Chương 27

The stick fell four notches before his left hand closed on it. John let it drop again. Four notches. Then five, which was worse, and then four. He'd cut the notches into a length of practice-dowel the evening before, a thumb's width apart, and the whole apparatus would have embarrassed a first-year physiology lab; but it was repeatable, and repeatable was the only word that mattered in a yard where everybody else measured progress by how loudly they could punch a sandbag.

Yesterday's page had a conclusion on it he'd already crossed out: Selective aura application can only make him slightly faster. It had looked clean when he wrote it. Put Aura into the fibres that fire hardest and shortest, and the hand should snap shut sooner. Except that the snap was only the final part of a long process.

The stick had to be seen, the seeing had to be recognised as falling, a command had to leave the brain, the command had to travel the arm, cross the gap into the muscle, the muscle had to release its calcium, and the motor units had to answer, and only then — last, at the very bottom of a long staircase — did anything actually move. Eight steps. Most of the staircase ran through the head, and the head was where he was not going.

He had spent three years of a previous life learning what happened when you interfered with a brain's electrics on purpose, and the answer was usually seizure, stroke, or a pathology report. So: peripheral nerves only, and the left hand. Non-dominant, expendable if something went wrong with it, and he'd rather be a swordsman with one good hand than a vegetable with two. He ran the first trial the way any warrior in the Annex would have, flooding Aura into the whole arm, shoulder to fingertips.

The arm went solid and eager. He swung the practice sword left-handed, twenty cuts, and the cuts were strong, the blade biting the air, and they were faster, but not enough so to justify the expenditure. Somewhere past the roofed hall, steel rang on steel — another yard, too far to tell whose. A gust came through and dragged the dry leaves along the base of the wall. Second attempt.

He let the flood drain and started again with nearly nothing: a thread, narrow as he could hold it, lay along the path the nerve ran from elbow to hand, as near as he could trace them by feel. Then a second thread, thinner still, into the flexors of the fingers — priming them, a little heat, a readiness — while he let the extensors on the back of the hand go slack, so they wouldn't fight the close. It took a dozen attempts just to hold both threads at once without one spreading into the other.

The thread was harder. Instead of drowning the arm, he drew the Aura down a narrow path — the nerve paths, as near as he could trace them by feel — and then did something no drill had ever asked of him: he primed the flexors of the left hand while letting the extensors go slack. Not contracting. Ready to contract. His hand held at the start of the draw instead of at rest. The stick fell three notches. Three again. Then three. Then four, when his concentration slipped, then three.

He checked the notch with his thumb to be sure he wasn't reading the dowel wrong, and dropped it again, and it was three. A thumb's width. He wasn't much, though the Aura cost was minuscule compared to simply flooding the arm. He stood there in the corner by the cistern looking at a stick and feeling more pleased with himself than he had any right to. So he pushed it, which was the obvious next mistake. If the nerve could be fed, so could the sense that ran up it.

He widened the thread, let it climb past the wrist into everything the hand reported — touch, pressure, the position of each finger — and then further, because why stop, into the eyes, into the ears. The yard came in all at once. The rustle of someone's sleeves three squares over, a retainer he couldn't see. The shadow of the shed's roofline moving across the stone as a cloud went by. His own pulse, loud in his ears, then in his fingertips, then in the dowel itself where his fingers touched it.

The grain of the wood. The exact weight of the air on the back of his neck. He could not find the stick in it. There was too much stick; there was too much everything; the falling of it was one event among forty, and his hand closed at six notches and then at seven. He pulled the Aura back so fast it left him lightheaded. The stick lay on the stone. He did not exactly remember dropping it. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Ten minutes later his left hand was still tingling from wrist to fingertips, and when he lifted it in front of his face the fingers shook — a fine, fast tremor he couldn't stop by wanting to. It passed. He flexed the hand until it did, and then wrote, carefully, right-handed: Sensory enhancement past threshold = slower. Hand paraesthesia + tremor, ~10 min. Nerves can be tuned. Then, after a thought as he sat for a while watching the leaves go back and forth along the wall, he added.

Nerves can be damaged by overtuning. After the evening's meditation, the ache in the hand was gone, so he returned to the dorm and settled in the common room to resume going through the primers he had received from Dorr. He was forty pages into the conduct primer, learning the correct form of address for an Academy adjudicator, when the door opened, and Elara came in with her satchel still on her shoulder.

"You're studying," she said, looking from him to the books.

"Ideally, yes." She stood there a moment, satchel strap in one hand. Whatever she was doing with her face settled, and she crossed the room and sat down across from him.

"Nessa's gone for dinner," she said.

"It'll be a while. The kitchens are short a boy." A pause, then she continued.

"I'll help. Charter law is my entire childhood." John arched a brow, but nonetheless turned the law primer round so she could read it.

"I've been on this page for a quarter of an hour. I'm told that's a bad sign." The trouble with charter law was that it was the law of a place, not a principle, and it kept forking.

A retainer might draw steel in the guard yards, during an authorised escort, or where a life was in immediate danger — he'd known that much since the oath — but the primer then spent three pages on when he must, which was a different question, and when his principal's order could be lawfully refused, and how much force could be used on an unarmed noble, which somehow had four answers depending on the hour and on which side of a gate you were standing. He read a provision and pointed at it.

"This says I can break a lordling's arm in the district after dusk but not before."

"Because after dusk the district answers to the night warden and not the provost, and the night warden's standing order presumes any noble abroad after the bell is up to no good." Elara pulled the book toward her and turned it the right way round.

"There was a man at Veymoor — my father's second huntsman, old Teg — who laid out a visiting cousin's son in the stable yard with a shovel. Kept his place because he'd said the words first.

'Stand down in the name of the house.' You have to say them. It's in the next clause." It was, and the provision made sense after that. Most of them did. She had a whole supply of them, household stories from Veymoor, analogies, examples, each one making a rule easier to remember. Quickly, John stopped reading the clauses and started asking her for those, and the primer went faster. First aid went faster still, which was the problem.

He read it once, all of it, and the only difficulty was slowing down enough to find the book's preferred wording for things he had studied for far more extensively at Columbia. Elara noticed.

"You seem to be very well learned in medicine," she stated.

"Mercenaries have to learn some medicine," John said, "or they stop being mercenaries. Healers are hard to find on remote trails " He kept his eyes on the book, keeping the deflection from his face"Hm," She mused, seemingly letting it go. Soon, the arrangement became reciprocal without either of them proposing it.

She talked him through the law; he began, quietly, correcting her few misconceptions on first aid — she was certain that a bleeding man should be given water, and that arrowheads should come out the way they went in, and he dismantled both with a plain description of what either one did to a body while she went slightly grey and kept listening.

"You're supposed to leave it in," she said at last, flatly.

"Until a healer or someone similarly trained is available to take it out. Yes."

"Nobody ever told me that."

"I doubt anyone ever expected you to need it." The primers migrated around the table. Somewhere past the second lamp-hour the awkwardness that had sat between them since breakfast simply wasn't there anymore. She had her boots tucked under her on the chair. He'd stopped being careful about how long he looked at her. It was Elara who broke the comfortable stretch, eyes still on the law primer.

"Did you truly mean to cross the ocean?" He considered lying, briefly, and discarded it as bad practice with a woman who read him too well already.

"Yes. I meant it." He turned his pencil over in his fingers.

"The plan was less complete than I made it sound. Horses, a ship, Corvane — after that it was mostly 'far away.' I hadn't worked out the money past the first month, or which of the New World ports would take a man with no papers and no Guild." He shrugged.

"I'd have worked it out on the road. That's usually how I do it."

"On the road," Elara said. She looked at him a moment longer than the sentence needed, then back at the page, and there was something at the corner of her mouth she didn't let develop.

"That is a terrible plan."

"Indeed." Down the corridor the outer door went, and Nessa's voice came ahead of her, already complaining about something regarding the fish. Elara sat up and got her boots back on the floor, and John slid the law primer across to her side of the table, closer so she didn't have to lean too close to him to be able to read it.