The training, once it began in earnest, did not look like much from the outside, which was, Ambrosius came to understand fairly quickly, rather the point of it.
There were no wands, no chanted words, none of the theater a person might have expected from the stories Elen still told by the fire some evenings, of wizards summoning storms or turning men to stone with a gesture. What there was, instead, was a great deal of sitting, and a great deal of watching, and long, tedious stretches of doing the same small thing over and over until Bledig judged she had finally stopped doing it by accident and started doing it on purpose.
"Magic," Bledig told her, somewhere in her eighth year, watching her fail for the fourth afternoon running to make a single dry leaf lift itself off the ground, "is not a door you knock on and are let through. It is a muscle. You are strengthening it exactly the way you'd strengthen an arm, which is to say slowly, and mostly through failure, and with a great deal of soreness you'll be tempted to complain about."
"I'm not complaining."
"You've been glaring at that leaf as though it personally wronged you for the better part of an hour. That is a kind of complaining."
She glared at him instead, which accomplished nothing, and went back to glaring at the leaf, which accomplished slightly more, though it would be another two months before it actually lifted, trembling, an inch off the dirt, and held there for the length of a single indrawn breath before dropping back down as though embarrassed by the whole affair.
What she did not do, in all this time, was tell her family any of it.
It was not, she told herself, a lie exactly. Nobody had ever asked her, directly, whether the flame was starting to lean toward her without her looking at it now, or whether she'd worked out how to hear the particular quality of silence that meant someone was standing just outside a door deciding whether to knock. She simply did not offer the information, the same careful, deliberate withholding she'd practiced since she was old enough to feed a dog under the table rather than admit she wasn't hungry, and the longer it went unasked, the easier it became to let the silence stand in for an answer nobody had actually requested.
She told herself this was practical. Elen worried enough already, in ways Ambrosius could see plainly on her face some mornings, the particular tightness around her mother's eyes that arrived whenever Bledig had kept her past supper the evening before. Telling her the leaf had lifted, however briefly, would only give that tightness something new to feed on. Telling Aedan anything at all about the fair folk, who still called for her some evenings, less often now but no less certainly, seemed likely to reopen a wound that had only just, after years, begun to properly close over.
It was practical. She believed that, mostly, the way she believed most of the things she told herself in order to keep doing what she'd already decided to do.
The evening it very nearly came apart was, fittingly, over supper.
"You're limping," Aedan said, watching her lower herself into her seat at the table with rather more care than the occasion strictly required.
"I fell."
"You fell yesterday too."
"I fall a lot." This was true, if not for the reasons she was implying, and she reached for the bread with the particular casualness of someone who has practiced looking casual rather more than the average nine-year-old generally needs to.
Elen was watching her now too, in the quiet, assessing way she'd taken to watching her more and more lately, the way a person watches a pot they suspect is about to boil over despite showing no outward sign of it yet. "Bledig says you've been coming by less this week."
"I've been busy."
"Busy with what?"
Ambrosius chewed for a moment longer than the bread strictly required, buying the small handful of seconds she needed to settle on an answer that wasn't quite a lie, because she had decided, somewhere along the way, without ever quite articulating the rule to herself, that she would bend the truth as far as it needed bending but would not break it outright, not to her mother, not even for something this large. "Learning things. Old stories, mostly. Which plants are which. How to be quiet."
"That sounds like Bledig," Aedan said, not unkindly, reaching for his own cup. "The man could make a lesson out of watching paint dry, if he thought it'd teach you something about patience."
"He mostly has," Ambrosius said, and this, at least, was entirely true, and she felt the small, private relief of having said something honest inside a sentence built mostly to conceal, the way a person feels relief finding one solid stone to stand on in the middle of a river they're otherwise wading blind through.
Elen did not press further, not that night, though Ambrosius caught her watching, once, with an expression that wasn't quite suspicion and wasn't quite worry either, but sat somewhere uncomfortably between the two, the look of a mother doing sums she didn't yet have enough numbers to finish.
"You'd tell us," Elen said, later, once Aedan had gone out to see to the animals and the two of them were alone clearing the table, "if something were wrong. Something Bledig was teaching you that frightened you, or asked more of you than you wanted to give."
"Nothing's wrong." Another stone in the river, solid enough to stand on, if not the whole crossing.
"That's not what I asked."
Ambrosius looked up at her mother then, and something in her chest went tight and complicated in a way she didn't have good words for yet, the particular ache of loving someone enough to want to spare them something and not yet having decided whether the sparing was a kindness or simply a more comfortable kind of lie. "I would tell you," she said, "if it were something you could actually help with. Some of it, you can't. Not because you're not clever enough, or brave enough, or anything like that. Just because it isn't the kind of thing that gets smaller for being shared. It only gets heavier, for both of us instead of one."
Elen studied her for a long moment, and whatever she found in her daughter's face, she did not argue with it, though something in her own expression settled into a kind of resigned, unhappy patience that Ambrosius recognized, uncomfortably, as the same expression she sometimes caught in Bledig's face, the look of an adult deciding, against their better judgment, to let a smaller person carry more than they'd like them to.
"All right," Elen said finally, quietly. "But you come to me the day that stops being true. However far off that day is. You come to me first. Not Bledig. Not the trees. Me."
"I promise," Ambrosius said, and meant it, entirely, in the moment she said it, the way she meant most of the promises she made to her mother, without yet having any real sense of how expensive that particular promise was eventually going to turn out to be.
At eight, the training moved from watching things to moving them, which turned out to be a considerably more painful business than either had anticipated.
"Again," Bledig said, for what felt to Ambrosius like the hundredth time that afternoon, nodding toward the small stone bowl of water balanced on the tree stump between them. "Not with your hand this time. Leave your hand where it is."
"Why water," she asked, not moving yet, studying the bowl instead with the particular suspicion she'd started reserving for anything Bledig asked of her without first explaining the shape of it. "You had me watching flame for years. Now it's water. What's the water teaching me that the flame didn't."
Bledig considered the question seriously, the way he considered most things she asked him lately, rather than brushing it aside the way he might have when she was younger and less likely to notice being brushed aside. "Fire wants to be watched. It reaches for attention the way a child reaches for it, eagerly, without much resistance. Water doesn't want anything from you at all. It simply is what it is, indifferent to whether you're paying attention to it or not, and that indifference is precisely why it's harder. You are learning, with the water, to move something that isn't already halfway toward meeting you. That is the difference between charming a thing and commanding it, and you will need both skills before this is finished, though you will need the second considerably more than the first, and considerably more often than you'll like."
"And the leaf, before that. And the stillness, before that."
"The leaf taught you that intention and accident are not the same muscle, however much they feel like it from the inside. The stillness taught you that most of what people call magic is simply attention, applied with more patience than anyone else in the room is willing to spend." He set his own hands in his lap, watching her rather than the water now. "I am not teaching you tricks, Ambrosius, whatever it might look like from where you're sitting. I am building you, one small piece at a time, in the order that will hold together instead of collapsing the first time something asks more of you than a party trick requires. Skip a step, and the whole structure is weaker for it, later, when you can least afford weak structure. I have watched that happen to cleverer students than you, who wanted the impressive lessons before they'd earned the boring ones underneath them."
"Why does it matter what order it comes in, if I get there eventually anyway."
"Because eventually is not a fixed point, and you do not get to choose when the world decides to test what you've built." Something in his voice had gone quieter, and more serious than she was used to hearing from him outside of their actual lessons. "There will come a day, sooner than either of us would like, when someone asks something of you that you have no time to prepare for properly. On that day, you will only have whatever is already load-bearing in you, built solidly enough to hold weight without you having to think about it first. That is what all of this is for. Not the water. Not the flame. The day you don't have time to remember how any of it works, and simply need it to already be there, holding, without being asked."
Ambrosius sat with that longer than she usually let herself sit with anything Bledig told her, turning it over from several sides the way she'd learned to turn over everything he said, testing it for the trade hidden underneath. She did not find one, this time, or at least none she could locate yet, which unsettled her nearly as much as finding one would have.
"Fine," she said, finally, and turned back to the water. "Then teach me properly. All the way down. I don't want the party trick version of anything."
Something that might have been pride moved across Bledig's face, brief and quickly smoothed away again before she could be entirely certain she'd seen it. "That," he said, "is precisely what I was hoping you'd say."
She stared at the water instead, the way she'd learned to stare at the flame all those years ago, reaching for it with whatever the reaching actually was, that wordless, muscular effort she still had no better name for than pushing, though nothing about it involved anything so simple as pushing. The surface of the water trembled, faintly, the way it had trembled the last nine times, and then went still again, entirely unmoved by whatever she was throwing at it.
"I can't."
"You can. You did it Tuesday."
"I don't remember what I did Tuesday."
"That is precisely the problem, and precisely the lesson." Bledig did not look frustrated, only patient in the particular, wearing way that was somehow more exhausting to be on the receiving end of than actual anger would have been. "You keep doing this by accident, in moments you're not paying close enough attention to remember afterward, and then you come back the next day and try to do it on purpose, and discover the doing-it-on-purpose is an entirely different animal than the doing-it-by-accident was. Most people spend years stuck exactly where you are right now. The gap between what you can do without meaning to and what you can do because you meant to is the whole of the craft, Ambrosius. Everything else is decoration."
She went back to the water, jaw set, and did not manage it that day, or the next, and came home each evening with a headache behind her eyes that she told her mother was from squinting at her needlework too long, which fooled no one, least of all Elen, who said nothing about it and simply began leaving a cup of willow-bark tea by her plate at supper without comment.
At nine, it was Aedan who very nearly caught her.
She'd been practicing in the old barn, well past the hour she should have been asleep, coaxing a small flame to hold steady in her open palm the way Bledig had finally judged her ready to attempt, when the door creaked and her father's shape filled the gap, lantern in hand, sleep still heavy in his face.
She closed her hand before he'd fully cleared the doorway, and the flame, mercifully, obliged her by simply going out, leaving nothing behind but a thin curl of smoke that could, with enough charitable interpretation, have come from almost anything.
"What are you doing out here."
"Couldn't sleep. Wanted to check on the goats." It was not, strictly, a lie; she had, in fact, checked on the goats, on her way in, though it had not been the goats that brought her.
Aedan held the lantern a little higher, studying her face in the wavering light with the particular attention of a father who has learned, over nine years, to trust his daughter rather more than he perhaps should, and rather less than he wished he could. "You smell like smoke."
"There's a fire going in the corner. For warmth." This was also, technically, true; she had, in fact, lit one, for exactly this reason, the moment she'd first learned the trick well enough to bank a proper hearth-fire instead of a wild one, precisely so that any smell of smoke would have a plain and uninteresting explanation waiting for it.
He looked at her a moment longer, and something in his face, tired and unguarded in the lantern light, softened into something that wasn't quite suspicion giving way to belief, but was at least suspicion agreeing, for tonight, not to press the matter further. "Come inside. Goats are fine. You need your sleep more than they need checking on."
She went, guilt sitting heavy and unfamiliar in her chest the whole walk back to the house, not because she'd been caught, since she hadn't, not really, but because some part of her had wanted, badly, for him to ask one more question, the right one, so that the choice of whether to keep lying could be taken out of her hands entirely and she could simply, finally, tell someone the truth of it without having to be the one who decided to.
He didn't ask the right question. She didn't offer the truth. And the barn kept its secret a little longer, the way it had kept most of her secrets for two years running now, patient and unbothered, exactly the way she'd needed it to be.
By ten, the lying had become so practiced it no longer felt like lying at all, most days, only like a second, quieter language she'd learned to speak alongside the ordinary one, fluent enough now that she rarely had to think before reaching for it. It was this, more than any single close call, that unsettled her most, on the rare evenings she let herself think about it honestly: not that she was good at deceiving the people who loved her, but that the deceiving had stopped costing her anything at all to do.
She thought, sometimes, of the promise she'd made her mother at nine years old, over the supper table, about coming to her first, the day the weight of what Bledig taught her stopped being something she could carry alone. She had not broken that promise, not exactly. She had simply, quietly, moved the day it applied to further and further off, the way a person moves a debt's due date each time it comes round, telling themselves each time that they'll manage the full sum eventually, just not yet, not this month, not while there's still road left to put between themselves and the reckoning.