Dominic woke up the next morning to find the tent and horses gone, with no further orders. The man had abandoned him! "Serve?!" Dominic saw only a wrapped hunk of bread and cheese waiting for him, plus the money pouch. "How am I supposed to know what to do without specifics?"

Stop thinking like one of the Bound, Jasper had been telling him. Dominic covered his face with one hand and pointed at the empty air, saying "I'll have you all killed! Serve and obey!" Then he sighed. At least he had the mission to find some inn in three days, and the amulet to mark him as something other than a missing Bound, and the traveling papers to show to anyone who questioned him. He patted his clothes.

"Oh, you brazen bastard!" Dominic looked in the direction of the hoofprints. "You didn't just 'forget' to give me the papers, did you?" Part of the test.

Well. There'd be more people in the city, making it easier to blend in, and he did have the necklace. He felt the brass chain around his neck and peered at the wooden triple-triad design hanging from it. It took him a few tries to slip into the right frame of mind to see the Weave, but the thing clearly had a complicated, glowing knot design worked into it. Must have been as good as a signature. And at worst, the Servant would be there at the inn before long. Probably.

The rutted road carried him on foot past more fields and orchards. The dirt walls, overgrown with roots and trees, sometimes crossed his path and made him detour through the morning shadows they cast.

He passed rolling wagons and work teams of Bound with their Citizen owners supervising. At first he tried to flatten himself against the tall hedge-rows to get out of the travelers' view, but no one seemed to care.

The tallest wall he'd ever seen, this one made of stone, loomed over Dominic. At least five times his height! Every rock must have been cut and placed at enormous cost in labor. Bound labor. People thronged the street on the other side, past a pair of guards with spears. Dominic stepped warily up to them, trying to look like he knew what he was doing, and held out the amulet.

The guards looked bored as they waved him on. Dominic let out a sigh of relief.

He felt tiny, too. The buildings all had multiple floors. Everything was full of life and color, from the vegetables in windowsills to the tiles on roofs to the endless variation among the people's clothes. He took in a deep breath of city air, and gagged. Ugh! So many people together made a worse stink than his village's outhouses. Strange, too, that the people around him weren't part of his work team, weren't owned by the same Citizens, and otherwise weren't tied to him.

Inspect and learn and observe, Jasper had said. Dominic kept having to dodge people brushing past him, who all seemed to know what they had to do. With no specific instructions, Dominic had to assign work to himself.

He picked someone at random. "Excuse me? Do you know where the Lynx's Den is?" His throat tightened when he spotted the brand on the man's forehead. He'd stopped a Citizen for his own petty needs.

The man glared, then glanced down at Dominic's amulet. "Two blocks that way, then right. Look for the sign."

A few minutes later he was in a red-tiled building with a sign bearing a short-tailed cat. He tried to figure out how to pay for a few nights' stay and a meal without looking like a fool. His clothes suddenly felt inadequate, too drab and simple. Even many of the Bound here had some sort of colorful sash.

The innkeeper had a Citizen's brand instead of finery. "I'm visiting with my new master," said Dominic. "Are the inn's staff your Bound, sir?"

"Yes. I don't see many people wandering around with that much money, treating it like they've never seen it before. Who did you say owns you?"

Dominic sweated. "A Servant named Jasper. Here, see this necklace?"

The innkeeper shouted for one of his Bound. "Take a look at this. Authentic?"

The Bound girl in a simple grey dress smiled nervously, bowed to her master, then gestured to be shown the pendant. She cupped it in one hand, glanced into Dominic's eyes, and looked back down at the wood. "I think so, sir."

As she let go, Dominic let out the breath he'd been holding. "Magic. I should be learning that. Is there someone around here who teaches people?"

The innkeeper frowned. "Your master should take you south to Temple Island, if that's what he's after. Around here you'd be best off hiring a Citizen tutor or borrowing his books. Try the Upwell Market." He saw Dominic's blank look. "By the Seaflower? You really must be new here. And of course you can't read; I should have guessed."

Dominic looked bashfully aside. "Yes, sir. I thought it wasn't allowed for any Bound."

"We don't bother with that rule here. Too many places where we need a good clerk."

You don't bother? Dominic wondered. Was it legal to teach Bound here, or did the rules just not get enforced?

The inn girl piped up. "Oh! I could teach you about reading, sir. If my Citizen thinks it's all right."

The innkeeper said, "Fine. You can keep whatever money you get from him too."

"Thank you!" She faced Dominic and gave him a dazzling smile. Her tasseled grey dress wasn't much different than a Citizen's from back home, and her long brown hair, tied like a horse-tail, showed she was no farmer who had to keep it short and practical. "For just a few coins I can show you a different sort of magic, if you're staying for a while."

That was an easy purchase to agree to!

#

Dominic had his first lesson that afternoon, off and on. The girl, whose name was Julia, had chores and customers to attend to. She showed him a food menu, and how all the symbols worked together, meaningless in themselves, to carry a meaning. "Ju-Li-A," she said, drawing three marks with a pen. "See? Now pick out the symbols for Do, then Mi, Ni, and Ka with the no-vowel mark."

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Dominic soon stared at a scrap of paper with his own name on it in shaky splashes of ink. I am no longer truly Bound, he thought. He looked back up at Julia, and smiled.

#

The days had grown long. Dominic spent the rest of this one searching for the Upwell Market, until he found the city's namesake. Heard, then saw: it gurgled loudly enough to make the constant bustle of the people seem muted. Then he turned a corner and reached the plaza itself. A massive fountain poured water up into the sky in joyous arcs that caught the sun and splashed back like the hanging leaves of a willow. The water streamed out in six directions past six lesser wells, all ringed with metal pipes and walkways so that no one would harm the source. The plaza seethed with market stalls, each one a little festival of its own with a unique color and shape and array of fruit or cloth or meat for sale. The air here was fresher, cleaner.

"How does it work?" he asked one of the merchants, staring not at him but at the great fountain. Women with buckets came and went from the wells like pilgrims.

"Ah, boy, it is the work of the Boundless One! For it was he that struck the stone and called forth a lake that had never seen light." The man lifted his hands and mimed the spreading arcs of water. "Praise be to the One!" He looked expectantly at Dominic.

"'For the One guides Three'," Dominic recited. If he was supposed to think and learn, "a wizard did it" wasn't a good enough explanation anymore, even if the spellcaster was the Servant of All who ruled the State. He said, "I'm looking to learn more about this sort of thing. About magic."

The merchant glanced at his necklace. "I'm not the one to ask. You see the bearded Citizen over there? Marchaud's his name. Tell him the cheese-seller sent you. Meanwhile, would you be interested in these miracles of milk?"

"Maybe later. Thanks." Dominic stepped away and explored some more. All of the merchants had the Citizens' forehead brand of the three triangles, except for the occasional Bound assistant. The man named Marchaud claimed a shady spot under a tree with bright red berries. Dominic introduced himself and waved to the cheese-seller.

Marchaud said, "I am not a Servant, nor a licensed teacher. This humble Citizen barely knows magic, and deals instead in art." He pointed to the array of scrolls and the few that lay open on his table, weighed with rocks. "Would you like a painting of the coast? A woodblock print of the great victory at our Flower Walls against the western barbarians?" There was a scene where ghoulish soldiers with suns on their chests assailed the earthen walls and got stabbed in great sprays of red ink.

Dominic took his eyes off the frightening scene. "But he said you could teach me. I can pay."

"I could, but I can't."

"That's nonsense."

"You have much to learn, boy. May I show you my wares instead?" The man ignored Dominic and turned his attention to the scrolls. He began to wave one hand theatrically over the wooden rods and paper. They moved.

Dominic watched carefully, slipping into the trance-like state he'd been learning. The stone plaza he stood on was magically inert, but nearly everything on the table was full of the Weave. It swirled and dangled from the merchant's fingers like puppet strings. Slowly, one of the top scrolls unrolled itself, revealing an image of long dark hair, haunting eyes, a smile, a slender neck, the curve of a breast --

Then the scroll re-rolled itself with a bang. Dominic startled, and the merchant grinned. "Anything you learn from me certainly wouldn't be formal or for pay. Understand?" He began to toy with the scroll, lifting it into the air without touching it.

Dominic tried to follow what he was doing. The merchant was touching the emerald threads in the air and tugging them toward him, but he suspected half the effort was mental. There was some trick to it that he wasn't seeing. "How necessary are the gestures?"

The art-seller turned aside and began to sort through his collection, leaving the lifted scroll wobbling in the air. He spoke with some strain and hesitation as he unrolled another picture with his hands. "Perhaps you'd like a scene from the Madlands' edge? Looks impressive on a wall." This one showed an island of trees, inexplicably hovering above the sea.

All the while, Dominic watched how the Weave knotted itself around the paper that Marchaud wasn't focused on. "How could an island stay up without some mind guiding it?" He had no double meaning in mind when he said it, but noticed one immediately. The merchant wanted to teach without running afoul of some law against it.

The man smiled back at him. "Seems impossible, and yet it does! Difficult for me to say exactly how, but I suspect that some hidden pattern of thought is indeed there. One that's focused on what experts call a root of thought, made from an idea sort of tied in on itself and looping. I'm told that people out there at the border fort study diligently at creating such a stable pattern and seeing how it interacts with nearby objects."

They chattered about anything but spellcasting for a few minutes. In gratitude, Dominic said, "I'd like to buy that island picture, please."

They spoke more in the process of making the sale. The art-seller said, "And that, young man, is how business is done. By the way, you're wearing that money pouch wrong. You won't have it much longer unless you tie it like this."