey volume on the bottom shelf with its title glowing faint blue.
The truth was simpler. I was afraid of it.
I'd sat down with The First Grammar of Runes once, on my very first night in the Reading Room, and understood nothing. Not one page. And some small, stubborn part of me, the part that had always been top of the class, the part that had never failed an exam in two lifetimes, did not want to feel that again.
So I left it where it was. Every time I came into the Reading Room I walked past it, and the blue letters on its spine flickered at me, patient and steady, like a lighthouse waiting for a ship that kept steering the other way.
The months went by.
I kept my rules. Library only during night sleep. One night in three for real rest. Stop when the thread thins. Whenever the sheet got smudged, I copied them onto a fresh one and propped it back against the lamp.
And I made progress, slowly and steadily, the way I'd always liked best.
A Brief Bestiary of the Common Roads taught me that the dark forest north of the estate held creatures called gloomwolves and thornbacks, and something called a mire-hag that I sincerely hoped never to meet. A Treatise on Weights, Measures and Coinage taught me that a silver was worth twenty coppers and a gold was worth twenty silvers. I did the sum before I could stop myself: Berta's reduced wage of three silver came to sixty coppers a month, which by the treatise's own tables was very little money indeed. The Common Calendar taught me that the year had twelve months of thirty days, plus five feast days at midwinter that belonged to no month at all.
Book after book, comprehended and logged.
Volumes Comprehended: 14 / 48
Outside the Library, I had my first birthday. Berta made honey porridge to mark it, Tomas carved me a small wooden horse to keep the sparrow company, and Elke sang the song about the pig who went to the tavern, all fourteen verses, with actions. I crawled now, fast and with great determination, and pulled myself up on furniture, and could say Berta and Tomas and lessa and no. I used no a great deal, mostly when someone tried to put me down for a nap at a time that didn't suit my schedule.
And every night, I walked past the rune book.
Then one evening, standing in front of the shelves trying to choose what to read next, I realized there were only two books left on the bottom shelf that I hadn't touched. One was The Elements of Mana. The other was The First Grammar of Runes.
I'd run out of excuses.
I sighed and took the rune book down.
It was exactly as baffling as I remembered.
The first page still showed that single rune in soft blue light: the circle, the line through it, the curl at one end. The paragraph beneath still talked about "the root of becoming" and "the first verb of manifestation" and "the threshold between intention and form." I still understood every word in isolation and had no idea what they meant together.
I read it four times. I read the next page, and the next. Nothing improved.
I was about to put it back for another year when I noticed something I'd missed the first time.
In the margin beside the first rune, so faint I'd taken it for a smudge, there was writing.
I tilted the page toward the lamp. Pencil, light grey, nearly invisible against the cream paper. The hand was small and sharp and fast, the letters leaning forward as if they were late for something. It was in the Common Tongue, which I could now read without effort.
Do not start here.
I stared at it.
Below, in the same hand, a little smaller:
Read Elements of Mana first, you fool. Feel it before you read about it. I wasted a whole year on this page.
I lowered myself into the armchair very slowly, the book open on my knees.
Someone had written in this book.
Someone had sat where I was sitting, in this room or one like it, with this exact book open, and been every bit as lost as I was. And they'd been annoyed enough to scribble a warning in the margin for whoever came next.
I wasted a whole year on this page.
The Keeper had chosen before. They'd told me so. Sometimes, they'd said, when I asked whether it had gone well, and I could still hear exactly how they'd said it.
When I'd thought about those others at all, I'd pictured them as distant figures from long ago, as faceless as the Keeper. I had never once pictured them in an armchair, frowning at the same page, muttering, sharpening a pencil with a knife and blowing the shavings off the desk.
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I turned the page, and my fingers weren't steady. There were more notes. Not on every page, but scattered through the book like footprints left in snow by someone who'd come this way before me.
Beside a complicated diagram of interlocking runes: This is wrong in the third edition. Use the older form.
Beside a long, dense paragraph on something called "the conditional binding": Skip this until you have read chapter nine. Trust me.
Beside a rune shaped like a spiral: Beautiful, isn't it?
And on the very last page, below the final line of print, a longer note in the same quick, leaning hand:
The language beneath all languages. Every word you have ever spoken, in any tongue, is a shadow cast by one of these. Learn them, and you will never again mistake the shadow for the thing.
—O.
I didn't sleep well that night. My body slept like a stone; my mind wouldn't stop turning that single letter over.
O.
Who had they been? When? From Earth, like me? From this world? Somewhere else entirely? One of the ones for whom it went well, or one of the others?
The next night I went looking. I took every book in the Reading Room down from its shelf, one at a time, and paged through each with the lamp tilted close, hunting for faint grey pencil.
I found it in four more.
In Histories of the Western Kingdoms, beside the evasive passage on the Sundering: Liars. Ask the elves what really happened.
In the bestiary, beside the mire-hag: Fire. Lots of fire. Do not let it sing to you. I committed that one to memory on the spot.
In the herbal, beside the recipe for a simple fever tea: Add a pinch of meadowsweet. The book forgets it. Every herbwife knows. I copied that onto my medicine sheet, under Fevers first, and underlined it.
And in On the Nature of Gifts, right beside Brother Anselm's paragraph about the Scholar family being "a polite misfortune," in letters pressed so hard they'd nearly gone through the paper:
Anselm was an idiot.
I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the floor.
Whoever O had been, I thought I'd have liked them.
So I did as the note said. I put the rune book aside and opened The Elements of Mana.
It was a good book, clear and patient, written by a teacher for students. Mana, it explained, was the energy that flowed through all living things and through the world itself, the way water flows through soil. It was in the air, the earth, plants, animals, people. Every living creature also held a small store of it, an inner wellspring, usually felt as a warmth somewhere below the navel.
In most people, the book said, that wellspring was faint and quiet, and they lived their whole lives barely aware of it. People with mage gifts felt it strongly from early childhood. Anyone else could learn to sense it with practice, though few bothered.
At the end of the first chapter there was an exercise meant for children.
Sit quietly in a calm place. Close your eyes and breathe slowly. Place your attention, the way you might place your hand, just below your navel. Do not try to feel anything. Simply wait. In time, if you are patient, you will notice a small warmth there, like a coal in a banked fire. That is your wellspring. Do not try to move it. Only notice it, and come back to it each day.
In the margin, in faint grey pencil: Do this in the real world, not in here. Your body is out there. So is your mana.
That made sense once I thought it through. The body I wore in the Library wasn't my real one. It was a remembered body, a shape my mind took out of habit. My real body was out there, small and new, asleep in a cradle by a stove.
So I tried.
The next fine afternoon, Berta carried me out to the bench under the dead apple tree and put me down on a blanket in the long grass while she mended. I sat up, the way I'd learned to, put my hands in my lap, shut my eyes, and breathed slowly. I set my attention just below my navel, and waited.
Nothing.
I tried the next day, and the next. Every afternoon she took me outside, and every morning in the cradle while she milked the goat. Sit. Breathe. Wait. The grass stems prickled the backs of my legs through the blanket. A fly kept landing on my ear and walking around the rim of it. Nothing.
Berta noticed, of course. One afternoon she peered at me over her mending and asked what I was doing, sitting there with my eyes shut like a little old monk.
I opened my eyes and said I was thinking. It was one of my newer words. It came out as tinking, but she got it. She snorted and wanted to know what someone my age could possibly have to think about, and I weighed the question against the dozen or so words I was allowed to say out loud and settled on one. "Warm," I said, and patted my stomach.
She laughed, said she was glad to hear it, that was what porridge was for, and went back to her mending, still chuckling about little old monks.
It took nearly two months.
I had almost stopped expecting anything. I'd begun to wonder whether my body was simply too young, or whether a scholar's gift came with no wellspring worth mentioning. I kept at it anyway, because the note said to, and because by then the stillness itself had become something I looked forward to: a few quiet minutes in the grass with the sun on my face and the bees working the weeds and Berta humming beside me.
Then one afternoon in late spring, sitting under the apple tree with my eyes closed, I noticed it.
It wasn't dramatic. No flash, no rush of power. The smallest thing in the world. A tiny warmth just below my navel, like the last ember at the bottom of a fire that's nearly out. If I hadn't been paying attention, I'd never have known it was there.
But I was paying attention. And it was there.
I didn't move. I didn't try to do anything with it. I sat very still and noticed it, the way the book said, the way you'd sit beside a sleeping bird and take care not to wake it.
Hello, I thought.
It didn't answer. But it didn't go away.
That night, in the Reading Room, I finished The Elements of Mana.
[VOLUME COMPREHENDED] The Elements of Mana
Volumes Comprehended: 15 / 48
Without pausing, I took the rune book down again and opened it to the first page.
The circle. The line through it. The curl.
And this time I saw it.
It wasn't a picture. It had never been a picture. It was a map. The circle was a vessel, a wellspring, exactly like the small warm ember I'd felt below my navel that afternoon. The line running through it and curling at the end was a flow: something moving out of the vessel, into the world, and becoming something else.
The root of becoming. Of course. The threshold between intention and form. Mana inside you, flowing out, turning into something real.
I hadn't understood it before because I'd been trying to read it like a word. It wasn't a word. It was a description of something that happened inside a living body, and you couldn't understand it from outside any more than you could learn the taste of a tomato from a botany textbook. You had to feel it first.
Feel it before you read about it.
The rune on the page seemed to brighten slightly.
I looked at the margin. The faint grey note was unchanged. Do not start here. But below it I saw, for the first time, one more line, smaller, which I could have sworn hadn't been there before. Perhaps I simply hadn't been able to see it.
There. Now you've begun.
I sat with the book open in my lap and looked out at the garden. The sprout had grown again. It was taller than I was now, a slender young sapling with a thin grey trunk and small, oval, finely toothed leaves.
They looked, I thought, very much like apple leaves.
"Now I've begun," I said softly.
Then I turned to the second page.