By the time she was seven, Ambrosius had learned that most people mistook silence for stupidity, and she had decided, with the flat, practical certainty of a child who had never once needed to be taught the lesson twice, that this was a mistake worth encouraging in everyone around her.
Bledig had been a fixture in her life for as long as she could properly remember one, longer, if the stories Elen told were to be believed, than Ambrosius herself had existed to remember anything at all. He was simply the elder to the villagers, and something closer to a second, sterner sort of parent to Ambrosius, though she had never once heard him raise his voice or lay an unkind hand on her. He did not need to. He had other, quieter tools for keeping a child where he wanted her, and Ambrosius, even at seven, understood those tools well enough to admire the craftsmanship of them, even while she resented rather thoroughly being their target.
The four years since the evening at the tree line had not been idle ones, whatever her mother might have preferred. Bledig had begun, gently at first, with small lessons dressed up as games: which plants along the forest path were safe to touch and which were not, how to sit perfectly still until a wild thing forgot to be afraid of you, how to listen to a silence and tell whether it was empty or simply waiting, how to hold a candle flame's attention with nothing but her own and then, much later, let it go again without singeing anything on the way. It was training, plainly, whatever softer name he'd given it in front of Elen, and Ambrosius had known that much for at least as long as she'd known her own name, though she had let him believe, for the better part of those four years, that she hadn't worked it out.
At four, it was the plants.
"This one," Bledig said, crouching beside her on the forest path, holding up a spray of small white flowers, "will put you to sleep for an afternoon if you eat enough of it, and put you to sleep permanently if you eat rather more than that. What does that tell you about how much of it you should eat?"
"None," Ambrosius said.
"Wrong. It tells you that the plant doesn't care how much you eat. It only cares that you stop asking it politely once you've had enough, which you won't know until it's already too late to ask. The lesson isn't the flower, Ambrosius. The lesson is that some things in this world will kill you exactly as sweetly as they'll comfort you, and offer no warning at all when the one turns into the other."
She picked a single white bloom anyway, when he wasn't looking, and pressed it flat between two stones behind the house, and kept it there for the better part of a year, taking it out sometimes just to look at it, the way another child might have kept a particularly interesting stone.
At five, it was stillness.
"A fox will not come within twenty paces of a person who's fidgeting," Bledig told her, the two of them crouched behind a fallen log at the edge of the clearing where the vixen denned. "It doesn't matter how quiet you think you're being. It can hear your heart change its mind."
"My heart doesn't have a mind."
"Everyone's heart has a mind. Most people simply never learn to listen to what it's saying." He did not look at her while he said it, his eyes on the den, patient as stone. "Watch. And don't move. Not your hands, not your eyes, not the corner of your mouth, no matter how badly you want to smile when she finally comes out."
The vixen took the better part of an hour to emerge, and when she did, Ambrosius did not move, did not smile, did not so much as breathe any louder than the wind moving through the log beside her, and held perfectly, achingly still even after her legs had gone entirely numb beneath her, because some stubborn, private part of her had already decided, long before the fox appeared, that she was going to win this particular game if it killed her.
"Better," Bledig said afterward, watching her limp exaggeratedly back toward the path once the vixen had gone. "Considerably better than I expected, this early."
"My legs hate you."
"Your legs will forgive me. Foxes rarely do."
At six, it was silence itself, which turned out to be a far harder thing to learn than either the plants or the stillness had been.
"Close your eyes," Bledig told her, the two of them sitting on opposite sides of his small hearth, the fire banked low for the exercise. "Tell me when the room changes."
She sat, eyes closed, for what felt like a very long time, hearing nothing at all beyond the ordinary settling of the fire and her own breathing, and was on the verge of complaining about it when something in the quality of the quiet shifted, subtly, the way the air shifts before rain, though she couldn't have said what exactly had changed.
"Now," she said.
"What changed."
She considered it, eyes still closed, turning the strange new quality of the silence over the way she turned over Bledig's harder questions. "It got bigger. Like the room got bigger without actually getting bigger."
She opened her eyes to find Bledig watching her with an expression she didn't yet have a name for, something between surprise and satisfaction, the look of a man whose experiment has just returned a result well ahead of his projected schedule for it.
"Someone came to the door," he said. "Stood outside it for a moment. Decided against knocking, and left again. You heard none of that, not with your ears. But you felt the room make space for them, and then take that space back once they'd gone. That is not a common thing to catch, at six years old, or considerably older than six, for that matter."
"Who was it?"
"Someone who'll come back, eventually, when he's ready to." Bledig would not say more than that, no matter how she pressed him, and it would be some years yet before she learned who had stood outside that door, and why, and what it would eventually cost her to have felt the room make space for him and not thought to ask his name while she still had the chance.
By seven, the games had stopped feeling like games some time ago, though neither of them had ever formally announced the change, and it was into the middle of one such afternoon, Ambrosius halfway through the ungrateful business of feeding her dinner to the dog rather than finish it properly, that Bledig finally decided the gentler version of things had run its course.
"You are not eating," Bledig said now, without looking up from the bundle of dried roots he was sorting by the fire.
"I ate this morning."
"You ate half of what Elen gave you, and fed the rest to the dog under the table when you thought no one was watching."
"The dog was hungry."
"The dog is always hungry. That is not the same as needing what you give it." He set the roots aside and finally looked at her, the particular look he reserved for moments he considered instructive, which she had also learned, this year, to recognize and privately despise. "You are testing whether I notice things I am not meant to notice. You have been testing this for some months now, in increasingly clever ways. I would like you to know that I have noticed all of them, and that I find the exercise more promising than troubling."
Ambrosius said nothing, which was, in its own way, an answer, and Bledig seemed to understand it as one, because he almost smiled.
"You've been circling a larger question too," he said. "For a year now, maybe longer. Not what am I, exactly, since you already have the bones of that answer, and have had them since you were old enough to understand what your mother and I told you about the riverbank, and about the ones in the trees who still sing to you some evenings, whatever I've asked you not to answer them alone. What you actually want to know is what it's all for. What any of it is going to add up to, once you're grown enough to stop being handed pieces of the answer and start assembling the whole of it yourself." He set the roots aside entirely now, giving her the whole of his attention. "You haven't asked it directly, because you worked out, correctly, that a direct question hands the other party too much information about what you actually want. That is a remarkably sophisticated instinct for a child who cannot yet reach the top shelf of that cupboard."
"I could reach it if I stood on the stool."
"That was not the point I was making, and you know it wasn't." But there was no anger in it, only a kind of careful, watchful satisfaction, the expression of a man who planted something four years ago and is pleased, in spite of himself, to see it growing faster than he'd planned for. "Ask me the real question, Ambrosius. Properly, this time. I will not punish you for it."
She considered him for a long moment, the way she had learned, somewhere without quite knowing where, to consider anyone who offered her something for free. Nothing in her small life so far had suggested that free things stayed free for long, and Bledig, of all people, had never once given her a reason to believe he was the exception.
"What do you actually want from me," she said finally, plainly, no longer bothering to dress it in a smaller question first. "All of it. Not the parts you've already told my mother."
"Fair enough." He did not flinch from it, which surprised her more than an outright dodge would have. "I know, because I have watched you for seven years now, that you have a mind built for two very different kinds of work at once. Patience, of the kind it takes to wait out a long game, the kind you've shown me every time you've come back from those trees when they've called you, instead of staying, however much they've asked. And force, of the kind it takes to end a game quickly, once patience has stopped being useful. I have met very few people in a long life who carry both of those in equal measure. Most are born favoring one, and spend their whole lives never properly developing the other."
"Which do you think I favor."
"Today, force. You are seven, and hungry, and feeding your dinner to a dog out of pure stubbornness, because some part of you has decided that obedience is a debt you don't intend to pay in full." His mouth did, finally, curve into something like real amusement. "Ask me again in twenty years. I suspect the balance will have shifted by then, and I suspect, further, that whichever way it shifts will end up being the most important thing about you."
Ambrosius turned this over the way she turned over most things Bledig said, testing it from several sides before deciding how much of it to keep. "You want something from me. You wouldn't have started any of this, four years ago, if you didn't."
"Of course I want something from you," Bledig said, entirely unoffended by the accusation, as though it were simply the correct and expected response rather than an insult. "I have wanted something from you since the hour you were born, and I have never once pretended otherwise to your mother, whatever comfort she takes in believing I have. What we've done together these past four years has been the gentle version of it, games dressed as lessons, lessons dressed as games. I think you're old enough now for the gentler version to stop serving either of us well. I want you properly trained, Ambrosius. I want the raw thing inside you shaped into something this land can survive, instead of something it eventually has to be protected from. And I want it done before the men who are already asking questions about the child born under that sky, and about what she's been seen doing at the tree line after dark, decide to come collect their own answers, in a manner considerably less patient than mine."
"And if I don't want to be shaped."
"Then you'll be taken instead, unshaped, by someone with far less interest in what you actually want than I have." He said it without cruelty, the way a man delivers a fact he has decided not to soften, because softening it would only make the truth harder to use later. "I am offering you the version of this where you have some say in what you become. That offer will not stay open forever, and it will certainly not survive contact with the sort of men who are already starting to whisper your name in places I would rather they didn't."
Ambrosius sat with that for a long moment, watching the fire, doing the particular arithmetic she had always done best, weighing cost against leverage, patience against the plain, ugly fact of how much power currently sat on which side of the table. She did not trust him. She was fairly certain, in the cold, clear part of her mind that had never once in seven years failed her, that she was not supposed to trust him, that trust was not actually on offer here at all, only a trade dressed up to look like one, the same as it had always been, the same as the trees had offered her four years ago at the edge of the garden.
"Fine," she said. "Teach me. Properly, this time. But I choose what I use it for, once I know how to use it. Not you."
Something crossed Bledig's face then, quick and almost startled, gone before she could fully name it, though she filed the shape of it away regardless, the way she filed away everything, for later, for whenever it might prove useful. It looked almost like recognition. The particular recognition of a man meeting, for the second time in his very long life, a will he was fairly certain he was not going to be able to fully bend, no matter how patiently he worked at it.
"Agreed," he said. "For now."
Ambrosius did not miss the qualifier, and did not comment on it either, filing that away too, the way she had learned, without ever remembering where she'd learned it, that the smartest thing a person could do with a threat was let the other side believe you hadn't noticed it at all.