Chapter Five
By the time she was three, Ambrosius had developed a habit that unsettled her mother a great deal more than any ordinary mischief a three-year-old had any business getting into, and that habit was wandering.
Not wandering the way most children wander, aimlessly, chasing whatever bright or noisy thing has most recently caught their attention and lost it again within the same breath. She wandered the way a person walks toward an appointment they have not yet been told the time of, with a quiet, unhurried certainty that made Elen's skin prickle every time she caught sight of it, that small determined figure making straight for the tree line at the edge of the yard as though something out there had called her by name and she was simply, politely, going to answer.
"Ambrosius." Elen caught her by the back of her dress before she'd cleared the garden fence, for perhaps the fourth time that month. "Where do you think you're going."
"To see them." Said plainly, without guile, the way she said most things, as though the answer ought to have been perfectly obvious to anyone paying attention.
"See who."
"The bright people. In the trees." She pointed, with the total, unselfconscious confidence of a child who has never once been told that the thing she's pointing at doesn't exist. "They sing sometimes. In the evening. You don't hear it?"
Elen did not hear it, and said so, and watched her daughter's small face go thoughtful rather than disappointed, filing the information away the way she seemed to file everything away lately, carefully, for later use.
"That's all right," Ambrosius said. "I'll tell you what they say, once I understand it better."
It was this exchange, more than any other, that finally sent Elen to Bledig's door with her jaw set and her patience thoroughly spent.
"She's calling them the bright people," Elen said, standing in the doorway of Bledig's small stone house with her arms crossed against the evening chill. "She says they sing to her from the tree line. She's three years old, Bledig, and she talks about walking off into the wood after them the way another child might talk about walking to the well for water. As though it were nothing at all."
"For her, I suspect it very nearly is nothing at all." Bledig did not look up from the small fire he was tending, though something in the careful way he fed it another stick of kindling suggested he had been expecting this particular visit for rather longer than Elen had been dreading it. "The fair folk do not often call to human children this young, or this openly. That they've taken such an early interest in her tells me a good deal about what she is, and rather less than I'd like about what they intend to do with that interest."
"Then stop them."
"I cannot stop them, Elen, any more than I could stop the tide from noticing a particularly interesting stone that had washed up on its shore." He set the fire tools aside and finally looked at her, and there was no unkindness in it, only the flat, tired patience of a man delivering news he'd rather not have had to deliver. "What I can do is make certain that when she finally does go to them, and she will go to them, sooner or later, whatever either of us wants about the matter, she goes with enough sense in her to come back again afterward. That is the whole of what I can offer you. I'd advise you take it, rather than spend what time we have left arguing about the parts of this neither of us can change."
Elen said nothing for a long moment, watching the fire instead of him, and when she finally spoke again her voice had lost most of its edge, worn down to something closer to plain exhaustion.
"When."
"Soon," Bledig said. "Better sooner, while she's young enough that whatever she learns from them, she'll still learn more from you and Aedan besides. Wait too long, and the balance tips the other way."
It did not take long for "soon" to become "several afternoons a week," and within a month Ambrosius had come to expect the walk to Bledig's small stone house the way she expected supper, an unremarkable fixture of her days rather than anything she thought to question.
"Watch the flame," Bledig told her, one such afternoon, setting a single tallow candle between them on the packed dirt floor. "Not the light of it. The base, where it meets the wick. Tell me what you see."
Ambrosius watched it, scowling with the particular concentration of a very young child determined not to be caught failing at something. "It's yellow."
"It is many things. Yellow is the least interesting of them." He did not look impatient, only expectant, the way he always looked when he believed she had more in her than she'd yet offered. "Look longer. What does it do."
She watched longer. The flame bent, very slightly, and straightened again, and bent the other way, and she realized, after a while, that it was not bending at random at all, but leaning, faintly, toward her, the way a plant leans toward a window.
"It's watching me," she said, and then, hearing how it sounded, added, crossly, "That's not right. Fire doesn't watch."
"No. It doesn't." Bledig's mouth twitched, the closest he generally came to open approval. "But you are watching it, very closely, and a flame this small has very little will of its own to resist being watched with. What you're seeing is not the fire paying attention to you. It's the fire answering yours. That is the whole of the lesson today, and it is a larger lesson than it looks. Attention is not a passive thing, Ambrosius. It reaches. Most people go through their whole lives never learning that, and wonder why small, ordinary things in the world always seem to be reacting to them without any obvious cause."
"So if I stopped watching it, it would stop leaning."
"Try it."
She looked away, deliberately, at the wall instead, and counted under her breath, and looked back. The flame stood straight and unremarkable, burning the way any ordinary flame burns.
"That's not fair," she said. "I want to know how to make it lean without looking at it."
"Of course you do." This time he did smile, briefly, before schooling his face back into its usual careful neutrality. "That is a considerably harder trick, and you are not ready for it, and telling you so will only make you more determined to manage it in secret before I judge you ready, which I confess I am rather counting on. Go home for your supper. We'll try the wax tomorrow instead. Wax holds a shape once you've asked it for one, which will suit your particular impatience rather better than fire does."
"I'm not impatient."
"You fed your dinner to a dog rather than wait for it to cool last week."
"That was different."
"It generally is, to the one doing it." He waved her toward the door, not unkindly, already reaching for the next bundle of dried roots on the table beside him. "Go on. And Ambrosius — don't practice the flame trick alone tonight. Not because I don't think you can manage it. Because I know you can, and I'd rather teach you to bank a fire properly before you burn down your mother's house learning to start one."
She left grumbling, and did, in fact, try it twice more that evening with the kitchen candle before Elen caught her at it and made her stop, which was, though neither of them said so aloud, more or less exactly what Bledig had expected of her.
The evening it happened, nobody had planned it, which was, Elen would think later, very much the point.
Ambrosius had gone out to bring in the wash before the light failed entirely, an ordinary chore she'd done a hundred times without incident, and had simply not come back in when the ordinary amount of time for it had passed. Elen found her standing at the very edge of the tree line, perfectly still, the basket of half-folded linen forgotten at her feet, looking into the trees with an expression Elen had never once seen on a child's face before and would spend years afterward trying, and failing, to properly describe to anyone who hadn't seen it themselves.
"Ambrosius."
She didn't answer right away. When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet, almost formal, the voice she used when she wanted to be taken seriously by someone considerably older than she was.
"They're here," she said. "Properly here. Not just singing. Come look, Mama. They want to see you too."
Elen came, because there was nothing else to do, her heart going fast and hard in her chest, and stopped short at the tree line, because there was, unmistakably, something there. Not a shape she could have described afterward with any confidence, only a kind of bending in the air, a place where the evening light seemed to fold itself differently than the light all around it, and within that folding, faintly, the impression of eyes, several pairs of them, watching her daughter with an interest that was neither hostile nor entirely kind, but something colder and stranger than either, the interest of something very old regarding something very new and deciding, patiently, what use it might eventually be.
You are not wanted here, mother of ours, said something, without quite using a voice to say it, the words arriving instead the way a chill arrives, felt rather than heard. But you may watch, this once, since it will ease you to have watched.
"Watch what," Elen managed.
The claiming. Amusement moved through the folded light, faint and glittering and entirely without warmth. We do not steal children, whatever the old stories tell you. We only remind them, gently, of the part of themselves that was always ours to begin with.
Ambrosius, through all of this, did not look afraid. She looked, if anything, intent, the way she looked at everything that interested her, weighing the strange folded light the same unhurried way she weighed a fall before deciding whether to cry about it.
"What part," she asked. Not to her mother. To the light itself, directly, the way she asked Bledig things, plainly, expecting a plain answer in return.
The part that watches before it feels. The part that counted the singing before it let itself enjoy it. The light shifted, drawing closer without appearing to move at all, the way a shadow lengthens without anyone seeing it walk. You have been doing sums since before you could speak, little claiming. Weighing every hand that reached for you. Do you think that came from the man in the stone house? Or from your mother, who has never once weighed anything in her life that she didn't first love?
"I don't know where it came from," Ambrosius said. "That's why I'm asking you."
Good. The light rippled, something like approval moving through it. An honest gap is worth more to us than a false certainty. Most who come to this tree line arrive already convinced of what they are. You have not decided yet. That is rarer than you know, and more valuable to us than you can currently afford to understand.
"Then tell me. If I'm valuable to you, tell me what I am, and I'll decide whether I want to know it."
You are ours, the light said again, simply, and you are theirs, something in it inclining, faintly, toward Elen, and you are something else besides, that neither of us made and neither of us fully owns, though we will both spend years pretending otherwise to you, because that is what it is to raise a thing worth raising. We are not going to hand you the whole truth tonight, little claiming. You are three. Even we have some sense of proportion.
"That's not an answer."
It is the only honest answer available to give a child, and you would do well to learn the difference between an evasion and an honest limit, since you will spend a great deal of your life mistaking one for the other if you don't. The amusement sharpened again, delighted rather than offended. You want to know what you are. We will tell you, in pieces, across the years, the way anything true is ever told to anyone. In exchange, you will come to us. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. But you will come, when we call, and you will listen before you argue.
"I'll come," Ambrosius said, "but I decide how much I listen. And I'm not promising not to argue. I argue with Bledig too, and he still teaches me things."
Bledig, the light repeated, and something in the way it said the name was almost fond, almost old, the particular fondness of one long-lived thing acknowledging another it has watched from a distance for longer than either would care to admit. He is not wrong to want you shaped. He is simply not the only hand that intends to do the shaping. You would do well to remember that there will be several hands on you before you're grown, little claiming, and every one of them will tell you theirs is the important one.
"Then I'll decide which one actually was," Ambrosius said. "Once I'm old enough to look back and count."
A bargainer, already, at three years old. The light drew back slightly, the folding easing, the ordinary evening beginning to reassert itself at the edges. Very well. Real things, then, in exchange for your evenings, when we call for them. And we will see, in time, which of us ends up owing the other the larger debt.
"I keep my debts," Ambrosius said. "Ask anyone."
You have not lived long enough yet to have anyone to ask. But there was no unkindness in it, only that same cold, glittering amusement, the sound of something very old finding something very young more interesting than it had expected to. We will see about that too, in time.
And then, as simply as it had arrived, the folding in the light smoothed itself back into ordinary evening, the eyes gone, the chill gone, only the wash basket sitting forgotten in the grass and a small girl turning back toward her mother with the calm, unbothered expression of a child who has just finished an entirely reasonable conversation and is now ready for her supper.
"They're interesting," Ambrosius said, taking her mother's hand as though nothing at all remarkable had just occurred. "I don't think they lie, exactly. I think they just don't say things the way we do. Bledig will want to know about this."
Elen picked up the wash basket with a hand that was not, she noticed, entirely steady, and did not trust herself to answer right away.
"Yes," she said finally. "I imagine he will."
Bledig did want to know, in exhaustive and faintly alarming detail, and the telling of it took the better part of that evening and most of the next morning besides. When it was finished, he sat for a long while without speaking, staring into his own small fire with an expression Elen recognized, uncomfortably, as the look of a man revising a plan he had believed, until quite recently, he had rather more time to finish preparing.
"She bargained with them," he said finally, half to himself. "Unprompted. At three years old. Do you understand how rare that is, Elen? Most who go to the fair folk go as supplicants, or as prey, or as fools who don't yet know which of those two they are. Your daughter walked up to something old enough to remember when this whole wood was something else entirely, and opened a negotiation with it."
"Is that good," Elen asked, "or is that the most frightening thing you've told me yet."
"Both," Bledig said, without hesitation. "It is very often both, with her. I begin to suspect that is going to remain true for a good long while yet." He looked up at Elen then, and something in his face had firmed, decided, the look of a man who has just concluded that whatever careful pace he'd intended to keep no longer had the luxury of being kept. "I had thought to wait another year or two before beginning her training in earnest. I don't believe we have that year or two anymore. If she's bargaining with the fair folk at three, unsupervised, in her mother's own garden, I would rather she learn how to do that properly, under a careful eye, than continue learning it entirely on her own out there in the trees, where I cannot see what she's trading away."
Elen wanted, badly, to argue with him. She found, turning the matter over, that she no longer entirely had the grounds to.
"Soon, then," she said instead, and it came out sounding less like agreement and more like surrender, though the two, she was beginning to learn, were very often the same thing where her daughter was concerned.
"Soon," Bledig agreed. "Let her have this last little while yet, being simply a child. It will be the last of it she gets, for a very long time to come."