Meek

The Leotide City headquarters of the Stonemasons' Guilde looked exactly like Eli expected. Four stories of ornate stonework behind a cleverly-wrought stone fence. With carved stone lintels and columns rising above stone statues and fountains in the courtyard.

The flagstone courtyard.

"Welp," he told Lara, strolling past on the street outside the wall. "That's a lot of stone."

She scuttled alongside him, dressed like a maid. "Maybe give me a few more details?"

"There's a carriage drive in the front, beyond the gate, with huge double doors. Smaller doors on the side facing us, for staff or servants. A lot of stonework on the walls. There's what looks like a guard station just in front of the gate. It's four stories with--"

"I can see how tall it is."

"Oh. Right. Uh, there are barred windows on the lower two floors."

"Stone bars?"

"No, they look like metal."

She straightened the collar of his footman uniform as his sparks roamed inside the walls. "So untidy!" she scolded, when a few pedestrians strolled past.

"Looks like there's a coal cellar," he murmured, as he led her around the corner. "There are no doors, no nothing below the level of the perimeter wall, except a few benches and a drying line."

"Keep walking," she said.

He kept walking. She knew more about this kind of thing than he did. After all, she'd noticed him scouting for Chivat Lo back in Rockbridge.

"Buy me a sweet," she said, a few blocks later.

He did as she told him. "So now we don't look suspicious?" he said, when they stepped away from the rock candy stall.

"So now," she said, flashing a smile, "I got candy."

He snorted a laugh and they took the long way home. He watched for followers with sparks that ranged farther from him than ever before. Every time he improved any aspect of his control of the sparks--power, finesse, distance--the other aspects all improved as well. Which surprised him, even though it made sense. When he strengthened his core, he strengthened everything about his sparks.

He and Lara didn't scout the Guild the next day, or the day after that. Lara insisted that they avoid the area as much as possible before they struck, for fear of raising the alarm.

So their training continued almost uninterrupted. Until one afternoon, when Eli was meditating crosslegged in the training room, a sixth spark emerged.

Gently, softly. As quietly as opening his eye.

"Ah," Elsavet said, looking up from her knitting.

Eli laughed. "I didn't feel anything. The last time ..."

"Was with the Bloodwitch?"

"Yeah. And it hurt."

"We usually Flare in response to trauma," she told him. "Not always, but usually. However, that's not usually how we grow. We grow from within."

The weight of the new spark swirled in Eli's core. He felt himself expand and he sent a spark across the room--over five yards away--and lifted Elsavet's skein of yarn.

"Very nice," she said.

"Thank you. For everything."

"Don't waste your thanks on me, Mir Meek. I am Lady Brazinka's. Thank her. Or better yet, serve her."

"I'm not much of a servant."

"Neither was I, until I found someone worth serving."

He placed five of his sparks onto the floor, in a circle around himself. "You started as her instructor?"

"Mm."

"How did you become ..." He pressed on the sparks and lifted himself, still crosslegged, six inches off the floor. "Whoa!"

He'd been using the sparks to shift his weight, to help him move, ever since Ehrat. But nothing like this. Not sitting there, suspended in the air like he was flying.

"Ha!" he said, trying to push himself higher.

Instead, he tipped forward. So he threw more weight into the spark on the floor in front of him. He balanced, steadied ... then overbalanced. He fell backwards, though a spark spread wide and cradled his head before it cracked against the floor.

"Did you see that?" he asked, smiling giddily.

"Yes, I was looking directly at you," Elsavet said.

"With a little practice, I'll won't need to touch the ground."

Except when he practiced lifting himself into the air while standing, he couldn't stay upright. He kept tilting forward. So maybe it would take a lot of practice.

Still, his stronger connection to the sparks changed everything. If he lodged a spark in the high branches of the peach tree, he could pull himself up like he only weighed a few pounds. He shot effortlessly into the crown of the tree, then braced his feet against the trunk and pushed off, jumping outside the embrace of the branches.

The sparks slammed into the ground below him, shoving hard to keep him from plummeting too fast. At that distance, they couldn't keep him floating, but they pushed harder the lower he fell. Two yards from the ground, he felt them take half his weight.

He landed like a cat.

An overweight, clumsy cat, but still. He'd dropped from a treetop and hadn't even sprained his ankle.

He sparred with Fishhook every day, though not for as long as Lara. Fishhook often restricted him to using one spark, and only for defence. He'd use his single spark to turn Fishhook's blade, to slow his slashes, and to help himself move more quickly and lightly, too.

Since the sixth spark emerged, he shifted his own weight twice as smoothly and strongly. Fishhook was still leagues better than him as a swordsman. No comparison. If he didn't use a spark, Fishhook put him down within seconds, every time.

He eventually learned, when using a single spark defensively, to fight Fishhook to a draw. He'd end up covered in slashes, but nothing deep enough to finish the fight.

With two or three sparks, he'd been able to walk away untouched. In fact, with three spark he'd been able to press Fishhook to focus on defense. Because if Eli didn't need to worry about parrying, he could just hammer away.

Yet after he got the sixth spark, he actually drew blood with his blade while using only two sparks for defense. Not often, and not deeply, but the improvement pleased him. Every time he snuck past Fishhook's guard, he had to suppress a smile.

The next time Eli scouted the Stonecutters, he did so from inside a closed carriage. He sat concealed in the back as Dorgo stopped the carriage against the north wall of the guildhall. The big man pretended to fix the axle while Eli's sparks ranged at the limit of their leashes, peering through the windows on the second floor. He gained a sense of the rear half of the building, which Brazinka hadn't seen. He also noted location of the stairs and the guards.

Her ladyship was adamant that he not hurt anyone badly, though. That might undermine her effort to gain favor from the throne.

So he just needed to sneak into the building, make his way to the fourth floor unseen, avoid the guards, remove the key from the Guildmistress's neck, open the vault embedded in the stone floor, snag the two pouches of gemstones, leave the receipt, then escape--also unseen.

In other words, he needed to train.

Eli spent days practicing with his sparks, first learning to handle his bodyweight and then focusing on stealth. He tried to slip into Swan's bedchamber at her tavern without being caught. He failed. He did better with Fishhook, and with Dorgo and Twoeyes. Elsavet flatly refused to engage with that particularly training, and even more flatly refused to allow him to enter Brazinka's bedchamber, even though the lady herself was willing.

Then he awakened a seventh spark.

Not even during his meditation. He just woke up, and bang: a seventh spark.

The next day he sparred with Mage Elsavet again.

That time he didn't dodge. That time, he walked directly toward her.

When she fired a bead at him, his spark swatted it out of the air.

He kept walking.

She fired two more, and another spark blocked them both.

He kept walking.

She fired a rock and he deflected it into the ground behind him.

She fired another rock and that one he deflected upward, into the air. Then he battled it back toward Elsavet. The rock was too weak to break through her shield, but he was enjoying himself, showing off.

He kept walking until he was close enough, then he battered her shield with four sparks while two more deflected her beads and one remained on overwatch.

He shattered her final shield and tweaked her nose with a spark and--

"I concede," Mage Elsavet said.

"That's no fun," he told her.

"True," she said. "But what may prove more enjoyable is watching you attempt the same victory whilst using your sparks balance bowls in the air without spilling the contents."

He struggled with increasing numbers of bowls for a fiveday, while Lara bribed and flirted for more information about the guild and guildhall. And eventually, Brazinka was granted another audience with the guildmistress.

So Eli took the opportunity to break into her house.

The guildmistress's townhome was a narrow building that backed onto the river. The exterior walls boasted extravagantly-carved windows and bas relief sculptures: the work of her guild, according to Brazinka, from hundreds of years earlier.

Eli took note of the expensive glass windows on the uppermost floor of the three-story building and of the hint of greenery on the rooftop. Maybe a garden; despite his improve range, his sparks couldn't rise high enough to see.

Well, not from street level.

He strolled down the long side of the rectangular building toward the river, checking in all directions with his sparks. Then he lodged two sparks on a windowsill and three on the ground beneath him. He pushed and pulled, and climbed the wall in a matter of seconds.

He caught the lip of the roof, using four sparks to take most of his weight. He scanned with the other three. The rooftop looked more like a terrance than a garden. A handful of chairs stood around a table beneath an awning. There were a dozen small fruit trees in terracotta pots. There was nobody in sight, so he hopped onto the roof and plucked a kumquat as he slunk toward the door.

He checked the handle as he chewed. Locked tight. With a fancy lock, too. He'd expected a bolt, drawn from the inside, but not this.

Still, it didn't bother him. Not anymore.

He pressed a spark to the keyhole. He closed his eyes and ... didn't force anything. He just waited for the spark to soften. To turn almost liquid, almost vaporous.

Then he eased it through the keyhole.

When it reached the other side of the door, Eli slumped against the wall. That was pretty exhausting for him to pull off.

He took a few seconds to recover while the spark solidified inside the house. Then he sent it to the limit of his range--six yards, more less, which was far enough to see around the corner and into a bedroom. Sadly, it wasn't far enough to open the third-story window from the inside. Hm.

With one spark following him inside the building, he stayed low and crept around the edge of the roof. Checked all the windows on the third story. Locked. Cautious woman. He could break a pane of glass, then open the window and pull himself inside.

He didn't want to leave a trace, though. Not yet.

Probably easier to go through the front door, if he could be sure nobody would take note. Dress in livery, maybe. Or wait until a few hours before dawn, and then--

A door opened inside the building.

A teenaged boy stepped into the view of his spark in the corridor. Half-naked, rubbing his eyes. The guildmistress's son, from what Brazinka had told him.

So maybe that wasn't the best time to prowl around. Eli had mostly come to test himself, and to check if the guildmistress had her own stash of gems. He'd wondered if he could hide in her house and make an imprint of her safe key while she slept. He even had a block of clay in his pocket, but that would have to wait.

He withdrew his spark, slunk to the side of the building, and dropped off the roof. He loved the feeling of catching himself in mid-air, slowing himself before landing as gently as a leaf drifting from a tree.

A carriage clattered past on the street in front of the townhome. The air smelled of damp wood. When the carriage turned the corner, Eli strolled unhurriedly away.

Twenty minutes later, he leaned against a fence overlooking the river. He couldn't see the barges unloading at the wharf, but he could hear the riverfolk and dockworkers calling, poles splashing, and crates scraping. He stood there for a time, thinking about the Killweeds. Thinking about the concomitance, but mostly thinking about Lady Brazinka's plan to unite the valley.

It sounded like a long shot to him. Still, at least she was taking a shot. That was more than anyone else had tried in generations, as far as he knew. The rest of the valley just hunkered down to weather the Celestial attacks, to suffer them and survive; nobody else gave any thought to fighting back.

Eli didn't know if fighting back was possible, but Brazinka was right about one thing: if it was, the first step was unity. Without that, they had absolutely no chance.

And was there a better way to achieve unity than to influence the Hyssop Throne?

No.

Plus, Brazinka's power functioned as a sort of compass, leading them through the wilderness. It couldn't tell them what obstacles might be waiting, but at least they'd know they were heading in the right direction.

He was still thinking about that when he returned to Brazinka's compound. He stepped through the side gate then turned the corner to the courtyard, absently noting Nanny berating a maid in the kitchen. He smiled at the sight. He'd started to feel so comfortable in the compound, that he barely scouted ahead.

And, too late, he saw the visitors:

A handful of soldiers.

Two women in civilian clothing, one with short hair and a square jaw, the other with silver-streaked black hair.

And two young nobles. One was a handsome man idly plucking a dead leaf from a bush in the front yard. The other was his twin.

A young noblewoman with clear brown eyes and a hawk nose.

It was Lady Pym, and she was looking directly at Eli.