The Hammer Unfalls

4.63 Pushing the Boundary

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His official lesson of the day had ended: four straight hours of ignoring distractions. Master Willow had used light, sound, wind, pain, insults, and even boredom to try to rattle Glim’s focus. To his tutor’s dismay—and Glim’s satisfaction—it had proven difficult to distract him.

But meditating in a clearing among the trees outside the south gate, Glim felt his true lesson had barely begun. Glim found a slightly rotten log and sat, adjusting his posture until he felt comfortable. He relaxed his shoulders and breathed deep. He felt the scrape of the air against his nostrils as he inhaled, and felt his lungs expand. The damp wood at his bottom and the cold air in his lungs became muted. Mere points of observation in a whole he sought to understand.

The brown branches sighed with a sudden breeze.

Should I fetch you a pillow? the wind asked.

“No, thank you,” Glim murmured, with a half smile.

The wind tossed his hair around, and tossed a few insults his way for good measure. They too were part of the whole Glim had just begun to appreciate. The sound of the wind became part of the backdrop and her words fell away from his ears.

Glim sensed movement in the shadows. He looked over at a beetle, which climbed along the underside of a stick. It had no essentiæ to speak of, and would make for a poor snack. Yet it existed here, in the same space with Glim. Where had it come from? What had brought it here? Where was it going next?

The beetle moved to the tip of the stick and stopped. Its mandibles moved, antennae twitching. Glim watched it for an hour and noticed that the stick had grown slightly smaller as the beetle chewed on the twig. At last it turned around and burrowed back into the ground, where it undoubtedly had friends. Glim imagined thousands of similar beetles taking similar bites all throughout the forest, like tiny dots of silver light swarming the detritus on the forest floor.

This is where dirt comes from, he realized at last. The beetles chew the wood down into tiny bits.

Glim walked back into Wohn-Grab thoughtfully.

After dinner, Garrick pulled Glim aside. “I expect you’ll want to get back to sparring? I have some time now if ye like.”

“Lead the way,” Glim said.

Garrick brought him to the armory and selected a couple of training swords. Glim took his and looked at it critically.

“What do you do with these when we’re done sparring?” he asked.

“I hone them with this stone, and put a bit of oil on them.”

“Show me?”

Instead of sparring, they spent the evening pulling swords from the rack and inspecting them for chips or rough spots. Garrick told him what to look for, and how to apply the oil.

“Got on the wrong side of the captain, eh Glim?” one of the guards joked as he came in from his watch. Glim merely smiled and kept honing the steel.

That evening before bed, Glim walked up the stairs to his study. He checked on the peas, which had trailed down to touch the windowsill. Glim took out a book and recorded his observations about beetles and weapon repair.

Something on the table caught his eye: the device he’d once brought to Ryn. “It tests a plyer’s facility with the fringe,” she’d told him. Glim ignored a pang of sadness and guilt and set the device before him. He took a marble from the pouch, dropped it into the top, and watched it fall. Just left of center.

Glim drew a chart in his book, with nine lanes as columns. He marked a line in the fourth column and dropped another marble, then another, until he’d dropped a hundred marbles in all. Glim checked the numbers and gasped.

Unless he misunderstood Ryn’s words, the marbles had definitely skewed to the smaller numbers. Column one had seven marbles, column two had ten. Column eight had only a few marbles, and column nine had none. Laid out like this on the chart, there was no mistaking it: Glim definitely skewed toward the fringe. But how?

There were only a couple of explanations that made sense. Either Glim himself somehow gravitated towards the fringe. Or, as he suspected, Master Willow had been leading him down a skewed path from the beginning. He had no way to know for certain. Glim set the mystery aside for the moment and fell into a dreamless sleep.

The next day brought no answers. As he went through his lesson, and later sat among the beetles to learn more of their ways, Glim pondered the fringe, and where he fell on it. Did his essentiæ somehow fall outside of the bounds of most? Had his inclinations led him away from the center?

He simply didn’t have enough information to know. But he did have one way to study the question. Whatever Master Willow taught him, he’d explore the opposite side of the same technique in private, and see if over time the head sorter showed different numbers.

Numbers alone meant nothing, however. The true question had yet to be answered: what did it mean to ply central or fringe? Once again, Ryn had given him the answer: Glim had to forge a path that felt right to him. Nothing else would honor Ryn.

And so Glim spent the next days exploring the balance between all things, and where he fit into it. Days became weeks, then months. Each night he dropped a hundred marbles, watching nervously as he tallied the results, and tried to pull himself into the sort of plyer he’d be proud to be.

Others had always had an agenda for him. The time had come to carve out his own.

--------------- ~~~ *** ~~~ ---------------

The pile of moss at his feet might not seem like much of a morning’s work to others. But the sight of the lichens, weeds, and other tiny plants Glim had plucked from the fortress walls represented the answer to a thorny question he’d been wrestling with for months on end: is it ever acceptable to kill?

Glim had killed more times than most.

He’d asked the other guards about it. Most of them had hunted their whole lives. But none of them he’d asked had faced combat and drawn their swords in self defense. Not a single guard had ever intentionally walked into a hinterjack lair and slaughtered them all.

Guilt, fear, and a need for revenge had sloshed around in Glim’s brain so often he felt like his thoughts might never settle. At long last, they had.

Weeds struggle to survive. They scatter their seeds and make more weeds, which helps lifeless lands flourish. But here in the wall of Wohn-Grab, where their roots tunnel deep into the cracks between stones, it weakens a wall that took centuries to make. So pulling a weed from a forest path went against the balance, but plucking a weed from the wall ensured it. Just as walking into a hinterjack lair and slaughtering creatures in their home went against harmony, whereas defending against crazed predators while repairing a nutrient tank seemed understandable to him. Context is what mattered most, and the intent behind the act. Not the act itself.

That’s why he felt guilty for the violence when thinking of the dead hinterjacks, but felt guilty for the situation in general when remembering the hyaenas.

Glim stretched as he headed towards the town square. He pulled a purple carrot from a grow bed and munched as he walked. A girl broke off from one of the market stalls and walked towards him. Glim rubbed his chin and wondered if it was time to shave again as Gyda fell in beside him. Glim was so wrapped up in his ruminations on life and death that he forgot to put up his usual wall of wary sarcasm.

“There's a trading caravan coming in,” she said. “Meet it with me? You have a good eye for trinkets.”

“You have good eyes period, Gyda. They go well with the rest of you.”

She snorted and slapped him on the chest. Did her touch linger?

“Glim, you need to learn how to flirt better. You’re as subtle as an avalanche.”

“I'd love to practice. Maybe you can show me where I'm going wrong?”

“Why me? You were practicing fine on Pyri yesterday.”

“That? Flirting? Merely discussing repairs for my undertunic.”

“I think your mind was on her undertunic.” Gyda sighed and looked away from him. “We talk about you, you know. Try to figure out whether any of us matter to you.” She fidgeted with her dress. “Do me a favor. If you ever come calling for me, be serious. Because I can't tell if you are too serious, or not serious enough.”

Something about her voice rang sincere. Glim looked at Gyda in surprise. So focused he’d been on mindfulness, that he’d nearly tripped over his own shortsightedness. For the first time in his life, he finally realized that the hints others had dropped over the years were actually true: Gyda was interested in him. Despite all the insults, the teasing, the awkward looks... she didn’t actually care about his eye at all. Nor the plying. She saw him as a person, as himself, and liked what she saw.

A sense of profound foolishness washed over Glim. Missing what had been right in front of his stupid, mismatched eyes all along.

“What?” she asked, looking at him in puzzlement.

Glim looked into her eyes. Really looked. Not with shyness or dread. Not with his mind racing to find words of defense. He looked at her the same way she’d looked at him a moment ago. Openly, honestly, seeing Gyda as herself.

Locked in each other’s gaze, the moment stretched, infinite, as if their minds had opened to each other and entwined in shared curiosity. Her eyes flickered with confusion, then hope, until something between them thawed and crumbled away. Glim knew it the moment it happened. Gyda’s eyes widened. Her nostrils flared. They leaned ever closer towards each other. Before he even knew what had happened, Glim closed his eyes and felt his lips touch hers.

Half-forgotten scents ignited in his mind. The slight sweetness of beet juice. The softness of wax. The light perfume of her hair, all jumbled together in a heady mix.

He thought of their moments together in a rush. Her taunts. The way her hips swayed when she walked near him. The flush of heat that colored her cheeks sometimes when they laughed.

That same heat warmed Glim now. Without consciously intending to, he pulled her closer, wanting her warmth against his skin. Their timid tongues made a pact with each other to speak again soon. They parted slightly, lingering, breathing the same air.

A voice behind him rose Glim's hackles before he even spotted his tutor. He pulled away from Gyda in irritation. Flustered, but smiling in elation, she tucked an errant lock of hair behind her ear and nodded in deference to the Mage-at-Arms who had just cleared his throat with an exaggerated cough.

“The caravan is here, young lady. I've just spoken with the traders, in fact. Glim is needed elsewhere. But if you see any parchments, procure them for me.”

“Of course, Master Willow.” Gyda hurried off towards a group of people standing next to horses. Each wore light gray cloaks. Mottled, as if made of granite. Their forms blended into the mists and rocks. All women, it seemed, and they didn't seem like very good traders. No cart horse. No tent. One of them kept turning towards him, but every time he looked she focused on something else. Glim considered walking over, but Master Willow intercepted him.

“Spending your off hours wisely, I see?” Master Willow's voice dripped contempt as he watched Gyda leave.

“That is why they're called off hours, Master Willow.”

“You’re about to have fewer of them. I need you to leave at once and fetch some linden leaves.”

Glim sighed and went to fetch his pack.