"Cast it," said Gang Wolha.
The east hall at sixth bell was empty except for the two of them, the light coming in long and orange across a floor nine prodigies had spent the afternoon sweating on. Wolha had taken her stool to the centre of the room, which she did when she intended to sit still for a while, and had put Yeju on the casting line six feet in front of it: a distance chosen so neither of them could pretend to be doing anything else.
Yeju cast [Spark]. The dinner-plate of fire bloomed off her palm, hung a second, went out. Her ears rang faintly. They had started doing that this week, and she had not mentioned it to anybody, including herself.
[ Cast successful. One point. Balance: 10,588. ]
Wolha watched the empty air where the fire had been. "Again."
Yeju cast it again. [ Balance: 10,587. ]
"Again."
"Can I ask why."
"No." Wolha sat with her forearms on her knees. "Again."
Yeju cast it eleven more times. By the fifth her hands were shaking. By the eighth the ringing had a pitch to it. By the eleventh the fire came out the size of a coin, and she had to sit down on the good hall's floor with her head between her knees while the room did something unpleasant at the edges.
[ Balance: 10,576. ]
Twelve points for thirteen casts, and I can't stand up. A real mage throws this a hundred times a day for free.
"There it is," said Wolha.
Yeju looked up. The scarred side of the woman's face was toward the window. She suspected that was deliberate.
"You've got a floor," Wolha said. "Every mage has a floor. Mine's about four hundred casts of anything under third circle, and I'm Ring seven, and I've been building it since before your mother met your father. Yours is eleven." She said the number without any emphasis at all, and it landed harder than shouting. "Eleven casts of the cheapest form in the school, and you're on my floor with your head down. I've seen Rift-hands with a punctured lung do better."
"I know."
"You don't, or you'd have told me." Wolha's eye came around. "Your ears are ringing."
How does she even...
"You've been favouring the left since the fourth cast, and you've stopped hearing the drills in the yard, which everyone in this hall complains about by the second hour. That's not a mana problem. That's a body problem, and it means you've been casting past your floor all week and lying about it to somebody. Probably yourself, since you don't seem to have anyone else."
The hall was quiet except for the yard noise Yeju could not hear.
"Sit up. You'll vomit like that."
Yeju sat up. The hall did a slow half-turn and settled. Wolha watched with no expression, then reached into her coat and threw something. Yeju caught it out of reflex: a heel of bread, wrapped in wax paper, still faintly warm.
"Eat that. Your problem's half mana and half sugar, and only one of those is interesting." Wolha waited while she ate. It took a while. The bread was very good, which meant it had come out of the ovens at four in the morning, which meant Gang Wolha had been up at four in the morning. Yeju filed that and did not have the energy to examine it.
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"Here's your situation." Wolha took out the pipe and did not light it, her working configuration. "The eight others in this room can throw first-circle forms until the sun goes down. In four years, three of them will be Ring four. They'll do it by grinding. You cast until it's free, then you cast the next thing until that's free, and after twenty years you're something. That's the whole ladder. It's not glamorous. It's arithmetic."
"And I can't climb it."
"No. Your core's decorative. It'll be decorative when you're forty." She turned the pipe over. "So we're not going to climb it. You're going to do something else, and I want you to understand it now, at the start, because everyone who does this hates it for the first year."
Here it comes. The part where she tells me to work hard.
"You're going to master one form," Wolha said. "One. Not five. Not three. One, all the way down, until you can throw it in your sleep, drunk, bleeding, in the dark, without thinking, and it costs you nothing at all."
Oh.
"You have one first-circle form. [Spark]. It's a candle." She pointed the pipe stem at her. "A candle, thrown at the right thing at the right moment, has ended more fights than you'd believe. Not because it's strong. Because everyone in a fight is deciding, constantly, and a candle in the eyes at the moment of a decision makes a man decide wrong." She sat back. "You did it to Taewoong by accident, and you've been telling yourself it was luck. It was half luck. The other half was that you threw the candle at the second he'd committed. That's not a core. That's a clock."
Yeju sat on the floor and said nothing for a moment.
"How long," she said.
"To master [Spark]? For you? Nine months. Maybe a year."
"A year."
"A year to make one candle free. That's the trade." Wolha stood and stretched, and something in her shoulder made a sound a shoulder should not make. "Meanwhile the boy in the third row will learn eleven forms and everyone will clap. In four years he'll have eleven forms he can throw at half strength when he's frightened, and you'll have one thing you can throw when you're unconscious. That's my offer. It's a bad offer. It's the only honest one anybody's going to make you in this building."
"Why one," Yeju said.
Wolha stopped with the pipe halfway to her pocket. "Explain the question."
"You said master one form. Not two. Two would take eighteen months and I'd have two." Her hands were still doing the shaking thing, so she kept them flat on her knees where she could see them. "Everyone else in the hall learns eleven. You're telling me to learn one. That's not slow. That's a different ladder entirely, and you decided it in about an hour. So why one?"
Wolha looked at her for a long moment. Out in the yard a drill sergeant was shouting at somebody about their feet, and Yeju could hear it again, which meant she'd been sitting on this floor a while.
"Because I watched you for two hours and you didn't ask me for anything," Wolha said. "Not once. Nine of them asked me something today. Jang asked to be moved up the rotation. The Ha girl asked what she did wrong on her thirty-eighth. You sat against a wall and counted their casts." She put the pipe away. "People who ask for things get taught things. People who count get taught one thing, all the way down, because they'll do it, and because in four years they'll be the only ones still standing when the clever ones run out of forms."
She started for the door. Then she stopped, and did not turn around.
"The ringing. It's your ears warning you. When it stops warning you, that's when you're in trouble, because there'll be nothing left to warn. I've buried four people who cast through the ringing." She went. "Ten more casts, Han Yeju. Not eleven. Then go eat something."
The door closed.
Yeju sat on the good hall's floor while the room settled. After a while she got up and cast [Spark] ten more times, badly, and stopped at ten.
[ Balance: 10,566. ]
[ Would you like the itemization? ]
No.
[ It's short. Twenty-three casts today, twenty-three points, and a woman who's never met you diagnosed your entire situation in an hour by watching your ears. ] A pause. [ You could have bought [Ember Coil] tonight. Four hundred. You've got ten thousand. You could have bought nine second-circle forms, never mastered any of them, and thrown fire like a real mage for as long as the points lasted. ]
And then I'd have nothing.
[ And then you'd have nothing. ] Another pause, longer than the panel usually took. [ For the record, host. Nine out of ten hosts buy the forms. ]
Yeju stopped in the doorway of the empty hall.
Hosts. Plural.
She turned around. The panel was already gone.