Chương 13: Morren

I was walking fast. Too fast, probably, for a forest I didn't know and a lack of left with the others, but fast felt right, and slowing down would have meant thinking about things I wasn't ready to think about, so I kept going.

"Who does he think he is?" The words came out under my breath, to nobody, into the leaf litter in front of my boots.

"Who does he think he is. Tells me I have no honour. Tells me I'm dressing things up. A few hours. A few hours and he's decided he knows what's in my head better than I do. Just hours!" A low branch caught my shoulder and I ducked under it with more force than it required.

"Write it down in your archives, Rael. Go ahead. Put it in the Solenne library right next to all your other notes. I'm sure it'll be a fascinating entry. A model student. A careful observer. The boy who decided he understood an Aridis after one conversation." I ducked another branch.

"Because that's what they do, isn't it. That's what Bellos said. Two sentences a week for a Kaelith and a whole smiling afternoon for a Solenne, and by the end of the afternoon they've written you into a report without telling you, and they call it getting to know you. He told me. He told me and what did I do? I walked into the first Solenne who smiled at me and let him run his little test on me for half the morning. I'm an idiot." A bird went up from a branch somewhere to my left.

I flinched, cast a reinforcement glyph on reflex, realized it was a bird, dismissed the glyph, and felt more stupid than before so I stopped. I stood there in the middle of a stretch of trees I didn't recognize, breathing a little too hard, with my fists closed at my sides and no idea where I was going, and the realization that I'd left Eydric behind with Rael settled on me slowly. I thought about turning around, but I did not.

"He can keep him," I muttered.

"He can have the bench and the speech and the notes. I'll find a flag myself."

"And why are you so angry, my young friend?"

"AARGH!" I jumped out of surprise as a deep voice came out of nowhere, and when I came down my hands were already wreathed in fire, one palm open and the other clenched, a full cast ready to throw with nothing to throw it at. My heart was trying to exit through my throat.

"Who's there?!"

"Easy, easy. I mean no harm, least of all to a boy who has just demonstrated, to my considerable entertainment, that he can summon fire faster than he can turn his head."

"Who are you?!"

"Over here."

"Where is 'here'?"

"To your left, young one. Past the crooked tree." I looked past the crooked tree.

"No, the other crooked tree." I looked.

"Yes, that one. Down the small slope. Around the clump of ferns. Good. Now stop." I stopped.

"Look down." I did as I was told, and found a… rock. It was looking back at me. It sat at the base of a mossy outcrop, about waist high, and most of its surface was the grey weathered stone I'd have expected. The part facing me had a face on it. Two deep-set hollows for eyes, one half-lidded with a crust of moss that gave it a distinctly ironic quality. A crease where a mouth would be and a heavy brow.

"There you go," the voice said. The mouth-crease shifted as it spoke, not enough to be dramatic but enough to be unmistakable. I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding as the fire in my hands guttered out.

"You're... a rock?"

"I am not a rock."

"I'm sorry, but… you look like a rock."

"A rock is a piece of stone that has been lying in a forest doing nothing in particular for an uninteresting number of years. I am not doing nothing. I am talking to you. We have established this already, and I was hoping to move on."

"Then what are you?"

"I am the spirit who lives inside this stone. The stone is my house, not my person. I moved in a very long time ago, I redecorated the face because the face was boring, and I have been sitting here ever since, watching the forest do its quiet work and waiting for conversation. You are the first person to walk past me in about months, and you are the angriest of them, which is why I thought it worth saying something." I opened my mouth to say something, and nothing came out.

I stood there for a few seconds trying to work out what the appropriate next line was supposed to be, because I had been introduced to a rock, the rock had opinions about being called a rock, and nothing in sixteen years of education had prepared me for the protocol. The rock was the one to break the silence.

"I am Morren," it said, when I still hadn't found a sentence.

"Morren of the Outcrop, if you want the longer version, though I haven't used the longer version since the people who invented it stopped visiting. And who might you be, my young friend?"

"Oh." I straightened up, because that at least I knew how to do.

"My apologies, Master Morren. My name is Howl. Howl Aridis."

"Howl?"

"Yes."

"That's your name? Howl?"

"Yes, Master Morren."

"I once knew a mage by that name." The mouth-crease shifted into a smile.

"A long time ago. Very talented young man. A little vain. He had a castle that walked."

"A castle that walked?"

"Yes."

"Like, on legs?"

"On legs. Four of them, if my memory is honest. The castle never stopped moving. He said it was so nobody could find him, but I suspect it was also because he enjoyed the attention." I stared at Morren for a moment, and he looked mildly pleased with himself. Suddenly, a small laugh surprised me out of my chest before I could stop it. My first laugh in the forest that day.

"Well, now." Morren said.

"I didn't know I was so funny. Not in all my time down here in this moss. Thank you for laughing, young Howl, it's been some time since I earned one." I caught the laugh before it could go anywhere else, and without really deciding to, I sat down on the patch of dry leaves in front of him.

"Thank you for making me laugh," I said.

"I think I needed it."

"Is that so?"

"It is."

"And what, I wonder, might a young man like you have to be so downcast about in the middle of a forest full of things he has clearly proven himself capable of handling?" I pulled a leaf apart between my fingers.

"I… well, I had an argument with someone. Earlier. Just now, actually."

"Ah." Morren let the sound sit for a moment.

"Arguments," he said.

"Friends and arguments, young Howl. You cannot have the one without the other. A friendship that has never had an argument in it is either very new or very shallow, and most of the time it is both." I pulled another piece off the leaf.

"He's not my friend."

"Ah. A lover, then?"" NO!" The rock's mouth-crease twitched in a way that was almost certainly a smile, and I had the distinct impression he'd known the answer before he asked.

"Alright, alright. Calm yourself, young Howl. I only wondered. At your age, in my experience, anger of that particular flavour is almost always one of two things, and if you've ruled out the more interesting one, I am obliged to ask about the other. What could make a young man so furious, if not love or friendship?" If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"It's—" I stopped, then started again.

"It's complicated."

"I have time." I chuckled at that.

"I'm taking an exam," I said.

"Right now. The entrance trials for Sartheon Academy."

"Mm. I have heard of that place."

"The first part was written. I passed that. The second part is a practical, out here in these grounds, which is why I'm in your forest. It runs until midnight, and we're supposed to find flags, and there are teams, and I was assigned to a team, and — that's where the problem is, actually. The team part." Morren said nothing, which I assumed was his way of telling me to keep going.

"They didn't let us pick. The faculty assigned us. I got put with two other candidates. One of them is Eydric. Eydric Vael. He's — I don't know what he is, honestly, but he's not the problem. He's fine. He's quiet and I think he's actually decent, as far as I can tell from half a morning." Morren waited.

"The other one is Rael. Rael Solenne. And he's—" I caught myself about to get loud again and took a breath.

"He's from House Solenne. I don't know if you know about the great houses, but the Solenne are… my combat instructor warned me about them, specifically, before I left the estate. He said they smile while they take you apart and that they'll be your closest friend for a year before you realize you've told them everything about yourself and learned nothing about them.

He told me in so many words to be careful around Solenne, and the first real Solenne I meet walks up to me in a plaza this morning and does exactly what Bellos said they'd do. Tries to make me look like a fool in front of a group." Another strip off the leaf. There wasn't much leaf left.

"And then the faculty puts him on my team. Which I think isn't an accident, and that honestly kind of makes me angrier." Morren's eyes crinkled. I wasn't sure how a rock's eyes crinkled, but his did.

"So we come in here. He proposes a plan. The plan is to find a team that's already found a flag, follow them to extraction, and ambush them at the finish line. A mugging, Eydric called it, and Eydric wasn't wrong. And I said no, because it's… because it's not how I want to pass this exam. I want to find a flag myself. That's not a crime, is it? Wanting to earn the thing instead of taking it off someone else who's already done the work?" I tossed the last strip of leaf away.

"And Rael, because he's Rael, spent the next few minutes explaining to me that the real reason I said no isn't honour. It's that I'm having too much fun and I don't want to skip the good part. He told me I was dressing things up and that I'd take a flag by force if midnight was closing in and I had no other option. And he said it with a smile. The whole time. He never stopped smiling." I looked down at the leaf fragments scattered on my boots.

"I walked out. I told him I didn't trust him and I walked out. And I don't regret it. But I'm also in a forest by myself arguing with you, and I can see that this may not have been the perfect move." Morren, for his part, did not laugh at me. He just kept listening to me ranting for a while, and when I was finally done, he smiled at me.

"What is it?"

"Aren't you being a little dishonest with yourself, young Howl?" Oh. I… had not expected that answer.

"How so?"

"Well." Morren took his time.

"It seems to me you made up your mind about that young man some while before you had any reason to. Before you'd even met him, in fact. Your instructor told you what a Solenne was, and you walked into that plaza carrying his description like a lantern, and everything that came out of that boy's mouth, you read by the light of it. Is that a fair summary?"

I started to object — because Rael had tried to humiliate me in the circle, and the humiliation had been real, because I hadn't imagined it — and then I stopped, because I started doubting myself. Morren noticed the almost-interruption and waited politely for me to swallow it.

"Let me ask you something else, then," he said, when I had stayed quiet long enough.

"Setting your instructor aside for a moment. Setting his warnings aside. If you had met this Rael with no warnings at all, no preparation, no name of his house attached to his face — and you had spent the same morning with him that you have just spent — would you, honestly, in your own heart, believe him to be the kind of person your instructor described?"

"I... maybe?"" Aha." Morren's crease deepened into something that was definitely a smile now.

"So there is, at least, the possibility." I started to reply, but he kept going.

"Listen, young Howl. Try an exercise with me. Strip away, for the length of this one conversation, every opinion you have been handed about that boy's house. Every warning, every lesson, every tight-lipped afternoon with your instructor. Pretend you have never once heard the name Solannay —""Solenne."

"— Sollonay —"" Solenne, Master Morren." I was trying not to laugh and failing.

"—the name of whichever house the young man happens to belong to." He paused, dignified.

"Thank you for the correction. My pronunciation has spent some time in moss."

"You're welcome."

"Now. Having forgotten, for one question only, the name of his house and everything that name is said to mean. If those same words had come from the mouth of a boy you knew nothing about, good or bad, would you say he was right? Not entirely, perhaps. But in some of it. Somewhere in there. Would you say he had seen something true about you?" I looked down at the scattered leaf fragments on my boots and thought about it honestly. The first thing I wanted to say was that Rael was wrong about the honour part.

My honour wasn't a costume. It was real. If I'd been alone in this forest and I'd stumbled across a team with a flag who did their best to honestly get said flag, I would not have taken it from them, even if the exam clock had been down to its last minute. I was reasonably sure of that. I was sure enough of it that I could look the question in the eye and not flinch. But that wasn't really what Rael had said. Rael had said the honour wasn't the reason.

He'd said the reason was somewhere underneath, and the honour was sitting on top of it. And I thought about the clearing. All the things I felt then, and how the first name I'd put on those things was fear, because those were the symptoms of fear, I'd read it in books, I'd felt pieces of it with Bellos. I thought about how I hadn't moved when the others had told me to move. And I thought about what Eydric had said afterward. You were smiling. Looking back, I don't think I had been afraid. Not really.

Some of me had been, the thin outer layer of the body that didn't know how this was going to go, but underneath it I had been something else the whole time, and now that I was sitting here I could finally look at it without the distraction of a pack of predators coming across a clearing at me. I'd been hungry. Not for food, but for the fight. For the next one after it, and for the number that would come up in my vision afterward telling me I had become a fraction more of whatever I was supposed to become.

The System had dangled a reward in front of me and I had thrown myself at the thing in the clearing before anyone had finished arguing about whether we should, and I'd apparently done it smiling. … That part wasn't a costume either. And the worst of it, sitting with it now, was that I couldn't remember a time in my life when I hadn't been like that. Not once.

Every drill in the eastern hall, every glyph set Varren put in front of me, every evening I'd spent under a blanket reading about heroes who'd climbed into worse situations than I was in, I had always wanted the harder one. The rarer one. The one that would make me the sort of person the next story got written about.

The System had turned up somewhere early in my childhood and given that wanting a shape and a set of numbers, and the numbers had made the wanting worse, because every time I pushed at something difficult the numbers answered back and the answering made me want to push again. That was sixteen years of habit, layered on top of whatever I'd been born as, and somewhere in there I had learned to tell myself that the reason I kept reaching for the harder thing was that I was… noble.

But what if the honour was real and the hunger was real, and the hunger was the one actually choosing? I sat with that for a while.

"You may be right," I finally said, and stood up, then patted the leaf fragments off the front of my tunic and shook one out of my collar and looked back down at Morren.

"It is good that you are being honest with yourself, young Howl. There is nothing wrong with being thrilled, you know? You are young, and the human body is made for that sort of thing. So do not be angry with your friend for pointing at it. A person who sees you clearly is a very rare find."

"He's not my friend, though." I chuckled a little, because I couldn't help it.

"I've only known him since this morning." Morren's smile deepened.

"Time is the least honest measure of a friendship, young one. There are people you will walk beside for twenty years and never truly see, and there are others you will know in an afternoon. The forest does not grow all of its trees at the same speed." Huh, it was a better answer than I had been expecting.

"So," he said.

"Are you going back to your non-friends now?"

"Yes, Master Morren." I hesitated.

"I would have liked to stay and talk, honestly. I've always wanted to meet a spirit, and you're… well, you're the first one who's actually spoken to me. But I'm still on the exam, and I'm on a clock."

"Of course, of course. A boy on a clock should not be detained by a rock with too much time."

"I'll come back, though. If I can. Before we leave the grounds. I'd like to say goodbye properly."

"That would please me." I turned to go, and then Morren made a small thoughtful sound.

"Speaking of your exam, young Howl. A question for you, before you run off."

"Yes?"

"A few months ago, a group of people came through this part of the forest. Humans. Robed ones, with blue and red patterns. They were talking among themselves about an entrance trial, and they were placing things. Here and there. They were polite about it, which I appreciated, because people moving things around in a forest are not always polite."

"Proctors." I felt a small quickening under my ribs.

"That was for our exam. They would have been setting the flags."

"Ah. That was the word, yes. Flag. One of them stopped at this outcrop and had a short conversation with me. Very respectful young woman. She asked whether I would mind holding something for her for a little while, and I told her I had been holding this outcrop for a few centuries so one more thing was not going to trouble me. She told me I could hide it or give it away as I pleased. I have been sitting on it since."

"You—" Morren suddenly shifted. His whole body, the face and all, lifted an inch off the ground with a quiet grinding sound and slid three careful inches to his left, and the motion was so unexpected that I took a step back on reflex. Under where he had been sitting, tucked into a hollow in the moss, was a small folded square of deep red cloth. A flag. My eyes widened.

"Master Morren. Is that—""It is the thing she left with me, yes."" Can I take it?"

"Why, of course you can. I have not had much use for it, and she was very clear that giving it away was one of the two options." I crouched down and lifted the cloth out of the moss with both hands. It was heavier than I expected. The fabric was thick and slightly waxed, and the centre of it carried a small cool anchor of mana, the clean structured kind I had been trying to find with every sweep for the last half hour.

In the corner, stitched into the fabric with silver thread, there was a small empty frame — about the size of a palm. I quickly reached up and touched the badge over my heart. The frame in the cloth and the badge in my hand were not a match. The frame was too big. And the design of the frame had three small notches in it, equally spaced, and my badge only had one. Oh. The team badge. The bronze disc with the number twenty-eight stamped into it.

The one that wasn't on me, because the three of us had shared it at the balcony and Rael had put it in his pocket on the way out. I looked up at Morren with a face that was almost certainly doing something embarrassing.

"I have to go back to them."

"I suspected as much."

"Thank you. Thank you, Master Morren, truly, I don't know how to — I'll come back, I swear I will, I'll come back before midnight, I promise—""Run, young Howl. Run." I turned, the flag clutched against my chest, and I ran.