I SAT IN THE back of Abenthy’s wagon. It was a wonderful place for me, home to a hundred bottles and bundles, saturated with a thousand smells. To my young mind it was usually more fun than a tinker’s cart, but not today.
It had rained heavily the night before, and the road was a thick morass of mud. Since the troupe was not on any particular schedule, we had decided to wait for a day or two to give the roads time to dry. It was a fairly common occurrence, and it happened to fall at the perfect time for Ben to further my education. So I sat at the wooden worktable in the back of Ben’s wagon and chafed at wasting the day listening to him lecture me about things I already understood.
My thoughts must have been apparent, because Abenthy sighed and sat down beside me. “Not quite what you expected, eh?”
I relaxed a bit, knowing his tone meant a temporary reprieve from the lecture. He gathered up a handful of the iron drabs that were sitting on the table and clinked them together thoughtfully in his hand.
He looked at me. “Did you learn to juggle all at once? Five balls at a time? Knives too?”
I flushed a bit at the memory. Trip hadn’t even let me try three balls at first. He’d made me juggle two. I’d even dropped them a couple of times. I told Ben so.
“Right,” Ben said. “Master this trick and you get to learn another.” I expected him to stand up and start back into the lesson, but he didn’t.
Instead he held out the handful of iron drabs. “What do you know about these?” He clattered them together in his hand.
“In what respect?” I asked. “Physically, chemically, historically—”
“Historically,” he grinned, “Astound me with your grasp of historical minutiae, E’lir.” I had asked him what E’lir meant once. He claimed it meant “wise one,” but I had my doubts from the way his mouth had quirked when he said it.
“A long time ago, the people who—”
“How long ago?”
I frowned at him in mock severity. “Roughly two thousand years ago. The nomadic folk who roamed the foothills around the Shalda Mountains were brought together under one chieftain.”
“What was his name?”
“Heldred. His sons were Heldim and Heldar. Would you like his entire lineage, or should I get to the point?” I glowered at him.
“Sorry, sir.” Ben sat up straight in his seat and assumed such an aspect of rapt attention that we both broke into grins.
I started again. “Heldred eventually controlled the foothills around the Shalda. This meant that he controlled the mountains themselves. They started to plant crops, their nomadic lifestyle was abandoned, and they slowly began to—”
“Get to the point?” Abenthy asked. He tossed the drabs onto the table in front of me.
I ignored him as best I could. “They controlled the only plentiful and easily accessible source of metal for a great distance and soon they were the most skilled workers of those metals as well. They exploited this advantage and gained a great deal of wealth and power.
“Until this point barter was the most common method of trade. Some larger cities coined their own currency, but outside those cities the money was only worth the weight of the metal. Bars of metal were better for bartering, but full bars of metal were inconvenient to carry.”
Ben gave me his best bored-student face. The effect was only slightly inhibited by the fact that he had burned his eyebrows off again about two days ago. “You’re not going to go into the merits of representational currency, are you?”
I took a deep breath and resolved not to pester Ben so much when he was lecturing me. “The no-longer-nomads, called the Cealdim by now, were the first to establish a standardized currency. By cutting one of these smaller bars into five pieces you get five drabs.” I began to piece two rows of five drabs each together to illustrate my point. They resembled little ingots of metal. “Ten drabs are the same as a copper jot; ten jots—”
“Good enough,” Ben broke in, startling me. “So these two drabs,” he held a pair out for my inspection, “Could have come from the same bar, right?”
“Actually, they probably cast them individually….” I trailed off under a glare. “Sure.”
“So there’s something still connecting them, right?” He gave me the look again.
I didn’t really agree, but knew better than to interrupt. “Right.”
He set them both on the table. “So when you move one, the other should move, right?”
I agreed for the sake of argument, then reached out to move one. But Ben stopped my hand, shaking his head. “You’ve got to remind them first. You’ve got to convince them, in fact.”
He brought out a bowl and decanted a slow blob of pine pitch into it. He dipped one of the drabs into the pitch and stuck the other one to it, spoke several words I didn’t recognize, and slowly pulled the bits apart, strands of pitch stretching between them.
He set one on the table, keeping the other in his hand. Then he muttered something else and relaxed.
He raised his hand, and the drab on the table mimicked the motion. He danced his hand around and the brown piece of iron bobbed in the air.
He looked from me to the coin. “The law of sympathy is one of the most basic parts of magic. It states that the more similar two objects are, the greater the sympathetic link. The greater the link, the more easily they influence each other.”
“Your definition is circular.”
He set down the coin. His lecturer’s facade gave way to a grin as he tried with marginal success to wipe the pitch off of his hands with a rag. He thought for a while. “Seems pretty useless doesn’t it?”
I gave a hesitant nod, trick questions were fairly common around lesson time.
“Would you rather learn how to call the wind?” His eyes danced at me. He murmured a word and the canvas ceiling of the wagon rustled around us.
I felt a grin capture my face, wolfish.
“Too bad, E’lir.” His grin was wolfish too, and savage. “You need to learn your letters before you can write. You need to learn the fingerings on the strings before you play and sing.”
He pulled out a piece of paper and jotted a couple of words on it. “The trick is in holding the Alar firm in your mind. You need to believe they are connected. You need to know they are.” He handed me the paper. “Here is the phonetic pronunciation. It’s called the Sympathetic Binding of Parallel Motion. Practice.” He looked even more lupine than before, old and grizzled with no eyebrows.
He left to wash his hands. I cleared my mind using Heart of Stone. Soon I was floating on a sea of dispassionate calm. I stuck the two bits of metal together with pine pitch. I fixed in my mind the Alar, the riding-crop belief, that the two drabs were connected. I said the words, pulled the coins apart, spoke the last word, and waited.
No rush of power. No flash of hot or cold. No radiant beam of light struck me.