The weeks passed by quickly again as I fit going to the garden and library into a new routine. I continued to get up early, but rather than spend most of the time exploring, I crossed the thin paths. Then I would lose an hour or so checking up on the plants, watering the ones that needed it, harvesting the plants that were ready. Some of the plants wouldn’t have normally been in season, but I assumed the warmer temperature of the Seedling Palace allowed them to keep growing despite the snow covering the rest of Her territory. Sometimes I couldn’t resist the need to take the mortar and pestle in hand or do other ingrained motions that would have contributed to healing but instead contributed to making a test poison. Not that I could actually try out the poisons on anything since I didn’t want to risk my own health and ability to train, but the act was comforting. I was also limited by my need for fire, so more often than not I had to settle for preparing everything I could and leaving it at that, but other times frustration won and I would sneak down to the cook stones in the evening. It was difficult learning how to properly heat some of the plants and mixtures when I couldn’t change how hot the stones were or cover everything in heated ash to have it cook evenly on all sides. That ruined more test poisons than anything else, though there were some, like the spiritflower and feverluck mixture, that simply didn’t last long before expiring.
Once I finished at the garden I would head to the library and read the Collection of Wishes Shawsh had recommended. Working my way through the archaic characters, punctuated at times by a helpfully detailed drawing, was laborious and slow going, but reading the new tales was worth it. Perhaps I should have hidden my reading ability from the librarian and Clara but the temptation of the stories was too great. Besides who were they really going to tell? The pair had such an insular feeling to them, and I only saw them in the library—already settled, never coming or going—that it was difficult to picture them ever going anywhere else even if, logically, I knew they had to.
Clara was more of a fixture in the seedling library than I ever expected her to be given that she had permission to explore a significantly larger portion of the Seedling Palace as an older seedling. She seemed to have a fondness for the old librarian and his art, and indulged him with a patience that was never extended to the library’s other visitors. I refrained from asking her about it, however, because the less I pressed her the less likely she would press me in turn. Besides, it wasn’t my business and they never interrupted my studying. Clara seemed content to ignore me in favor of whatever scroll she was reading. Shawsh sometimes liked to chat about the scrolls and their history when I was trying to decide which one to attempt to read next and I did my best to be on my best behavior because he had a wealth of knowledge I hadn’t heard before. I think, if he was ever put to the task, he could recite the writer, subject, major events and themes of every scroll in the library as well as historical events surrounding the writing of each scroll and its influences. They were as familiar to him as his own hands, if not more so.
I would read up in one of the needle bed benches until I had to return the scroll before heading to the day’s lessons. Those stayed steady and unchanging from the weeks before. Jin worked us hard and drilled more knowledge into our minds without hardly giving us a minute to breathe.
There was no room for failing, for not being able to keep up. It wore on some of the cohort more than others. Dera, Wren, and surprisingly Ento seemed to struggle with the unrelenting pace. Dera struggled most with the physical lessons while Wren and Ento would fade by the afternoon’s mental exercises. The constant physical conditioning in the morning wore on me as well, but Rawley’s lessons had given me enough muscle to push through the exhaustion—and I had years of experience to know how to deal with an unrelenting taskmaster. Ulo kept up the lessons, for now, but from what I could tell the earnest girl didn’t know to pace herself. Every now and then she would snap a disgusted look in my direction when I was snatching a minute’s break or not running at my top speed around the training area. I ignored her. Either she would burn out or she would learn that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. It wasn’t my problem and even if I felt like giving advice, she wouldn’t have listened to me.
The evenings I saved for time in my nook. Recalling and rehearsing lessons, myths, and weapon stances all needed to be taken care of, and I couldn’t bring myself to sit through the boring and grueling experience of wasting time with the other seedlings. Yes, I was supposed to being getting to know the others “as well as I knew myself”, but I didn’t see why I couldn’t do that simply through observation. It wasn’t like any of them were particularly hard to read other than Juniper and Breck, and I had time to uncover their weaknesses. Prevna was a headache waiting to happen, but she made her intentions clear and bothered me enough that we probably passed Jin’s expectations of knowing each other.
However, despite not spending time with them, the others didn’t miss that I had all my evenings free while they still had special training on a rotating schedule. Idra and Ento cornered me on the way to my nook after the evening’s meal one night. Loclen tried to pass it off as something she wasn’t particularly curious about when I returned to the dome another night while Nii listened in. And I heard Andhi, Wren, and Dera gossiping about it at the bathing pool when I went to clean up earlier than normal. They all wanted to know if I had somehow failed the blessing training or if I was hiding that my blessing was Named and I didn’t need the training because there had already been generations before me to work out the kinks—if only I could be so lucky. I neglected to answer their questions and, failingly that, they pressed for me to reveal exactly what my blessing was. I neglected to answer that too.
All in all, that settled me as the outsider to the group—even more so than Breck who didn’t seemed bothered to make friends with anyone, either. But she wasn’t as brash and rude, apparently—and still had the special lessons—so I won the role of group delinquent. It wasn’t unfamiliar, so I accepted the trite honor with little protest. Not that made it any easier for them to figure out how to treat me. Was I an annoying know-it-all who had too big of a head on her shoulders? Someone to be given respect and deference because of the secret Named blessing I might have and the trial mark on my chin? An antisocial failure to be ignored and dismissed?
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No one guessed an ex-healer’s daughter who couldn’t die but that was the point of not telling them, so I couldn’t really judge them for the failure. Prevna didn’t help matters, either. The others started to prod her for answers once they realized she was the one who spent the most time around me, relatively speaking, and for some confounding reason she refused to tell them what she knew. Instead she had fun leading them on a goose chase of conjecture and sarcasm without ever fully touching on the truth. I think at one point she had Andhi hooked on the idiotic idea that I was some Echo’s illicit child, given a wonderful blessing but unable to ever truly connect with others in case they found out about my true heritage. I got a lot of pitying looks that week. Still, I waited for her to get bored and finally break the more mundane truth.
In the meantime, after two months at the Seedling Palace, Jin declared that she had enough of the training platform. By the next day she had roped together a handful of older seedlings—Sprouts—who had drank the shadows to help take us to the grassland around the Seedling Palace. I was startled to see Clara among them while she just looked disgruntled to be pulled away from her scrolls.
The Sprouts had a varied success rate. Some brought their charge down to the grass between the Palace’s roots, as intended, but on the wrong side of the grove while others ended up miles away and had to make a second attempt. Only two or three, the more experienced Sprouts, managed to take their passenger within a few minutes walk of where Jin waited. Clara was one of them. She brought Idra down and then returned and took me. We waited another uneasy fifteen minutes under Jin’s implacable gaze for everyone to arrive.
The cold air was like a slap in the face after the constant temperature I had gotten used to. The give and crunch of snow underfoot was a comfort simply because how refreshing it was to be surrounded by something so normal. I felt my thoughts clear and my focus sharpen the more I took in the familiar environment, only offset by the gigantic roots breaking into the ground around us. One of them blocked the view of First Shore Lake, or at least the wall along its edge, so all that was left to focus on was snow and sky and the trees towering overhead.
Jin talked to Clara and the two other Sprouts who had brought their two charges off to the side as we waited. At one point, Clara glanced over with a devious smile. My guard shot up and I had to restrain myself from stepping closer to make out what was being said. Breck, brought by one of the others, also noticed the smile and shifted in place. Idra and Ento were busying murmuring to each other while Juniper stared off at the branches blocking out the sky above us. Ulo and Nii were exchanging details about their trips through the shadow paths. Perhaps not unexpectedly, this was only the second time they had been allowed to look when brought along. When we had each been brought to the Calling Road when we were young, we had been required to wear blindfolds as the shadow paths were thought to be too much for regular tribes folk.
When everyone finally arrived, Jin took in the two loose groups of seedlings and Sprouts with her cool, commanding gaze. Despite the fact that she still only wore her light weight robe over her dress and no shoes covered her feet our mentor didn’t seem to notice to the cold. Instead, her gaze sparked with anticipation and a small smile curled her lips as she stretched the moments of waiting to their breaking point.
Then she clapped sharply and an oddly darkened forest sprung into existence behind her. It was full of shadows and scraggly brush that seemed designed to trip up feet as it thrust through the snow. Nor did it help that the entire illusion was covered in true shadow from branches overhead. The forest also had the sounds of a regular forest: brushing needles, bird calls, and the scampering of squirrels.
Jin held up a nondescript circular brown token. “It’s time for Hunter’s Quarry. The premise is simple: rack up the most points to win within a three hour time limit. You’ll be able to find these tokens in the forest; each one is worth ten points. Stepping outside the forest’s boundaries means instant disqualification as does striking any blow that could cause permanent or lethal damage.”
She made a show of tossing the token over her shoulder and into the forest behind her. “However, that’s not the only way to earn points. You will be broken into three teams: Sprouts vs two groups of seedlings. Loclen, Andhi, Nii, Juniper, and Idra will be one team and Ento, Ulo, Dera, Wren, and Prevna will make up the other.” I didn’t miss that Breck and I had been conveniently left out or the way Jin’s gaze cut into me when she continued, “Seedlings, capture a Sprout and hold them until time runs out and you’ll earn fifty points. Capture Gimley or Breck and, seedlings or Sprouts, you’ll earn a hundred fifty points per girl. They are not a team. Since they’re cocky enough to think they can do everything on their own we’ll have them prove it.”
My mouth opened in protest against the unfair challenge, but I firmly shut it. She wanted to humiliate me by pitching me against six Sprouts with mostly unknown blessings and my cohort?
Fine. I would just prove myself like she said.
Jin pulled out colored headbands from a new bag tied to her waist I hadn’t paid much attention to. Blue for the first seedling team, grayish purple for the second, and green for the Sprouts. Breck and I were given nothing, nor was anyone given a sack to put the tokens we would be collecting into. Apparently, that was a problem we were supposed to solve ourselves. Luckily, I had a couple small mostly empty pouches tied to my belt. There wasn’t much need to carry around herbs or bandages in the Seedling Palace, just as there hadn’t been after I cut off my healer’s beads, but I kept the habit of having the pouches all the same. It felt more balanced to have them there with my eating knife, sling, bag of stones, water pouch, and the empty poisoner’s pouch.
It didn’t take long for everyone to put the headbands on, but there was some bickering over who got to be each team’s leader. Clara was granted the honor for the Sprouts for unclear reasons as well as a twenty five point bonus in addition to the original fifty should she get captured.
Eventually, Juniper and Wren earned the right to be captain for their respective groups. There wasn’t a benefit to capturing them, or any of the other seedlings, irritatingly enough. Breck and I were the clear prizes of the game.
And our only recourse was to somehow collect more tokens than what five or six people could gather together or capture multiple Sprouts, a feat that was bound to be difficult even with a team. Jin turned to Breck and me.
“You get a five minute head start.”
We ran.