An age had passed for Saphienne since she last entered the library, and potent nostalgia made her pause on the threshold in recognition of what she had never consciously admitted to herself:

This had been her home.

With that revelation came the pang of loss, as she beheld in the phrasing of her thought that she had become homeless since she had been attacked. Whereas once the shelves had been a wonderment that conveyed the feeling of childhood, now they were only wood and books arranged by subject; all the grandeur had faded from the curtains and cushions. When she squinted, she could no longer see the places where she had read to Kylantha, nor discern the sill of the window where she had practiced calligraphy, nor the seat by the fire where she had often lost herself in books.

Where had it all gone? Where had she gone, that she no longer saw herself there?

Faylar was behind the front desk, preoccupied with removing what Saphienne assumed were filled pages from the interior of the Tome of Correspondence. To repress her sadness she watched him, seeing that the enchantment took the form of a brown outer binding which affixed to an inner book via its golden clasps. The spine of the binding was also decorated with gold, into which a medallion was set–

And from which the disc was presently being extracted. Faylar set the medallion down and took another from the drawer open before him, clicking the second into place before he reached for a different volume.

Her curiosity had grounded her. “…What in the world are you doing?”

He paused, smiling without looking up. “Filaurel said you were too young to handle the tome when you were apprenticed to her…” Faylar beamed where he met her gaze. “…I suppose this means I’ve officially surpassed you, doesn’t it?”

She let him revel in his achievement, and approached, leaning her elbows on the desk. “I’d supposed that the pages could be swapped out somehow — my master said the enchantment was in the binding. What about the rest? How does it work?”

Pleased to know more than her about a magical subject, Faylar proudly elaborated. “The Tome of Correspondence is actually this cover, which can fit around most sizes of books. So long as the pages being sent from another tome are smaller than those of the book the binding is attached to, it will reproduce them.”

Saphienne lifted the book he’d discarded, flicking through its contents — and raising an eyebrow as she saw it was mostly blank. “This isn’t full.”

“I’ll put it back in when I’m done.” He pointed to the medallion he’d removed. “The emblem is… I don’t know what a wizard would describe it as, but it’s matched to others of the same design, and all tomes with the same emblem are linked together. That one is used for general correspondence.”

She eyed the the new medallion he’d inserted. “And this one?”

“Ever wonder how books are shared between libraries?”

Saphienne blinked — then smiled broadly. “Really? They copy them?”

“When it’s appropriate. Sometimes, like with loans, it’s better just to send them physically.” He opened the volume he was about to insert, showing her several paragraphs of neat scrivening. “This work is surplus to the collections, and it’s physically bigger than a text we’ve been offered, so it can be recycled.”

“The tome overwrites existing contents? But if both tomes have different text, how–”

“Additions to identical books have priority when overwriting, and then whichever book is inserted first overwrites the others,” he clarified, before pointing out a row of symbols below the medallion, “unless paused. This mark enables sending, this one receiving, and this quiets the announcement when new content arrives.”

She marvelled at the design. “This is more sophisticated than I expected; I’ll have to ask Taerelle about the enchantment.”

“Be sure to let me know what she says.” He grinned conspiratorially…

…Then gradually sobered as he finished readying the tome. “I was wondering when I’d see you and Celaena again. My mother said I should keep my distance until things settled down.”

Celaena had guessed why he hadn’t visited. “We’ve not been out much.”

“I’ve heard some rumours.” He didn’t need to tell her their subject. “My mother told me that you had nothing to do with the attack — that you were working with Sundamar to collect evidence.”

His unspoken question made Saphienne straighten up, folding her arms. “That’s right. I wanted the five of them to face justice.”

Faylar accepted this, pausing to skim the text of the soon-to-be-replaced book. “…Did Laewyn and Celaena have a fight?”

Laewyn had been absent since she gave Celaena her alibi. “She was with Celaena when the wardens came…” Anyone could be listening to them – and Faylar’s mother was herself a Warden of the Wilds – but telling him a direct lie still made her unhappy. “…They were indisposed at the time. She must have been shaken.”

“She’s been stopping by most afternoons, when she finishes in the bakery.” He closed the book and tapped the symbol for receiving. “You must be right: she hasn’t wanted to talk about what happened. Thessa wondered if it was Taerelle.”

Given that Thessa knew who was responsible, learning that improved Saphienne’s opinion of the artist’s guile. “No. Taerelle had an alibi — and she’s too close to being a wizard to do anything so dangerous and brazen.”

“I didn’t think it was her,” he insisted. “From what I know of her, she seems too efficient for what was done to Lensa. I heard Lensa was…” He coughed. “…I heard that her attacker took their time.”

“Gaelyn said so.”

Faylar swallowed. “Sundamar believes–”

“I know: he blames me.”

The apprentice librarian shook his head. “I’ve never seen my mother argue with him like this. He won’t listen to reason. He doesn’t even have an explanation for how — he just insists that you’re a monster.”

She breathed through her nose to channel her temper. “I imagine he’s been telling anyone who’ll listen. He’s furious with himself for taking the risk, and for failing to catch whoever it was who did it; easier for him to blame me than reflect on his choices.”

“My mother told him to take the rest of the month to cool off.”

“Do you think he will?”

Faylar pursed his lips. “…Cool off? No. I think he’s going to be your enemy until whoever did it gets caught. He’ll probably apologise after.”

Doubting it, she smirked. “Something to anticipate with–”

“Go to hell!”

Both Saphienne and Faylar flinched as the shout exploded through the hush, the apprentice librarian wincing as he glanced across his shoulder. Saphienne recognised the voice as well — and discerned that its origin was in the kitchen.

“…What was that?”

He cringed. “It’s an obscure human profanity–”

“That’s not what I meant.” Saphienne half-wandered around the desk as she peered back through the stacks. “I’ve never heard Filaurel lose her–”

To her astonishment, Saphienne saw the elder and master jeweller, Eletha, emerge from the back of the lower floor. Her head was lowered as she slunk from the shelves and went past on the opposite side of the room, where both children saw her greenish gaze was glimmering with unshed tears.

Neither Saphienne nor Faylar said anything until after the doors had closed.

“Filaurel didn’t want to talk to her,” Faylar murmured. “She’s been very cold, lately.”

Every part of Saphienne wanted to go straight to Filaurel, but given what had happened between them, she knew that wasn’t possible, that she wasn’t–

…Saphienne felt for the purse in her pocket.

* * *

Fuming where she furiously scrubbed a teapot in the filling kitchen sink, Filaurel didn’t notice it was Saphienne who approached. “I advise you to be somewhere else right now, apprentice.”

Heart pounding, Saphienne studied her flush. She clenched the coin. “…I don’t want to do that.”

Hearing the girl, Filaurel went rigid and dropped the pot into the soapy water. She didn’t turn toward the doorway.

“…But I’ll go, if you ask me to.”

Filaurel closed her eyes; she spoke very, very softly. “No. Hello, Saphienne.”

Why did she always keep herself distant? Saphienne yearned to enter the room, but the coin hadn’t courage enough. “I have poor timing.”

“That’s her fault, not yours.” Filaurel rinsed her hands under the enchanted pitcher, then tipped it upward to stop its flow before drying them on a hanging towel. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

Saphienne forced a smile that she didn’t feel. “Depending on who you ask…”

Her joke didn’t sway Filaurel, who still didn’t face her. “I wasn’t expecting you to drop by like this.”

Flee, said her heart. “I hadn’t planned to.” Fly, whispered the silence. “I don’t really know what I’m doing here… I just…”

Filaurel leant against the sink, her head down. “…I wondered how you were doing.”

What should she say? Kylantha would have known.

“I heard you’re staying with Celaena.” The woman with eyes like the sea gripped the edge as though clinging on above a fall. “I know about what happened. I wanted to… visit you. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to.”

“I would have liked–” Saphienne swallowed. “…That.”

Filaurel inhaled sharply. When she pivoted, she was dazed. “Saphienne… what are you asking for? What do you need?”

To be wanted; to be embraced; to be loved. To be what she was not, and never would be. To belong with someone who understood her, and who understood life better than she did, and who would guide her along a path she could not find, away from the lonely remove that surveyed the world from a vantage that was unassailable and yet – and yet – inevitable. To be held when she stumbled, and carried when she couldn’t walk a step further.

To be herself, while not herself.

To have the impossible.

“…Your advice.” To have whatever she could, no matter how little. “And your company — when it’s convenient for you.”

Why did Filaurel only stare?

“…To be friends, once I grow up.”

What were her thoughts? Her doubts?

“…I don’t want to intrude.”

Filaurel shuddered; she retreated to the tall stool by the countertop. She loosed her hair from its band, then fretted with it as it hung forward around her hunching shoulders. “I can do that much.”

Who was there, with her? Whose ghost pushed her from behind? Whose giggling squeal did she dream she heard as she stepped into the kitchen and approached Filaurel? “Can we go back to the way things were?”

Her mentor looked down. “I don’t know. I wish so.”

Unable to switch it to her other palm, Saphienne set the coin on the counter before she held out her hand.

Filaurel was slow to take her fingertips in her own, but for a brief moment, she clasped them so very tightly.

Then she let go, and drew a resuscitating breath. “Not today. Today, I feel like hell.”

Missing her already, and yet close enough to feel her warmth in the bright and narrow kitchen, Saphienne retrieved the coin and made herself be curious. “What does that word even mean? Does telling someone to go to hell mean the same thing as telling them to–”

“Hell is a human religious concept.” Filaurel’s chest heaved, once, in an unvoiced and pained laugh. “To those who believe in it, hell awaits the wicked when they die… which I know doesn’t make sense, but humans imagine they endure beyond death. It’s an inescapable place of eternal torment and suffering. Or, to some, it’s a state of being — what it feels like to be forsaken by the gods.” She shrugged. “I expect it’s hard to imagine.”

Quite the opposite. “Telling someone to go there seems worse than telling them to go into the ground and rot… that’s a harsh thing to say to someone.”

“Some deserve it.”

She squinted. “…Like Eletha? She’s so very quiet. All she does is work on her jewellery. I don’t know how you can think that of her.”

Filaurel sighed as she stood, her hands crossed to massage her shoulders. “You don’t know her like I do.”

“But you had me study with her day and night for months — I thought I understood her quite well. You know her that much better?”

“Of course I do.” Filaurel’s smile was rueful. “She’s my mother.”

* * *

Their parting, like too many of late, was awkward; yet Saphienne felt better about herself as she emerged from the library and stared up at the clouds in the afternoon sky.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

She had limited choices about the life she would lead and the person she would be, but she had choices all the same. This, she had known since the day she forced herself into contention for an apprenticeship with Almon. Yet, that hadn’t been so monumental as what she had just done.

Feebly, as though groping for the shape of it with her impaired hand, Saphienne had the first, tremulous impression that she could decide more than what she did and how she would later remember. For all that she could think deeply and deviously before acting, as she stood upon the true steps of the real library she fathomed that there was another intelligence at work in her. There was a decision that lay behind her decisions — and it wasn’t as simple as her beliefs, as conflicted as her principles, or as ingrained as her passions.

Defiance: that was what it had taken. But what – or who – had she defied, when she fought against her own judgement and went to Filaurel?

Was it fate? She had never consented to having her future divined.

Was it simply herself? How could a person defy herself — was choice not the very affirmation of selfhood? To defy oneself was to bow to another.

Then… was she defying someone else? That made no sense.

Goosebumps rose as she recalled Celaena and her father.

“…But I don’t have parents…”

There was something wrong with Saphienne, and she couldn’t articulate to herself what it was. She didn’t like the life she was living, didn’t like the person she was becoming, and she knew the fault lay within herself — knew also she could defy it… and that meant…

She sank down onto the steps, holding her knees against her chest; her gaze was no longer turned to the malformed heavens, instead directed utterly inward.

When she rose again, she didn’t have answers — but she had someone to ask.

* * *

The grey door was no less forbidding when she knocked on it, but she made her fist firm around the copper coin and fixed herself upon keeping to the terrifying way that awaited her behind it.

When her door cracked opened, Taerelle greeted Saphienne with a sly and self-satisfied smile. “I wondered if you would come today. How went your lesson?”

“…Not well.”

“I anticipated as much.” She opened wide the door, revealing that she was dressed in black trousers and blouse beneath a diaphanous, smoke-like shawl. “Come inside, prodigy. We shall talk.”

Yet when Saphienne entered the cramped sitting room, Taerelle stood on the threshold and flicked her fingers in evocation of a spell, speaking an almost understood syllable that lit her eyes with white light that could never be fractured.

She crossed her arms as she peered out into the grove. “Trail after Saphienne if you must — but I won’t let you invade my privacy. Begone.”

First one shimmer and then another revealed two armoured Wardens of the Wilds; Saphienne didn’t recognise them. The senior of the pair was gruff as she addressed Taerelle. “Apprentice wizard or not — you don’t have the authority to exclude us, child.”

“Yet I have the ability.” She was uncowed. “And there is an authority I can invoke. Wait there — come not a step further, or we will have an argument.”

The senior apprentice left her door open as she went through to her kitchen, daring the wardens to trifle with her. They glared, but stayed where they were.

Taerelle returned with a short letter in her hand, and Saphienne glimpsed the familiar seal affixed to its end as she passed by and went out to show the pair. There was a long pause as they read what was written.

Subdued, the leader exhaled in frustration. “…Does your master know about this?”

“No.” Taerelle grew more imperious as she folded the letter under her arm. “I hereby invoke the authority delegated to me in this matter to require that you not tell him, and that from now on, you regard my conversations and correspondence with Saphienne and Celaena as falling under the veil of Luminary Privilege. They have done nothing to warrant your attention, and I won’t have their education disrupted by your voyeurism.”

“This is very unusual.”

“Yes.” Taerelle was having fun. “We are concluded — unless you have any other business with me?”

In answer, the wardens glanced at each other and adjusted their ring fingers, vanishing from Saphienne’s sight while Taerelle remained watchful.

In due course she came back inside and shut the door. “Thrilling! Sit down, prodigy.”

A couch and armchair were close together near the fireplace; Saphienne seated herself on the former as she took in the room. Next to the stairs was a chalkboard with writing that had been smeared illegible by a dusting cloth draped over its frame, while full bookcases were rammed together along all all the other walls. Propped next to the armchair, a writing board leant upon a small pile of books, paper and calligraphy set within reach on the nearest shelf.

Taerelle gracefully alighted on the armchair as she thrust out the letter to Saphienne. “Care to guess what it says before you read?”

Taking it, Saphienne pursed her lips. “…You’ve been formally appointed to tutor me and Celaena. They’ve given you permission to invoke the Luminary Vale in that role.”

“…Subject to the condition that I don’t cover theoretical material before our master.” Taerelle waited for Saphienne to confirm what she explained. “A longer letter accompanied that one, unsigned but presumably from Celaena’s father. I would show it to you, but it dissolved as soon as I was done reading.”

Passing the letter of appointment back across, Saphienne recollected the note Almon had given to Iolas, Celaena, and herself on the night when he had shared the name of the great apostate. “Is that sort of correspondence common?”

“Not very. Usually, confidential writing is enchanted to combust if read by anyone other than its intended recipient.” Taerelle canted her head. “Your behaviour after you were assaulted has met with approval from whoever has taken an interest in you. They’ve wrongly credited me with being responsible for your principled refusal to name your attackers to anyone other than the wardens– yes, it’s funny. You can stop laughing.”

Saphienne covered her face. “I’m not laughing at you. It’s just absurd: I went out of my way to avoid Almon doing what the Luminary Vale would have let him do, and it ended up making everything worse… but that was good?”

Taerelle’s gaze softened. “You were idiotic in how you went about it, but what you wanted was reasonable. Holding you accountable for what someone else did – without your knowledge – would be counterproductive.”

Her hand lowered. “…But I am responsible. My mistakes led to it.”

“Learn from them.” Taerelle spoke sharply, but not without sympathy.

She felt her stomach flutter as she returned her tutor’s stare, alive with dread. “That’s… why I’m here. Among other reasons.”

Steepling her fingers, Taerelle leant back. “Tell me what happened with our master.”

* * *

When she finished summarising the events of the morning, Saphienne held her breath as Taerelle thought them through.

“Not what I intended,” the senior apprentice conceded. “Far from the worst outcome possible under the circumstances — but not how I would have preferred Celaena’s father to intervene. I can see the logic behind his action.”

“Iolas thought–”

“You told him?” Taerelle clicked her tongue. “I suppose that was unavoidable. He’s far from dense, and better to have him inside the lit tent than roving around somewhere in the dark. But prodigy, promise me you haven’t told Faylar?”

“No.” Saphienne wished she could. “He’s trustworthy with secrets, but I don’t know how he’d react to a crime.” Especially given how he felt about Celaena…

“I presume when you told Iolas you– no, of course you would have. You were sensible enough to keep the ring hidden.” Taerelle drummed her fingers on the armrest beside her, contemplating the issue from every angle. “What about Thessa?”

“She figured it out before Iolas did, and begged him to say nothing.”

“Interesting.”

“She also lied to Faylar…” Would this sour Taerelle’s opinion of the artist? “…She told him she thought it might have been you.”

Taerelle laughed brightly. “Very interesting! She’s cleverer than she seemed. That’s a well-judged misdirection on her part, given that I was one of the first to be ruled out.”

“You’re not offended?”

“Whyever would I be? I’m prepared for scrutiny — and one of the hardest people in the Eastern Vale for the wardens to scrutinise.” She let her smugness show, then smothered it down. “Wormwood assures me that Hyacinth will not cause any more problems, so I think the matter is locked away… assuming that no one does anything else that’s so incredibly stupid.”

Despite agreeing, Saphienne wasn’t consoled. “Leaving our apprenticeships in peril.”

“Prodigy…” Taerelle shifted forward. “…Our master will eventually get over the indignity of how he was treated, and he will warm to you both. He was already seeking a valid excuse to fail you as his apprentice; nothing has meaningfully changed for you. Celaena being treated in the same way is very light sanction for what she did.”

“How…” Saphienne felt a stabbing pain in her bad hand, and rubbed at it as she tried to imagine the future. “…I can’t see him ever warming to us. I’ve never seen him how he was today.”

“I have,” Taerelle said. “Remember I told you that one of my cohort was stripped of his apprenticeship? Our master didn’t fail him — or rather, our master wasn’t the one who ended his apprenticeship.”

Saphienne blinked. “…I misunderstood. I thought the Luminary Vale only barred him from further study.”

“No. They reached down to end his apprenticeship.” Rising, Taerelle stretched, and paced toward the kitchen. “Our master believed that he was fundamentally good, and just needed the right mentorship to find his humility and adjust his perspective. After trying and failing to instil a more appropriate attitude in him, advice was sought from other teachers.”

“They saw him more objectively?”

She paused by the doorway. “I told you: our master can be wrong about people. He argued to save his apprentice at great length and with eloquence, but was overruled.” Taerelle reached for her braid, winding it around her fist. “Between us? I think he was reprimanded for not ending the apprenticeship sooner; he was very much like you describe for months afterward.” She beckoned Saphienne as she passed into the kitchen.

Following her, Saphienne hovered in the doorway while she watched Taerelle filling a kettle from an enchanted pitcher. “That doesn’t give him a reason to forgive us.”

“I know him better than you do.” She set the kettle to boil, then opened a cupboard, found it empty, and resignedly fetched out two cups from a pile of used crockery in the sink. “Once Arelyn becomes a wizard and is immediately admitted to the Luminary Vale? He’ll have a change of heart.”

“…Because of his pride in the achievement.” Saphienne marvelled as she traced the consequence. “In order to be proud of successfully educating him, our master will have to emotionally justify the admission to himself… and when he does, by extension he’ll feel different about the events that led to it.”

Taerelle was busy casting a Transmutation spell of green and flickering red, cleaning the cups before she set about finding her teapot. “More or less. He’s made peace with what’s hap– fuck.” The pot she was seeking was among the dirty dishes. “The day I can enchant a Rod of Cleansing can’t come soon enough…”

Brooding, Saphienne watched her tutor repeat the magic, aware that she was going over her lesser struggles as a means of avoiding the greater. Her anxiety deepened as Taerelle set the teapot to steep and vanished into the pantry.

Wordlessly, she went back to perch on the couch.

Taerelle was frowning when she brought the filled cups through. “Your lack of further comment gives me pause. Since you’re so good at reading people, have I misjudged the situation?”

Saphienne set the oat-infused tea she was given on the floor, straining to find expression for what she didn’t want, tremendously feared, but knew she needed if–

“Prodigy?”

“…Taerelle,” she said, her tongue thick, “I…”

Composed in her concern, Kylantha’s cousin came to sit beside her.

“…I think there’s something wrong with me.” She examined her hands. “It’s not physical… or maybe it is… I don’t really understand myself. Ever since I sought this apprenticeship, I’ve felt like the whole world is closing in around me. I feel trapped.” She shut her eyes as they stung. “I’m watching myself do things I don’t want to do, becoming a person I don’t recognise myself in. It’s like I’m drifting on a current that’s carrying me away from the shore. But the current is me. Who I am… the way I see life… the way I think about people, and how I am with them…”

Movement, and then Taerelle’s hand tentatively touched her shoulder.

“…I used to blame myself for what happened to her.” Saphienne bit her lip. “I know that’s stupid; I didn’t make the woodlands the way they are, and I didn’t choose to be allowed to stay when they sent her away. But I felt like I was complicit. Then, at the festival, before it all went wrong? I realised I’m only a child. I let it go. And on the same day I did–”

Trembling, she gulped the tears that ran down her throat; Taerelle let them flow.

“Then I woke up, and went right back to doing the same.” How bitter they tasted. “I made it my responsibility. I didn’t even mean to tell Celaena, only Hyacinth. Keeping it to myself nearly got you– you nearly–”

“Saphienne.” Taerelle rubbed her back. “I didn’t die. And, foolish girl that I am, I didn’t recognise until now that your upset that night was from guilt.”

She steadied herself — noticing in the act that she held back from the warmth that Taerelle offered her. “It’s like I’m cursed to be someone terrible.”

“Prodigy, trust someone who is versed in the subject: you haven’t been cursed.”

“That’s how I feel.” She worried at her numb hand. “All that I feel, all that I think, the way I live in the world… it makes me unhappy. I don’t see a future for myself where I’m happy, or where I’m– where I’m who I should be. Or not should, but…”

“Who do you want to be?”

“I don’t know.” There was calm in the numbness. “I don’t trust myself to know. I feel like whatever I want for myself proceeds from a faulty premise. My instincts just lead me to misery, or cause harm to other people. In my heart…”

And there appeared another wonder.

“…Whatever is within me, it’s a fire that wants to burn. I can’t do other than feed myself to it — or feed it all I touch.”

“Anger.”

“More than anger.” How much more, she couldn’t yet behold. “There’s a… glow that it casts over the world. And the world it illuminates hurts.” She opened her eyes, absent any green to ring her wide, frightened pupils. “Everything that isn’t aflame just hurts.”

Taerelle gently took hold of her chin, turning Saphienne to meet her appraising gaze.

She let her see.

“What don’t you want? Not for the future: right now.”

Bells were ringing against the intrusion, screaming danger, urging her thither.

Saphienne ignored them, and spoke as though she did hope. “I don’t want help.”

Glacially, fighting herself as well, Taerelle nodded.

* * *

They talked for the rest of the day, and into the night.

Taerelle made Saphienne confess herself. And the woman who wore black committed at the outset to be listener, not judge, and to embrace the girl for her promise that she desired herself other than she yet knew how to be.

Were it within Taerelle’s gift, she would have promised love. But Taerelle, too, had been divested from the connection that fostered such closeness, and so what she pledged for Saphienne was the best she could provide:

Acceptance, and the teaching of self-control.

* * *

The summertime sun was set when Saphienne sat on the floor before Taerelle and let the woman braid her hair.

“You are quite special,” Taerelle admitted, entwining the three tresses together. “I could imagine that you were manipulating me, but the swiftness of your cunning and duplicity is almost beyond my belief.”

“I’m sorry…”

She pinched her ear. “Stop that. You have my forgiveness — and the price is that you tell me right after, the next time to you do it.”

“I don’t want to do that to you again.”

Taerelle snorted. “Habits are hard to break. You’ll play me again, in a small and harmless way. That will be how it starts.”

Saphienne felt the throb in her ear, feeling queasy. “So I won’t ever be able to stop?”

“Prodigy…” She tugged lightly on the growing tail. “…We are who we are, and there is a limited degree to which we can change. Your problem is not that you are gifted with these unnerving capacities, but that you haven’t grown to be their master.” Another pull. “Note the distinction: to be their master, not to master them. You behave the way you do because no one has shown you how to separate yourself from them.”

Confusion made her tilt back. “I don’t understand.”

“Of course not.” She nudged her forward. “‘Who is Saphienne?’ Why, she is the apprentice wizard of startling intelligence and burgeoning capacity for trickery, oblivious to what she does not consciously consider and astonishingly insightful about what she does, keenly sensitive to what she perceives as injustice and filled with fury toward the same.”

The summary fit, but was incomplete. “There’s more–”

“And so on.” Taerelle laughed. “You’re missing my point. Those are all statements about you, but not one of them is actually you. You can’t see yourself for their glaring presence — and so you lose yourself in embodying them. They come to direct you.”

“…I can manipulate people, but not be manipulative?”

“Better.” She finished her work, and began tying the end of the braid. “I won’t lie: I don’t know how to be close to people in that ready way others are. My mother was always inconstant, and my father hapless. Better than yours were, if I can damn them with that faint praise. But I have learned a marginally less self-destructive approach to living with my tendencies, and it starts with that insight.”

Shuffling around, Saphienne stared at Taerelle in the full receptiveness of childhood. “What comes next?”

“Knowing you can always stop.” She was very serious. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, and whatever you feel, no matter how it swallows you, will pass from you in time. You are, definitionally, bigger than whatever stirs within you.”

Saphienne didn’t believe… but then, wasn’t that the problem? “I don’t know how to trust in what you’re telling me.”

“You barely know how to trust.” Taerelle offered her hand, her smile tight. “I expect I’ll be saying this very often from now on: one sympathises.”

Yet, the girl hesitated. “…I’ve been hurt, when I’ve trusted.”

“So have I.” Her tutor in more than magic gave her patience.

She searched the icy vision that would welcome her. “You’re not promising you won’t hurt me?”

“Promises can be broken. I’ll try not to, and when I inevitably do?” Fierce and joyful anger arose in Taerelle’s countenance. “You’ll curse me out, and forgive me my failure; because you know you’ll hurt me in turn, and that I will do the same. That, prodigy, we may place our trust in.”

So it was that Saphienne arose in an accord with Taerelle, who would not be what Lynnariel could not be, nor do what Filaurel could not do, but who nevertheless would make a place for the girl. The senior apprentice was resigned to give as she had given to her cousin, though the junior was in need of far more than Kylantha had received. Theirs would not be a quiet belonging.

Yet it might in time fulfil the design of its author.

End of Chapter 90