The first proper lesson began with Yvaine handing him nothing, teaching him nothing, and asking him to sit on the cottage floor in complete silence for what felt, to a six-year-old, like several unreasonable hours and turned out, when Wren checked the little travel-clock Aldric carried, to be eleven minutes.
“Tell me what you feel,” Yvaine said, once he’d opened his eyes.
“Nothing,” Kaelen said, which was almost true and entirely unsatisfying to say out loud.
“Wrong.
You feel a great many things.
You’ve simply never had to separate them from each other, because you’ve never had reason to.” Yvaine settled into the chair across from him, hands folded, patient in the specific way of someone who has taught this exact lesson to exactly one other stubborn child before, decades ago, and remembered every mistake he’d made along the way.
“That is the actual gift, Kaelen.
Not the feeling itself — half the empaths who ever lived could feel plenty and still couldn’t tell you whose feeling they were drowning in.
The gift is knowing which weather is yours.”
“How do I know?”
“You start with something known.
A fixed point.” Yvaine’s eyes moved, deliberately, to Wren, who was sitting cross-legged by the window pretending not to be flattered by the sudden attention.
“Your sister’s feelings, I’d guess, you know better than your own by now.
You’ve had six years of practice reading her and none at all reading yourself.
So we use her as the marker.
We narrow it down from there.”
It took the better part of the afternoon, and several attempts that went nowhere, before it started to work.
Wren, informed of her new role as “the fixed point,” took to it with the seriousness of someone handed an official post, sitting very still and, at Yvaine’s request, thinking deliberately about things that made her feel specific and identifiable emotions — the horse she wanted for her upcoming birthday, a chore she resented, a memory of their father coming home safe from the Thornwood raid.
“That one,” Kaelen said, on the memory.
“That’s — warm, and a little scared, underneath.
That’s you remembering being scared, and then not being scared anymore, all at once.”
“That’s exactly it,” Wren said, startled into honesty.
“Good,” said Yvaine.
“Now.
There’s a feeling in this room that isn’t hers, and isn’t the two of us being polite houseguests.
Find it.”
It took him longer than the first exercise, mostly because he’d never had reason to look for it before — he’d simply let all the room’s weather arrive as one undifferentiated storm and dealt with the whole of it at once, the way he had since he was an infant behind a nursery door.
But once he stopped trying to feel everything and started trying to feel Wren specifically, and then subtract her, something else came into focus underneath: old, patient, tired in a specific and particular way that had nothing to do with the day’s weather and everything to do with a very long life spent looking things up.
“You,” he said, surprised.
“You’re — not sad, exactly.
Tired of something. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Something that isn’t in this room.”
Yvaine was quiet for a moment, and the tiredness he’d named didn’t get smaller, but something in her expression acknowledged it had been correctly seen, which Kaelen was beginning to understand was, for her, its own rare form of warmth.
“The Guild and I disagreed, once, about what a child like you is for,” she said finally, choosing the words the way Aldric chose his — carefully, a beat behind the truth.
“I lost that argument.
The child in question did not have anyone like your mother or your sergeant or, apparently, your sister, standing between him and what the Guild decided he was worth.
I’ve been tired about it for twenty years.
It’s not your weather to carry.
But you asked, so there it is.”
Nobody pressed her for more, not even Wren, which was itself a kind of lesson Kaelen filed away without being told to: that some feelings, once correctly named, didn’t need to be solved.
Just witnessed, and then set back down.
They rode home as the light went orange over the forest, Wren narrating the day to Aldric in exhaustive detail while Kaelen stayed mostly quiet, turning the new tool over in his mind the way he’d once turned over the wooden practice sword — testing its weight, working out where his own grip on it was still weak.
He had a fixed point now.
A known weather he could always locate first, in any room, and use to find his own footing before the rest of the world’s feelings arrived and tried to carry him off with them.
It would be years before he understood that he’d need more than one — that a single anchor only holds a boat so far from shore, and that a life like the one he was quietly building for himself would eventually require several.
For now, riding home beside his sister in the last of the light, one was more than he’d ever had before, and it was enough.