Chapter 13. Morren

I was walking fast.

Too fast, probably, for a forest I didn’t know and a lack of left with the others, but fast felt right, and slowing down would have meant thinking about things I wasn’t ready to think about, so I kept going.

“Who does he think he is?”

The words came out under my breath, to nobody, into the leaf litter in front of my boots.

“Who does he think he is. Tells me I have no honour. Tells me I’m dressing things up. A few hours. A few hours and he’s decided he knows what’s in my head better than I do. Just hours!”

A low branch caught my shoulder and I ducked under it with more force than it required.

“Write it down in your archives, Rael. Go ahead. Put it in the Solenne library right next to all your other notes. I’m sure it’ll be a fascinating entry. A model student. A careful observer. The boy who decided he understood an Aridis after one conversation.”

I ducked another branch.

“Because that’s what they do, isn’t it. That’s what Bellos said. Two sentences a week for a Kaelith and a whole smiling afternoon for a Solenne, and by the end of the afternoon they’ve written you into a report without telling you, and they call it getting to know you. He told me. He told me and what did I do? I walked into the first Solenne who smiled at me and let him run his little test on me for half the morning. I’m an idiot.”

A bird went up from a branch somewhere to my left. I flinched, cast a reinforcement glyph on reflex, realized it was a bird, dismissed the glyph, and felt more stupid than before so I stopped.

I stood there in the middle of a stretch of trees I didn’t recognize, breathing a little too hard, with my fists closed at my sides and no idea where I was going, and the realization that I’d left Eydric behind with Rael settled on me slowly.

I thought about turning around, but I did not.

“He can keep him,” I muttered. “He can have the bench and the speech and the notes. I’ll find a flag myself.”

“And why are you so angry, my young friend?”

“AARGH!”

I jumped out of surprise as a deep voice came out of nowhere, and when I came down my hands were already wreathed in fire, one palm open and the other clenched, a full cast ready to throw with nothing to throw it at. My heart was trying to exit through my throat.

“Who’s there?!”

“Easy, easy. I mean no harm, least of all to a boy who has just demonstrated, to my considerable entertainment, that he can summon fire faster than he can turn his head.”

“Who are you?!”

“Over here.”

“Where is ‘here’?”

“To your left, young one. Past the crooked tree.”

I looked past the crooked tree.

“No, the other crooked tree.”

I looked.

“Yes, that one. Down the small slope. Around the clump of ferns. Good. Now stop.”

I stopped.

“Look down.”

I did as I was told, and found a… rock. It was looking back at me.

It sat at the base of a mossy outcrop, about waist high, and most of its surface was the grey weathered stone I’d have expected. The part facing me had a face on it. Two deep-set hollows for eyes, one half-lidded with a crust of moss that gave it a distinctly ironic quality. A crease where a mouth would be and a heavy brow.

“There you go,” the voice said. The mouth-crease shifted as it spoke, not enough to be dramatic but enough to be unmistakable.

I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding as the fire in my hands guttered out.

“You’re… a rock?”

“I am not a rock.”

“I’m sorry, but… you look like a rock.”

“A rock is a piece of stone that has been lying in a forest doing nothing in particular for an uninteresting number of years. I am not doing nothing. I am talking to you. We have established this already, and I was hoping to move on.”

“Then what are you?”

“I am the spirit who lives inside this stone. The stone is my house, not my person. I moved in a very long time ago, I redecorated the face because the face was boring, and I have been sitting here ever since, watching the forest do its quiet work and waiting for conversation. You are the first person to walk past me in about months, and you are the angriest of them, which is why I thought it worth saying something.”

I opened my mouth to say something, and nothing came out. I stood there for a few seconds trying to work out what the appropriate next line was supposed to be, because I had been introduced to a rock, the rock had opinions about being called a rock, and nothing in sixteen years of education had prepared me for the protocol.

The rock was the one to break the silence.

“I am Morren,” it said, when I still hadn’t found a sentence. “Morren of the Outcrop, if you want the longer version, though I haven’t used the longer version since the people who invented it stopped visiting. And who might you be, my young friend?”

“Oh.” I straightened up, because that at least I knew how to do. “My apologies, Master Morren. My name is Howl. Howl Aridis.”

“Howl?”

“Yes.”

“That’s your name? Howl?”

“Yes, Master Morren.”

“I once knew a mage by that name.” The mouth-crease shifted into a smile. “A long time ago. Very talented young man. A little vain. He had a castle that walked.”

“A castle that walked?“

“Yes.”

“Like, on legs?”

“On legs. Four of them, if my memory is honest. The castle never stopped moving. He said it was so nobody could find him, but I suspect it was also because he enjoyed the attention.”

I stared at Morren for a moment, and he looked mildly pleased with himself.

Suddenly, a small laugh surprised me out of my chest before I could stop it. My first laugh in the forest that day.

“Well, now.” Morren said. “I didn’t know I was so funny. Not in all my time down here in this moss. Thank you for laughing, young Howl, it’s been some time since I earned one.”

I caught the laugh before it could go anywhere else, and without really deciding to, I sat down on the patch of dry leaves in front of him.

“Thank you for making me laugh,” I said. “I think I needed it.”

“Is that so?”

“It is.”

“And what, I wonder, might a young man like you have to be so downcast about in the middle of a forest full of things he has clearly proven himself capable of handling?”

I pulled a leaf apart between my fingers.

“I… well, I had an argument with someone. Earlier. Just now, actually.”

“Ah.”

Morren let the sound sit for a moment.

“Arguments,” he said. “Friends and arguments, young Howl. You cannot have the one without the other. A friendship that has never had an argument in it is either very new or very shallow, and most of the time it is both.”

I pulled another piece off the leaf.

“He’s not my friend.”

“Ah. A lover, then?”

“NO!“

The rock’s mouth-crease twitched in a way that was almost certainly a smile, and I had the distinct impression he’d known the answer before he asked.

“Alright, alright. Calm yourself, young Howl. I only wondered. At your age, in my experience, anger of that particular flavour is almost always one of two things, and if you’ve ruled out the more interesting one, I am obliged to ask about the other. What could make a young man so furious, if not love or friendship?”

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“It’s—” I stopped, then started again. “It’s complicated.”

“I have time.”

I chuckled at that.

“I’m taking an exam,” I said. “Right now. The entrance trials for Sartheon Academy.”

“Mm. I have heard of that place.”

“The first part was written. I passed that. The second part is a practical, out here in these grounds, which is why I’m in your forest. It runs until midnight, and we’re supposed to find flags, and there are teams, and I was assigned to a team, and — that’s where the problem is, actually. The team part.”

Morren said nothing, which I assumed was his way of telling me to keep going.

“They didn’t let us pick. The faculty assigned us. I got put with two other candidates. One of them is Eydric. Eydric Vael. He’s — I don’t know what he is, honestly, but he’s not the problem. He’s fine. He’s quiet and I think he’s actually decent, as far as I can tell from half a morning.”

Morren waited.

“The other one is Rael. Rael Solenne. And he’s—”

I caught myself about to get loud again and took a breath.