Chương 18: Friend

"—and I tried to say I love it, Master Morren, I really did, I was going to say it properly, and a burp came out right in the middle of the word. I got the I lo- out and then the whole thing just, UUUUURP, right there, right in front of all of them, I genuinely thought I was going to die of embarrassment." A long low rumble came up out of the stone.

"Hahahah!" I laughed.

"And Rael, Rael was on his back on the moss, he couldn't even speak, he kept trying to say he loves it and then losing it again, and Eydric was laughing too, and even the boy we had just pulled out from under a beast was laughing into his own knees." The rumble came again, a little longer this time.

"You know, I think I would do the burp again if it meant I got to drink another one of those." I was smiling into the moss in front of my knees, and I was aware, in a slow unhurried way, that I had been talking to this rock for a very long time and had not once wanted to stop. It was a thing I used to do with Nana.

I would come back from whatever the instructors had put me through that day, and she would be folding linens or polishing something in my room, and she would ask me how it went, and I would sit on the edge of my bed and tell her everything. She would make small noises at the right moments, and she would laugh at the funny parts, and when I said something foolish she would let the silence be long enough that I would hear it myself, and she would never once tell me I was taking too long.

I had not talked to anyone like that in five years.

"Morren."

"Mm?"

"Thank you for listening."

"I have been sitting in moss for longer than your grandfather has been alive, young Howl. I have nothing else to do. But you are welcome." I laughed, more quietly this time. The canopy above the outcrop had gone from green to grey to blue while I hadn't been paying attention to it, and I could see stars through the gaps now, three or four of them where earlier there had been only leaves. The air was cooler against the back of my neck.

I had no idea how many hours I had been sitting cross-legged in front of Master Morren, but it had been enough for a sunset to happen without me noticing.

"Young Howl."

"... I know."

"You have said I know four times."

"I know."

"That was five." The laugh came up easy. I pushed myself onto my knees and then onto my feet. My legs were stiff enough that I had to brace a hand on the edge of the outcrop to steady myself. Morren waited for me to be upright. He did not hurry me.

"You did well today. Passing that examination, finding your flag the way you did, and coming back here at the end of it to sit with an old stone who asked for nothing and got an afternoon's company anyway. I am grateful." This took me by surprise, and flattered me more than words could place, I felt myself blushing a bit, but I didn't know what to reply to his praises, so I didn't say anything. He let the quiet sit for a few breaths before speaking again, and when he did his voice had gone softer.

"You are good company, young Howl. I have enjoyed this afternoon more than I can properly tell you. I would like to give you a gift before you go." I sat up straighter.

"Oh no, please, you don't have to do that. I didn't come here expecting anything, I promise." I really didn't, but I was genuinely curious about what he wanted to give me, and the rules I had been drilled in for years were very clear that you turned a gift down at least twice before accepting it out of courtesy, and I could only hope Morren wouldn't take me at my word and put the offer away.

"I came because I gave you my word, and because I wanted to, and that is more than enough, truly, I—""Young Howl." Okay. One more polite refusal and then I stop, I swear.

"—I would be grateful just for the afternoon, honestly, I don't need—""Young Howl, I am giving you a spirit's blessing." I stopped mid-sentence.

"... A blessing?!"

"Mm-hm."

"Like, a spirit's blessing?!"

"Mm-hm."

"What's that?" The mouth-crease flattened into a perfect line, and Master Morren looked at me, dumbfounded.

"... Why did you look so excited about it a moment ago if you did not know what it was?" I let a few seconds pass and kept a straight face, but couldn't contain my laughter in the end.

"I'm joking, I'm joking, of course I know what a blessing is. I've read about dozens of them. There's this spirit in the southern provinces who gave a shepherd boy the ability to hear the thoughts of sheep, which sounds silly until you find out he became the wealthiest wool merchant in the kingdom by the time he was thirty. Oh!

Or the one in the old northern chronicles about a river spirit who gave a girl the gift of walking on any surface a single human foot had walked on before, which meant she could cross oceans by following ship routes. Or the famous one about a forest spirit who gave a hunter a sense of direction so true he never got lost a single day for the rest of his life." I was gesturing now. I couldn't help it.

"I used to read these to myself, and I would imagine what I'd ask for if a spirit ever offered me one. I had whole lists, Master Morren. Lists."

"Is that so?"

"Yes! And every spirit gives a different gift, right?"

"That is, broadly speaking, correct."

"So what is yours? What do you give?" Morren's mouth-crease curled into a smile.

"Come a little closer, young Howl."

"How close?"

"Closer than you are." I scooted forward on my knees until I was almost nose to nose with him. The moss under my hands was cool, and the old stone smell of him was stronger up close, like rain on a forgotten courtyard.

"Are you ready?"

"Yes, Master Morren."

"Close your eyes." If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. I closed them.

"Here it comes." Ptooey. Something wet and surprisingly warm hit me square between the eyes, and I jerked backward so hard I almost toppled onto my back in the leaves. My hands went up on reflex, my palms came away damp, and I sat there blinking at my own fingers with my mouth slightly open and a patch of spirit spit sliding slowly down the bridge of my nose." Master Morren."

"Mhmm?"

"Did you just spit on me?"

"Mm-hm." I held very still for a moment, with the spit-patch sliding slow and steady down the bridge of my nose, and tried to assemble my thoughts into a sentence that wouldn't make this worse.

"Master Morren."

"Yes?"

"... Have I... have I perhaps offended you in some way?" I must have done something wrong. Possibly the I'm joking part. Maybe in spirit etiquette it was the equivalent of slapping a host across the face.

"Oh, no, no, young Howl. Quite the opposite. That was the blessing." I was so confused.

"... The spit?"

"The blessing." He corrected.

"The spit was the blessing?"

"The blessing took the form of spit, yes. The spit itself is not magical. Do not be concerned about the hygiene of it." The hygiene of it had not, until that exact moment, been a concern. It now was. I wiped my forehead carefully on the inside of my sleeve and tried to keep my expression somewhere in the neighbourhood of gracious recipient of a great spirit's gift. The expression I actually had on my face, I suspected, was somewhere closer to boy who has just been pranked.

"... I see," I said, slowly.

"Well, I am honoured, Master Morren. Truly. I will, um. I will treasure it."

"You don't see anything yet."

"I'm sorry?"

"You will, in a few seconds."

"Wh—" Suddenly, I noticed something moving across the sky above the canopy. I don't know what made me look up. There hadn't been a sound, and the gaps in the leaves above the outcrop weren't large enough to track much through, but my eyes went up anyway, and I saw it." WHOA!" It came out of me before I had decided to make a sound.

I think I scrambled backwards a little, because the next thing I was aware of was the heel of my hand pressing into a patch of damp leaves and the moss giving slightly under my weight and Master Morren laughing somewhere behind me. The thing in the sky was enormous.

It was passing high above the canopy, much higher than the tallest tree, and the patches of sky I could see between the leaves should have shown me nothing but stars, and instead they were showing me a long ribboning shape moving across the gap in slow curves. It had a body like a river. Banded in scales that caught the last of the light and threw it back in red and gold.

It didn't fly the way a bird flew, it swam, the way the spirits in the riverlands had moved beneath the water, except this one was swimming through the air. There were whiskers. Two of them, long and trailing from somewhere near its head, drifting in the current of its own movement. The head itself was crested. I could see the silhouette of it whenever the body curled and brought the front around, a long jaw and a swept-back crown. It glided across the gap without hurrying.

Maybe four seconds, and then the gap was just leaves again. Morren was still laughing.

"Your face, young Howl. Your face."

"Master Morren—" My voice came out smaller than I wanted.

"What was that?" The laugh cut off." That," he said, "is Vasshen-Aeleth-Korumai of the Cinder Coil, Third of the Smouldering Court, et cetera, et cetera. The list goes on for about an hour if you let him recite it, which I did once."

"He's a spirit?"

"He is a fire spirit. A very old one. Older than me by some margin, which is saying something, and he has not let me forget it in four hundred years." The mouth-crease pulled itself into a scowl.

"He passes through this part of the forest every evening at this hour and has been doing it since before the trees on this ridge were saplings."

"He looked..." I didn't have the right word.

"He looked amazing."

"Oh, he looks amazing. He has been working on looking amazing for the better part of a millennium. The whiskers? Cultivated. The trailing shimmer? Affectation. The slow undulating glide? Practiced. I have watched him rehearse, you see." I made a sound I hoped was sympathetic.

"In the early years, when we still spoke, he would land in the clearing south of here and ask me what I had thought of the day's flight. What did you think of the dive at the third pass, Morren? Did the tail-curl land the way I wanted it? As though I were a critic he had hired."

"Did you give him notes?"

"Once."

"What happened?"

"He took them very well, thanked me with great formality, and then spent the next eighty years working them into a revised version of the flight which was, somehow, more annoying than the original." I laughed before I could stop myself.

"He is, in fairness, an impressive spirit," Morren added, in the grudging tone of a man being honest against his preference.

"The flight is technically a meditation. It traces the path of an ember rising from a fire and returning to the earth. It has spiritual significance. The fact that he performs it nightly for an audience of trees and one annoyed rock does not make it less meaningful, only more exhausting." He paused.

"Do not tell him I said that."

"I'll take it to my grave, Master Morren."

"Good." I looked up at the gap in the canopy. It was just leaves and the first stars now.

"Master Morren."

"Mm?"

"I couldn't have seen him before, could I."

"No."

"Even if I had been looking at exactly that gap at exactly that moment?"

"No." So that was the blessing.

"Spirits are not, by default, visible to human eyes. We live in the same world as you, but not quite. A spirit is seen by a human only when the spirit chooses to be seen. That is the rule. You have walked past dozens of us today on your way through this forest and seen perhaps two, and the two you saw, you saw because they wanted you to."

"The riverlands," I said.

"Yes. Those ones are friendly. They like being looked at. Many spirits are like that, they will perform for an audience the moment they have one. Vasshen is an elaborate example, but the impulse is the same."

"And the ones that don't want to be seen?"

"Are not seen. Not by humans. Not by the priests and the summoners either, most of the time. They see what we let them see and they ask what we let them ask, and the rest of the spirit world goes on around them." He paused.

"There are some humans who are born seeing more. It happens, rarely. The temples call them initiates. What I have given you is closer to that. Not the full thing — I am one rock in one forest, and my reach is not what it once was — but you will see spirits now who would otherwise have walked past you, and you will see edges of the spirit world that most people live their whole lives without noticing. It will not be constant. It will come and go. But it is yours." I sat with that.

"Master Morren, I—""Don't thank me again, young Howl. You have thanked me enough for one afternoon." Ding! The gold text rolled out in front of my eyes. [Special Skill Acquired] Spirit Sight — Level 1 (0%) I read it again to make sure. Special. I had never seen that word in front of one of my skills before. And it was at Level 1. Which meant it could climb. I could feel the smile coming up before I could decide what to do with my face.

"You've gone a little glassy, young Howl."

"Sorry. It's—" I waved a hand at the air in front of me where the text was still hanging.

"It's a, it's a thing I have. The thing I told you about earlier. It just gave me something."

"Ah. Your invisible advisor."

"My System."

"I prefer my version." I laughed.

"Go now."

"I—""Go. The proctor at your arch will start to wonder, and a wondering proctor is a worse problem than a long walk. Off with you." I got to my feet, slower than I needed to. My knees complained from the cross-legged sitting. I brushed the leaves off my trousers and took a step back from the outcrop, then stopped, because there was a thing I wanted to say.

"Master Morren."

"Mm?"

"If they take me, after all of this. The exam. School starts in about a week. And I think we get our first leave at around the six-month mark." I scratched the back of my neck.

"I'd like to come back. If that's all right. I don't know what the road back here looks like from the academy, but I'll figure it out." He was quiet for a beat.

"I would like that very much." That was all.

"Goodbye, Master Morren."

"Goodbye, young Howl." I turned and walked. I did not look back, though I wanted to, and I was about thirty paces into the trees before I let my pace settle into something close to normal. Wondering about the scores, could I have hit ninety? Oh I hoped I got over ninety.