On the fifth morning, the door of the small stone house by the well finally opened, and Raider walked out into the divided quiet carrying a stack of books bound in redhide.
He did not call a gathering. He simply set the books on the rim of the cold firepit — twelve copies in Bee's beautiful hand and one original in handwriting like a rockslide — and let the Settlement's silence do the summoning for him. It took less time than a kettle takes to boil. Two hundred people can pretend not to watch a door for only so many days.
"These are rules," said Raider, when the square had filled. "For the Settlement I described. The one worth living in."
He laid his hand flat on the topmost copy.
"Every family takes one. Read it. Then annotate it — write in it, whatever you please. Cross things out. Add things. Write this is nonsense in the margin if that's what you think, but write why. In one week I'll come back, we'll put every copy on this firepit, and we'll argue it into something that belongs to all of us."
He paused, and delivered the last rule of the rulebook.
"If your copy comes back empty, that means you agree with everything in it. Silence has always counted as agreement here. It's time that worked in both directions."
That landed exactly as intended, and not comfortably. He watched the understanding move through the crowd — the elders who had spent twelve years not objecting to anything, doing the arithmetic of what their silence had been agreeing to all along.
Nobody knelt this time. Somebody, near the back, laughed the small startled laugh of a person surprised to find themselves interested. Hands came forward — some eager, some wary, one pair of hands taking a copy with two fingers, like a dead rat, to loud approval from its owner's friends.
Twelve copies walked away into twelve different silences.
The original stayed with its author, who slung a travel bag over his shoulder in full view of everyone and said, to no one in particular: "I'll be back in a week. There's something I need to fetch."
...
Gregor caught up with him at the broken edge of the barrier formation.
"Company?" they offered, though the set of their shoulders said they already knew the answer.
"Not for this," said Raider. "There's a place that's only mine."
Gregor studied him — the bag, the bone, the boy who had been ordering his life like a campaign since the cliff's edge. "The week you promised them," they said at last. "Keep it. A crowd that's been handed its first argument shouldn't be left alone with it too long."
"I'll keep it."
He was an hour into the barren flats before he let the wind take him, and he made sure that hour wandered — doubling through gullies, crossing bare stone that held no prints. It was likely unnecessary. It was also, twelve years of being watched had taught him, free.
Then the pull under his ribs sharpened, the ground of an unremarkable stretch of rock opened under his feet like a held breath finally released, and Raider fell into the dark for the second time in his life.
The first time, he had screamed the whole way down.
This time he fell loose and unhurried, the radius humming in his fist, the wind parting around him like a curtain being held aside. Somewhere below, light was rising to meet him. He realised, with a jolt that was almost guilt, that he was smiling.
'When did falling become coming home?'
The wind set him down at the bottom, centimetres above the ground, out of what he could only assume was nostalgia.
...
The spirit was out of the skull before Raider cleared the tunnel's last turn, and it crossed the chamber like a thrown spear, pulling up an arm's length away to stare at him with eyes like lit needles.
"Well, well, well." Master Bones drifted a slow circle around his apprentice, the way a merchant circles a horse. "The spine's new. The eyes are new. There's a thought sitting in your head with roots on it — don't tell me, don't tell me..." He stopped, delighted. "A Dao seedling. Ha! Not one month gone and the mortal grows a Dao seedling. Kid, experts meditate a century for less. This old man has excellent taste in apprentices."
Then his gaze dropped to the radius in Raider's hand, and the delight went out like a pinched wick.
"...Why," said Master Bones, in an entirely different voice, "is my bone in your hand?"
"Where else would it be?"
"Where—" The spirit's colourless hair began to lift, though there was no wind in the chamber that Raider wasn't making. "A month. I give a boy the distilled understanding of my Wind, and for a month he carries it about like — like a walking stick. Tell me you nourished your body with it. Tell me you at least tried to store it within you."
"Store it where?"
Master Bones put his face in his hands. From inside them, muffled, came a sound that in a lesser being might have been a scream.
"I flattened four cultivators with it," offered Raider helpfully. "And a tenth of a village. And I hunted three hordes—"
"You used a ladder to beat men over the head." The hands came down. The needle-eyes fixed him. "Sit. Sit, apprentice. It seems this old man must begin at the true beginning: not what my bones can do to the world, but what they are for. They are for you."
...
The method, once shown, was so simple that Raider understood immediately why he could never have guessed it.
He sat cross-legged before the formation with the radius pressed flat against his sternum, skin to bone, and did nothing at all — no willing, no picturing, no stubbornness. Only breathing, in the slow rhythm his Master counted for him, and permission: the deliberate, difficult act of letting something in.
"Your flesh has spent twelve years keeping the whole world out," said Master Bones, pacing the air around him like an examiner. "Blows, techniques, my own soul — commendable, kid, truly, but a wall is only half a house. Tempering is teaching your body the other half. My bone holds what my body knew. Let yours drink."
On the ninth breath, warmth left the bone and entered Raider's chest, and it was nothing like the wind's cool river. It was slow and heavy and it spread — down the ladder of his ribs, along the long bones of his arms, into the small stones of his wrists, and everywhere it went it sank into his own skeleton and settled there like ore into a vein.
It ached. It was the deep, structural ache of a thing being rebuilt while in use.
"It will hurt more later," said his Master, pleased. "Tempering is honest work. It mends as it makes, though — this method once knit me back together from wounds that should have scattered my soul across three mountains. Breathe. Again."
Raider breathed. The bone poured. His body drank.
They kept at it for five days.
There was no sun in the chamber, but Master Bones kept time to the surface with the offhand precision of something that had counted tens of thousands of years, and he filled the hours the way no one in Raider's life had ever filled hours — with talk. Lessons that turned into stories that turned into lessons. The names of dead friends. The taste of a fruit from a world that no longer existed. Three separate accounts of the same duel, each more flattering than the last.
On the fifth day, Master Bones told him to stand, walked him to the chamber wall, and said: "Hit the stone."
Raider hit the stone. The stone cracked. His hand did not.
He stood looking at his own knuckles — unmarked, unremarkable, the same knuckles that had split on a well-rope a week ago — and felt nothing different in them at all. That was the strangest part. The change had gone in below the floor of feeling, into the part of him that was structure.
"I don't sense any difference," he admitted.
"The wall disagrees," said Master Bones. "Your senses will catch up to your bones eventually. Now. Try the fusion again."
Raider sat, laid the radius along his left forearm, and let go of everything he had tried in his room — and this time, like against like, tempered flesh recognising what had been seeping into it for five days, the bone clung. It drew flush to his arm and held there, snug as a vambrace, and power ran up through the join: his hand felt like it could crumple iron, and the air around his arm bent faintly, ready.
But it would not go in. He could feel the boundary like a skin of glass — the place where he ended and his Master's bone began — and nothing he did would dissolve it. When he tried to draw the bone inside his body the way Gregor drew mist, the glass held. When he tried to store it, the glass held.
"Stuck at the threshold," murmured Master Bones, watching with his chin in his hand. "Mm. As expected of a body no power can enter, even invited. We'll go around. Listen: stop treating my bone as a thing. Things sit in hands. Make it illusory — hold the idea of the bone, let the matter of it follow the idea—"
Raider tried. For the better part of a day he tried, and the bone stayed exactly, stubbornly, gloriously real.
He opened his eyes at last, looked at the vambrace of ancient bone clinging to his arm, and said the thing he had been circling since the wall cracked.
"Master. Give me a second bone."
...
The chamber went still.
"No," said Master Bones.
"The tempering works. Two bones would temper me twice as—"
"No, kid." The spirit drifted down until they were level, and for once there was nothing playful in the sharp old face at all. "Hear the rule, because it is not mine to bend. Each of my bones holds a portion of what I was. A portion chooses. You did not pick up my radius because your eyes hurt least, whatever you think you were doing — it accepted you, and the acceptance is the entire craft. You could not lift the others that night. You cannot lift them now. A bone that has not accepted you is not a treasure sitting in a formation, kid. It is a dead man's power, awake, and asked a question."
"Then I'll ask it," said Raider. "The ulna. It's the radius's pair — they lay side by side in your arm your whole life. If any bone was going to accept me next, it's that one. I won't know unless I try."
"You'll know precisely one heartbeat after you try, which is one heartbeat too late to change the answer." The spirit's light flared. "The bones of a third Realm expert do not merely refuse, apprentice. They answer. Wind is a courteous element; my Lightning was not courteous even while I lived."
Lightning. Raider's eyes went, before he could stop them, to the long bone lying parallel to the radius's empty place — and now that he knew to listen for it, he could almost hear it: under the chamber's hum, a thin bright note, like a wasp in a jar.
Twelve years of being told what he could not do stood up inside him, all at once, and set its feet.
"I'm going to try."
Master Bones looked at his apprentice for a long, long moment — the boy standing in front of the formation with a vambrace of borrowed wind on one arm and a mule's whole soul in his face.
"Yes," said the spirit at last, wearily, "you are. I taught freedom my whole life; it would be a poor joke to forbid it to my own apprentice." He drifted back until he hung above the skull, dimming to a watchful ember. "Then hear this old man's last lesson before you reach: whatever it does to you — do not let go. A price interrupted is a price paid for nothing."
"I won't let go."
"I know," said Master Bones softly. "That's the only reason I'm allowing this. Scream if you must, kid. I will be listening."
Raider knelt at the formation's edge, wiped his palm dry against his new grey clothes, and reached for the left ulna.