TWO HUNDRED FORTY-EIGHT: The Lucky 57

TWO HUNDRED FORTY-EIGHT

The Lucky 57

Something was wrong with Stuart.

Alden suspected it soon after he woke up. The Artonan boy had gotten dressed in his LeafSong uniform and put their learning cushions side by side in front of the window, like he hoped they would have time to talk or study together there. And he was kneeling on his now, but he was just looking down at his hands, watching his auriad slide through his fingers.

He seemed absent. That alone was odd for him. And his smile after he realized Alden was awake was fleeting.

When Alden asked him to come over and warm up their meal, he just did it instead of talking to himself at length about the precise temperatures that would make everything closer to perfection. As he watched Stuart perfunctorily aim a heating spell at different components of their breakfast, Alden was ill at ease.

Giving excessive attention to the minutiae of certain things they did together was part of how Stuart enjoyed himself. Alden had recognized that, but he hadn’t realized he’d begun to develop a sense of which activities they were going to be fussy about until just now. This morning’s cinnamon roll was the right temperature, and it tasted like pastry glory. But the first bite of it was weak compared to last night’s, when Stuart had been telling him about his favorite bark spices from different planets and asking if they should call Natalie to get her opinion on whether the frosting ought to be left fluffy or allowed to melt a little.

Maybe we’ve just exhausted all the minutiae about this.

He didn’t believe it. This moment wasn’t going right. Stuart had been relaxed last night, and now they were having a quiet breakfast without anyone around to interrupt them. If Stuart didn’t have anything left to say about the food, he should be asking Alden about the company that made the container it had been packed in, or he should pull out a set of century-old enchanted chopsticks he’d gone to fetch because he had ideas about how they might be the correct utensils for placing things on top of corn chips.

“I meant to bring tea,” Stuart said suddenly, looking at the glasses of water Alden had put on the table for them. “I think we have one kind in the kitchen that might taste like coffee.”

Alden perked up. Coffee had been mentioned last night.

“I forgot it,” Stuart said, drooping even more.

Alden jumped up. The cabinet against the wall to his right was the one full of convenient provisions for guests staying in this cottage. “There were some teas in here, weren’t there?”

He opened the two wooden doors at the top. The throwaway magic jewelry jingled on its pegs. The dried tea ingredients were in bottles on a shelf inside.

“Not the right kind.”

“But I was curious about them! Do you like any of these types?” He brought all the bottles over and set them in front of Stuart. “Tell me about them.”

I have supplied you with herbs you would normally enjoy explaining to me. Be happy again.

It worked about as well as trying to distract a person from their funk with a novelty could be expected to. Stuart seemed more like himself when he was talking about what the teas were and sniffing them all with Alden. Alden even threw Zeridee-und’h upon the altar of entertainment for him by describing how confused he still was that she’d made so many cups of tea for him to choose from while the island was flooding.

Stuart nodded at that and agreed that it was funny of her. But then first meal was over, and when he said he had to teleport to school, he was wearing an expression that only made sense if he expected to be fed to those creepy plants that ate the klerms upon arrival.

What happened while I slept? Did someone from LeafSong send him bad news or something?

“You look like you expect to be fed to the plants that eat the klerms,” Alden said, still sitting on the floor by the table while he watched Stuart collect his school supplies and check his pockets.

No response.

“A klerm was the first living thing I held with my skill. Did I ever tell you that?”

That worked. A pouch disappeared into one of Stuart’s pockets, and he looked over.

“It was?”

“I was summoned so fast I hadn’t had time to try it on Earth. So Bti-qwol handed me one of those plants with a klerm stuck inside. She was a sixth year, and managing the Avowed during your exams was a special project for her. I walked around with it for a while, and then…” Skip that part. “Do they really make a lot of noise? The one I carried was quiet.”

“They’re loud,” said Stuart. “Mostly in summer. At night. Right now the campus is surrounded by them.”

“The klerms know of my amazing power. So it must be me they’re talking about every night.”

Stuart raised both eyebrows at him. “What were they talking about during all the summers before they met you?”

“Boring people. I’ve raised the importance of their conversations toward the sky.”

Stuart’s chortle was a relief. He finished getting ready to go, and then walked over to the table, where Alden had started setting up his tablet for his own schoolwork. After a brief moment of what looked like doubt, Stuart took a thin study journal with a pale purple cover from his bag.

“I don’t want to distract you from your studies, but if you have extra time…” He held it toward Alden, who was already reaching to receive it.

“Is this the one filled with your thoughts on friendship and friendship oaths? So fast! You only promised it to me a few days ago.”

“It’s just a few pages. I thought you should read them to make sure I’m explaining things well across cultures before I write more.”

Alden traced a finger down the squiggly silver line and the mysterious spiky blob symbol. It was exactly the same cover as the others Stuart had made.

“Thank you. I look forward to reading it, and I didn’t even have to sneak it out of the top library.”

He hadn’t figured out if he was more curious or anxious about the contents before Stuart was sliding open the cottage door. For a while, he stood there, facing the forest outside. Then, he turned back.

“What happened to the klerm?”

He caught that? Did I make a face when I skipped over it?

“Hmmm…well…”

Stuart didn’t look like he was in a hurry to hear an answer or depart. He just waited, all in black except for a couple of rings on one hand and a strand of gleaming red-orange ear jewelry he was wearing because it was a gift from Emban. He thought his cousin might like to see him enjoying it if she called.

“Bti-qwol said to kill it,” Alden admitted. “Because they’re pests that make a disagreeable racket. I wanted to let it go, but I was too nervous to argue with her. I handed the plant to her, and she stabbed it. You know how I love meatpetal, and meatpetal is a carnivorous plant, too…so it’s probably crazy that I still feel sorry about that one particular klerm. But I do.”

“Why did you leave that out?” He was giving Alden one of his signature stares. “Because you thought I would think badly of you?”

“Of course not. I’ve told you worse things. I was trying to make you feel better. You seem stressed this morning. I didn’t want to say ‘and then the klerm died’ while I was trying to help your stress. Only now I’ve done that anyway. Is there any chance that dead klerms are a positive thought for you? They are part of the outdoor decorations at LeafSong, so…”

“I do walk past many plants consuming them this time of year. I don’t find that at all <<cheering>>, but I also don’t consider it much.”

“That’s best. Don’t add this one to your contemplations.”

Stuart’s head was tilted.

“It was just a klerm,” said Alden. “I hope you have a good day at school.”

******

Olorn-art’h’s earring waited on the corner of the table. It was going to be the ideal tool to keep Alden’s mind on task this morning even though he was worried about Stuart. There were some steps he needed to take to set himself up for success with it, though.

When he was learning spells, simply opening Whan-tel’s Art and starting to read was great. Becoming fascinated with every detail and spending a whole study session on a single page was good for him. He was sure it was helping him glean as much foundational theory as possible from the book, and that was something he wasn’t going to outgrow the need for anytime soon.

However, when it came to preparing for his finals next week, accessing the textbooks while he was wearing the earring was a terrible idea. He needed to cram in large quantities of information here, not go deep and get really passionate about what was written on each page.

That’s a shame, but it can’t be helped now.

The idea was for him to pass the remedial science class and Intro to Other Worlds even though the timing of his acceptance meant he’d missed the first half of the quarter. Artonan Conversation was already in the bag, and Engaging with the Unexpected’s final was going to be a series of essay questions he wouldn’t have trouble with. MPE would be a short test on gym rules and basic laws for power use that nobody should fail when they took it on Monday at the start of class.

So it was just the two exams to worry about. He’d gone to the science course’s resource page to get the finals from previous terms, and he’d reformatted those into a study guide that didn’t have anything exciting enough on it to trip him up while he had the earring on. And he was taking Vandy’s study guide for Intro to Other Worlds and cutting it down to half the size.

“Have I told you I like my hands?” he asked the empty room. He dashed his stylus across his tablet, marking a final paragraph Vandy had included for deletion. “I notice it at the most random times. Look at these lines I’m drawing. They’re coming out so straight without me even trying.”

When he finished rectangling around the paragraph, he had a moment before it disappeared to appreciate that it looked like he’d stenciled it instead of free-handing it.

[I’m glad you’re appreciating yourself,] she replied.

“I can do this now, too.” He lifted the stylus with his thumb, index and middle fingers and started spinning it, increasing the speed until it was a silver blur. “The guy who made the pen spinning tutorial I watched last weekend was amazing. And he had way more tricks.”

Alden switched to a two-finger twirl, then walked the stylus back and forth between his knuckles.

“But he was talking about how much practice it took, and how tough some of it was with unbalanced pens.”

He moved his wrist up and down, and slowed the spin so he could imagine where the ends of something longer than the stylus would be.

“I didn’t have to try for long before the ones I was interested in started to click.”

He wondered if the pen guy resented superhumans taking up his hobby. Some people did. Alden understood it. Keeping your eyes on your own progress was a healthier way to approach things, but it was harder.

“It’s still not as flawless as I pictured it being,” he continued. “It’s hard to go as fast as I want without having split seconds when the stylus isn’t actually touching my hand. That’s fine for a person whose goal is to spin pens. It’s not fine for me.”

Alden got a lot of incidental hand dexterity training because of his auriad, but he hadn’t gone at it hard purely for the sake of his skill yet. Learning to preserve things without physically holding them was one goal, but getting better at the way the skill already worked was a valuable thing to pursue, too.

He spun the stylus as fast as he could and felt it slip an instant before it shot across the cottage. It flew into the sheer curtain that could be used to separate the bedroom from the table area. The curtain slowed its fall, and the implement hit the floor right beside the bed.

“I need to master the hands,” he said, getting up.

He collected the stylus from where it had landed, then glanced back toward the table. The study journal was on the edge of it. He’d read just enough of the first page to know he’d get little else done today if he went any farther. Stuart might not have written much yet, but he’d put so much brain power into each line that Alden was going to need to meet it with effort.

It opened with the words, “This is a study to be seen by only two people, and so I greet you, Alden. I look forward to sharing my thoughts here, though they may be flawed, and hearing your own. To begin, I wonder if you have ever considered how the people we spend our days with might be like the banks of a river? The water is guided by the land, and the land is carved by the water. In the same way, the ones who surround us guide our direction, and we change the shape of them, too.”

Alden was looking forward to the rest of it.

“I wish I could cheer him up,” he said, “but I don’t even know what happened to upset him…you won’t tell me, will you?”

[No.]

That’s fair.

“I shouldn’t have asked. If he wanted me to know, he would have told me himself.” He pulled his eyes away from the journal. “I think what Rel-art’h said last night worried me too much.”

That even though Stuart wanted to be confident in his ability to handle being a knight, he wasn’t…Alden wanted to argue against it. But now that he’d heard it, there was a tiny doubt in his own mind that he couldn’t shake.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“Having one hundred percent confidence is overrated, right? I felt more sure of myself before I became an Avowed than I have at any point since then.”

[Except for right in the middle of spell casting maybe,] he added by text.

Confidence in parts of yourself that had never been challenged probably wasn’t a bad thing…better than assuming you were stupid and incapable. But it wasn’t solid. Alden followed that thought like he was on the inward path.

“There’s untested confidence, and then there’s the kind you have because you’ve actually done something and learned what you’re capable of. The first type is really just a wish for yourself that feels like something true because you don’t know any better.”

Of course I wouldn’t freeze up if someone else was in danger. Of course I’ll be the bravest, most level-headed, least whiny person around if there’s ever an emergency. I would never waste time crying for myself in a vault when there was survival business to attend to and a recently-orphaned child to take care of. A guy who would do something like that sounds like more of a selfish wimp than me.

“After the wishful thinking took a beating, what was left must’ve been my real confidence. And how much of that was there? Not a lot. People sometimes describe high confidence as ‘towering’ in English. If I had a tower before, then now I have just a few bricks. A knee-high brick wall? So, I’ve got a lot of building to do. But at least I can make sure every brick is solid instead of an illusion… ”

He frowned. “There might be advice buried in here for me instead of Stuart. I don’t know what he needs to hear, or if Rel-art’h is even right about how he feels. But I know that it isn’t okay for them all to treat him like he failed at growing up just because he didn’t turn out like they were expecting.”

He fell backward onto the foot of the bed and switched to texting again. [I mean seriously…if they think he can’t make it, after everything he’s been through, knowing how hard he tries…if they think he can’t make it with years of preparation and with all of them beside him…then what would they think of my long-term chances?]

“I think I want someone to tell me a few bricks are enough to build any future with. As long as they’re real. Maybe he needs to hear that, too.”