Light Step

The skill came with a chime.

He noted the chime before he read the words, because the difference had become useful to him three days ago and he had been sorting them ever since. A chime meant a transaction. Something had been handed over. The silent ones were decisions and arrived from somewhere further off.

This one had a chime. Whatever it was, it was a delivery, and a delivery is a smaller thing than a verdict.

[SKILL ACQUIRED: LIGHT STEP]

Thirty seconds. Undetected.

He read the description twice and it did not get longer. Two words and a number. It did not say undetected by whom, or by what, or under which conditions, and he stood in the yard with the morning going on around him and turned the gap over.

He was out of the gate inside a minute.

He had the old sword on his back.

It had been there since his first night home. He had got out of the plate that night and laid it on the long table in the order it came off, and had gone upstairs with nothing on his back for the first time in a week, and had found that he did not like the feel of it. The good sword was in a molten lake under a mountain four days north. He had known that since the chamber. He had not, until he went up to bed, known it in his shoulders.

So he had unwrapped the old one from the sacking on the floor by the bed.

It came out the way it had gone in, dull along the edge and heavier than it had any right to be, and Poppy's strip of cloth came out with it, folded against the blade where he had put it at the gate. He set the cloth on the sill to give back and hung the sword on its hook.

He did not go to the smith for another. He tried to say to himself why, and the nearest he got was that he had bought one good sword in his life and lost it in the only fight it had been bought for, and that buying a second felt like answering a question he had not finished asking.

The old one would do for a boar meadow.

A thing which has not been tested is not yet a fact, and he had a skill he could describe and not one he could use, and the two are as far apart as a road drawn on a map and a road under your boots.

He went to the boar meadow.

This was the correct choice and he made it without much thought. The meadow was where things could be got wrong safely. Everything in it was low-tier and green-tagged and slow, and nothing there had ever killed anybody, and it had been his classroom for two months when he was new.

He had learned most of what he had on that grass. He had learned it badly and in the wrong order, by walking at things and finding out. The east fence was where he had worked out that a boar commits to a charge and cannot easily stop committing. The gate corner was where he had learned to put something solid between himself and a problem. There was a dip in the middle of the field, three paces across, which had once saved his life in a manner he still considered undignified.

Mid-morning. Two people working the far side of the field at a distance which made them shapes.

He did not care what either of them thought.

That was a change from his first weeks, when he would have gone out at dawn to avoid an audience, and he did not notice the change had occurred.

He picked a boar off the near edge of the herd and started walking.

He activated the skill at fifteen paces and the hard part turned out to be the walking.

Everything in his body wanted to creep. His weight wanted to go onto the outside of the foot, his shoulders wanted to come down, his breath wanted to go shallow. Five months of approaching things had built all of it and it took a real effort of will to override, because the skill had said nothing about moving quietly and he had a suspicion, which he could not have defended, that creeping would be somehow insulting to it.

There was also a practical argument, and he made it to himself as he walked. If the skill required silence, then it was not a skill, it was an encouragement, and he had a name for the class of thing which required him to do the work himself and took the credit afterward. He wanted to find the edges of what it did without his help.

He walked at an ordinary pace, in ordinary boots, over dry grass with a crust on it.

Twenty feet.

That was closer than he had been to an untriggered boar. The line was usually somewhere around twenty-five and he had learned it by having it enforced.

Ten feet.

Six.

Four, and he stopped, because at four feet he could count the individual hairs on its shoulder and the situation had crossed into the absurd.

The boar did not notice him.

The fact took a moment to get into him properly. It went on grazing. It worked across the grass in the small irritable jerks boars use, tearing and stepping and tearing, entirely uninterrupted, with its flank warm and moving an arm's length from his hand.

He was standing beside a creature which had charged him on more than one occasion, one of which had cost him a week, and it had no opinion about him whatsoever.

He waved a hand in front of its eye.

He recognised what he was doing about halfway through the wave, which was too late to stop, and had the grace to be slightly embarrassed by it.

He had done this before. He had done it at the gate at Grennet on his first afternoon, in front of a man's face, and had been ashamed of it at the time and had gone through the arch with his head down.

The boar's eye did not track the hand.

The guards came up in him and he pushed them down again, because the two situations were not the same and the comparison did not go anywhere useful. He had a test to finish.

He said a word out loud.

Not loudly. An ordinary word at an ordinary volume, at that distance from an animal which does a good half of its work by ear.

Nothing.

He said a second word, louder.

Nothing at all. Not an ear turning, not a pause in the chewing, not the small check every grazing thing makes when the world produces a noise near it.

He was aware, by this point, that he was conducting an experiment on a boar in a public field, and that one of the two distant shapes had stopped working and was standing up straight to watch him do it.

He continued.

The thirty seconds ran out.

He had expected the end to be a fact he would have to infer. It was not. There was a small internal release, low down, like a held breath ending, and he had about a quarter of a second in which to understand what had happened.

The boar discovered him instantly and comprehensively from four feet.

The next several seconds were undignified.

He came out of the meadow at a speed which was, on any reasonable accounting, impressive, and part of him noted while it was happening that twenty points had gone somewhere and had gone into the legs, and the rest of him was occupied with the fence.

He was laughing before he reached it. Properly, out loud, alone, with a hand on a post and a boar making its opinion known behind him.

He tried it on a person that afternoon.

It was the obvious next test and he did not think about it for long. He stood at the corner of the square in Grennet with the fountain going, picked a woman reading the posting board, activated the skill, and walked toward her at the same ordinary pace.

She turned at about fifteen feet and looked straight at him.

Not gradually. There was no moment of half-noticing. She turned with the flat ordinary attention of somebody registering a person coming across a square, gave him the fraction of a nod strangers give, and went by.

He stood where he was and worked out that he had learned nothing yet, because one instance is an event.

Two is a rule.

He ran it again on the other side of the square with a man carrying rope, from behind, which ought to have helped, and was picked up at twelve feet. The man turned round with the rope over his shoulder and asked him what he was doing.

There was no answer available which was not extremely strange.

"Reading the board," he said.

"The board's behind you."

"Yes."

The man went off with his rope, and Alaric stood in the square and had his rule.

Creatures and monsters. Not people.

He arrived at the rule quickly and spent most of the rest of the afternoon on the mechanism, sitting on the lip of the fountain with the sun going long across the front of the smithy.

The mechanism would not come.

He laid it out the way he laid everything out. The boar had eyes. The woman had eyes. Both had been pointed more or less at him. Both were made of the same kind of material as far as he could tell, which was to say meat and bone and warmth, and both were doing an ordinary thing in an ordinary place in the middle of the day.

One of them had been unable to find him at four feet.

The other had found him at fifteen without effort.

He tried five explanations.

It was not size, because a boar is bigger than a woman. It was not distance, because the failure had held at four feet and the success had come at fifteen. It was not attention, because the woman had been reading a board and the boar had been doing nothing but eating, and if anything the boar had less to occupy it.

It was not intelligence either, which was the one he wanted, because it was tidy. He held it up for a while. A person works things out and an animal does not, and a thing which works things out might be harder to slip past. But the woman had not worked anything out. She had not reasoned her way to him. She had turned at fifteen feet with no more thought in it than a door has when it opens, and reasoning takes longer than that.

The fifth one got further than the others and he took it slowly.

It was not about what a thing could see.

It was about what a thing was.

He got that far, sitting on a fountain in the late sun, and it was entirely correct, and he had nowhere further to take it. To go on from there he would have needed to hold in his head that the world contained two separate kinds of thing which looked identical from the outside, and he would have needed to work out which kind he was, and he had neither piece and no way to get either.

He sat with the edge of it for a while anyway, because it had the feel of a true thing, and true things were worth a few extra minutes even when they went nowhere.

Then he filed it, under things the world has decided and does not explain, which was not the largest file he kept but was the oldest.

He spent what was left of the day walking up to things.

Deer on the northern edge, which he got to within a dozen feet of, and which was the closest he had ever been to a live deer and struck him as a strange thing to have achieved by accident.

A hare, which took some finding and then ignored him at two feet, sitting in a scrape with its ears flat, doing the thing hares do where they become part of the ground.

A pair of crows, which he abandoned as a test, because crows leave anyway. They had gone before the thirty seconds were up and he had no way to establish whether they had gone because of him. He put crows aside as a bad instrument.

By evening he had stopped counting the thirty seconds.

That was the real work of the day, and he had done it without setting out to. Somewhere around the fifth or sixth run he had begun to sense the release coming, a fractional tightening before it went, and by the deer he could call it within about two seconds, and by the hare he could call it exactly.

He walked home along the north wall in the last of the light with his hands in his sleeves.

It had been, on an honest accounting, the best day he had had since coming to Grennet.

He turned that over, and could not entirely account for it, since he had killed nothing and earned nothing and the whole day had cost him a morning of contract work. He had spent it walking up to animals in a field and being laughed at from a distance by a man with a hoe.

He decided the accounting was probably wrong somewhere and left it alone.