Bren Alder made the world reasonable for three hours. Kaelen arrived with sleep still in his eyes and left it on the hook by the door with his cloak. He spun the wheel to check the wobble; it wandered, so he found the high spot and sanded until his palm stopped complaining. He swept the shavings into a pile and bagged them for kindling. Between each task he breathed like a person and not like someone trying to starve a storm.
"Again," Bren said, and the shop agreed. By midday the wheel had accepted several apologies and become closer to round.
"Stop," Bren ordered finally, as if forbidding victory from getting greedy. "Grease the axle; then take the long way. Streets teach hands."
Kaelen greased the axle with a thin coat so the wheel would turn easy, wiped the surplus, put each tool back where it lived, and left before Bren could hand him another lesson his muscles would be unable to carry with grace. The square met him at full clatter and then, out of kindness, allowed him to slip through. He had made a promise to himself before first bell and it tugged at him now like a friend who doesn't understand patience. He fetched bread from Maelin with a kiss to her floury cheek, endured Daran's quick check of his eyes, 'You good? Good enough', then took the path the river keeps for people who need to be alone without the loneliness.
The willow bend waited. The same tongue of gravel. The same heron with its holy indifference. The Lark wrote a clean sentence round the turn, every word spelled water. He sat, and the hum that had behaved itself like a good guest in Bren's shop came forward and put its elbows on the table of his hands.
"All right," he said, because this was not a temple and he could be casual. "We try again. We try and fail less stupidly."
He warmed up with the small work: raised a reed-tip the thickness of a fingernail and held it there; asked a foam fleck to wait and got a half a heartbeat of obedience; nudged grit in the sand so it made a quiet spiral and then clapped himself internally for not turning spirals into an omen. The hum answered like a dog that had been taught two tricks and wanted to show them even when asked for the third.
He cupped his palms to shelter a thing that did not yet exist. He drew breath, slow as Bren's plane across a board. He thought: 'circle, not fire; shape, not hunger.' The not-dark point pinched itself into being between his hands with the same wrongness as yesterday. It jittered into orange, then blue, then wrong-orange again. It did not cast light. It edited the air. He moved his right hand a hair and it followed late, glitching into the path it was supposed to have taken two heartbeats earlier. He pushed. It lurched into the air like a stone regretting its career change, traveled two yards with tiny rewinds that made Kaelen's stomach tilt, and then erased itself from the rim inward, silent, stubborn, unholy in the way art is unholy when it first becomes itself in a world that hasn't invented the belonging yet.
He waited for the flood of triumph that boys are supposed to get when they throw anything at anything and it goes. He received instead the quiet grimness of a craftsman who has done something, yes, but done it wrong. He tried again. He failed better, the wrong-fire slid straighter before it remembered to stutter, but it was still wrong. The hum inside his hands sang along with the thing's own dry tune and the two sounds made a braid that was not music and not not music.
He took a breath and felt watched.
Not like the other day when a single attention had followed him at the edge of a lane. This was multiple threads of noticing, distinct enough to count if he held very still, but they were different. Human. One weight of gaze anchored and upright, professional; one slippery and amused, someone willing to be seen and then not; one soft and steady, like a hand that has laid itself over wounds too long to be greedy with its own interest; one precise attention, almost a tapping, 'tick-tick-tick', the count of a mind that measures what it cares about so it can care better.
He did not move. He had learned from Daran that sometimes the best thing to do with being observed is to let the observation walk itself out. He tried the trick again, small point, wrong light, wrong behavior, and it jittered like a bird painted badly on a page that wanted to be river. The hum answered in him in a way that felt… pleased to be useful; not proud, just content. He hated it for that, briefly. He loved it for being his.
He looked at the heron to give his eyes cover. The willows shook one leaf at a time. Footsteps pressed moss somewhere that made no sound.
"Again," he told himself, and the word came out a command and a plea.
He set his hands. The hum rose. He pinched a not-dark; he widened it; he organized it against its will; he pushed, and the wrong-fire leapt, a heartbeat more obedient, a heartbeat more rewound. It reached the river and then decided it had never left and winked out.
He nearly laughed, because what else do you do when the world teaches you that your hands were meant to be a joke and forgot to be. The fourth watching presence shifted its attention. The precise one. A staff butt tapped once against earth with a sound that was almost polite.
"That's not magic," said Seraine, stepping from the alder shade with her braid tight and her staff carried like a measuring stick. "That's something else."
Kaelen's heart attempted to prove its education by leaping into his throat. He did not drop his hands. He failed not to flinch.
Nyx arrived by appearing to have always been there, on the root to his left, arms folded, smile soft enough not to alarm a dragon. "I told you he'd do it again," she said around a grin that apologised for enjoying herself. She managed to peek at his previous session the other day, just about when Kaelen decided to head home and deemed stalking appropriate. "Boys with new tricks cannot resist the doctrine of repetition."
Rowan entered as a correction to Nyx's mischief: straight-backed from the rise, mail quiet, helm hooked at his saddle because he refused to admit it was not part of him. He lifted two fingers in a greeting that meant a promise: 'we came like weather, not like thieves.'
Sister Mirel came last, as if deciding to arrive only once the other three had made enough noise for his quiet to matter. He took in Kaelen's hands with a healer's habit, noticing not only what they did but what they tried not to do. He stood at a distance that allowed him to look at Kaelen fully.
Kaelen realized his palms were still cupped around a thing that did not exist and had to fight the impulse to clap that nothingness as if it were a moth and then the fear that the act of clapping would invent something even worse. He lowered his hands slowly.
"You followed me," he said, aiming for accusation and landing somewhere nearer annoyed gratitude. "That's impolite in Stonebridge. We have rules about not stalking boys at rivers."
Nyx spread her hands. "We have rules about not letting boys set themselves on fire in rivers, too, which I am staunchly in favor of enforcing."
Rowan gave her a look that said both thank you and stop. He turned to Kaelen with leadership in his posture and humility in his eyes. "We crossed the ridge and returned by the north track," he said, answering the question Kaelen had not asked to save him the weight of it. "Bandits are less interesting than rumor paints. A tavern made of rope and rumor is exactly as dangerous as Daran said. We came back because someone sent for us, and because Sister Anwen told us you were practicing something you didn't have words for yet. We wanted to see you safe while you learned your words."
Kaelen blinked. 'Sister Anwen knew about me coming here?' He thought. Fury threatened absurdly; he did not know at whom. Anwen had betrayed him with kindness, which is the worst kind. He looked at Seraine because it would be easier to be mad at her. Seraine did not allow it. Her attention was a blade that trimmed the anger's ragged edge and left behind the thing itself: fear, curiosity, and that small happy spite which refuses not to learn.
"It doesn't sound," Seraine said softly. "There's no burn. Only a pressure. If I were a poet I'd call it a hum, but I am not and so I won't."
He swallowed. "Yes," he said, and then, because it cost nothing to be unhelpful: "No."
Mirel took a step nearer. He kept his hands visible, palms open, as if coming to an animal who will bolt if unwisely addressed. "May I stand closer," he asked, and waited.
Kaelen nodded because it was either nod or do something irretrievable with arrogance. Mirel came to within arm's length and did not reach, the way good healers learn to work in air first. "I don't feel the Loom's pull in you when you work," he said. "I don't feel the law of healing in it either, which is perhaps fortunate because if you had unholy fire and mending together, I would have to adopt you and I don't have the bread for it. Whatever this is, it isn't our house's book."
Nyx's grin thinned. "Which is my favorite kind of problem," she admitted. "The kind that refuses to stand under anyone's roof and ask to borrow salt."
Rowan glanced at Kaelen's hands the way a commander glances at a map that has just changed a river's course. "Show us again," he said. It was an order dressed as a question; then he remembered himself and added, "If you wish."
Kaelen didn't. He wanted to say no and watch their faces eat that word and pretend to respect it. He wanted to say yes and show them he could make something, even if that something hated being made. He wanted to keep the hum secret until he had taught it a better song. He wanted not to be afraid of seeing himself in their eyes.
He said, flatly, "If I do, you don't tell the square."
"Agreed," Rowan said at once, which both helped and did not. "This isn't for a crowd."
"We are very good at keeping secrets," Nyx added. "We keep several from ourselves."
Seraine's mouth made a shape that in other people would be a smile. "I will tell only my staff," she said dryly, "and it will publish a book in which you will be given a false name and an unreasonable amount of credit."
Mirel said nothing.
Kaelen took in one breath. He told the hum: 'stay.' He told his hands: 'don't try to impress them.' He told his pride: 'go wipe plates.' He cupped his palms. The smell arrived before the not-dark, the copper, the clove ash, the bread that had changed its mind. He pinched a point into being. Seraine leaned in a fraction; her staff didn't move. The wrong-fire jittered into shape, fought with itself for color, and held, a little steadier. He pushed. It left him and traveled four paces before it remembered the secret that undoing is sometimes easier than doing and ate itself politely.
Nyx exhaled like a woman watching a tightrope walker refuse gravity out of sheer rudeness. "Pretty, except for how it isn't," she said. "Like a coin trick that keeps reminding you it's not a coin."
Seraine's eyes had gone very dark and very bright at once. "Not magic," she repeated, a verdict and a riddle. "Not ours. Not the Loom. Not borrowed, not stolen. It does not tithe to any law I can name."
Mirel's head tilted. "And it hums," he said. He looked at Kaelen. "Do you hear it?"
Kaelen swallowed the yes that would open more doors than he could close in a day. "I feel it," he said. Truth is best when it is small.
Rowan crouched to the spot where the wrong-fire had pretended to burn and didn't. He pressed his palm to the pebbles. No heat. No ash. He lifted a stone and smelled it. "No story," he said, almost disappointed. "Which makes it more story."
Kaelen's hands wanted to do the trick again out of nervousness, the way a boy will repeat the sentence he has just said because people looked at him when he said it. He stilled them by folding his sleeves over his palms. Seraine watched that too and filed it in her mind's tidy chest.
"Where did you get it?" she asked, not prying, not gentle, simply asking the way a historian asks time to be honest.
Kaelen's throat closed around the word gate. He could not tell them about the whiteness and time freeze. He could not say about being deemed 'unauthorized' by some magical voice aloud in front of these people whose lives were made of lawful danger. His silence made Nyx's mouth quirk in a way that said she recognized a boy guarding the one jewel, even if the jewel was a stone.
Rowan made a soothing motion with two fingers. "You don't have to say," he said plainly. "You can keep your map in your pocket until you like the weather."
Mirel said, "If keeping it makes you shake at night, tell me, and I will sit beside your bed until we both snore."
Kaelen choked on a laugh that was nearly a sob and hated that it had the gall to be both. "So what am I?" he said, full of questions about a world that denied him so much, but also so little.
"You are a bridge," Rowan affirmed, and the word made the air shift loyally around Daran's son. "Which is more dangerous and more useful."
Nyx kicked a pebble into the water where it made a single insubordinate plink. "I want to know if it breaks other things," she said, squinting at Kaelen with affection that refused to ask permission. "Your wrong-fire. If I throw a knife through it, do we get two knives or none? If Sister Mirel prays, does it eat the prayer? If Seraine swears an oath at it, will the oath decide to become a bird?"
"I am not swearing at a child's experiment," Seraine said primly. "Even I have limits."
"I will not throw a knife at him," Mirel added. "Today."
Rowan stood. "Permission," he said to Kaelen. "We ask for tests; you say yes or no; we stop when you say we stop. We borrow your courage only as far as you hand it to us."
A relief went through Kaelen so pure it felt like river water taking mud. He could say no. Having the right to refuse made him able to consider yes. "What tests," he asked, suspicious, hopeful.
"Small ones," Seraine said, and Nyx groaned because Seraine's small is other people's cathedral. "Hold it again. I'll stand on the far side. I want to see if light bends in it. I will stand here," she added, and stood where a boy could run between her and the willow twice and not be caught if he didn't want to.
Kaelen nodded. He set his hands, called the hum, pinched the wrong-light into being. The smell arrived; the color found and lost itself in dizzy loops; he held it steady, breath as straight as he could make it. Seraine lifted her staff and, with the barest gesture, made a bead of witch-light hover in the air the size of a grape. The bead remained honest white; the wrong-fire did not drink it. Seraine moved the bead to pass it behind the wrong-fire; for the blink it crossed the wrong sphere's edge, the bead smeared, a streak of light in the wrong direction, then corrected as it came out.
Seraine's pupils widened by the smallest amount. "It doesn't burn," she murmured. "It edits."
"Like a scribe who hates poetry," Nyx offered. "Or a thief who steals the space around coins and not the coins."
Mirel reached into his pocket and brought out a small strip of blue braid like the one Canon Edrin had used. He held it up and the willow's light caught at it. "May I," he asked.
"Fling it," Kaelen said, and then corrected himself, "No-, wait." He moved so that Mirel would not throw across him, because he liked his own eyes; then he nodded, because he also liked answers.
Mirel tossed the braid lightly. It passed through the wrong-fire, through the edge, through the center, out again, and did not burn, did not fray, did not even smell of clove and ash. The wrong-fire stuttered once as if offended and then remembered sulking.
Rowan bent, gathered a handful of pebbles, and then, ignoring them, tossed a single grain of dirt instead, safety, disguised as carelessness. The grain vanished at the edge and reappeared on the far side a finger's width lower, as if it had forgotten where down was.
Kaelen let the wrong-fire go. It unmade itself, neat as a good soldier. He breathed. The hum tucked itself away, purring or pretending to.
"You are not going to tell me how it came," Seraine said, as if noting the weather. "You are not going to tell me what it felt like the first time. You don't need to confirm or deny any of that; I am simply saying the parts of the map I know you are keeping in your pocket."
Kaelen went cold. He did not show it, because Daran had trained his boy to keep his face when mules were involved. "I don't know what you mean," he lied, competently for once.
Seraine's mouth softened, which in her is akin to someone else's hug. "Good," she said. "Keep your pocket. But if you wake with conversations in your hands, if you smell coins and clove where there should be sleep, if the quiet is loud-"
He flinched because she had reached for his phrase and nearly found it. "I'm fine," he said, and meant it in the way people mean I will not bleed on you.
"Of course," Mirel said kindly. "And if you are not, I will sit and not talk at you until both of us remember how listening works."
Nyx jumped down from the root and landed without a sound because she liked to make gravity doubt its career options. "And if anyone else sees you do it," she added, "I will make them remember they saw something ordinary. It's a hobby. I'm good at hobbies."
Rowan put a hand on the saddle, then didn't mount. He waited. "We won't parade you," he said. "We won't take your trick north and sell it to a tavern made of rope. We won't even tell your father today."
Kaelen swallowed. Gratitude and offense looked at one another and decided not to fight in front of guests. "He'll know," he said, grim and fond. "He knows when I have a splinter the size of a lie."
"Then you'll tell him when you like your words," Rowan said. "Good. We ask one thing: don't practice in the square. Stonebridge loves to help. She is very bad at secrecy. Practice here. Where willows have opinions they keep to themselves."
Kaelen nodded. He might have nodded even if Rowan had asked him to throw himself off the bridge, which was the danger of men like Rowan: they made obedience feel like common sense. "Fine," he said. "One more time and then I go home."
Nyx saluted. "Make it ugly and honest," she suggested. "That's how we learn to love things."
He cupped his hands. He drew the hum. He pinched the not-dark. He widened it and did not apologize for its stutter. He pushed; it left him more obediently now, as if the presence of witnesses had shamed it into straightness. It rewound twice, then remembered forward. It reached the river and decided to have never existed. He laughed once, quietly, because he had made a thing that refused to obey and refused to hurt him for it. He let his palms fall open and they were only hands again: nicked, steady, insufficient, his.
"We'll see you," Rowan said, not soon, not later, not tomorrow. A promise without a schedule. He turned his horse. The others followed, peeling away as carefully as they had arrived, leaving the willow to keep its secrets and the heron to pretend it hadn't learned a new word.
Kaelen stood with his breath in both hands until it realized it belonged to his ribs again. He washed his palms in the Lark and watched his fingers come up ordinary: nicked, damp, obedient to towels. The hum nestled back down where it had been sleeping before he'd taught it a trick it disliked performing. He touched the willow once, 'thank you' or 'excuse me', he didn't know which, and turned toward the path that threaded between nettles and fieldstones back to Stonebridge.
He walked with the deliberate calm of someone who intends to be seen by no one, even the wind. The willow bent to gossip behind him and then let him go. The bend in the river hid him from the heron's jurisdiction. The path climbed a little and flattened, the way of paths that have decided to be reasonable. His boots remembered which roots to avoid without consulting his mind about it. He rehearsed sentences he would not say to anyone, and new silences he would. I'm fine. I'm learning to be nothing. I'm learning to be something else. He smiled at how none of those belonged on a table with stew.
At the low gap in the hedge where children take shortcuts and thorns pretend not to mind, the daylight acquired a thinness, like parchment held too close to a flame. Kaelen slowed without admitting he had slowed. The hum in his hands stirred and then pressed itself flat, as if trying to hide beneath his skin.
"Not today," he said to nobody and the air, gently, disagreed.
The path underfoot kept its shape and then... it remembered itself in pieces. The green went dull, as if a painter had lifted pigments with a wet thumb. The hedge on his left sank an inch, not into the earth but out of the world. The right-side ditch lost its mud first and then its water, leaving the outline of ditch like a thought you can no longer remember the words to. Sound thinned. Not gone; thinner, like soup stretched for too many mouths. A lark's song stuttered and held the last note as if the bird had been told to pack its sound away while a god counted.
"No," Kaelen said, softer, as if he might be able to talk a horse down.
He should have turned and run. He should have done what sensible boys do when the day peels. But the path ahead had already grown chalk. A whiteness came like unrolled parchment, not poured, not rushed, laid. It slid from nowhere to everywhere, covering the field track where cart wheels had scored honest lines, washing the clover to an idea, erasing color without brightness, the way snow makes a map of intention rather than of land. The world did not snap to stillness as it had under the arch; it faded, as if embarrassed to make a scene.
He looked back. Behind him the trees were a wash of watercolor and then a charcoal ghost and then paper. The city's roofline had been cut out of the world with a knife and the hole left behind kept its shape for one heartbeat, then smoothed to blank. He was inside it; the hole didn't care about which direction he'd been walking.
He tested his body the way a person tests rope that they are unsure will carry them. One step forward. The white did not push him yet. Another, and another. His feet met texture for three strides, residue of cobble memory, and then nothing, only the tactile suggestion of ground, like walking across finely woven cloth stretched very tight. When he swallowed, the sound stayed inside his skull. His breath made no mark on the air. He lifted his hand. It existed because he told it to. He could move. He could move.
He walked, not fast, counting against panic.
One, two, three. The whiteness had a shape if you looked slantwise: faint grids, almost, the way river ice forms a lattice beneath a skin. But this lattice flickered, positioning lines that did not agree with one another about where they ought to lie, a geometry arguing with itself in very small polite voices. His hum wanted to answer and he held it back, a hand on a dog's collar.
Four, five, six.
He had no sense of direction beyond the ribbon of himself he could remember. The whiteness had no sun, only the idea that light existed and did not need a source. He kept his eyes low to avoid the vertigo of a sky that had elected not to participate. Eight, nine. His mouth had gone dry. He thought of Bren's pitch skin, of its familiar plug, of the way the smell of it insists that the world be useful. He thought of his mother's spoon tapping the rim of a pot and the river listening for permission. He thought of his father's list on the peg with the glove keeping it company, and that small thought steadied him more than he deserved.
The first sign he wasn't alone didn't arrive as a sound or a shape. It arrived as absence shaped into a presence. Darkness is wrong in white; it declares itself like ink in milk. Ahead and slightly right, if right had meaning here, a blot formed. Not a void. Not a shadow. A concentration. A bruise. It pulsed, not rhythm like heart or bell, but jitter: on-off-on against nothing. As he walked the white, the black learned to be nearer by being more definite. It was as if someone held a mirror in which nothing reflected and then shook the mirror very gently.
He could have turned.
There was nowhere to turn to. The whiteness had become less blank the further he moved, subtle stains in the parchment, thin hairlines where the world had perhaps been once and might be again. The black throbbed against it, and when it beat, the faint grid flinched and rearranged, tired of being asked to hold shape for something that insisted on not having one.
He knew fear; he feared falling in front of boys; he feared being pointless; he feared Maelin's quiet disappointment and Daran's exhausted pride.
This was none of those.
This was the fear of being erased. His knees wanted to go away. He kept them by speaking their names in his head in his mother's voice.
The hum in his hands climbed. Not louder, he had no sound here. Brighter, if his senses had agreed to exchange jobs. The blackness ahead had a hum of its own, worse than his not because it sought malice but because it had none. His hum knew music only by rumor. That hum knew none by design. Two chords that should not mix, meeting anyway.
He took another step. The whiteness underfoot gave the faintest bow like cloth stretched taught then accepting weight and his body was briefly taller and then returned to its actual size. The black concentration jittered toward him, then rebounded without moving; nearer, because some numbers had changed. With each pulse, finer lines appeared around it and then disappeared, hair-thin cracks in a pane of something that was not glass.
"Hello," Kaelen said, because this is what Stonebridge teaches its children to say even to trouble. His breath formed no word. The black jitter hummed and the whiteness around it folded where it stood, like pages trying to become one another.
The black swelled. Not larger, more present. A sensation like cold unstitched his hands. He did not lift them; he did not want to show his hum to whatever this was. Heat followed the cold a breath behind, as if the whiteness had remembered you can be two things in one place and had decided to punish itself for being generous. Kaelen's legs tried to run on their own; he told them not yet. He felt the size of himself and found it insufficient.
An angle of something appeared between him and the black, thin as spit on glass, and held, as if the whiteness had finally agreed to let substance be. The angle grew into a rectangle, neither floor nor wall, a pane of transparent that was also opaque, like a window that believes in privacy more than windows should. It hung at arm's length. Its edges were too straight for the world he knew. The air around it cooled with the timid conviction of a sickroom. He could see the black through it; he could see nothing through it; both were true and there was no argument to be had about that.
Symbols arrived on the rectangle's face. Letters?
Not any script Sister Anwen kept locked up for festival readings. Strokes arranged themselves in sequences that made his teeth ache. Diagrams he could almost call ladders became river maps became spiderwebs became marching ants and then each set of marks erased itself cleanly, as if ashamed, letting the next take its place. For a moment he thought he recognized a curve, the looped grace of a bowline pulled snug, and then the shape changed and he was left with the feeling you get when you wave at a stranger thinking they are your friend.
He felt the black's hum pulse again and, across the rectangle, a new sequence hurried itself, stacking shapes in rows that tried to decide whether they were words or fences. His own hum answered without his consent, a defensive chord, low, stubborn. The rectangle burred, not sound; vibration, a creature shaking rain off, and more symbols appeared, these ones sharper, angrier, not at him exactly, at failure. Each sequence lived for the life of a blink. Each ended in a particular nothing, as if polished away.
He understood not a stroke. He knew in his bones what was being attempted: conversation.
Not with him.
Around him.
Over him.
Through him.
He suddenly and vividly wanted his mother and a spoon and anything that obeyed the courtesy of friction and flame.
The black throbbed again, a slow, terrible appetite. The rectangle flashed a final cluster of shapes, very small, arranged like a flock of birds indecisive about direction, and then everything on its face died: not faded, died. The surface went to a kind of quiet that is the opposite of rest.
Kaelen took a step backward for the first time since the whiteness had closed. The rectangle followed as precisely as a measurement, keeping its arm's length of air. He took another step. It matched. The black increased its jitter as if offended by movement that did not center it.
He did not think about being 'unauthorized.' He did not hear any voice pronounce it. But the shape of that refusal came and sat on his shoulder the way sorrow does when you have not invited it but you have set a place anyway. The hum inside him compressed, went small, urgent.
The rectangle flickered once more. One symbol remained a hair longer than the others had, a square with a bite out of it, a door drawn by a child who had been told what doors are for but had never seen one.
It vanished.
The panel hung, inert and full of attention.
"Stop," Kaelen said, and meant it for his own body and for the world's table manners. "Stop," he repeated, and this time he meant run.
The thought came with the clarity of thirst: 'I need to get out of here, fast.'
He turned, not trusting the direction, trusting only the stubbornness that has kept Stonebridge children alive when fields tried to teach them lessons, and he ran. The whiteness underfoot disagreed a fraction of a second after each footfall, sliding him off his own intentions; he corrected like a boy slipping on wet boards, redirecting momentum with desperation for elegance. The rectangle tried to remain in front of him and failed to be everywhere at once; it jittered to his left, then snapped to his right, then flickered behind him uselessly and kept returning to the arm's length in front, as if bound.
The black pulsed, faster now, not rhythm, exactly. Rate. The faint gridlines in the white flurried like a flock flushed from a hedge. He felt nausea climb his throat, the delicate dignity of bile, and swallowed it because he had no time for apologies to his own stomach. He set his eyes where he thought the world should be and sprinted.
In the blank there are no landmarks; he found some anyway: a smear that could have been the ghost of a stone, a pattern in the whiteness that, if you were generous, might once have been a rut, the memory of a shadow cast by something gone. He linked them with will and training. He put Daran's walk in his knees, Bren's patience in his feet, Maelin's measuring into his breath, and he ran.
The rectangle kept pace, always precisely where a window would be useless. He threw his left arm into it out of spite. His sleeve met nothing and everything. Cold slid up his forearm, a neat, awful stripe; the hum in him flared defensively and then compressed to a point to save itself. He yanked his arm back and the cold came with it, clinging, then evaporated with a sensation like a word forgotten. No burn. No mark. Only the impulse to be sick.
He ran harder.
The whiteness did not resist in the way moving water resists; it obeyed, then amended, then obeyed again. He kept his stride wider than habit, in case the ground decided to be half a stride farther than where it pretended to be. His lungs began to shout they were in charge. He informed them they were part of a team. The black's jitter dimmed behind him, then brightened, then dimmed, its distance a lie he refused to believe in any direction.
He tried to pray and found no words that were not names. So he named people as he ran. Maelin. Daran. Bren. Sister Anwen. Tamsin. Garrin. He named wheels and pears and the bridge and the lamp-wick and the goose that had become religious. He named Mrs. Kettle's cat and the hoop in Undern's shop and the hawk that did not change its mind and the boy drawing on a slate in the square that morning, brow creased as if stern with himself. He named the doorframe of home. He named the peg where the glove hung.
Something ahead was not white. Not black. Color... no, texture. The thinness of the day thickened in a very small place, like soup being corrected with patience. He ran toward that proof with the idiotic confidence of the doomed and was rewarded. The grid stopped arguing. A smear collected into a hedge. The smell of mud returned with the intimacy of a hand on a cheek. The rectangle shimmered and juddered and tried to stay attached to the front of his life and failed; it stuttered and shrank and thinned until it was a knife-edge of air, and then not even that.
The whiteness rebelled once, an afterthought of erasure, and slid under his foot. He lunged and caught a reality that decided in that moment to remember itself: a root. He stumbled over it inelegantly, flailed, kept his feet by insulting three gods in his head and promising them bread later, and burst out of the hole in the world onto the dirt path that had always been there and never will leave again, because he personally would make it stay with his eyes if necessary.
Sound slammed him. The river muttered its simple grammar. A thrush informed the afternoon that insects were delicious. Wind put its hands in the hedge and made coin-rattle noises out of last year's leaves. His hum recoiled from all of it like a cat caught in a rain barrel, then, realizing the world was what it had been yesterday, settled, shaking.
Kaelen ran still. He ran the first twenty paces he didn't need to because momentum was in charge. He ran the next because terror still touched him with careful fingers, refusing to be dramatic now that drama had had its turn. He ran until the square was in sight and other people's mistakes and hopes radiated off it like heat, until a woman scolded a boy for living too loudly and a man laughed as if to apologize for existing and both sounds affixed him to reality like nails.
He did not stop.
He did not look behind him to see if the whiteness had the nerve to stick its head into Stonebridge and ask for a measure of bread. He aimed for the door that knew his hand and the kitchen that knew his name and the chair that had adopted the shape of his weight and he ran like his life was on the line.
Everyone on his way home looked at him run almost as if death was right behind him, waiting to claim yet another victim. He was crying, straining.
One turn left.
He saw his house, the door was slightly open to let the kitchen catch some air. He burst into his beloved refuge with a leap, as if he had to to score the decisive point in the final match against fate.
His hands and knees were now full of splinters, but he didn't feel any pain. Adrenaline numbed everything. His mother, who was beginning to prepare the ingredients for that evening's dinner, flinched at the sight of her son barging inside the house like that, and instantly dropped to the floor.
"Kaelen! What happened? Are you hurt?!" Her motherly instincts kicked in without her even realizing at first.
Kaelen dared not to say a word. He just kept sobbing, his eyes similar to one of her mother's pots, typically full of water to boil, but now full of tears.
His father, who returned home just about five or six minutes before Kaelen, ran like he'd never before to the front door, only to find his wife and his son completely shook, but for different reasons.
"Kaelen! Maelin! What happened? Did somebody get hurt? I'll get my helmet and knife-"
"No," Maelin said, "It's Kaelen, he jumped inside crying his heart out. I have no idea what happened either."
Kaelen kept crying, muttering incomplete words trying to explain what had happened. "I... I-," his tears were in the way, "The river, the willow, everything was out to get me! I don't know what I did, I-I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" The cries grew louder, only to them fade away thanks to the warm embrace of his parents hugging him so tight he couldn't escape even if his body was made of water.
"We're here, Kael. We're here."
He hadn't heard that nickname in a while.