Chương 43: Passage

Now as anyone who has worked in education can tell you, there's almost no method of instruction that works better than motivated self-teaching. No lesson plan or lecture series or gamified edutainment can hold a candle to a neurotic little gremlin diving into a pile of books and refusing to come up for air. That's me. I'm that gremlin.

Now, we're never going to be able to rebuild that library we had at Harigold Manor, but since technically I am currently seen as a highborn noble of the Central Houses of studying age operating as a ward of the throne and living within Hearstcliff's royal grounds, I have a lot of access to plenty of books that were not available to me before. Not to say 'better' or 'worse', but different collections are available in different places.

In Meadowtam I had the resources and isolation to order any of a huge variety of books, and study them as long as I may like, and take that book all around the family library to compare to any of the other books there. It gave me a fantastic grounding in a broad range of subjects, with deep foundations and solid factual knowledge.

But Hearstcliff has the advantage of having not only the royal libraries and record-vaults, but also about a hundred lending libraries around the city, with a network of communications to trade books about by request or to keep stock fresh in different regions. So my capacity to just ask for a certain reference or "about eight or nine good-sized books by authors in good standing on this subject" is basically unparalleled. No shade to my previous education: Mester Demes, Lady Puckree, Magister Nukhail...

even frickin' Quethron. They were all about as good as could be. But they, like my parents, were plugged into the standard thinking about education: that a child needs to be spoon-fed information in specific order, in measured doses, by a qualified adult. That children hate learning, and need to be strong-armed into cooperating. In my experience? If a child hates learning you're doing it wrong. The kids likes dogs? Teach them about dogs. Everything they want to know. Teach them biology, kinesthetics, nutrition.

How high a dog can jump, we're getting into physics. Where do the breeds come from, history and geography. Art, psychology, business administration, all of it branches out. If your kid wants to know everything about dogs, they will learn everything about every other subject. You can teach the French Revolution through dogs, stock market procedure, whatever. Me? My thing's not dogs. I like 'em okay. I'm more of a fish person. What does make my head whirl and makes my hands go all grabby is books about the Fissuring.

For everyone else, this is an odd point of interest. Not too unusual. It's not a red flag like some of those guys that are way too into the Roman Empire or the Weimar Republic. More like finding an adolescent with an obsessive need to know everything about the San Francisco Fires. After consuming book after book about geology, geography, seismology, spelunking, history, metallurgy, roadbuilding, air pressure, fluid dynamics, explorer's diaries, maps, topography..

well, I could easily spend an entire day just sitting curled up in my chair, eating whatever Gedes thought to bring me, turning a big stack of books on my left into a big stack of books on my right, reading fervently about everything. This explorer's diary mentions hardtack. I've heard of hardtack, but now I want perspective and context! I run to the dictionary, gather enough information to know what I need to look up, jot down some subjects I want more books on, and then go back to my reading.

Tomorrow I'll learn about how different baking methods impact spoilage and mold cultivation. The only reason I was not our librarian's least favorite person was that I kept books clean, returned them promptly, and could use sorcery to restore paper, clean up its edges and brighten ink: I gave them back in better condition than I got them. So that's why I was one of our librarian's most favorite people instead. The first few weeks of prison had a lot of appointments kind of spread out any which way.

But after a bit it started to settle. There were several people that I would see plenty of- Yheta came by most Sixthdays, Baroness Grancine would stop by for about an hour every other week, and on the alternating weeks I'd see the head of the minstrel's guild. Sisa would stop by for at least an hour just to check in, but more and more she was forced to admit that she could do little to help me, my family was feeling pressure to distance themselves from me and let me fall out of current conversation.

She would still see to matters around the city for me, but it was best if those errands did not need to use my name. But as I started to find a routine, I found that most of the time my Oneday-to-Fiveday schedule was pretty clear. So each morning would start with me making my treadmill and running until I almost die, then take a shower and be dressed before breakfast, out of consideration for poor Gedes. And after that, I would hit the books.

Somedays I would sit down for an hour or two here and there and add some composition to the pages. Mostly the classicals that I know particularly well, Holst and Vivaldi and Tchaikovsky and Liszt, or some pop songs that i thought would translate well to this format. There are lots of pop songs that do well in orchestra- funny enough, it's usually the ones that really surprise me. Two guitars and a drum? That's really hard to score for a chamber quartet and not have it be really thin. Synthpop?

Really lends itself to layered string sections and a brass arrangement. And then, back to the books! Most of the really good books about the Fissuring are not available. They, obviously, were written during the hundred years or so after it happened. And after that, there were plenty of people writing books about those books. Comparative texts, rebuttals, dissertations, discussions, clarifications, biographies of the authors of those books, whatever.

And annoyingly, most of those books are the ones that did a better job of surviving to the modern age. Well, Hearstwhile modern. So medieval-modern. It's really hard to consider what is modern in this setting. For fashions I think we're in the 1800s, for technology we're mixed from the 1500s to the 1700s, for cultural mores we're a damn mess. In terms of trade and travel we're kind of Bronze Age, and I don't even know how to grade the economic structure of Hearstwhile. The kingdom barely has a unified currency!

Every House is basically its own economy, a central bank and trade organization. The unaffiliated banks are either glorified self-storage lots, or glorified loan sharks, or both, and people that do business with them are either too shady to be allowed within the aegis of the Houses, or they are too isolated to live in their protection. Either way, they're getting ripped off.

So the Houses hold land, build projects, collect taxes, maintain titles, and occupy the strata of fealty and vassalage between the commoners and the throne. All of this allows them to hold the capital and collateral to serve as effective banks and money-changers, issuing marks of credit and loans.

There are indications that the throne used to operate a central bank, but when the royal line of the Eyellon was deposed and the Freckentop dynasty began, it caused a crisis of currency- people were not sure that the Freckentop banks would honor the obligations of the Eyellon banks, or that the Eyellon banks even could honor their own obligations now that they did not hold the throne.

So the Freckentop family had the great idea to distribute the legal responsibilities of a credit bank to all the Houses for their own holdings as collateral. Clearly a clever move on their part to avoid having to hold a ton of debt against their own deposits. They were the most financially-savvy of the Houses, which is how they got to be the ruling house in the first place. Why do I know all this about the banking system and history of currency credit in Hearstwhile? Because it goes back to the Fissuring of course!

After the capitol city of Hearstwhile was absolutely walloped by a giant impossible earthquake, the Eyellon family was having a hard time paying for all the repairs and construction. Freckentop came in with loans, resources, and personnel... and in the aftermath wound up owning almost everything. Read your contracts carefully! All of this was in those old books, which referenced the older books. And, as I said, the old books were here, but the first-person accounts were all lost.

The dissertations and comparisons and biographies and clarifications that popped up after the Fissuring were put into reprints by publishers and authors who were in an ongoing struggle to see whose version would win out- is my cataloging of the timeline better than yours? Will my sensational compilation of these survivor accounts sell better than yours does? That was rife. The original generation of books that they were all arguing about?

Everyone just assumed that every house and home already has a copy, and nobody kept the master print.

"Why would we reprint such a famous book?" said every publisher from those eras, whom i presume were idiots. Also, it was a vast continent-cracking catastrophe, so I guess a certain interruption of normal record-keeping is to be expected. That's how a dark age happens, after all.

Fortunately, that lesson was learned before too too late, and the master printing-plates for those books were kept to keep printing, and so we've got a semi-decent historical account that has only been mildly spoiled by generation after generation of academics that think they have to add something to the discussion even if it only serves to obscure the original works further. Seriously, fuck that Oubravka guy!

I'm trying to find "Deepest Theory West" by Gupmap and I keep getting copies of "Deepest Theory West: How Gupmap Reordered Thinking About The Anquarry Aftershocks" by Oubravka. His homage went into so many reprints that it's almost impossible to find the actual book that he's so excitedly referencing! Anyway, the history. Here's the simple version: Once upon a time there was a big damn earthquake that ran right down the middle of the Hearstwhile continent.

It was a strike-slip style quake, and the northern half of the land was shoved upwards by about a quarter mile, and the southern half was shoved down by about a hundred yards. Fortunately the flooding was largely contained, and most of the water that rushed in from the oceans at the east and west just poured into the deep caverns that were revealed in the chasms. The geography stabilized, all was well.

This absolutely rewrote the political divides and economy of the whole continent, and led to a massive mutual-aid effort that turned a massive corrupt confederation into a single vast kingdom with dozens of bickering Houses. The big problem here is that the centerline east-west region of the Hearstwhile continent has no mountain ranges before the Fissuring. That's because there is no fault line there, and no continental plate divide.

And of all the possible types of quake or seismic event to have happen in the middle of a continental plate? A slippage is by far the least likely. So you can imagine the sort of attention this got from everyone with any education at all. Even the ancient people in this backwards-thinking fantasy setting know that the ground doesn't normally do anything exciting in regions that don't have mountains. This is the event that I read about obsessively for hours. It's a great way to help time go by in prison.

After supper I usually do some stretches, some strength training, and then run until I feel like I'm going to die, again. Why so much physical exercise? Well for one thing it makes endorphins and helps keep me happy and sane. For another thing: my stats. Other than leveling, I can increase my attributes somewhat by working my ass off. And raising Strength by increasing my physical exercise is faster and more effective than just casting big spells.

By the time summer comes up, I've gotten my Strength up to a 5, which is cool except that it's actually just a 3 plus the bonuses from my two levels. All the running has my Stamina up to 4, which is actually the low side of average. But, "the low side of average for an adult" looks pretty darn good on a 12-year-old. And, my Intellect is up to a 10. Finally!

It's amazing what you can do with good time-management skills, no distractions, near-infinite educational resources, magic, a full-time servant or three, every possible opportunity, and the knowledge that the world could end if you fuck this up. But honestly, a lot of it will come down to the fact that I've got the opportunity to learn what I want how I want to learn it. Literally everything about this catastrophe winds up being fascinating to me.

Sure I occasionally sprinkle in a book about sorcery or magical theory, but almost everything else branches out from the Fissuring. It helps to distract me. My family has to try to pretend I don't exist. Most of my regular visitors are either business associates or people that just want to bask in the scandal of the high-born princess whose vendetta turned her into a mass-murderer. I'm not going to stand under the sky for the next two years and three months.

I am revolutionizing the arts by plagiarizing everything I love, and I can't sign my name to it or give credit to the ones that really deserve it. I'm wearing a gold clasp around my neck that nullifies my powers whenever I'm not fully contained in my cage. My requests for a pet goldfish are repeatedly denied. It's been six weeks since Nathan wrote back to me. I still can't get rid of Yheta. Sometimes I'll be doing something unrelated and I find my hands shaking for no reason, or my eye will twitch.

I don't think this is good for me. I do need some distractions. On Sixthdays, Baroness Grancine comes by, and these days she doesn't come by alone. Every week I've got a new song picked out, "thought up", and she brings people that do know how to really score music much better than me, because they've actually taken the time to study that and aren't just muddling along piece by piece like me. I hum or sing it out, they write it down, take some shorthand and flesh it out when they leave.

Sixthday is also the day that the minstrels come by to get more stories. Or the tabloid journalists for that first month that my story was new enough to be exciting to people. I did eventually get back to those hoaxers that wanted a piece of my story. I got one of them to start a story that I had been replaced by a very unconvincing stand-in and the real Natalie Harigold was still out there somewhere, and got another to start a story that I had actually died in the fire and returned as a lich.

They both thought it was real funny. I got some more attention from the tabloids because of those, for a little while. On Sevenday the chaplain comes by, and we have services, parables, and some discussions. Almost always the same chaplain, but occasionally there's a substitution if I've been asking particularly difficult questions lately. It seems that I have an unusual perspective and a somewhat troubling way of looking at certain things.

So far the priests have admitted that nothing I'm saying is actually heretical or sacrilegious.. not that it's a real problem anyway, this is not a theocracy. But it sure would not make me popular if I got branded as a heretic or idolater or something. And honestly the chapel staff are some of the friendliest visitors I get, I don't want to screw up that relationship I've got with them. And at night? More study! More reading! Every night, I slip out of my skin and grab the books.

Sometimes I curve paper and use that to turn the pages. Sometimes, I sit my body up and use its fingers to turn pages. That's challenge mode, getting those things to only move one page at a time. Slowly, I'm getting better at puppeting my own body while most of my soul sits outside of it. I am desperate for any kind of game to play or challenge to overcome. The chaplain thinks I should take up meditation, to help the time go by easier. Just sit still, open my mind, and let the hours slip by without thinking.

I suck at meditation. There's people that are good at it. I'm not it. I'm better off filling every hour, waking or sleeping, with something to do. It's just who I am I guess. All the books on meditation say to relax and let go and release your thoughts, but what does that mean? Where you do you start? I can't just put an entry on my schedule: "release attachment to worldly things" and expect that to happen! Anyway, lately I've got a new trick. I've had Yheta start bringing me small samples.

Tiny stones of different kinds, tufts of different animal hair or scales, small samples of chemicals from his natural philosophy class. And at night, I leave them on the table for my soul to start memorizing them, sort their essence into an affinity for me to call upon. With a single scale I was able to completely master goldfish in an hour. And yet dog fur just barely gets me any results at all. But my list of affinities is growing still, and I'm way past "impressive".

By the time I enter the Academy, I'm going to be the most versatile sorceress in the world. Someday I might get my fire affinity up to 50%. Fingers crossed. I look down at my trembling fingers, and press them flat against the table to still them.