CHAPTER SEVEN

  -Walking Through Invisible Crowds

  IV. The Fourth Passage: The Burden of Evren

  “For the weight of his brothers in his belly, the dragon was given a heavier burden: to carry the broken world on his back so the waters never close over all.”

  –The Song of Creation

  as carved upon the Ulankara Obelisks

  The days lengthened. The sun lingered a little longer on the tops of the trees each evening before slipping away. The slush dried into rutted earth, and at the high points it turned slowly to dust. Training kept the same shape, but its weight changed.

  Sometimes he'd catch the Hermit sitting with his back straight and his hands loose on his knees, not moving at all. It looked like sleep until Chanyu listened and realized the man's breathing was too even, too deliberate. Chanyu couldn't tell what he was doing. Only that it wasn't nothing.

  The Hermit no longer needed to tell him to straighten his back every time he picked up a bucket. Chanyu's feet found their places on the packed earth almost without thought. His arms ached, but they ached in a way that felt like building instead of breaking.

  "Now we add people," the Hermit said one afternoon, standing in the yard with a coil of rope over his shoulder.

  Chanyu looked around at the empty space. "What people?" he asked.

  The Hermit walked to the woodpile and began tying short lengths of rope from one log to another, then from the logs to the posts of the shed, to the corner of the cabin, to any point that would hold. He strung them at different heights. Some brushed Chanyu's knees, some his thighs, some his hips, some his shoulders.

  When he was done, the yard had become a rough maze of lines and dangling pieces. He hung strips of old cloth and a few rattling bits of metal from them.

  "People," he said. "Enough of them."

  Chanyu frowned. "That's rope."

  "It's what people feel like when you're moving through them," the Hermit said. "Things to trip you. Weights to knock with your knee if you don't watch. Edges to catch your clothes."

  He walked to the door. "Start at the threshold. Walk to the woodpile. After that, go to the barrel. Come back here. Don't touch anything.”

  "That's impossible," Chanyu said.

  "Then you'll fail," the Hermit said. "Fail until you don't."

  Iye sat on the roof and looked down with bright interest.

  "This will be fun," she said.

  Chanyu took a breath and stepped into the maze. It went badly. The first time, his boot caught on a low rope. The rattling metal pieces jangled. The Hermit's voice came from behind him.

  "You looked down again. You saw only what was under your feet. See the whole path."

  The second time, he made it three steps before his shoulder brushed a hanging strip of cloth.

  "Too close," the Hermit said. "Give things space. People don't like to be touched by strangers. They move away. If you move correctly, they move around you, not into you."

  The third time, he thought he had done well.

  "I didn't hit anything," he said, turning.

  "You did," the Hermit said. He picked up one of the ropes and shook it. Dust fell. "You brushed this. In a real crowd, that means a man feels something on his arm and looks. If he is hunting, he sees you."

  By the tenth attempt, Chanyu's patience had frayed thinner than the ropes. He wanted to throw them all down and stamp on them.

  "That would get you trampled in a real street," the Hermit said, watching his face.

  "I've never seen a street," Chanyu snapped. "Only the space between yurts, the packed dirt of a fort, and the bottom of a pit. Your rope people are worse than either."

  "Good," the Hermit said. "Streets are worse than rope and wood. They shout, they stink, they don't care what they knock over. Learn here where the only thing that steps on you is your own anger."

  He jerked his chin toward the door. "Again."

  Chanyu went again. He began to see it, slowly. The path stopped being only the next step and turned into a whole shape. If he stepped there, his thigh would swing into that rope. If he turned too wide, his shoulder would graze that strip of cloth. He started to feel the lines with his ribs and elbows instead of his eyes.

  By the time the light thinned, he could walk the path twice without a jingle. Confidence made him careless on the third pass. His boot clipped the lowest rope.

  The Hermit grunted. "Better," he said. "You're almost a stone instead of a screaming goat."

  "A stone is boring," Iye said.

  "Stones don't get dragged by their ankles," the Hermit said. "Boring is what we want in the middle of a street."

  He took the ropes down and gathered them into a coil by the shed. "Tomorrow I’ll set it differently," he said. "You don't learn by memorizing one path."

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  "That can't be," Chanyu muttered.

  The Hermit smiled, just a little.

  "It's only walking," he said. "You already know how."

  Chanyu didn't argue. Not out loud.

  The things they said at night changed as the days pushed toward summer.

  The Hermit began telling stories when the meat was eaten and the fire settled low. Not long ones. Fragments. A patrol in some nameless city where the streets were stacked stone instead of packed earth, and the roads held their heat long after sunset. The sound of armor creaking in weather so hot men bled through the leather. A river crossing gone wrong beneath old arches that had outlived the men who built them. Once, the taste of dust that wasn’t steppe dust at all, a fine bitter grit blown off a sea of sand that swallowed whole caravans. Another night he mentioned soldiers who wore iron and walked like men but whose eyes caught the light like hunting cats, and whose shadows dragged behind them in the long curve of a tail. He stopped there and stared into the coals for a long time. He never named the places. He never used the word knight. Chanyu listened, mouth shut, eyes on the flicker of flames against the iron pot.

  Once, when the Hermit fell quiet, Chanyu tried a story of his own. His Zhanar was halting, slower than he liked. He told them what the old women on the Steppes whispered when the fires burned low: the forest people who wore horns like stags and grew moss in their beards, who stepped out of trunks as if the trees had let them go for a while. Ar?ura, the stories called them. Their skin ran green and blue in patches, so no one could see where the leaves ended and they began.

  Iye listened with her head tipped, tail flicking. The Hermit didn’t smile, but his eyes narrowed in a way that meant he was filing the word away with all the others.

  Later, when Chanyu tried to repeat those stories back in Zhanar, the Hermit corrected his grammar without correcting the details.

  "You put the verb at the end like in your own tongue," he said one night. "Zhanar like their verbs early. It makes them feel they're doing something even when they aren't."

  "Is that why they talk so much?" Chanyu asked.

  "People talk so much because they are afraid of silence," the Hermit said. "Silence makes them fill the space. It makes them show their hand." He poked the fire once. "Most people fear it. Learn to use it, and it becomes a weapon."

  Iye rolled onto her back on the shelf. "You're one to lecture about silence," she said. "You haven't shut up since the snow."

  The Hermit snorted. "Silence is a weapon," he said. "It doesn't mean I have to use it all the time. Besides, I'm invested now."

  He said it dryly, but something in his voice made Chanyu glance up.

  "Invested," Chanyu repeated in Zhanar, tasting the new word. "Like putting money in a thing."

  "Or time," the Hermit said. "Or work. Or whatever else you can't get back if the thing turns out to be foolish."

  He gestured with his cup. "Finish that. Sleep. Tomorrow we see if you can answer a question without sounding like you're being strangled by the language.”

  Summer slid in so quietly that he almost didn't see it.

  One night he went to sleep to the sound of bare branches scraping the roof. One morning he woke to leaves whispering instead. The forest was a different place in green. Light dappled instead of stabbing. The ground had softened, sending up ferns and small flowers in places that had been nothing but brown. Birds argued in the canopy from first light to last.

  The Hermit made him repeat the same paths, the same drills, under new conditions.

  "Shadows are liars in this season," he said. "Don't trust them. In winter you see shapes. In summer you see movement. Learn the difference."

  They hunted again. Chanyu's second arrow flew truer than the first. His hands cut meat faster. He didn't have to think about where to plant his feet while he worked.

  Pale lines blinked into the air and vanished as fast as a breath.

  [Skill in use: Novice Dead Step]

  [Death walks without warning.]

  [Tag: Unverified.]

  [Error… Skill has not been acquired.]

  He kept his eyes on his hands anyway, pretending he hadn't seen anything.

  Sometimes the Hermit corrected him with a word. Sometimes with a tap. Sometimes with nothing but a look. The looks grew fewer.

  Once, after a long day where he had managed not to drop anything, not to strike himself in the shin with the practice blade, not to tangle in the invisible crowd, the Hermit poured them both a cup of thin, sharp wine.

  "What's this for?" Chanyu asked, suspicious.

  "For not making me regret letting you stay," the Hermit said.

  Chanyu snorted. "I thought you already regretted it."

  "Frequently," the Hermit said. "But less today than before."

  Iye sat between them, tail wrapped neatly around her paws.

  "You should be honored," she told Chanyu. "He doesn't look like a man who shares wine often."

  "Or maybe he just ran out of ways to punish me," Chanyu said.

  "I know exactly why," she said. "You ask enough questions for three lifetimes."

  He lifted the cup anyway. The wine burned going down, sour but better than anything he had tasted in years. It sat warm in his stomach.

  "Thank you," he said, in Zhanar.

  The Hermit inclined his head once.

  "Good," he said. "Hold on to that. A man can learn to kill and still forget how to be one."

  By the time the leaves began to darken toward the edges and the nights bit again, Chanyu could walk the rope-maze blindfolded more often than not. His Zhanar no longer earned a correction every other sentence. His body had forgotten how to curl around invisible chains when he slept.

  He had new habits now. He woke at the slightest rasp on the door. His eyes counted exits without thinking. His hands fell into guard positions when anything moved too quickly near him. He wasn't strong yet. Not like the Hermit. Not like the men in the stories. Not like the qutbatur the songs had promised. But he was no longer a boy who had been thrown in a ditch and left for the crows.

  On an evening when the air smelled of wet leaf and distant smoke, he sat on the step outside the cabin and watched the forest darken. The Hermit sat a little behind him, working on a strap. Iye lay across his feet, a small, steady weight of warmth.

  "How long has it been?" he asked.

  "Since what?" the Hermit said.

  "Since I stumbled into your cabin," Chanyu said.

  The Hermit's hand paused on the leather. He frowned at the sky like the answer might be written there.

  "Nearly a year," he said. "Give or take a few wasted days."

  "A year," Chanyu repeated.

  On the Steppes, a year meant another cycle of grass, another shearing, another migration. Here, it meant four turns of the forest's face. White. Brown. Green. Now this.

  He looked down at his hands. The calluses were still there, thicker now along his palms and fingers. The tendons stood out more clearly when he flexed. His fingers didn't shake when he closed them.

  "One year is nothing," Iye said. "You haven't even worn out your first set of mistakes."

  "It feels like something," Chanyu said quietly.

  "No," the Hermit agreed. "A year is never nothing."

  He tied off the strap and set it aside. "If you had walked out that door the day I gave you the choice," he said, "you'd be very dead now. That's what a year has bought you."

  Chanyu thought of the pit. Of the fort. Of the road he had nearly taken through the snow.

  "Is it enough?" he asked.

  "Enough for what?" the Hermit asked.

  "To reach the Steppes," Chanyu said. "To cross Zhanar land. To not be dragged by my ankles again."

  The Hermit was quiet for a long moment.

  "Not yet," he said. "But you're no longer something they can break by accident. That's a beginning."

  Iye yawned and dug her claws lightly into Chanyu's boot.

  "Don't rush to be broken on purpose," she said. "I'm not finished watching you trip over yourself here."

  He snorted, but the sound felt different than it would have a year ago. Less bitter. More like breath leaving a space that finally had room for it.

  His gaze went to the trees, to the narrow path that led into them. The forest was still a cage. The Hermit had built the bars himself. For now, he had chosen to stay inside. Two years, he thought. You said it'd take years. One is gone. I can survive that much. I can survive one more. He didn't say it aloud. He didn't need to. The way his days ran now would carry it for him.

  Tomorrow there would be wood. Water. Rope. Sticks. Words. He would walk the same paths. He would fall a little less.