Forty Four: Futures

Jordan's sparring stick flew through the air and landed with a thud in Thirris's garden. Ren squeaked and scampered after it, and then sat and gnawed on it until Jordan retrieved it. It was a bit big for the shadow-runner to play fetch with, but she was giving it a good go.

"You're distracted again," Yddris growled. "We're not going to get anywhere if you don't concentrate."

"So far," Jordan snapped back, stalking back to stand opposite his tutor, stick in hand, "I've crossed the Barrens in one stretch after spending twenty years doing little more than walk round the fucking block, been stuffed with purging herbs and lost half my internal organs, and then found out that this place I fell into by accident is not only plagued with demons but also zombies out to kill me and anyone like me. I'm having a bit of a tough time concentrating."

"What's a zombie?" If Jordan's list of woes affected Yddris at all, it wasn't in the way he'd been hoping.

"Undead thing that eats brains."

"Your world has those?"

"No. They're fictional."

Yddris's bafflement radiated from him in waves. "You don't have real demons, so you make them up?"

"I..." Jordan scowled. "That's not the point I was making at all."

"If you focus, boy, you won't have time to mope about your problems. Ready up again."

Jordan bit down on his retort and tried to do as Yddris said. He flexed his aching hands on the stick, and tried to anticipate where his tutor would come from first. He forced himself not to think about watching Yddris at the bouts, because he knew already there was no way he could win. He could just do without the added discouragement.

He didn't win – predictably – but he could've sworn he parried a few more blows than he had managed previously. He stepped back as Yddris's stick tapped his shoulder and leaned over to catch his breath. The match had been longer than usual, and to his surprise he had managed to forget about things for a few minutes.

"Very good," Yddris said, and sounded like he meant it. "See, boy, you've got some skill when you put your mind to it. I think it's about time we tried you on a blade. You must be bored of sparring by now."

"Kinda," Jordan said. He straightened. "But blades are sharp."

"Obviously." His tutor's voice was dry as a desert. "Don't tell me Blackheart's had you on sticks."

"We haven't done anything with blades," Jordan said, a touch defensive. "Usk's been teaching me to fight and he just uses them to finish someone off a bit faster."

"That surprises me," Yddris mused. "I'm sure Blackheart would marry his blades if it was an option."

Jordan snorted. Arlen was very particular with his knives; he kept a varied selection on him at all times, even when it was just him and Jordan alone, and in idle moments the assassin could always be found polishing one even if it was already gleaming.

"I think he wants to teach me himself," Jordan said. "I just don't know how he plans to do it."

"If he manages it, there's no one in the Devils better to teach blades." Yddris flicked a knife out from seemingly nowhere and twirled it around his fingers. "Not since I left it, anyway."

"Cocky much?" Jordan asked, and then squeaked in alarm as the knife thudded into the tree behind him, missing his face by an inch.

"You're moving to blades. Sparring is getting demoted to a warmup. Dagger out, boy."

"You sound as bad as I feel," Koen said an hour later. They had agreed to meet up after training in the building the Unspoken used as a kind of tavern, though it was far more civilised than any pub Jordan had been into in the Reach. Both of them sat at the table like their bodies had turned to rubber. Jordan's fingers had myriad tiny cuts on them from fumbling his blade, and they stung as he picked up his pint and took a sip. He hissed and shook it out. He hadn't been able to bear pulling his gloves over them.

"Yddris decided to start on knives," he muttered. "After an hour of sparring, before which he made me run laps. I think I'm the closest to death I've been in a while."

"Hap made me do the full perimeter patrol." Koen stared despondently into his own glass. "I swear he did something to me that attracted demons, it wouldn't bloody end."

They settled into their mutual mope with twin sighs. Jordan complained, but secretly this was what he had hoped for on all those nights he'd wanted the Gift to just leave. It hadn't occurred to him that he could have this – the simple pleasure of going for a pint with a good friend after a hard work day – with or without the Gift. He had friends, and a purpose, even if he wasn't all that pleased with what it was. And Arlen Blackheart couldn't get anywhere near him here.

"Are you nervous?" he asked Koen. His friend was uncharacteristically quiet. These silences had become more and more frequent the closer they drew to Koen's graduation.

"Of course I am." Koen rubbed his face with one hand. "I'm terrified. This is it. Everything I've been working towards in the last three years, and it's all over. Hap's going to retire in the next year or so, and then I'll be out to find something to do with myself. Get my own jobs, sort out my own taxes. Half of an Unspoken's education comes from living it, that's why it takes a decade to be allowed to take an apprentice." He chuckled. "I know it blows, but you might have a blessing in disguise from inheriting Yddris's job. You'll know what you're doing. Life is just so...open ended from here. I grew up thinking I'd always be working the family farm until I got a wife and a freehold of my own. Then I'd have kids and hopefully see a few grandchildren before I copped it. Even when I manifested, I wasn't really thinking that far ahead."

Jordan took a long drink of ale, and cursed as one of his cuts split and began to bleed again. "You'll figure it out, cuz you're good at what you do. I was in a similar situation back home, but I left education with lacklustre qualifications and no ideas. My sister was always the one with aspirations and interests and I was the family shut-in." He slumped in his seat. "And now I spend my mornings learning how to stab things properly."

"Useful skill, that." Koen nodded. "Not my thing, particularly. Yddris must think you've got some potential to have you on blades this soon."

"But it's been..."

"Thorne." Koen interrupted him, a grin in his voice. "This is early for blades. Stop convincing yourself you're shit at everything."

Jordan shrugged. He didn't have the energy spare to argue. "How long did it take you, then?"

"I did sparring for almost my whole first year," Koen said. "I will add a disclaimer that I am an exceptionally poor aim with blades, but still. One season is not that long, considering." He glanced around. "I think it's a socially acceptable time to have a midday meal now, don't you? My insides are about to digest themselves in desperation."

Jordan nodded, realising that he was ravenous now that Koen had drawn attention to it. They ate bowls of thick vegetable soup with warm bread in companionable quiet. Jordan was in no rush to get back; his runic manual sat waiting on his desk at Thirris's for his afternoon's work line-up. He had no other obligations for the day as Yddris was in a meeting with Cara, and first thing in the morning he was going to visit Yerrit again. He had been a couple of times since the first, and he was confident that one more session would see his painting finished. He had already decided that this first canvas would be his contribution to Thirris's guest room wall.

"Have you worked out how rune nets link yet?" Koen asked wryly. He sopped up the remainder of his soup with the heel of his bread.

"No," Jordan muttered. He'd made a token attempt at Hap's challenge in recent days, but had for the most part forgotten about it.

"He'll ask you again soon. We're going on a perimeter patrol together at some point," Koen replied. "Better have some ideas by then."

"I don't think nets will ever be my best subject," Jordan said. "Yddris doesn't do them at all."

"But he does know how they work. I bet he could fix one in a pinch until a warder got there to redo it," Koen countered. "He thinks it's important enough to send you out with me and Hap."

They got up, draining off their glasses and clearing their crockery onto a tray. Jordan's whole body protested the movement, and even Koen seemed to move more heavily than usual. Hap must have been running him hard, Jordan thought, to make even Koen this tired.

They stepped out into the thoroughfare and meandered back towards the town centre. Was it his imagination, Jordan wondered, or were thin patches of weak light filtering through the trees above? The prospect of an end to the months of darkness put a spring in his reluctant feet. He parted from Koen at the main Guildtown hall and turned to go back to Thirris's house. His eyes lingered on Cara's home, set back from the clearing, inside which he knew his tutor to be. Yddris hadn't said so, but Jordan knew it was city business they discussed. Even here it was impossible to escape the events of the Reach; the city had clawed its way into every aspect of Jordan's life.

There was no one home except Ren when he returned. He picked her up on his way past his room and went into the back sitting room to set the kettle over a new fire, already trying to drag together the right mind-set for studying runes. There were fifteen main runes, he recited to himself, which could be used in and of themselves, slightly altered or embellished, or in combination. The manuals detailed the most common combinations but it was generally expected that Unspoken picked up their own flourishes through experience... He looked up from filling a strainer with leaves at a noise from the hall.

"Astra?" he asked in surprise, when he recognised the surface-calm aura of the Unspoken who had entered the house. He went out into the corridor. Astra stood in the doorway from the front room. It was hard to say whether he'd surprised her in turn. "Is something wrong?"

"No," she said. He didn't quite believe her. "Is Thirris in?"

"Not at the moment," he said, knowing she could already tell Thirris wasn't in. "Do you want a drink? I just put the kettle on."

She hesitated. Jordan was convinced for a moment that she would decline and walk out. Then she nodded and stepped inside. "Yes, please."

She drifted to a seat by the wall as he turned back to the hearth and got out a second cup and strainer. He didn't expect her to tell him what she was here for, but left the silence open. She didn't seem like the type for small talk. To his surprise, it didn't make things awkward. He took the kettle off the fire when it began to belch steam and poured it through the strainers, then rummaged around in Thirris's cupboard. He unearthed a box of plain sweet biscuits. He put it all onto a tray and turned around. "We can sit on the veranda if you want."

Rather than replying, she got up again and went out the back door, settling herself on the bench pushed against Thirris's back wall. Jordan didn't presume to sit on it next to her, instead taking the single wooden chair that Yddris favoured. He rolled a cigarette without thinking, and cringed at how automatic the habit had become. He was almost out of blackweed; when he ran out, he would have to shake the habit before he got back and risked Nika finding out. The fact that Yddris had a constant supply wouldn't be an issue, he told himself, as he quite liked keeping his head on his shoulders.

"I've always quite liked the smell," Astra said after a moment. "I tried it once, but I found it intensely nauseating."

"Yeah?" Jordan took another drag. "It used to make me feel all kinds of funny. You don't live with Yddris for long before you get too used to it." Or Usk and Arlen. The Varthian always had a smoke on whenever he was at Arlen's.

"I think his habit might be excessive."

Jordan laughed. "Nika seems to think so, too."

"Are you happy with him as your teacher?"

That drew him up short. No one had ever asked him whether he thought Yddris was a good teacher for him; from the start there had been little choice. He thought about it for a while. At the start of the season, he was certain he would have said that Nika felt like a better match, but...

"Yeah," he said, "yeah, I am."

"I hated Kolter at first."

Jordan kept quiet, sensing it was not the right time to make a clumsy foray into that conversation. He fidgeted. He had become cautiously more comfortable around Astra, but not enough to forget how badly they'd started off. He still didn't know why they had started badly, and he knew even less about what had prompted her to talk to him now, let alone about personal topics. One blessing he silently thanked circumstance for was growing up with a younger sister who told him everything. Astra wanted to talk, and she didn't want his input - just someone to listen.

He could do that without falling over half a dozen social tripwires, at least.

"I blamed him for my Gift," she continued. "I thought that if he had just not arrived at my home when he did, it wouldn't have happened. I was standing so close to his casting and the demon it was aimed at that I was sure it had infected me somehow. But there was no one else to take me on in the area at that time and he really wanted an apprentice." She took a hurried sip of tea, staring ahead into the trees. Jordan took another drag of his cigarette and let the smoke spiral away on a light breeze. "I had so many plans. I never thought for a moment the Gift would choose me. From the very start, I could hear everything, knew everything about the world around me, and I didn't know how to block it out. It was torture. I thought I was going to crack. But I wouldn't let Kolter help, and he wouldn't do it without my permission. In the end I begged him to help me and after that...when the world was quiet again and he had shown me that the Gift wasn't the end of my life, we became so close. I don't think I'll ever find anyone who can replace what he did for me. All my plans felt so shallow, afterwards. So superficial. I thought I understood what it meant to really live. And then he left me. He promised we'd see the whole known world together."

Until the last line, she had spoken evenly and dispassionately, but it broke on the last.

"I can't even have revenge on the one who killed him," she said, after another pause. "I can't even have that much."

Jordan stubbed out his cigarette and dropped it into the bucket that Yddris used to knock his pipe out into. Part of him wished she had never told him these things – what was he supposed to say? But another part was glad that she judged him worth telling it to. He said, "Has someone offered?"

She glanced sharply at him, as if she'd temporarily forgotten he was there. Then she sighed. "Yes."

"You've...declined, then?"

"I...no." She suddenly sounded very young. "I ran away."

"You..."

"I ran away. I ran off, right in front of them. I didn't even have the guts to tell them I'd consider it." She sniffed. "I wish Thirris was in."

Jordan tried not to take it personally. "He's probably in the meeting with Yddris. I don't know how long they're going to take." He paused. "You can stop here until he's back, if you want."

"I don't want to disturb you."

"You wouldn't be. I'm just doing rune studies. Nothing urgent."

She tentatively nibbled on one of the biscuits, quiet for a while. Ren hopped down to the floor and began snuffling up the crumbs around Astra's feet, and then bounded off into the garden to hunt for slugs. Jordan scowled. He'd found a stockpile of regurgitated slug-bits under his bed the previous day. "Don't catch so many that you puke," he called half-heartedly after her. "That was fucking gross."

He turned back to find Astra watching him. He startled and tried to cover it up with a hasty sip of tea, but only succeeded in choking on it.

"If you want any help, I'd be happy to study with you," she said. Her voice was faintly amused. Through watering eyes, he stared at her. "I could do with a refresher."

"I...yeah. I'd like that," he said. "I think Thirris has another copy of Draskell in my room. Hang on."

He got up and hurried off, unable to quite believe what was happening. He wouldn't question it, he decided. He had resigned himself to Astra never wanting anything to do with him, but if she was willing to make efforts now, then he wasn't going to refuse it. Especially not with Koen about to graduate, though he didn't like to think about that much.

Yddris and Thirris returned together an hour later, proving Jordan's suspicions correct. Jordan and Astra were still on the veranda, Jordan marvelling at the miracle of a rune-study session that didn't bore him to tears. He looked up as the men entered. "I wasn't supposed to start dinner, was I? Shit. What time is it?"

He looked around, trying to get a clue from the light. Despite there generally being more of it, it didn't give him many clues. He opened himself to the current, and found it rising. Heading towards night, then. He stood up.

"I'll get started on it," he said. He glanced at Yddris. "Can you help?"

"I can watch and make unhelpful suggestions," his tutor replied. "We got a deal?"

Jordan rolled his eyes. "Whatever."

He closed the door behind him on Thirris and Astra. Yddris grunted. "What's going on, boy?"

"She wanted to talk to Thirris," Jordan replied, heading for the cellar stairs to collect ingredients for dinner. Then he grinned. "And I really think she doesn't hate me."