He gazed at his little stack of fallen stones. He…didn’t feel so excited anymore.
“Don’t get discouraged,” Yumi said softly. “That’s what you need to consistently draw them. My first spirit came to me after only two weeks of training—but the next took another four months. It was years before I could do it every time, but we don’t need you to hit that level of skill. I keep feeling that even a single spirit could give us guidance.”
He heaved out a sigh, then nodded and gave her a smile. Unfortunately, she fell back into strict proctor mode, launching him into his next phase of training: forming solid bases for stacks. It wasn’t quite as mind-numbing as the previous week’s work. Neither was it exhilarating. It reminded him of his anatomy classes, where he’d drawn the same muscles over and over again.
Yet a little success brews eagerness, and the hours passed quickly. Particularly because Yumi seemed to catch the taste of success herself, and was somewhat less demanding. Instead of looming over him and snapping out instructions, she spent more time showing him examples. Sadly, she couldn’t manage to build anything higher than a handful of stones before what she’d stacked started disintegrating to smoke. Her incorporeal creations had a lifespan of a couple minutes.
They stopped periodically for drinks of water, and remarkably Painter found as the day wore on that he was almost enjoying himself. He still didn’t understand what was artistic about piling up rocks, and the spirits were an erratic bunch if they responded to it. But…it was moderately fun.
Besides, Yumi’s enthusiasm was infectious. Halfway through the day he paused to watch her make a little stack of ten stones, her lips pursed, her eyes focused, but her posture relaxed—as opposed to rigid with worry in anticipation of a collapse like he was as he stacked. She moved with a flowing suppleness—scooping the stones up instead of seizing them. Encountering them instead of seeking them.
She placed many of her stones on their short edges and let pieces hang out to the sides to stack other stones on, forming little towers. Instead of making the obvious choice with each stone, she somehow accounted for its individual irregularities and fit them all together into an unexpected puzzle. Each new stone was like a key change in a symphony: Abrupt, yet immediately right. So delightful you were left surprised you had enjoyed the song before that.
She was right, he thought （highly）。 It is an art. In her hands, at least.
She was part of the art—her motions a performance to be relished, then remembered. It was…beautiful. If he’d been a spirit, he would absolutely have been drawn to this.
Unfortunately, her bottom rock vanished at that moment, and the entire stack collapsed into swirling black smoke. She sat back on her heels and released a long, trailing sigh—exhaled like a eulogy. You know the sort. They’re fashioned from the corpses of dreams.
Painter stared at Yumi, pained for her. That emotion, the one he saw in her face—he knew that emotion. He’d never thought he would meet another who understood it the same way he did.
Her passion, he realized, is the same passion I used to feel. Realizing that recontextualized everything, and he started to wonder if there were other things she knew that he once had. That worry she displayed…was that the same worry he had always felt about getting things wrong—about not being the person everyone thought he was?
Loneliness, even in a group. Shame and its stalwart companion: those whispers that say you aren’t worthy of attention or love.
He understood. Without needing to touch her, he understood.
She glanced at him and he fumbled, collapsing the stones he’d been stacking.
“Put the heaviest on the bottom,” she suggested. “That’s not always the biggest, depending.”
He nodded, hoping she hadn’t seen him staring. As he tried again, he wondered how the last week had been for her. Forced to give him instructions rather than doing what she loved—she could have been constructing stone towers all the while. It felt more tragic if both of them had been having such a bad time.
He tried to see the stones as she did for his next few constructions, but that was less effective and he felt himself backsliding. He didn’t have her effortless ability to evaluate, to see the placement for a rock, to visualize a larger whole. So he returned to piling flat ones.
She shook her head. “You’ll need to learn to judge a center of balance for the entire tower, not just individual stones. You keep perpetuating imbalances instead of correcting for them with new stones.”
“I…” He hesitated as he saw townspeople gathering outside. He looked to Yumi, who frowned. Liyun was supposed to keep the people away so he could practice in peace. What was…
They weren’t gathering for him. Something was happening. He could sense noise. A disturbance.
“It probably doesn’t involve us,” Yumi said. She said it in a half-hearted way though.
Painter heaved himself to his feet, stiff from having worked so long in basically the same posture. He crossed the place of ritual to the fence, outside of which Chaeyung and Hwanji were also distracted by the crowding people. It seemed that a wagon had arrived? Yes, another floating wagon, larger than Yumi’s, pulled by the flying devices made from spirits.
Painter absently pushed out of the place of ritual, noticing that Liyun had vanished somewhere. His two attendants yelped and hurried to catch up, trying to obscure him with their fans as he walked toward the crowd. Although he was clothed, he wasn’t technically on display now, and their duty was to hide him.
“We should stay at the place of ritual,” Yumi said, yanked after him. “Painter. We aren’t to leave!”
But he’d seen crowds like this before. At the scene of a disturbance. A nightmare appearance. He pushed the fans away, and when they returned he pushed them more forcefully—and the attendants fell back. The crowd made way for him, speaking in hushed tones as he approached the source of their consternation.
It wasn’t a scene of violence or fear, thankfully. The wagon had deposited a group of men with long mustaches, beards on their chins, and white clothing. Their most striking feature was their strange hats. Black, with tall backs and shorter fronts, like…well, kind of like little chairs. Only there were wings at the sides too.
“Scholars,” Yumi said, stepping up beside him. She put a hand to her lips. “From Torio City. The university. I’ve…always wanted to see them.”
“…heard of the unfortunate nature of your plight,” the lead scholar was saying, “even all the way in Torio City. So we have come to bless you.”
He addressed the town’s pudgy mayor, though the words were obviously for the entire crowd. The mayor, in turn, bowed to the scholars, then bowed again as if worried the first one might not stick. “Honored scholars,” he said in the highest and most flowery of forms, “you are welcome to our humble town.”
Painter frowned. Those were the kind of linguistic forms they used in the historical dramas to address a king. It left little ambiguity about how scholars were regarded.
Behind the four scholars, a group of younger men in smaller hats—simple black caps—opened the doors on the rear of the wagon, then heaved something out. Roughly the size of a clothing dresser, it was a metal construction with a great number of long rods. Spiderlike, if said spider had grown a few dozen extra legs.