The island had changed.

  The Lanai, who had spent our first days scurrying away from us like startled birds, now moved through the temple grounds with a purposeful, almost ceremonial energy. They carried stones and wove mats and left small offerings, braided grass and smooth pebbles and tiny arrangements of dried sea flowers, at the doorways of the huts where we slept. When a student passed them on the path they would pause and trill, a sound that was not quite a greeting and not quite a prayer but somewhere between the two. They had decided we were something. I was not entirely sure what.

  The other students had decided something too. The assignments went up on the stone archway before breakfast and I heard the muttering before I saw my name.

  "Velara Mahlynn Misith. With Master Morvin."

  I felt the stares the way you feel heat from a fire you are not looking at, on the back of the neck, along the arms. Vane said nothing this time. She just looked at the archway and then looked at the ground and spat, a small and precise expression of contempt that somehow landed harder than shouting would have. Kit turned away to speak with one of the senior initiates, his healed shoulder moving freely in its socket, and did not look at me at all. Even Mobe-Joan, who had worked beside me in the rubble without complaint, kept her eyes forward and her face carefully empty.

  I stood at the archway with my fingers resting on the red leather of my pauldrons and let the silence do what it was going to do.

  I did not ask for this, I thought. I did not ask to be called first or praised first or assigned to the head Master while everyone else trained with the junior knights. I did not ask to be what I am. But I had learned young that the people around you rarely care what you asked for. They see what you have and they measure themselves against it and some of them come up wanting and that is not your fault and it does not stop it from costing you something anyway.

  I kept my chin level and walked up the path to find Master Morvin.

  He was on the highest precipice, a narrow finger of rock that jutted out over the open ocean with nothing below it for a very long way. He sat on a moss-covered boulder at the very edge with his small green hands folded over his cane and his eyes closed, perfectly still, as though the wind and the spray did not register as things happening to him.

  I stepped up beside him. The drop was dizzying. The water below was the color of iron and moved in long, slow swells that had traveled a very great distance to break against the base of the cliff.

  "The life force," he said, without opening his eyes. "How do you see it, child?"

  I had thought about this before, how to describe it to someone who might not experience it the way I did. "Like a tapestry," I said. "Every living thing is a thread. I can feel the Lanai in the valley below, dozens of them, each one distinct. I can feel the birds on the rock face. I can feel the moss under my boots." I paused. "I can feel the students at the temple. Each of them has a different quality. Vane runs hot. Kit is coiled tight. Warren is..." I stopped.

  Morvin waited.

  "Steady," I said. "Warren feels steady."

  Morvin nodded slowly, his eyes still closed. "The living you understand. But the Force does not stop at the waterline, Velara. It goes where the light does not." He opened his eyes and looked at the ocean. "Tell me what moves beneath us."

  I looked at the water. Then I closed my eyes and reached past the surface of it, past the spray and the salt and the shallow cold, down into the dark where the pressure built and the temperature dropped and the light from above became something theoretical rather than actual. I let myself fall through it the way you fall through sleep, past the point where you can easily return.

  At first there was only cold and the vast, indifferent weight of the deep.

  Then I felt it.

  It was not like feeling a person or an animal near the surface. Those things had a warmth to them, a buzz of living intention. This was something older than intention. A presence that moved the way continents move, slowly and with absolute certainty, as though the concept of being stopped had simply never occurred to it. It had lived in the deep long enough that the deep had shaped itself around it. It was not part of the ocean. The ocean was part of it.

  "An apex predator," I breathed. My skin had gone to gooseflesh from the neck down. "It has been down there for centuries. Maybe longer."

  "Bring it up," Morvin said.

  I opened my eyes. "Master."

  "Size," he said, "is a shadow cast by the mind. Bring it up."

  I looked at him for a moment. Then I looked at the water. Then I closed my eyes again and found the creature in the deep and did something I had never done before. I did not reach for it the way I reached for a wound or a broken bone, with an open and offering hand. I reached for it the way you reach for something you intend to hold.

  I wrapped my will around its life force and I pulled.

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  The ocean did not part gently. It detonated.

  The water erupted from below in a column that caught the gray morning light and turned it white, and out of the column came the creature, rising and rising and rising still, tentacles spanning a distance that made the cliff face look small, its body a mountain of slick mottled flesh the color of deep water and old stone, its eyes, when they cleared the surface, the size of transport ships and utterly ancient, regarding the sky with an expression that had no human equivalent because no human had ever looked at anything from that particular depth of existence.

  I held it.

  The weight of it in the Force was like nothing I had words for. It pressed against my consciousness from every direction at once, not fighting me, not exactly, but present in a way that made my own presence feel very small and very new. My vision blurred at the edges. I felt the strain in my hands and my jaw and somewhere behind my eyes.

  But beneath the strain was something else. Something I did not expect and did not entirely want to examine. The creature was vast and I was holding it and the Force was moving through me in a volume I had never touched before, a current so large it felt less like something I was channeling and more like something I was briefly, precariously, part of. And it felt, underneath the exhaustion and the fear of dropping it, extraordinary. It felt like standing at the edge of something without a bottom and choosing not to step back.

  I held it for ten seconds. Then twenty. Then I exhaled slowly and lowered it, careful and deliberate, back toward the surface. The moment its tentacles touched the water it was gone, a darkness moving away at a speed that left no wake, vanishing back into the deep as though the last two minutes had been a minor inconvenience in a very long day.

  I sat down on the rock. I did not choose to sit. My legs made the decision without consulting me.

  "Impressive," Morvin said softly.

  I breathed. The world came back to normal scale slowly, the way your eyes adjust coming in from bright light.

  "Now," Morvin said, "lift the stone I sit upon."

  I looked at the boulder. Large, moss-covered, old, and completely inert. I reached for it with the Force the way I had reached for the canisters on the ship and found nothing to connect to. No pulse. No thread. No living architecture to speak to. It was just mass and mineral and silence.

  I pushed. The boulder shuddered slightly and a few pebbles skittered off the side and that was all.

  I tried again. Nothing.

  "I cannot," I said. The admission sat oddly after what I had just done. "The living things respond to me because there is something in them to reach for. The stone has no soul. There is nothing to speak to."

  Morvin looked at me for a long moment with his ancient, unreadable eyes. "A lesson for later, this is," he said. "Go and eat. The spirit must be fed."

  I stood, carefully, and made my way back down the path. My hands had stopped shaking by the time I reached the valley but the feeling lingered, that particular combination of depletion and something that was not quite pride and not quite hunger but lived in the same neighborhood as both.

  The mess hall was full and loud when I arrived and quieted in the specific way it always quieted when I walked in, not to silence but to a lower register, conversations continuing but turning slightly away. I filled my bowl and carried it to my end of the bench and sat and looked at my broth and thought about the creature in the deep and tried not to think about the fact that holding something that vast had felt, for a moment, like the most natural thing I had ever done.

  The bench groaned.

  Warren sat down beside me without asking, close enough that his shoulder pressed against mine, and he smelled of salt and woodsmoke and the particular outdoors smell of someone who had been training in the cold all morning.

  "I heard the Caretakers talking," he said, leaning in enough that his voice was for me only. "They say a goddess pulled a moon from the water today."

  "It was not a moon," I said. "It was a very large neighbor."

  "How large?"

  "Large enough that I sat down on a rock afterward without meaning to."

  He looked at me with something that was not the smirk. Something more straightforward than the smirk. "Are you all right?"

  The question caught me off guard because it was simple and direct and he was looking at me while he asked it rather than at the room, checking to see who was watching.

  "Yes," I said. "It was extraordinary. And I could not move a boulder afterward."

  "The rock thing," he said, nodding slowly. "Kit was complaining about that this morning. Says it feels like pushing against something that does not know you exist."

  "That is exactly what it feels like."

  He reached over without ceremony and wiped something from my cheek with his thumb, a smudge of dirt or dried salt from the cliff, and did not make anything of it, just looked at what was on his thumb and wiped it on his trouser leg and picked up his own bowl.

  I caught myself leaning very slightly toward the warmth of him and caught myself catching myself and decided, quietly and with full awareness of what I was deciding, to lean anyway.

  "You are terrifying," he said, after a while. "I want you to know that. I have been on ships with mercenaries and I have met two different crime lords and I have never been as unsettled by anything as I was watching you hold that thing in the air like it was a question you were considering."

  "I did not mean to unsettle you."

  "I know." He turned and looked at me directly. "That is the part that unsettles me."

  He stayed for the whole meal. He talked about the junk freighter he had grown up on, the smell of it, the particular way the artificial gravity used to stutter on the lower deck so you learned to walk with your weight slightly forward. He asked me about Misith and listened when I answered, not with the polite performance of listening but with the actual thing, following up on details, asking about my father, laughing at the right moments.

  I watched myself softening and I knew I was watching myself soften and I did it anyway because it had been a long time since anyone had asked me about Misith and meant it.

  When the meal was over and the hall was emptying he stood and picked up his bowl and paused with his back half turned.

  "Get some sleep, Velara," he said. Not Princess. Not Highness. Velara. "You held a sea monster in the air today. That earns you a full night."

  Then he was gone into the crowd and I sat with my empty bowl and the warm place on my shoulder where his arm had been pressed against mine and I did not try to be sensible about any of it.

  I walked back to my hut in the dark with the Lanai lanterns moving far below on the cliff path and the ocean doing what the ocean always did and I lay down on my pallet and looked at the stone ceiling and said the word to myself quietly, just once, just to hear what it sounded like.

  Love.

  It sounded terrifying. It sounded like holding something vast in the Force, that same quality of exhilaration and vertigo, the feeling of being in contact with something far larger than yourself and not knowing, not quite, whether you were strong enough to hold it.

  I closed my eyes.

  I did not particularly care whether I was strong enough. For the first time since leaving Misith I fell asleep without counting the ways I did not belong here, and that, I thought, just before I went under, was its own kind of answer.