Aldric came back a week later with a second option, offered the way a man offers something he isn’t entirely sure he should.
“There is someone,” he said, standing in Corwin’s study with his hands folded behind his back like a boy confessing to a broken window.
“A former Guild researcher.
Left the order some twenty years ago, under circumstances nobody explains the same way twice.
She lives in the Hollow, a half-day’s ride east, and studies old things — bestiaries, dead languages, affinities the current Guild has stopped bothering to catalogue because they’re too rare to be profitable.
If anyone in this kingdom could tell you what your son actually has, without also wanting to keep him for it, it would be her.”
“You trust her?” Isolde asked.
“I trained under her, thirty years ago, before either of us left the Guild for our own reasons.” Aldric’s mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“I trust her more than I trust the institution that lost her.
That may not be a high standard.
It is, however, an honest one.”
They rode out on a grey morning three days later — Kaelen, Aldric, two guards, and Wren, who had not been invited and had made her presence a foregone conclusion by the simple method of being already mounted and dressed by the time anyone thought to argue about it.
“You’re not leaving me at home for the interesting part,” she’d informed her mother, with the flat finality of a girl who considered the matter closed before it opened, and Isolde — who recognized her own younger self entirely too well to waste breath on a fight she wouldn’t win — had simply told her to wear the warmer cloak.
The road east ran through the kind of forest that had never quite decided whether it belonged to Ashgrave or to itself, old growth pressing close on both sides, the light coming down in coin-sized patches that moved when the wind moved.
Kaelen felt the woods the way he felt everything — not as a single mood, but as dozens of small ones layered together, none of them human: the low patient hunger of something hunting, the indifferent contentment of something very old that had stopped being afraid of anything in these woods generations ago.
He didn’t mention it.
Wren was busy naming every bird she recognized, loudly, and he’d learned there was a particular pleasure in simply letting her.
The Hollow, when they reached it, turned out to be less a house than an argument between a cottage and a library that the library had mostly won — shelves built into the walls where windows should have been, books stacked on the floor in towers that leaned like they’d made peace with gravity a long time ago, and, at the center of it, a small woman with grey hair cropped close and ink permanently ground into the creases of her hands. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
“Aldric,” she said, without looking up from the text she was annotating.
“You’ve gotten old.”
“You’ve gotten worse at hiding,” Aldric said.
“I found you in one letter.”
“I let you.” She set down her pen and finally looked at the three visitors properly — lingering, for a long moment, on Kaelen, in a way that made the back of his neck prickle.
“This is the one, then.
Mistress Yvaine Rendel,” she added, to the children, as if it were an afterthought.
“Sit.
Both of you.
The boy first.”
She didn’t use a bowl.
She sat across from him at a table cluttered with someone else’s decades of half-finished work, took his hand in both of hers without asking permission — Wren stiffened at that, and Yvaine didn’t so much as glance at her, which Kaelen would later understand was its own kind of respect, the assumption that Wren could handle being ignored for a minute without needing managing — and closed her eyes.
The room didn’t change.
No water warmed, no light shifted.
But Kaelen felt something in return for the first time in his life — a small, deliberate pressure, gentle and utterly controlled, testing the shape of him the way his own gift tested the shape of a room.
She opened her eyes.
“That’s old.
Older than you, by a considerable measure, and I don’t mean that as a riddle — I mean I can’t find the bottom of it, and I’ve been finding the bottoms of things for forty years.” She let go of his hand and sat back, studying him with an expression that had stopped being merely professional.
“I’m not going to pretend I know what you are yet, Kaelen Veyland.
I’m going to tell you what I told your Master Aldric here when he was your sister’s age: the not-knowing is the honest part.
Anyone who tells you they know exactly what a gift like this is, this early, is selling you something.”
“Will you teach him?” Wren asked, before anyone else could get the question out, in the tone of someone laying formal terms.
Yvaine looked at her properly for the first time, and something in her face eased, very slightly, in a way it hadn’t for either of the men.
“I’ll teach him what I can find, as I find it.
Slowly.
Honestly.
And you’ll come with him every time, since you’ve clearly already appointed yourself his second in command.” She stood, already turning back toward her shelves.
“Two afternoons a month.
No more, until I understand what I’m dealing with.
And somebody bring tea next time — mine’s terrible, and I’ve stopped being embarrassed about it.”