The First Binding, page 64
“Mahrab was a good student and graduated as highly as some binders could. Better than most who try. You say he was your sponsor?” Davram leaned forward, watching—weighing me.
I blinked. Mahrab had never said anything like that to me or left me with a recommendation. I swallowed, realizing I had come here woefully unprepared.
“He never told me I needed one. He did teach me of the Athir and how to counter a binder’s binding … sort of.”
Murmur broke out among the rishis before the one called Davram readdressed me. “He ‘sort of’ taught you how to counter a binding. And did you succeed?” The room grew noticeably silent in the aftermath of the question.
I nodded. “In a fashion.” I didn’t feel it best to admit I succeeded in dodging a stone meant to thump my skull. It didn’t sound that impressive. As long as I left it nebulous, they could interpret it far better than it might have happened in truth.
“Can you perform any of the ten bindings?”
I shook my head, knowing it best not to push the boundaries that far. An open lie like that would have me called on it and quickly dismissed for failing. “Mahrab thought it best for me to learn that here under your tutelage and proper training.”
Murmurs.
“Master Mender.” Davram gestured to a lean and balding man at the other end of the table.
The man rose, his dark robes rustling. He looked to be whittled from willow, thin, springy, and hard enough in body. His nose looked too long for his face and hooked to one side like it had once been broken and never properly reset. A look I knew from young boys who’d gotten into fights when sparrows.
“Rishi Marshi.” The man introduced himself, inclining his head to the other rishis but not toward me. We locked eyes. “What are the effects of Santhya?”
I opened my mouth, closing it just as fast. “I’m sorry? I don’t know what that is.” I cursed myself for admitting my lack of knowledge.
“It’s also known as white-joy.” Rishi Marshi laced his fingers together as the folds of his robes fell over them.
“Oh. It turns people into addled drug addicts. Their eyes eventually whiten all the way, and that’s why people call them cotton-eyes. They’re desperate enough to get another fix that they’ll sell their mother’s silver, then her kidneys, all before selling their own. Maybe yours if you cross them at the wrong time in the wrong alley.”
Marshi’s eyes widened at my answer and he looked at the other rishis. “That is an answer I’m not used to hearing. Truthful, accurate, but not what I was wholly looking for. How did you come by your information?”
“The streets of Keshum. I’m an orphan. One of the first times I walked an alley I didn’t know I came across cotton-eyes. They wanted to take my money. The hint of taking more than that was in the air. I probably wouldn’t be alive if not for someone coming to help me.”
Marshi sobered at my explanation. “Ah. Well you were close enough to appease me, I suppose. Out of curiosity, why did Mahrab let you wander like that if you were his student?”
I bristled and felt the room grow colder. “He died. I didn’t have anyone left. Anywhere to go.”
If the candles in the room had in any way been normal, they would have let out some gentle sound of burning flame. But no. They burned ever silent and still as if their fires had no need of air and did not ebb and fan to its breath.
Silence. Stillness.
No answers. No more questions.
Every rishi looked down at the counter, then to themselves for a time I lost track of.
Finally, Marshi sat down and cast one last long look to the others at the table. “I’m done.”
Davram nodded. “Master Conditioner?”
Another man stood, stretching the limits of his robes to the point I feared they’d tear and leave him fully exposed. He could not hide his build under those folds. A mountain of solid muscle, the likes that could never have come from hard labor alone. This only happened with deliberate effort and single-minded conditioning to the goal of strength and size.
“Rishi Bheru.” The man’s voice rivaled thunder and the deep basso pounding of drums. His thick and coarse beard did nothing to hide the solid brick line of his jaw. The little curly hair he had did nothing to soften his appearance. “What do you know of the body and the many ways it can move? Do you know how to break a man’s grip when he has you in a hold like this?” He clenched his arms tight to himself in a hug no man would like to be caught in. It promised aching ribs and broken bones.
“I learned some swordsmanship under a choreographer.”
The great bear of a man paused, following Marshi’s suit to look at the rishis around him. My answer must have thrown him as much as it had the other master. “You learned how to use a sword from someone who does theater dances?”
I shrugged. “Yes.”
“Show me.”
I hadn’t expected that and fumbled to speak.
He undid one of the laces holding his robes shut, and I very much worried for a moment he would undress in front of us all. Thankfully, he loosened it enough to reach inside and pull free a length of wood that could have served as a sword. It had been smoothed to a perfect cylinder with a rounded bunt of a top. The kind of rod any child would dream of in lieu of an actual weapon to knock some friend senseless with.
Bheru threw it to me in an underhanded toss.
I caught it by the hilt without thinking. Make no mistake, I was by no means close to mastery of the sword at this age. But I had the reflexes that came with excitable youth and enough proficiency from Vithum’s tutelage to manage.
The weight was an old comfort in my hands and I fell into the full flow of the movements I’d been taught.
“Enough!” The rishi motioned for me to return the sword.
I was almost tempted to lob it much like he had, then reconsidered. I walked up to him, the makeshift weapon laid across both my palms as I presented it to him with more care than it warranted.
He noted that and let out a pleased harrumph as he sat down. “He moves like a dancer more than a swordsman. But I can make a good fighter out of him, a good wrestler. He’s skinny though. Still too much a boy, not a man. How old are you?”
“Older than my teeth for sure. Younger than my tongue I think. Who can tell? Closer to my eighteenth year than my first by far.” My theater tongue got the best of me as I rattled out the rapid answer.
The big rishi’s eyes looked like they’d spin in their sockets for a moment before he grunted. “Too clever. He needs some of that knocked out of him. I’m satisfied.”
But to what end he didn’t say.
Davram took more notes before looking to the woman who’d spoken earlier. “Master Artisan.”
She stood on command. “Rishi Bharia.” She gave me a warm smile, the first bit of real welcome I’d felt since my arrival. “Do you know any of the minor bindings? How to impart your will into tools and shapings?”
I shook my head. The old knots returned to my stomach and a cold weight settled in. I knew my performance so far had left the rishis wanting for something more—better. I’d been doing poorly. “Mahrab focused on conditioning my mind for the folds and the bindings. He didn’t stop until I could hold twenty—”
“How many?” The voice that cut in didn’t belong to Rishi Bharia. It had come from the man sitting atop the desk on his velvet cushion. He wore what would have been robes if the sleeves hadn’t been torn from them to reveal scrawny arms corded with lean muscle. The fabric itself was really countless other pieces of clothing stitched together in a horrible multicolored patchwork.
He was clean shaven with just a bloom of wild black hair atop him like dandelion seeds. Unlike the rest of the rishis, he alone looked young, perhaps somewhere in his middle twenties. His eyes shone with a light that, to this day, still makes me uncomfortable. Their brown carried something of firelight in them in their brightness and the dangerous shine.
“I’m still asking the boy questions.” Rishi Bharia glared at the man who’d interrupted.
He waved her off. “You can after I’m done. The boy wanted to be a binder, no? Let me talk to him.” He straightened and puffed up his chest far more than anyone would ever need to. “Master Binder.” He blew out his heavy breath before pressing his lips tight over his tongue, sputtering as he did. The noise could easily have been mistaken for something one didn’t do in polite company.
I shifted from foot to foot. Sweat beaded along my brow and at the nape of my neck. My breaths grew shorter—shallower. “Twenty, Rishi.”
“Oh, no-no.” He waggled an admonishing finger. “Not yet. Not quite. Clever boy. I’ll give you that. I’m no teacher of yours yet. Twenty, you say?”
I nodded.
“Humph. Impressive. At least for someone your age. Do you know the story of fire?”
I opened my mouth to speak.
“No. Don’t lie. Don’t talk around it. Fine. What of stone? Do you know any of how the elements came to be? This world? Do you know the story of any one person the way you know the bottoms of your feet? No? No. You don’t, do you? You’re too quick. Too hot—angry. Stirred up. Excitable.”
“What does any of that have to do with the damn bindings?” My voice echoed through the chamber, and only then did I realize I had shouted at the man.
The man grinned, revealing perfectly straight teeth that could have used some honest correcting.
His self-satisfied smile could also have used some fixing. The temptation crept into me, I admit. One of my hands balled while the other squeezed against my cane.
He noticed, pointing at them. “And very easy to push around. Honestly, boy.” He rocked in place.
“Hardly appropriate, Master Binder.” Davram glared at him. “You’re antagonizing the child.”
“With respect, Rishi. I’m not a child. I know I look like one, but I haven’t been one for years. The way I lived…” I stopped short, not wanting to get into it. But it was the truth. Living as a sparrow with that responsibility, the death of your family, it robs you of pieces that make you like other children. “I’ve had to grow up and do things most don’t have to.”
The Master Binder tilted his head to one side, looking at me as if he expected to see words scrawled along the top of my head. “You have, haven’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
I nodded.
He made the same motion, satisfied by whatever he found in my face. “No. Throw him back out to where he came from. I don’t think he’s a good fit. And I don’t want him. He wants to be a binder? He can figure it out there.” He made a shooing motion.
My heart sank and I looked to Davram at the center. “You can’t—he can’t!”
Davram gave me a long and sympathetic look before muttering to the other rishis, including the ones who hadn’t yet spoken. “I’m sorry, young one. No sponsor, and the one field you have the most aptitude in, well, the master doesn’t want you. I’m sorry—”
“You can’t!” Something broke in me. All the years of pain, the choices, the shapes of hunger I’d suffered, the hurt from beatings and my daily sparrow life, and all the wounds of the heart I’d taken … for nothing. “The Ashram doesn’t turn away anyone who needs it. I’ve heard that.”
Davram nodded. “And if you need a place to stay warm, food—those things, we can manage. But you are denied admittance to study at the Ashram for the higher arts.” He placed his pen onto the stone desk and it rang with hollow judgment.
I’d failed.
Rejected.
And now I had nothing and nowhere to go.
SIXTY
RULES AND RUMORS
Something hot and ugly festered in me. Or it should have. That’s how it goes in the story.
I fall to my knees and scream a word that shakes the walls. My fists bang against the floor, drumming louder than thunder in that echoing chamber. And all through it, I channel a binding of fire, of wind and fury, of something great from the stories. With it, the masters are cowed into silence and admit me.
That’s what the stories would suggest.
But no.
I didn’t have the strength. My strings had been cut and I had no more cleverness or anger for them.
Everything loudened. The rishis and their mutterings. The sound of scratching against parchment. My heartbeat. The blood in my temple. And the edges of my vision blurred.
Then something broke through that hyperawareness.
The doors burst open behind me as if they’d been kicked in by a bull.
Vathin strode into the room, trading a quick look with me. He winked and flashed me a smile before adopting a somber look that fit his new, dark robes. The man strode over to the table. “Sorry I’m late. Bit rude, I admit. Not as rude as running admittance without me when I said I’d be back today.”
Davram stood up to address him. “You missed most of admittance.”
Vathin shrugged. “Well, my point still stands, doesn’t it? You went through most of it without me.” He shook his finger much as the Master Binder had, chastising Davram. “Right is right. And you’re in the wrong. There are nine of us, we should deal with students together.” He cleared his throat and leaned against an empty place at the desk to introduce himself formally. “Master Philosopher. Rishi Vruk. And I’ve got some questions for the boy.”
The Master Binder swiveled on his cushion, staring hard at Vathin. “I already told him no. He wants to be a binder. I teach it. And. I. Said. No. Do you know what that means?”
Vathin ignored him. “How are you doing, Ari?”
I couldn’t find the words to speak.
“That’s all right. Don’t let these old bullies bother you.” Vathin sighed, leaning heavier against the desk as if winded. He cleared his throat and focused on the rishis around him. “I suppose the boy already told you I’m his sponsor, nyeh?” Vathin put all of his attention on Davram. “So, Master Spiritualist and Headmaster, let’s run the boy through it again, hm?”
The headmaster steepled his fingers, resting his chin on them. “Most of us have already asked what we need of him, but if he has you for a sponsor—”
“He does. And the boy’s shown a fine head for philosophy. At the very least, I’d expect him to be in my classes. He has an understanding of the bindings, even if he can’t perform one. Then again, how many masters here can?” Vathin raised a hand, waiting to watch the others.
Four more hands rose: the Master Binder’s, Artisan’s, Mender’s, and Spiritualist’s.
“Now, that’s not all of us, is it? I think we can forgive the boy’s inability to do something not even all the masters of the Ashram can do.” Vathin managed to sneak me a self-satisfied look.
I grinned, relief flooding me. He’d just given me a chance and I couldn’t thank him enough for it.
“And the boy has proof of Mahrab’s teaching. We can hardly turn away someone who’s been taught by another graduate binder.” Vathin motioned at me with a hand.
I faltered, unsure what proof he meant. It took me another moment to remember the book I’d been given. I dropped my walking cane, letting the long staff clatter to the ground. My travel sack joined it a second later as I fished through it. I retrieved the book, running it over to Vathin.
“Thank you, Ari.” He turned it over in his hands, prying at the covers. “A book bound tight so no one can open it.”
Another woman at the table scoffed. Her hair had all the color of cold blood and rust. Her skin had more of the sun in its bronze than most of the other masters. She wore similar gray robes to Vathin. High nose and cheekbones, sharp and proud features that reminded me of a bird. “It could have been sealed with an adhesive. There are plenty to bind parchment so tight it would take a binder to undo them. Even then, you risk tearing it apart.”
Vathin clicked his tongue. “Exactly! Only a binder to undo them. This isn’t bound by man-made means.” He waggled the book before tossing it to the headmaster. “Check for yourself.”
Davram ran his hands over the book, pursing his lips as he did. “It’s bound. Good work. A tight binding. I couldn’t undo it myself. And if I took the time to try, it’d be too tedious to be worth the effort. But this doesn’t prove a student bound this book and gave it to the boy in mentorship. It just means he came across a book that happens to be bound.”
Vathin sighed and I did the same on the inside.
The Master Binder leaned over on his cushion, fumbling as his reach came short of the book’s spine. A loud thud filled the room as he fell against the desk in his efforts to snatch the book. “Ow.”
The headmaster fixed the kooky man with a level gaze.
The Master Binder righted himself and muttered something under his breath. He held his hand out as if expecting to catch something. The book shuddered in the headmaster’s grip and the man’s eyes widened. Mahrab’s tome hurtled out of the Master Spiritualist’s hands into the grip of the waiting binder.
I stared at the ease with which the man performed that binding. I couldn’t guess how it worked or which binding it had been, but seeing that proof there in the moment told me I’d done the right thing by coming here.
We all seek and hope for tangible bits of proof along the paths to our dreams. And when we get them, all fear and uncertainty are washed away for a moment. But that moment can be worth all the pain it took for us to get there.
The Master Binder took the book in both hands and flipped a thumb against the corner of the cover.
I waited for him to run into the restrictive binding holding the book together.
Except it never came.
He thumbed it open as if it had never been fastened shut at all. The man turned the pages with an idleness that could have only belonged to the profoundly bored. He snapped it shut the next instant, muttering something again under his breath that I had no hope of discerning. “It’s Mahrab’s.”
“How can you tell?” The headmaster looked at him askance.
“He wrote his name in it.” The Master Binder rolled his eyes and lobbed the book toward me without care.
I ran forward, catching it by one corner that jabbed hard into the flesh of my palms. Excitement took hold of me and I pulled at the book. It didn’t budge, staying as it always did in my grip. “You rebound it?”
