Oren woke moments before the bell sounded, as he had grown used to doing back in the village, when he’d had to open the archive before anyone arrived.
He lay still for a moment, gazing up at the tent’s ceiling, listening to the breathing of the sleeping recruits around him, before he remembered that today was different from every day since his arrival at the camp.
Today the training on the Path would begin.
When he stepped out of the tent, he found Silen sitting on a wooden crate near the entrance, lacing his boots with unusual concentration.
“Didn’t sleep?” Oren asked.
“I slept, but not much.” Silen lifted his head and gave a tired smile.
“I kept thinking all night: what if I don’t understand anything?
What if the Binding is too hard?
What if” “What if what?” “I don’t know.” Silen laughed softly.
“That’s what worries me that I don’t even know what I should be afraid of.” Daren joined them, carrying his share of bread, and the three walked together toward the mess tent.
No sooner had they finished breakfast than the recruits gathered in the main square, amid the usual clamor of boots on gravel and the shouting of junior officers arranging the ranks.
But this time, instead of being divided into groups by unit or rank, they were called by the Path each had chosen the day before.
“Binding group, to the eastern side!” “Transformation group, toward the rear yard!” “Theft group, here, behind me!” The three of them parted without saying anything worth mentioning just a quick glance between them — and then each walked off in his own direction.
The Theft group was smaller than Oren had expected, no more than fifteen recruits, gathered in a small yard enclosed by a low stone wall, far from the noise of the rest of the camp.
Standing before them was a lean man in his middle years, with long arms and narrow eyes that moved quickly between the faces, as though counting each of them before he began.
“I am Mark,” he said without preamble.
“I will train you in the basics of the Theft Path.
I won’t explain to you the philosophy of the Path or its history, because that will do you no good right now.
What will do you good is understanding how to begin.” He looked at them one by one, then took from his pocket a small copper coin and set it on a flat stone before him.
“The Theft Path, simply put, allows you to move something from one place to another without touching it with your hands.
That is all you need to know of its definition for now.
The rest you will learn by practice, not by talk.” One of the recruits asked, “Can any object be moved?” “At first, small, light things, close to you.
Don’t think now of anything beyond that.” His tone was decisive, closing the door on any question that went past this limit.
“I will not answer questions about what may be possible later.
For now, just try.” Mark handed each recruit a similar coin, and placed another flat stone before them, about half an arm’s length away.
“What’s required is simple: move the coin from the first stone to the second, without touching it.
That’s all.” Oren sat before his copper coin, staring at it as though looking alone might be enough to move it.
He tried to remember the word “theft” and what it meant, tried to summon a feeling, a desire, anything resembling what he’d imagined a magical act would feel like.
Nothing happened.
The coin remained in place, gleaming and motionless, as though mocking his silent effort.
He looked around and found most of the recruits in the same state faces set in concentration, eyes fixed, hands resting still on their knees while the coins before them didn’t move so much as a hair’s breadth.
Only one of them, a thin young man sitting at the far end, seemed to have his coin tremble slightly before it fell off the stone instead of crossing to the other one.
Mark walked among them, pausing beside each for a moment, without explaining much.
When he reached Oren, he said in a calm voice, “You’re trying to want it to move.
That’s not enough.” “Then what is enough?” “I can’t tell you in words.
But try focusing on the coin itself, not on the outcome you want.” Oren didn’t fully grasp the difference, but he tried.
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them, and looked at the copper coin more closely, trying to see its smallest details: the scratch along its edge, the faint sheen at its center, the way the light fell upon it.
He didn’t think about moving it he simply tried to know everything about it in that moment.
He felt something strange, very faint, like a distant prick in some place he couldn’t quite locate, neither in his hand nor in his head, but somewhere between the two.
Then nothing.
The coin stayed as it was.
“Try again,” Mark said, without waiting for Oren’s reaction, then moved on to the next recruit.
The exercise went on for nearly an hour, punctuated by failed attempts too numerous to count.
Some coins fell off their stones.
Others shifted slightly in the wrong direction.
One recruit, a heavily built man who looked more like a wrestler than a sorcerer, finally snatched up his coin in frustration and tried to throw it by hand toward the second stone, and Mark called out to him without raising his voice much: “That won’t help you.
Put it back and start again.” On his fourth or fifth attempt, Oren felt that same prick he’d felt before, but this time it lasted a little longer, as though something inside him were stretching toward the copper coin without his knowing how to describe it.
He tried not to think about it directly, and kept his focus on the coin as before, trying to summon that same feeling again without forcing it.
The coin moved.
It was a very simple motion, barely worth mentioning, a slight slide forward of about a finger’s width, but it was enough for Oren to feel something like a light shock.
He raised his eyes at once, certain for a moment that he had imagined it, but the coin had indeed shifted from its original place.
“Again,” said Mark, who had noticed the movement from where he stood, without showing any particular reaction.
“Don’t stop at a small success.
Repeat it.” Oren tried to recapture the same feeling, and after two failed attempts, he managed to move the coin again, this time a bit farther, though it still hadn’t reached the second stone.
“Good,” said Mark as he passed by him.
“Now you know how to begin.
Distance and precision will come with practice.” He explained nothing further, and did not clarify why the attempt had succeeded this time while the earlier ones had failed.
He left Oren to continue his trial and moved on to another recruit who needed correcting.
Oren sat looking at the coin before him, feeling a faint tiredness he wasn’t used to — not in his muscles, but somewhere deeper than that, like the fatigue that follows long concentration on something delicate.
He thought that this was perhaps the price people spoke of in tales when they talked of magic, but he did not dwell on the thought further.
He had to try again.
Some distance from the Theft yard, the Transformation group trained in a slightly wider rear yard, surrounded by piles of small stones and scattered pieces of wood.
The group, Daren among them, stood before a short instructor with gray hair tied back tightly, holding a thin rod she used more for pointing than for striking.
“Transformation,” she said in a dry voice that tolerated no excess of questions, “means changing the nature of something, partially and in a very limited way at the start.
You will not turn stone into gold, nor wood into iron.
At this stage, the most you can do is make a very small change in a single property of the object: its color, its texture, its hardness something of that kind.” She handed each recruit a small flat piece of wood.
“What’s required: change the color of this piece, even by a slight degree.
That’s all.” Daren held the piece of wood between his fingers, examining it carefully, as though inspecting a piece of metal before placing it in the forge.
He didn’t immediately try to “want” something, as some around him did, but turned it over between his fingers, feeling the grain of the wood, its fine texture, the way its density shifted from one edge to the other.
“What are you doing?” a recruit beside him asked, noticing he hadn’t started yet.
“I’m trying to understand it before I ask it to change,” Daren answered without raising his eyes.
It took him longer than most around him before he felt anything at all, but when he finally felt that faint prick deep in his concentration which seemed to him like the beginning of a true connection with the wood’s substance he found himself focusing not on forcing the wood to change, but on its details as they were, trying to understand where its color might shift without it losing its nature.
After several attempts, he noticed a very faint shadow creeping along the edge of the piece, barely visible to the naked eye, but it was a real change nonetheless.
The instructor passed by, cast a quick glance, and said, “Not a bad start.
Keep going.” She praised him no further, and clarified nothing more, but Daren felt something like quiet satisfaction the kind of satisfaction he knew well from watching metal finally yield to his hammering after long resistance.
On the eastern side of the camp, the Binding group was smaller in number than the other two, training in the shade of a single large tree, far from the noise.
Before them stood an old man, more like a village schoolteacher than an officer, speaking in a calm voice that never rose no matter how many questions came his way.
“Binding is the creation of a link between two things,” he said.
“Not an imagined or figurative link, but a real one, such that what happens to one is reflected, very simply at first, in the other.” He gave each recruit two small stones, roughly matched in size.
“Try to bind them, so that if you move one slightly, the other moves by roughly the same amount.
It won’t work on the first try, and it may not work today at all.
That is natural.” Silen, true to form, began with a string of questions before attempting anything: “Do the stones have to be the same kind?
Does the distance between them matter?
And if I break one after binding them, what happens to the other?” The teacher answered patiently, showing no irritation: “Similarity helps at the beginning, yes.
Distance matters, but not to the degree you’re imagining now.
As for what happens upon breaking, that is a question for another lesson not today.” Silen shook his head, not entirely convinced, but began the exercise anyway.
He held the two stones, one in each hand, and tried to feel something between them, anything resembling the thread the teacher had described in simple words a moment before.
Nothing happened for a long while, and frustration crept onto his face more than once, but he, unlike his usual self, stayed silent during the attempt, as though speech itself distracted him from concentrating.
When he finally tried to speak to the teacher in a quieter voice than usual, asking about some small detail in the way he held the stones, he received a terse answer that helped him more than all his previous attempts combined.
By the end of the exercise, he had not achieved a full binding between the two stones, but once he felt one “respond” faintly when he moved the other a very slight tremor he wasn’t entirely sure was real — it was enough to make him smile with more confidence than he’d had that morning.
The three returned to the tent at evening, tired in a way they weren’t used to, a fatigue that had little to do with muscle and more to do with something deeper, as though their bodies had been drained from some place impossible to pin down precisely.
They sat outside the tent, on the usual wooden benches, watching a small fire some of the recruits had lit nearby.
“How was your day?” Silen asked Oren.
“Strange.” Oren thought a moment before continuing.
“I moved a coin a few finger-widths from its place.
That’s about all I did the whole day.” “Sounds like a huge feat compared to me.” Silen laughed.
“I only felt something like a tremor once, and I don’t even know if it was real or if I imagined it.” “And you?” Oren asked Daren.
“I changed the color of a piece of wood, a little,” Daren said in his usual calm way.
“One edge went slightly darker.
Nothing more than that.” “It’s as if we all achieved very small things,” Silen said, “but they feel bigger than they are, because we weren’t expecting anything at all.” Oren didn’t comment on that directly, but looked at the fire before him, thinking of the copper coin that had slid a few finger-widths from its place, and of that faint prick that had accompanied the motion, trying to understand something for which he did not yet have adequate words.
He didn’t know where this Path would lead him.
He didn’t know its limits, nor the truth of what he might one day be able to do with this power just beginning to take shape between his fingers.
All he knew in that moment was that something inside him had changed a little today, by a very small measure, like a coin sliding a few finger-widths from its place but a real change, nonetheless.
One of the other recruits put out the fire before it was time to sleep, and the three walked toward their tents without saying much more, tired enough to leave the rest of the questions for the following day.
Your support means everything.”