“I am the one people hide from,” I said. “I am not the one who hides.”
The door had groaned open, and Alisa stood at the threshold with her chin already raised. She said that I had been hiding, and it seemed my answer had not quite convinced her. “It does not seem that way to me,” she said. “I’ve been told my rival is training for a foolish duel. I’ve come to see the fruits of that labor for myself. I’ve come to assess with my own eyes.”
Alisa Wulfram took one step forward, past the threshold, and the chamber’s mana caught her. She wobbled. Her arms swung wide. For one undignified moment she swayed at the edge of falling, and only at the last did she catch herself. It ruined the image somewhat. It ruined the image considerably.
Alisa straightened. She did not acknowledge the wobble, I would not have either. She stepped deeper into the chamber instead, each footfall slow and careful.
“Your supervision will not be necessary,” I said, arms almost crossing before I remembered I still held Sol. “And if you have come to assess instead, then it will be unnecessary twice over.”
Alisa glared at me. Then her gaze moved, and it found Sol. “I had heard something about you keeping a strange bonded beast,” Alisa said. She studied the small phoenix from a small distance. “It does not seem so strange to me.”
Sol let out a chirp. It was loud, and it was indignant, and her four wings flared wide even in my hands.
“She is not an ‘it,’” I said. “She is a she.”
Alisa’s nose crinkled, climbing a fraction higher up her face. And then, against every expectation I held of her, she leaned down. The motion nearly cost her her balance again, and she fought to keep it. “My apologies,” she said. “I did not know.” She looked at the bird with something softer. “What is her name?”
“Her name is Solara,” I said. “To be used at all ti-”
“Just call her Sol,” Ash said.
The phoenix chirped, proud and pleased.
Alisa considered this. “Solara is a prouder name,” she said, “for a proud creature.”
I found myself thinking that perhaps this Alisa was not so terrible after all. Then Alisa moved to reach for her. “She does not appreciate unwanted hands.” I warned her.
The girl regarded me for one moment, then she reached toward Sol anyway. With just one finger, she had been reaching forward with her whole hand before. Sol stared at the offending finger. Then she smacked it aside with one black wing.
Alisa withdrew her hand. The soft expression she held did not waver. “It seems Solara is rather picky.”
Then she stepped back and surveyed the chamber once more -the broken pillars, the craters, the lines carved across the floor, the dust still hanging in the air. “It seems you have been busy,” she said. “But I have brought something that might help. Might help more than this, anyway.”
“I do not require assistance,” I said. “Not that you would be able to offer assistance of any acceptable quality-”
“What do you mean?” Ash asked.
I looked at her, then back at Alisa. The girl had bitten her lower lip. She slowly nodded. Who she nodded to I did not know. She reached into her back pocket. “You aren’t to tell anyone that I gave you these,” she said. “I’m not strictly supposed to have them, you see.”
I frowned and raised an eyebrow. Then she held them out, and I forgot to hold the eyebrow entirely.
They were orbs, or at least, they were shaped like orbs. There were two of them, each shifting faintly, each perhaps half the size of Sol. One was a pale green. The other was a bright red. When I focused on them, I could feel something roiling beneath their surfaces. They only appeared red and green. Just past the surface, their color shifted and shifted. They reminded me, somewhat, of the mana crystals of my time. Not in shape, but in the feeling of power I got from them.
Sol let out a loud chirp. I placed her atop my head, assuming that is what she wanted. Sol slowly settled.
“What are these?” I asked.
Alisa had the nerve to raise an eyebrow at Sol atop my crown, then she looked back at me. “I suppose it’s little wonder you have not seen these before. These are Essence Hearts,” Alisa said. “C-rank Essence Hearts, to be precise.” She held them a little higher, as though the holding cost her something. “They aid mark advancement by filling you with a very large amount of pure Essence. More Essence than most people have, and purer than all Lines would have, I’m told. I do not know which beasts these came from, exactly, but even one of them could speed your advancement quite a bit.”
Mana crystals had been rare, in my time. They had not stayed rare -not after the number of beasts I had put to the sword- but before that, any crystal worth having had been a treasure. These Essence Hearts as the girl could them, would be rare in this time too. I was certain of it.
“And just why,” I said, arms folded, “are you offering these to me? Do you possess such wealth that you may give them out freely, to anyone who happens by? Or is this some debt you wish to collect upon, later?”
Alisa glared at me. “There’s no debt. I would never do something so dishonorable as carry a hidden debt.” She thrust them forward another inch. “Do you want them or not?”
Then the heat rose in her all at once. “You broke the Arbiter. You stole my glory! So you are not allowed to lose to some Eckhart girl now. Do you understand me? You will not lose to her.” Her chin climbed higher. “Because I will be the one to defeat you.”
“If you are waiting for that day,” I said, “then you will spend your whole life waiting.”
There was no bite in the words. I noticed that there was no bite, and I did not look too closely at why.
“Go on, Lys,” Ash said. “If it helps, it would be silly not to.”
I clicked my tongue. Very well. I took the green orb -green, like the false Line on my left arm. I wondered, briefly, whether the girl had chosen the color on purpose. Whether there was a significance to it. Whether she had gone looking for something I, specifically, might use. I knew the truth of my marks, and so it behooved me to ask.
“Girl. Could anyone use these? These Essence Hearts, as you call them. Anyone at all?”
Alisa looked momentarily affronted, then the confusion overtook the affront. Then she nodded. “Anyone can. The type of mark doesn’t matter. It simply assimilates faster if the beast it came from shares a similar nature to-” She closed her mouth.
I did not entirely understand. I understood more of it than I might once have. “Very well,” I said. “What am I to do now?”
“You do not know?” It was, by now, a tiresome question. “Even if you haven’t seen one before, you should know that much.”
“We do not know,” Ash said for me. That was good of her.
“There are several methods,” Alisa said. “The most common is simply to break the heart, and draw in the Essence that releases, through your mark. Then you must try to control it. After that, the results will show on their own, in time.”
Control it. She had handed me a thing that took control? I was no stranger to power that had to be bent, lest it turn on oneself. I nodded, took a breath. I shattered the orb in my left hand.
Green power spilled into the air, and I drew it into the Cradle. I felt the wellspring of it pour inward, and I braced myself for the control required and -and it was small. So very small. The power that had seemed a wellspring outside felt like a trickle against the Cradle. The power reached the Ember Core grinding thing beneath my ribs. For a moment, the grinding eased. Just for a moment. Then the power was swallowed whole, as though it had never been at all.
I waited for something to happen. Nothing did.
Alisa was watching me. “There is usually,” she said slowly, “a great deal more screaming at this point. It is supposed to hurt.”
“I did not even feel it,” I said.
“That cannot be right.” She stared. “How is that possible? That was a C-tier heart.”
“I have slain beasts that defied classification,” I said. “What is a C-tier heart to me?”
Alisa sighed, and there was something beneath the sigh. “Perhaps it makes sense. After the Arbiter.” She looked at the empty air where the green light had been. “I had thought it might help a little. I did not think it would do nothing at all.” Then, in a much lower voice, such that I almost didn’t hear, “-should have used it for her instead.” Alisa clenched and unclenched her hand, the one that had held the orb before she had given it to me.
Something moved in me that I did not care for. I did not know why this strange girl had done what she had done, when it had so clearly cost her something. I had not asked it of her. I had not needed it. And it had been wasted on a thing inside me that ate even gifts.
“The attempt at aid was unwarranted,” I said at last. “But it was not unwelcome.”
“She is trying to say thank you,” Ash said.
I glared sideways at her. “I am not trying to say anything of the sort.” The glare had no strength in it. I would have corrected her with more force, once. I let it pass instead.
Alisa’s eyebrow twitched. “Good. It had better not be.”
She looked down at the remaining heart, the red one, turning it over in her fingers. “And what am I to do with this one?”
Sol chirped from atop my head, loud enough to make Alisa flinch. I reached up and brought the bird back down.
“Bonded creatures do like these,” Alisa said, almost to herself.
“Sol has already been given Essence Stones as tribute,” I said. “She did not appreciate them. I doubt this Heart will fare any better.”
Alisa’s face took on an expression of genuine affront. “Essence Stones are made from hearts such as these. Do not compare the two.”
She moved the red orb toward Sol anyway. “You simply need to break the heart in the same way, and let her ea-”
Sol chirped, opened her beak wide, wider than I thought she could, and swallowed the heart whole.
There was a moment, a single moment, where the bird looked enormous. Where she filled my hands like a thing twice her size. She let out a strange, strangled chirp. My heart stopped.
“Sol-”
She loosed a small wisp of flame, and returned to her ordinary size.
I stared. “Is this normal?” I asked, looking back at Alisa.
Alisa said, slowly, “No. It is not.”
Ash had let out a strained laugh next to me. “Looks like little Sol has quite the appetite.”
Sol let out a mighty chirp, one that sounded uncomfortably like a burp, and more wisps of flame curled from her beak. She took a flapping, lurching leap off my palms and soared through the air for one genuine moment before gravity reclaimed her. She fell, rolled, struck a small pillar, and came to rest in a heap of feathers, from which a furious chirp emerged.
I moved to collect her, wisps of white fire trailing from my left. There was no injury. Sol let out another chirp, and I began to lift her. As I did, the chamber door opened again.
It was Ren and Corin this time, and they were carrying bags. Large ones. Even from across the chamber, I caught the scent of something. Something I had never smelled before, something that made my mouth water.
Ren took two steps in, opened her mouth, and stopped. She pointed at Alisa. “Why the hell are you here?”
Then she looked around, and her finger swung wide across the ruined chamber. “And just what the hell did you do to this place? Where’d so much of the mana go?”
It took some effort and help against the chamber’s weight, before Corin could come inside and sit. By the time the matter was settled, the five of us had arranged ourselves on the floor among the broken pillars, and Ren had begun unpacking the bags.
“I still can’t believe the noble brat is actually here,” Ren said. “Edda did say something about this but I thought she was joking.”
Alisa lifted her chin. “I’m beyond petty provocations.” Her eye twitched as she said it, so perhaps the provocation had worked after all.
Ren shrugged. She drew out a series of wooden plates, and then the food itself. It was meat on skewers, glistening, steaming and smelling of nothing I had ever smelled in the mess hall or anywhere else. The scent alone made my mouth water, and I did my best to hide it, and I am not certain I succeeded.
“You’re damn lucky I brought a few extra,” Ren said, thrusting a plate at Alisa. “And damn luckier I’d feel guilty eating while someone else wasn’t.”
Alisa accepted the plate. “Perhaps you have some sense after all. Perhaps you would do well for a serving girl.”
Ren choked and spluttered. Ash laughed, and even I found a grin pulling at my mouth before I could stop it. I looked at the skewer in my own hand. “Where did you find this?” I asked. “There is nothing of its like in the mess hall.”
“That’s ’cause it’s not from the mess hall, dummy,” Ren said.
I paused. I looked at Ren, then at Corin. “It is from outside the Academy,” I said slowly. “I did not ask you to bring me something from outside the Academy.”
Ren shook her fist at me. “I can damn well take it back, if you’d prefer.”
“Ren said it might be a good idea to eat something good,” Corin said, in a low voice. “You know. To get some energy. For the duel.”
Ren’s face darkened. She reached over and bonked Corin lightly on the top of the head. “You weren’t supposed to tell her that.”
I stared at the two of them. And once again, I felt very warm. I said nothing. I began to eat instead.
It was good. It was better than good. The meat was juicy and tender, and it carried tastes that bloomed and faded and bloomed again. I ate. I devoured. I had not known, until I began, just how hungry I was. There had been a time, not so long ago, when I had never tasted cooked meat at all, when a rabbit over a pathetic fire had been a revelation. This was something past that.
“Thank you,” Ash said, around her own skewer.
Even Alisa, after some time, conceded the point. “The fare is good. Whoever procured these knows what taste is.”
Sol had her own skewer, one I had bathed in the Cradle’s white fire until it met her exacting standards. She pecked at it happily, loosing a satisfied chirp now and then. At some point Ash leaned over and fed her a piece by hand, and then I did the same, and the bird accepted both as her due.
Ren tried next. She held out a piece, and Sol turned her back. Alisa tried, and Sol seemed to consider it for a moment before hopping pointedly away. Corin tried, and Sol took the piece in her beak and then carried it across the floor to me, and held it up, and waited to be fed it by my hand. Ren threw both hands in the air. Corin only smiled.
I glanced at Ash. Her gaze had drifted, just for a breath, to the satchel where Sol’s cushion was kept. Where a certain book now rested too, the one Ren had pressed into her hands. I could not be certain that was why she looked, but I was certain enough. Ash caught me catching her, and looked away, and the color rose faintly in her cheeks. I let it be.
At some point, Ash asked of Edda. I had wanted to ask myself. Ren and Corin had looked at each other, then looked at Ash and said that she seemed better, and that the healer had said she would wake soon.
We finished. Ren wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and looked at me. “Well? I can see you didn’t advance.”
I held up my arms. Both Lines had begun to dull, the red and the green going dim and flat against my skin. I suspected the Black and White Lines would look the same underneath. They reminded me, unpleasantly, of the days I had poured mana into my Sparks and watched nothing happen at all, no matter how much I gave.
Ren leaned in and peered at them closely. She sighed. “Looks like you’re pretty far along. That’s more than I managed even in my few months. No wonder the chamber looks and feels like this.” There was a thread of something under the words. Annoyance or jealousy, perhaps.
I nodded. “Perhaps. Yet it is not quite enough.” I was still a Line. And if I was right -if the thing I lacked was this Insight that everyone spoke of and no one could explain- then there was no one who could simply hand it to me and I did not know who to take it from.
“It sounds,” Alisa said, “as though my new rival is planning to give up already.”
“That is not what I meant,” I said. “I mean only that I will keep trying.”
Ash looked around at the chamber, at the wreckage of it. “There might not be a resonance chamber left soon,” she said.
I smiled. “The pillars are your fault, by and large.”
Ash grinned. “Maybe the fault is that you keep hiding behind them.”
“I was not hiding. I was taking a tactical reprieve.”
“Oh?” Ash said. “My apologies. I couldn’t see what you were doing when you were behind them, Lys. And I did not know you needed so many tactical reprieves.”
We smiled at each other. And then we both became aware that the others were staring. Ren’s mouth had gone faintly red. Ren stood. She did it abruptly, fire already crawling at the edges of her arm.
“Alright then,” she said. “Well? Get up already.”
“What fool idea do you have now?” I asked. The glow of the food had still not settled, and I would not ruin it so soon.
Ash laughed. “Come on, Lys.”
I paused as the rest of them rose around me. I did not, for a moment, understand what was happening. Then Ren burst into flame.
It climbed her from foot to shoulder throwing heat across the chamber until the air bent with it. Only her face and her hair remained untouched at the heart of it. She winced, and then she grinned through the fire. “Let’s get you some real practice fighting a Tenet, then.”
Corin pushed himself up beside her. “I can’t do much,” he said. “But I’ll try to help.”
Alisa rose as well. “I cannot use my mark,” she said, and as she said it, she drew her left arm in, hiding it from view. I had glimpsed it during the meal, when I had never noticed it before. In a place where everyone tried to make their marks obvious, I had not realized she had been trying to do the opposite to hers. It was a silver Line. If it had any significance to it, I did not know.
“But I will help as I can.” She said.
And Ash extended her hand to me, and she was smiling.
I looked up at them. Ren on fire. Corin sitting straight with visible effort. Alisa with her chin still raised. Sol on my head. Ash, hand out. The image was missing Edda, and was lesser for it. Sara’s clay bead was warm against my skin.
And for a breath, I saw others.
Seryth, standing six paces back as was her custom. Malrath, studying me as he always did. Zera, her eyes full of the wonder they always held. Zarvok, bowing, for he had never liked to loom over me, though he could. Orzathiel, looking at me with what I had once thought was servitude. They were gone.
Perhaps that was why I wanted to win. Perhaps it was only that.
I took Ash’s hand.