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The road back from Heller's market stall was not complicated.
Easthies knew this. He had walked it eleven times since Lady Vinnana began sending him on errands alone, and he could have drawn the route from memory with his eyes shut. Down the main road, past the split elm, left at the old stone post with the lichen, straight until you smell the millpond, then right.
He had been down the road, past the elm, left at the stone post, and then he had seen the mushrooms.
They were a pale, luminous blue, the kind of colour that did not usually belong to mushrooms, growing in a neat trail along the eastern ditch like someone had placed them there on purpose. They were not a variety he recognised, which was unusual. Easthies knew most of the fungi in the Mossfen countryside. Lady Vinnana had made him draw and label all of them in his second year.
So he had followed them, just a little, just far enough to get a better look... just a little further, and then the road had stopped being behind him and the millpond smell had stopped being anywhere, and he was standing at the edge of a wide, birch-ringed meadow with three bundles of dried moonwort under his arm and a pot of river clay in his other hand and absolutely no idea how he had gotten here.
He stood still.
He turned around once, very slowly.
The birch trees looked identical in every direction.
"Good grief," he said, to no one.
He set the clay pot down on the grass and put his hands on his hips and thought carefully. He was good at thinking carefully. It was possibly his best skill, alongside precise casting and the memorisation of things other people found boring. He had been doing it since he was small and it had served him well in almost every situation he had ever encountered.
It was not serving him very well at the moment.
The clouds were coming in. Lady Vinnana had said the afternoon clouds would come in and he had nodded because he knew, he always knew, and here they were, rolling in from the west in big grey swells, and here he was, standing in a meadow he could not name, and here were his moonwort bundles, getting faintly damp.
He was still trying to reconstruct his route in his head. You came from the northeast, no, the east, no, the path curved so... when something crashed through the birch trees on the far side of the meadow and a boy came out.
He was around Easthies' age, maybe a year older, with dark messy hair and a shirt with the sleeves shoved up and a coil of rope over one shoulder and a burlap sack over the other. He walked the way some boys walked — all forward momentum, like the idea of slowing down had never occurred to him. He was mid-stride when he spotted Easthies and stopped.
He looked at him.
He looked at the clay pot.
He looked at the moonwort.
He looked back at Easthies.
"Are you lost?" he said.
Easthies straightened. "I am reassessing my route."
"Oh." The boy's mouth curved up, easy and immediate, like a smile that lived there naturally and only moved aside for short intervals. "That means yes."
"It means—"
"You're standing in the middle of Belwick's meadow holding market things and staring at the trees." The boy walked closer, unhurried. "I've done it too. The mushrooms, right? The blue ones?"
Easthies blinked. "Yes, actually."
"Yeah, they do that to people." He dropped his rope coil in the grass with a thump and put his hands on his knees, looking around the meadow with the ease of someone who knew it well. "Where are you trying to get to?"
"Lady Vinnana's cottage," Easthies said. "On the Mossfen road."
"Oh, I know where that is! Well— I know where the Mossfen road is. And I know the cottage has the big rowan tree out front." He straightened back up and jerked his head to the left. "It's through the birches this way, down the slope, and you'll see the road from the top. Come on."
He set off without waiting to see if Easthies followed, collecting his rope on the way past.
Easthies picked up his clay pot and followed, because there was nothing else sensible to do, and Easthies was almost always sensible.
"I'm Utowin," the boy said, holding a birch branch out of the way so it didn't catch Easthies in the face.
"Easthies."
"Easthies." Utowin tried it out like he was settling a coin in his palm to check its weight. "That's a good name. Sounds like someone who knows a lot."
"I do know a lot!" Easthies replied.
Utowin laughed, sudden and loud, startling a bird in the undergrowth. "Yeah? What do you know?"
"Presently I know that these are birch trees, that the mushrooms that led me here are called ghost-caps and are mildly hallucinogenic to livestock but harmless to people, that the cloud cover from the west will likely bring rain in two to three hours, and that I have three bundles of dried moonwort that I need to get home without getting wet." Easthies had said all these proudly. Confident in all the lessons he had absorb over the years.
There was a pause.
"Okay," Utowin said. "You actually do know a lot."
"As I said."
Utowin grinned again, wider. "Are you a witch?"
"Yes. Lady Vinnana is my teacher. I study with her." Easthies glanced at him sidelong. "Are you?"
"Yeah." Utowin said it the way you'd say yes I have two legs, ordinary as anything. "My castings are terrible, though. Lady Corra keeps saying my circles are all wonky." He made a wobbly shape in the air with his finger, a rough oval that started wide and pinched in at one side. "Like that. She says it looks like a potato."
Easthies looked at the invisible potato in the air. "It does look like a potato."
"I know." Utowin dropped his hand and shrugged. "I can't help it. I try to make it round and it just— doesn't."
"You have to anchor the starting point before you pull the line," Easthies said. "If you start drawing before the ink has properly seated on the surface, the first stroke drags and everything that follows it pulls crooked." He said it the way he said most things — not to show off, just because it was true and useful and he saw no reason to sit on useful information. "Lady Vinnana showed me in my first month. Plant the tip, feel it grip, then move."
Utowin stared at him.
"Nobody told me that," he said.
"It is fairly fundamental."
"Lady Corra just kept saying make it rounder, Utowin, rounder— " he did a voice, an imitation with a nasal and weary tone. "and I kept trying to make it rounder and it kept being a potato."
Easthies felt something like indignation on his behalf. "You cannot make a circle rounder if the first stroke is already compromised. You would have to restart entirely."
"That's what I said!" Utowin's voice shot up half a register. "I kept asking if I could just redo it and she said no, you have to learn to do it right the first time, and I—" He made a sound of frustrated memory, somewhere between a sigh and a groan. "I hate sitting there at the desk trying to do it perfect while she watches. My hand goes all weird when someone's watching."
"It goes weird?"
"Yeah. Like— " He held his right hand out flat, then curled it, then made it tremble with theatrical exaggeration. "Tight. Like my fingers forget they're my fingers."
"Ah." Easthies considered this. "That is performance anxiety."
"It's really annoying is what it is," Utowin said.
They had cleared the thickest part of the birch trees now and the ground was beginning to slope downward, the grass longer and pale at the ends from the coming season's turn. Easthies could smell distant rain somewhere in the west. He shifted his moonwort to a more secure grip.
"So you do not practice," Easthies said. It was not a judgement, he was just... assembling the information.
"I do practice," Utowin said. "Just not 'sitting-at-the-desk' practice." He glanced over, and there was something that flickered in his face, something smaller and more private than his usual forward-motion energy. "I do other stuff. Just not what I'm supposed to."
"What other stuff?"
"Drawing, mostly. Just on my own. When I'm walking somewhere." He waved his free hand in a vague, loose gesture. "Or sitting outside. Somewhere not a desk."
Easthies frowned. "What is wrong with a desk?"
"Nothing's wrong with it," Utowin said, in the voice of someone who thought several things were wrong with it. "It's just— when I'm at a desk I feel like I'm supposed to be doing it right, and then I start thinking about doing it right, and then I'm not actually doing it anymore! I just worrying alot. You know?"
Easthies did not know, because when Easthies was at his desk he was doing the thing on the desk, and the doing of the thing was its own satisfaction. But he could see the logic of what Utowin was describing, even if he could not personally access it.
"And when you are not at a desk?" he asked.
"It's just it comes out." Utowin shrugged with one shoulder, the rope shifting. "Like I'm not thinking about making a circle, I'm thinking about drawing a rabbit, and the circle just happens around the rabbit and then it's done and it worked." He paused. "Mostly. Sometimes they don't work. Sometimes the circle's too far off and nothing happens. Lady Corra says that means the circuit is broken but she says it like it's my fault on purpose, and I don't think it's on purpose—"
"It is not on purpose," Easthies agreed.
"Right! I don't wake up and think, today I will draw the worst circle in the world!"
"No one thinks that."
"Lady Corra looks like she thinks I do." Utowin huff.
Easthies made a sound that was almost like a very quiet, but very briefly laugh. Not a full one. Just a small compressed exhalation that carried amusement in it. He pressed his lips back together immediately, but Utowin caught it and grinned, wide and delighted.
"You laughed," Utowin said.
"I did not."
"You definitely did! It was small but it counted!" He said smugly as if it was the best accomplishment he had ever got.
"It did not—"
"It do!" Utowin said cheerfully, and looked ahead at the slope, apparently deeply pleased with this outcome.
Easthies shifted his moonwort. His lips were still trying to do something he was preventing them from doing. "Your issue is likely fixable," he said, to redirect the conversation. "The 'not-at-a-desk' approach is a real technique, not just an avoidance. Movement castings are documented in Sollweg's third volume. She calls them ambulatory workings. They are considered advanced, but the reason they are advanced is because most witches learn the still method first and then have to unlearn parts of it. You have been doing ambulatory working from the start, which means you do not have the unlearning problem." He paused. "You just have the circle problem."
"See, nobody's ever said any of this to me," Utowin hums and said. He was looking at Easthies with both eyebrows up, something between surprise and mild grievance. "Lady Corra just says circles, Utowin, circles. She doesn't say here is why your circles matter and here is how to fix them specifically for you. She just says circles."
"She should say more than circles," Easthies said, eyebrow raised as he wonder how the lady ever qualified to be a teacher.
"Right?!"
"The anchor technique is one lesson. It is not a long lesson. It should be taught in the first session." Easthies was getting slightly indignant on behalf of all the students who had probably sat at Lady Corra's desk being told their circles were potatoes without being given a reason or a solution. "A good circle is not about drawing it perfectly round. It is about the starting point and the closing point meeting with intention. The shape in between is secondary."
Utowin had stopped walking.
Easthies was a step ahead before he noticed, and turned back.
Utowin was looking at him with his mouth slightly open. "You're saying my circles would be fine if I just— did the start and end points right?"
"They would be functional," Easthies said. "Fine is a higher bar. But functional is what matters for a casting to work."
"That's— " Utowin's expression was doing several things at once. "I have been told for two years that my circles are the problem. Not part of my circles. My circles. Like the whole thing is wrong."
"Well," Easthies said, "the whole thing is wrong. Just not in a way that cannot be corrected."
"That is the meanest helpful thing anyone has ever said to me," Utowin told him, and then he laughed, and started walking again, and his step had something lighter in it than it had had before.
Utowin was quiet for just a moment then. The slope was getting gentler, opening out into lower ground, and Easthies could see far below them the pale line of the Mossfen road threading through low hedgerows. His shoulders unknotted a degree.
"I'll show you what I've been working on," Utowin said. "If you want."
At the bottom of the slope, where the path levelled to packed earth and met a crossing that Easthies now recognised. The old thornbush, the leaning fencepost, the curve of road he knew like his own breathing. Utowin stopped.
"Here," he said. He dropped the rope and the sack in the path and fished in his front pocket, producing a small stoppered glass bottle. Inside was a dark liquid with the faint silver-blue shimmer of silverwood ink.
Every witch had their bottle. Easthies kept his in his inner jacket pocket, always full, always sealed. Utowin's bottle had a fingerprint smudge on the side and the stopper sat slightly crooked, but it was there.
He unstoppered it, wet the tip of his finger, and looked around for a surface. He dropped into a squat and pressed his finger to a flat piece of path-stone at the edge of the road.
Easthies crouched beside him, curious despite himself.
Utowin started to draw.
He was not wrong about his circles. The line he pulled was slow and wandering, too wide on the right, pinched and awkward on the lower left, the shape of something that had been interrupted partway through and redirected. Lady Corra was apparently correct about the potato. But Utowin's hand was loose, relaxed in a way that Easthies' hand at a desk, being watched, probably never was, and inside the wobbly circle he began to draw a shape, a loose curling thing, freehand and unbothered, and Easthies recognised it after a moment as the outline of a rabbit. Long ears. Round body. All done in one wandering line, the way you draw when you are not thinking about it.
Utowin lifted his finger at the closing of the circle. The two ends of the potato-loop meeting unevenly but meeting, the circuit completing, and the ink immediately lit.
Not the clean white flare of a properly anchored casting. Not the precise controlled bloom Easthies got from his own circles, even and reliable. This was something warmer and it came up from the stone in a soft rush of gold, more like something pouring out than something igniting, and the rabbit shape pulled off the surface and into the air.
It was small. Not larger than a hand. Made of light the colour of late afternoon, soft and slightly sparkling, like the inside of a lantern seen through cloth.
It was very wobbly. Its ears were uneven. Its body was slightly too wide on one side. It was the most imprecise casting Easthies had seen that still, unambiguously, worked.
Its nose twitched.
Easthies stopped breathing.
The rabbit gave a single lazy hop through the air. Going forward, then curving left and then dissolved, not in the clean instant a controlled casting dissolved, but in a slow scatter of warm sparks that fell upward, which was wrong physics, and floated for a second like embers before blinking out one at a time.
Utowin sat back on his heels and looked at Easthies.
"Again," Easthies said.
Utowin's face broke open, the surprised-pleased face of someone who prepared to be modest and found they didn't have to be, and he laughed, that loud unguarded laugh with too much air in it, and turned back to the stone and wet his finger again.
He drew a flower next, rounder than the rabbit, the circle somehow less potato-shaped when he was relaxed into it, the petals curling outward from a loose center point. The ink lit warmer this time, with something pinkish at the edges, and the flower lifted off the stone slowly, turning in the air like it was on a lazy string.
Then a bird, done fast, confident, a flick of his wrist for the tail feathers, and the sparkling bird ruffled itself and tilted its head and then flew, rising in a tiny spiral before going to sparks.
"I can do more at once, if I use a bigger surface," Utowin said, reaching for a broader flat stone. He drew quickly on this one. A lopsided star, a fat little fish, a sprig of something leafy, all crowded inside a single large wobbly circle, and when the circuit closed they all lifted at once and hung in the air together, rotating slowly around each other, a little constellation at knee height.
Then, last of all, he drew a string of tiny circles, each one closing its own small loop, and from each one rose a small orb of light with no shape, nothing complicated, just soft round glowing things, strung in a loose curve between two fixed sparks he had anchored to the thornbush twigs. Fairy lights. Warm and small and absolutely useless, hovering in the grey afternoon like something belonging to a festival, or a birthday, or the kind of evening where people stay outside later than they meant to because something about the air is too good to go inside.
"There's the string holding too," Utowin said, pointing at the thin faintly-glowing thread connecting each orb. "I couldn't get that to work for ages. I had to close two circles at once, one for the orb and one for the anchor point. Took me — " he made a face, calculating with difficulty "probably forty tries? There was a lot of ink wasted."
"Two simultaneous closings," Easthies said, with genuine interest. He was leaning slightly forward without realising it. "That is— that is actually not easy to do. Even with a clean anchor."
"It kept collapsing," Utowin agreed. "The string would come up and then just— " he made a falling gesture with his hand, "flop. Like a dead worm."
Easthies turned to look at him. "How did you solve it?"
Utowin scratched the back of his head. "I did the anchor first? And then drew the orb while keeping my finger on the anchor point. So both were sort of— still connected to me when they closed." He frowned. "I don't know if that's the right way to do it."
"I do not know either," Easthies said. "I have not done a string casting. But it worked, so it is a right way."
Utowin looked at him, surprised.
"What?" Easthies said.
"You said I don't know."
"I said I do not know. Which is different from not knowing in general. I simply have not studied string castings."
"Yeah, but— " Utowin was smiling. "You said it like it was fine. Most people who know a lot of stuff don't like saying they don't know."
Easthies considered this. "Not knowing a thing is just the state before learning it," he said. "It would be strange to be bothered by it."
Utowin stared at him for a second. Then he said, "You're really something, you know that?"
Easthies opened his mouth. Closed it.
Something warm climbed the back of his neck without permission. He was fairly certain it reached his ears, which was mortifying, so he looked very purposefully at the fairy lights and hoped the grey afternoon light was too flat to show colour on a person's face.
Utowin sat back.
Easthies looked at the fairy lights for a long moment. They swayed very slightly in the air, lazy and warm. They would not last long. He could already see the first one at the end beginning to dim but while they were there they were the most cheerful thing in the landscape.
"Your circles are wonky," Easthies said.
"I know."
"But they close. That is what matters most." Easthies watched a second fairy light begin to dim. "Your light-holding is good. Better than mine for warmth. Mine goes too white. The sparks when they dissolve—" he thought about how to say it correctly "they feel like something. Like they are happy to go, if that is a thing a casting can be."
Utowin stared at him. "That is the nicest thing anyone has said about my castings."
"Lady Corra should have been telling you this instead of only talking about potatoes."
"Lady Corra says pretty much only about potatoes." Utowin unstoppered his bottle and recapped it, turning it over in his fingers. "She says decorative castings are a waste of silverwood ink. That you should only cast when you need to cast something useful." He said it mildly, without heat. He had clearly heard it many times. "But I like making them. The little things. When I'm by myself I make them all the time."
"You should not need to do it only by yourself," Easthies said.
He meant it straightforwardly. Decorative castings were a legitimate study, they developed control and creativity, Lady Vinnana had told him so but Utowin went quiet for a moment in a way that suggested the words had landed somewhere specific.
Then Utowin looked at him. He had an odd expression. It's not sad, but something perhaps thoughtful, something that was considering Easthies more carefully than the casual forward-energy of the last half hour had suggested he was capable of.
"You're really good at casting, right?" he said.
"Yes."
"Do you like it? Like— all of it, all the studying?"
Easthies considered this. It was an honest question and it deserved an honest answer, so he thought about it properly. "I like knowing things," he said, slowly. "I like when a casting comes out right. I like understanding why it works." He paused. "Some of the drills are tedious. Repeating the same circle shape for an hour is not interesting."
"Yeah." Utowin nodded. He was looking at the last of the fairy lights now, the final two, dimming in the grey air. "Do you ever just — draw something fun? Like fireflies or sparkling things? Just for yourself?"
Easthies opened his mouth. Then closed it.
He thought about his study time. About the long ordered afternoons. About circles practiced until they were geometrically sound, about the drills for control and precision, about the casting chains memorised for their function. He thought about whether he had, in two years of study, ever once used his silverwood ink to draw something just because he wanted to see it.
"...No," he said.
Utowin looked at him.
"Not even once?"
"Lady Vinnana has not assigned—"
"I'm not asking about Lady Vinnana." Utowin's voice was direcT like someone who had not yet learned to frame things gently. "I mean just— you, by yourself, for no reason. Like making a firefly. Or a little fish. Just because." He tilted his head. "Don't you think— " he paused, choosing his words with the visible effort of someone who does not usually choose their words, "wouldn't you like to learn magic that made you happy? Just happy, not useful, just— " He gestured at the spot where the fairy lights had been. "Like that."
The last light blinked out.
Easthies looked at the empty air where the fairy lights had been. He looked at the flat stones with their faint silverwood residue, still faintly warm-looking, the wobbly circles already beginning to lose their shimmer. He thought about never having drawn a firefly.
Something shifted in his chest.
It was small and precise and happened very quickly, the way certain things happen when you are not watching for them. A latch, somewhere behind his ribs, very quietly giving way.
It was not the fairy lights specifically, and not the rabbit's nose, and not even the question. It was the way Utowin had said it. Like he genuinely thought Easthies deserved to have things that were just happy. Like it was obvious.
No one had said that to him before. Not in exactly that way.
"I suppose," Easthies said, and his voice came out less even than usual, "I would."
Utowin grinned.
Not the easy automatic grin of the last hour. This one was slower, and warmer, and it arrived in his face like it meant something.
And Easthies did not have a word for what happened to him at that exact moment, but he knew, in the precise way he knew most things, that something had changed and was not going to change back.
They stood up, both at once, brushing grass from their knees with the slightly self-conscious air of people who have had a more serious conversation than they meant to.
"Your cottage is that way," Utowin said, pointing. "See the rowan tree? That's the one, right?"
Easthies looked, and yes, the top of the rowan tree, dark and heavy with berries, visible over the hedgerow line exactly where it should be. He knew precisely where he was now. He had known for the last several minutes, actually, but he had not said so.
"Yes," he said. "That is Lady Vinnana's rowan."
Utowin nodded. He picked up his rope and sack, slung them back on, the forward-motion energy coming back into his posture. "Okay! Good." He looked pleased with himself, the particular pleasure of someone who has successfully completed a task. "You'll be fine from here?"
"Yes. I know this road."
"Great." He started backing up the path, toward the hill, still facing Easthies. "I go that way. Up over the hill."
"I know," Easthies said. He didn't. He had no particular reason to know that. He was not sure why he'd said it.
Utowin paused.
"Hey," he said. "You should draw a firefly tonight. Just one. For no reason."
Easthies looked at him.
"All right," he said.
Utowin's face did the warm slow grin again, the one that arrived. "Good." He turned, and then back over his shoulder: "Bye, Easthies-who-knows-things!"
Easthies' ears went hot.
It was a ridiculous name. It was an entirely childish thing to call someone, constructed from a single afternoon's worth of knowing a person, and it was also, somehow, the nicest thing anyone had called him in recent memory, and his face knew this before he did, which was why his ears were currently a temperature they had no business being.
"Goodbye," he said, at a volume that came out smaller than he intended.
Utowin waved without turning back and disappeared over the slope.
Easthies stood at the crossroads.
One second. Two. Five.
He became aware that he was standing still at a crossroads holding a clay pot for no reason, and that if anyone walked past they would see a thirteen-year-old witch standing alone on the Mossfen road looking slightly dazed, which was not an appearance he wished to present to anyone.
He picked up his moonwort. He tucked the clay pot under his arm. He walked home.
He walked faster than usual, because walking faster gave his legs somewhere to put the energy that was currently running laps somewhere behind his ribs, and it did not help at all, but at least he arrived home sooner.
The latch-giving feeling was still there when he got back.
Lady Vinnana was in the kitchen garden when he came through the gate, kneeling at her low herb beds in her garden gloves, her spectacles pushed up on her head. She looked up when the hinge creaked.
"You're late," she said.
"I went the wrong way," Easthies said. "Ghost-cap mushrooms in the east ditch. I followed them."
Lady Vinnana set down her trowel. She looked at him. Not at the moonwort or the clay pot. At him. His face, specifically, with the measuring, patient attention that she usually applied to plants and weather and things that needed reading carefully.
Easthies did not know exactly what was on his face. He suspected it was more than he would have liked.
"A boy helped me back," he said, before she could say whatever the look was about to produce. "Utowin. From Caldwick."
"Mm," said Lady Vinnana.
She had a sound, a single syllable, deliberately uninflected, that she deployed when she wanted to indicate she had understood considerably more than you had told her. Easthies had been on the receiving end of it before, but never quite like this, where it felt less like a teacher's observation and more like a knowing little bell.
"He showed me back to the Mossfen road," Easthies said, crisply. "I gave him nothing in return and do not owe him anything, it was a simple errand."
"Of course," Lady Vinnana said pleasantly.
"He does casting work. Decorative. Very amateur circles."
"I see."
"He had a rope."
"Did he?"
Easthies handed over the moonwort and the clay pot with perhaps slightly more precision than was necessary, and said, "I will go do my afternoon reading now," and went inside before Lady Vinnana could say anything further.
He heard the mm again just before the door closed behind him. It sounded almost fond.
He sat at his desk with Intermediate Patternings open to the correct page and did not read it for a very long time.
He thought about the firefly. Utowin had said to draw one. Just one, for no reason. He got out his silverwood ink, dipped his pen, pressed it to a scrap of paper, and drew a small circle. Neat, even, properly anchored, the way his circles always were.
Inside it he drew a firefly. Oval body. Two little wing shapes. Round head.
He closed the circuit.
The casting lit clean and white and the firefly lifted, small and tidy, and dissolved all at once the correct and efficient way.
Easthies stared at where it had been.
He thought about sparks that fell upward. He thought about happy to go. He thought about the lopsided rabbit and the little fish and the star rotating around the sprig of leaves, and the fairy lights swaying in the cold air like something belonging to a fair. He thought about wouldn't you like to learn magic that made you happy and the way it had arrived in his chest warm and specific and found something it fit perfectly, like a key in a lock.
He thought about the slow warm grin.
His face did something.
He pressed both hands over his face.
He stayed like that for a moment.
Then he got up and went to the kitchen.
Lady Vinnana was at the worktable with the moonwort, sorting it into tidy bundles, her movements unhurried and precise. She looked up when Easthies appeared in the doorway, and her expression was entirely neutral in the way that still water is entirely still just before a fish surfaces.
"Lady Vinnana," he said. "I want to learn flower castings."
She set down her bundle very slowly.
"Flower castings...?" she repeated.
"Yes. Decorative ones. Light flowers. I know the foundational principles overlap considerably with my current study so it would not require—"
"Mm-hm," she said.
"—starting from the beginning, and the precision demanded by delicate castings would actually improve my...."
"Mm."
"...general accuracy across all—"
"Easthies," she said.
He stopped.
She was looking at him with the rain-coloured eyes, patient, direct, reading him the way she read the sky before rain. Easthies was aware, with some discomfort, that he was standing very straight in the way he stood when he was trying to appear composed and was succeeding only technically.
"Sit down," she said.
He sat at the kitchen table. She came to sit across from him. She folded her hands and looked at him and said nothing, which was one of her most powerful tools.
Easthies looked at the table.
"The boy," he said, to the table. "Utowin. He does decorative castings. On his own— he taught himself. Wobbly circles, everything uneven, but they work." He paused. "They are warm. The light is this— gold colour. Not white like mine. Warmer." He paused again. "And when they dissolve, the sparks go upward instead of going out all at once. It looks like—" He stopped.
"Like?" Lady Vinnana said, with great gentle interest.
"Like they are pleased," Easthies said, at a lower volume.
"The sparks are pleased?" Lady Vinnana said.
"That is not—" Easthies made a small, frustrated gesture. "That is what it looks like. I am describing the aesthetic quality of the dissolution, I am not actually—"
"Of course," she said.
"He drew a rabbit," Easthies continued, and his voice had gone slightly strained. "And the rabbit— its nose—" He stopped again. His ears had gone warm. He could tell because the tips of his ears always went warm first before the rest of his face caught up, which meant he had approximately three seconds before he went visibly red, which he absolutely refused to do at the kitchen table.
He pressed on.
"He made fairy lights," he said, with great controlled dignity. "He hung them on the thornbush with a string casting. He figured out the double-simultaneous close by himself and it took him forty tries. And he said— " His jaw went tight. "He asked if I ever just — drew something happy. For no reason. And I said no and he said—" Easthies stopped.
The kitchen was very quiet.
"He said wouldn't you like to learn magic that made you happy," he said, flat and fast, like pulling off a plaster. "And I thought— I just thought— that was—"
He pressed his lips together.
There was a small silence.
"That was a very good question," he said, very precisely, staring at the table.
Lady Vinnana made no sound at all.
He looked up.
She was looking at him with an expression that could be called neutral in the same way that the sun could be called warm. Technically accurate but substantially understated. There was the beginning of a smile at the corner of her mouth that she was doing very little to suppress.
Easthies' face did the thing.
The red arrived, up from his neck, into his cheeks, somewhere slightly past his ears, all at once, quick and total, the way the sun goes behind a cloud. His face was simply hot now. There was nothing to be done about it.
"I want," he said, with as much composure as a thirteen-year-old boy whose face has just turned the colour of a late summer strawberry can muster, "to make a stored casting on birch card. To give to him. As a... as a thank-you for the road. I want it to have flowers and possibly a firefly and I want it to be good and I need you to teach me how to do it and I would appreciate it very much if you didn't—"
"Didn't what?" Lady Vinnana said pleasantly.
"That," Easthies said.
"I haven't said anything."
"You're doing the face."
"I have one face," Lady Vinnana said, with great serenity.
Easthies pressed both hands flat on the table. He was extremely red. He knew he was extremely red. Lady Vinnana knew he was extremely red. The table, at this point, probably knew he was extremely red. There was simply nothing to do about it except wait for it to stop, which it showed no immediate signs of doing.
"Teach me flower castings," he said.
"Of course," Lady Vinnana said, and rose to collect her teaching things, and as she turned toward the supply shelf he could see, in profile, that the corner of her mouth had entirely given up pretending and was now openly, warmly, completely smiling.
She said nothing more. She was kind enough for that. But as she passed behind him to reach the shelf, she rested one hand briefly on the top of his head, a light, gentle, entirely deliberate pat and then moved on without comment.
Easthies stared at the wall.
The back of his neck was the temperature of a well-stoked hearth.
He was going to learn flower castings, and he was going to make the best stored casting he had ever done, and he was going to give it to Utowin, and he was absolutely, completely, under no circumstances going to think about that right now.
He looked at his hands.
He thought about it immediately.
He pressed his face into his palms.
He could not sleep.
He had eaten supper and done his evening reading, retaining barely three pages, and washed and gone to bed at the proper hour and was lying completely awake in the dark staring at the ceiling with a feeling in his chest that he could not make settle.
He was going to make a stored casting on a piece of birch card and give it to Utowin. That was the plan. It was a reasonable plan. It was a normal thing, making a small gift for someone who had helped you. People did this. It was not strange.
The problem was that he kept thinking about Utowin opening it. The imagined version. Imagined-Utowin's face doing something like the warm slow grin, the one that arrived rather than burst, and the feeling this produced in Easthies' chest was doing something he could not organise.
He turned onto his side.
He had noticed, on the walk, that Utowin's hair did a particular thing at the back where it couldn't decide which direction to go. He had noticed that Utowin moved his hands a lot when he talked. He had noticed that Utowin had said you're really something and then looked away first, which felt significant, though Easthies was not sure how.
He turned onto his other side.
He thought about wouldn't you like to learn magic that made you happy, and the way the question had reached somewhere in him that Lady Vinnana's careful lessons never quite had, not like that. Lady Vinnana's lessons reached his mind. That question had reached somewhere adjacent. Somewhere that did not have a very good label yet.
He turned onto his back and stared at the ceiling with great intensity.
He was going to draw duskbell flowers. Three, in a cluster, small and bell-shaped and the round-petalled ones in a spray, and a firefly in the center, slightly lopsided, because he thought Utowin would like something that was not trying to be perfect. He was going to seal the closing stroke with hold and make the whole thing as warm as he could and then he was going to give it to Utowin the next time he...
The next time was a problem.
He didn't know when there would be a next time. He did not know Utowin's schedule or what brought him to this side of the hill. He had not thought to ask. This had been an oversight. He should have thought to ask. He had been too busy thinking about the fish casting rotating around the star casting and the way the fairy lights had swayed in the grey afternoon air.
He kicked his feet under the blanket, a short sharp motion, and immediately felt ridiculous.
He was thirteen. He was careful and diligent and good at most things. He was lying in his bed kicking his feet like a much younger child because he didn't know when he would see a boy he had met four hours ago.
He turned onto his side.
He pulled his blanket up.
He thought about the birch card. He thought about the duskbell flowers rising off it. He thought about Utowin's face doing the warm slow grin and his hands going all expressive the way they did when he was talking about something he cared about — fingers spreading wide, gesturing at the air, drawing shapes in nothing.
He thought about wouldn't you like to learn magic that made you happy.
And then he thought, with the clarity of someone who has been trying not to think something directly and has finally just thought it directly: I would like very much to see him again.
There it was.
He pressed his face into the pillow.
From down the hall came the quiet sound of Lady Vinnana's cottage settling in the nighttime. The faint creak of old wood, the soft tick of the cooling hearth. Ordinary and calm. Easthies lay in the middle of it being the most unordinary-feeling he had ever felt, which was unfair, because nothing had actually happened. He had walked home through some birch trees. He had watched some sparkling animals. He had been asked a question.
He had answered it.
He kicked his feet again, once, quietly.
He was going to make the best stored casting he had ever made. He was going to make the firefly slightly lopsided on purpose, because it was the right kind of imperfect. And he was going to go back to Heller's market stall more often than he strictly needed to, because Heller's stall was near the main road, and the main road connected this side of the hill to the Caldwick side, and maybe —
Maybe was not a plan. But it was something.
The cottage settled again. Somewhere outside, rain was starting very faintly against the window. It was the thin, gentle rain of late evening, the kind that settled rather than drummed. It was the kind of evening where everything felt close and quiet and full of something you couldn't quite name.
Easthies stared at the ceiling.
He thought about sparks falling upward.
He thought about how Utowin had done forty tries on the string casting and hadn't stopped. He thought about how the string casting had looked in the end, warm and swaying and perfectly, wrongly beautiful, and felt, in the slow muzzy way of thoughts arriving just before sleep, that forty tries was a very Utowin way to approach a problem, and that this was not a criticism, and that in fact it was the kind of thing that made your chest do the quiet latch-giving feeling if you thought about it too carefully at midnight.
He was almost asleep.
I want to show him what flower castings look like when they're done properly. I want to see what he thinks of them.
He was asleep before he could be embarrassed about that, which was probably for the best.
Lady Vinnana was already up when he came to breakfast.
She was at the worktable with her morning tea and a small wrapped parcel of dried herbs she was itemising, her spectacles on now, the reading kind. She looked up when Easthies came through, registered his face, and said nothing for a full minute while he got his porridge and sat down.
He ate two spoonfuls.
"Lady Vinnana," he said.
"Mm?"
"I would like to begin the stored casting lesson today. Before afternoon reading."
"After breakfast," she said.
"Yes, after breakfast. And I need to know— the birch card squares, the small ones. May I have two?"
She looked up over her spectacles. "Two."
"One to practice on and one to do properly."
"I know why you need two," she said. "I am just noting that you said two and not four."
"I will not need four."
"You are very confident for someone who has not yet done a stored casting."
Easthies ate his porridge. "I will need two," he said.
Lady Vinnana looked at him for a long moment with her rain-water eyes, the patient measuring look. Then she got up and went to the small supply cabinet on the kitchen wall, slid it open, and brought back two small squares of birch card, smooth and pale, and set them beside his bowl without comment.
Easthies looked at them. They were perfect. Smooth and clean, the birch grain running horizontally, which would hold the ink nicely along the line of the pattern.
"Thank you," he said.
"Eat your porridge," she said.
He ate his porridge. He kept glancing at the birch cards.
Lady Vinnana drank her tea and watched the kitchen window and said nothing at all, because she was very good at saying nothing, and because some things were better left for the person to carry themselves, at least until they were ready to put them down.
Outside, the morning was clear after last night's rain, the light gold and thin across the damp hedgerows, and somewhere over the hill, in Caldwick, a boy with an uneven grin and wobbly circles was probably already up and moving, already finding things to carry, already being useful, not yet knowing that someone on the other side of the hill was sitting over a bowl of porridge and two squares of birch card and quietly, carefully, terrifyingly looking forward to the day they would meet again.
The thing in Easthies' chest was still there.
He suspected, with the precision he applied to most things, that it was going to be there for quite some time.
He looked at his birch card.
He thought about duskbell flowers and a lopsided firefly, and the warm slow grin of someone who believed happiness was an obvious and reasonable thing to want.
He finished his porridge.
He was ready to begin.