His mother did not say much more that night. What she did say, she said the way she taught him letters: slowly, clearly, and only once, so that he had to listen.
"Never ask it its name. Never speak to it out loud, not even alone, not even in the barn. Never let anyone see your eyes go to it. Not Elsie. Not Rowan. Not your father." She held his hands so tightly his fingers ached. "And if anyone from the Temple asks you what you saw in the water, you saw nothing. You will see nothing for the rest of your life."
"Why?" he had asked. "Mother, how do you know about it? What is it?"
She had looked at him in the lantern light for a long moment, and he had seen her decide, and he had seen what she decided.
"When you are older," she said. "Not tonight. Tonight you go to bed, and tomorrow you work in the field with your father like it's any other day. Because it is. Do you understand me?"
"No," Adrian said honestly.
That had almost made her smile. "Good. Then at least you're not lying to me."
She had walked him back to the house with the lantern, and stood at the bottom of the ladder until he climbed into the loft, and he had lain awake until the rooster crowed, thinking about the word erased, and about a silver thread in the air where a scythe had been.
❖ ❖ ❖
It was, in fact, not any other day. It was the day his father cut the south meadow.
The south meadow was the only land the Vales rented that had not failed. It lay low, near the river, where the ground stayed wet, and every year it gave them enough hay to see the goats and Barley through the winter. This year the grass had come up thick and green and knee-high, as if the meadow had not heard about the three bad harvests and did not care to.
Tomas Vale walked out to it at first light with the scythe over his shoulder. His knee was better. He said so, twice, which meant it wasn't.
"You'll rake behind me," he told Adrian. "Turn the rows at noon. Don't touch the blade."
"I know."
"You knew last year, too." His father glanced at him sidelong. "Still got all your toes?"
"Nine and a half."
Tomas barked a laugh, surprised out of him, and some of the stiffness went out of his shoulders. It went out of Adrian's too. For the length of that laugh, the chapel was very far away.
Then his father set his feet at the edge of the meadow, and swung, and Adrian forgot about the chapel entirely.
He had seen it a hundred times. He had never seen it.
Tomas did not chop at the grass. He did not even really cut it. He planted his back foot, turned his hips, and let the long curved blade fall through its arc, and the grass simply lay down in front of him in a neat green swathe, as though it had been waiting for permission. Then one step forward. Plant. Turn. Fall. Another swathe. The blade whispered. It never stopped moving, and it never seemed to hurry.
Adrian stood with the wooden rake in his hands and watched.
And there it was.
The seam. The thread. Faint as a spider's silk in the morning light, a silver line traced the path of the blade - no, not the blade. Adrian blinked and looked harder. The line did not start at the blade. It started at his father's back heel, where it pressed into the soft ground. It ran up through the calf, bent at the knee - the good knee, the right one - swung through the hips like a rope pulled round a post, travelled along the arms, and only then flowed out into the steel.
The blade was the last thing. The cut happened in the heel.
The thread faded. Adrian's head gave a small, sharp throb behind the eyes, like the first warning of a summer headache.
[Observation: Scything (Tomas Vale)]
[Progress: 1%]
The grey window hung at the edge of his vision, dim and flickering, and was gone before he could look at it properly - which was good, because his father had turned around.
"Rake," said Tomas.
Adrian raked.
❖ ❖ ❖
It went on like that all morning.
Every time his father swung, Adrian tried to see the thread again. Most of the time he couldn't. He'd stare at the blade until his eyes watered and see nothing but a farmer cutting hay. Then he'd stop trying so hard, and his gaze would slip a little wider, taking in the whole of his father - the feet, the back, the breath - and for half a heartbeat the silver would be there, and the ache behind his eyes would tighten by one small notch.
[Progress: 2%]
The window never stayed long. It seemed to understand, somehow, when someone might be looking. It opened when Tomas's back was turned and closed before his father straightened up.
By mid-morning Adrian had noticed something else. The thread was not the same every swing. When his father was fresh, it ran clean and bright from heel to blade. After an hour, it began to stutter at the left knee - the bad one - a tiny hitch, like a knot in the silk. Tomas didn't seem to notice it. But every time the thread snagged there, the swathe of grass that followed was a little less even, and his father's jaw was a little tighter.
[Progress: 3%]
"You're staring," Tomas said, without turning around.
Adrian jumped and nearly dropped the rake. "Sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Be raking." His father wiped his face with his sleeve and leaned on the scythe's long handle, breathing hard. "What're you looking at, anyway? You've been watching me like I'm a two-headed calf."
The easy lie was right there: nothing. He'd be saying it for the rest of his life, his mother had told him. But this was his father, and this wasn't the Temple, and the truth was harmless enough, if he only told part of it.
"Your knee," Adrian said. "The left one. It catches. About every twentieth swing, you put weight on it before you turn, and then the cut goes shallow at the end."
Tomas Vale stared at his son.
"Every twentieth," he repeated.
"About. It's more often now. Since the sun came over the trees."
His father was quiet. Then he swung again - slowly, watching himself this time - and Adrian saw the thread snag at the knee, and saw his father feel it, and saw his face change.
"Huh," said Tomas.
He did not ask how Adrian had noticed. He did not ask anything. But the next time he set his feet, he shifted his left foot a half-step back, taking the weight off the bad knee, and the swing that followed was cleaner, and the thread - Adrian saw it - ran straight and smooth all the way through.
"Huh," his father said again, and looked at Adrian for a long moment with an expression Adrian couldn't read, and went back to work.
[Progress: 5%]
❖ ❖ ❖
At noon they sat in the shade of the alder trees by the river and ate bread and hard cheese and drank water that tasted of the clay jug. Tomas stretched his leg out in front of him and rubbed the knee with the heel of his hand.
Adrian closed his eyes, pretending to rest, and thought as hard as he could about the grey window.
It opened in the dark behind his eyelids, which was stranger than seeing it in the air. The words were just as clear.
[Name: Adrian Vale]
[Age: 12]
[Trait: ████████]
[Profession: - ]
[Comprehension:]
[ - Scything (Tomas Vale): Observation 5%]
[Dissonance: 0]
He did not speak. His mother had said never to speak, and so he thought the words instead, deliberately, one at a time, the way he might write them on a slate.
What is Observation?
For a while nothing happened. He wondered if it could even hear thoughts. Then:
[The first stage.]
What are the other stages?
[Observation. Comprehension. Replication.]
Adrian turned that over. Observation was watching. He'd been watching all morning. Comprehension sounded like understanding - like the difference between knowing the letters of a word and knowing what the word meant. And Replication...
Doing it. Doing it the way he does.
[Yes.]
A strange feeling went through Adrian, starting in his chest and spreading out to his fingers. It took him a moment to recognize it, because it was not a feeling he had very often. It was excitement.
How long does it take?
[As long as it takes.]
That's not an answer.
[It is the only answer.]
He frowned behind his closed eyes. Hollis Brandt got [Sturdy Back] in one moment. He can lift a sack of flour right now that he couldn't lift yesterday. Oren got [Keen Nose] and he can smell things already. Why is mine so slow?
The window was still for long enough that Adrian thought he had asked a question it would not answer. Then it wrote, slowly:
[Their Interfaces give them what the Canon has already written.]
[You have nothing written.]
[You must write it yourself.]
Adrian opened his eyes.
The meadow was bright and green and half cut. Bees were working in the clover by the river. His father was sitting beside him, eyes closed, chewing slowly, with the sun coming through the alder leaves and dappling his tired face. It was the most ordinary scene in the world. It was so ordinary that for a moment the words in his head seemed like something from one of Brother Fennick's old stories.
You must write it yourself.
"You're thinking loud," said Tomas, not opening his eyes.
"How can you tell?"
"Your mother does the same thing. Goes all still, like a heron." His father cracked one eye. "Something on your mind?"
A great many things were on Adrian's mind. He picked the smallest one.
"Father. When you learned to scythe. How long did it take?"
Tomas thought about it. "To do it without cutting my feet? A summer. To do it right?" He shrugged. "My father said I did it right the year I turned twenty. I thought I'd been doing it right for years before that. Fathers are like that."
"Did [Steady Arm] help?"
"Some. Makes the swing straighter. It doesn't teach you where to put your feet." Tomas tapped his knee. "Nothing teaches you that but the field. The Trait's just a gift you're handed. The rest you've got to earn." He closed the eye again. "Why? Want to try?"
Adrian's heart thumped. "Can I?"
"No. You've got nine and a half toes. I'd like you to keep them." But there was a smile at the corner of his father's mouth. "Next year. Maybe."
❖ ❖ ❖
The afternoon was harder.
The sun was hot and the rows were heavy, and turning them with the wooden rake made Adrian's arms burn and his palms blister. But that wasn't what made it hard. What made it hard was the headache.
It had started as that small notch of pain behind his eyes. By the middle of the afternoon it was a steady, pounding weight, as if someone had tied a band around his skull and was tightening it one twist at a time. Every time he saw the silver thread, the band tightened. Every percentage point on the grey window cost him.
[Progress: 7%]
Squint. Watch. Throb.
[Progress: 8%]
By the time the shadows of the alders stretched all the way across the meadow, the light itself hurt. Adrian's mouth was dry and his stomach felt strange and sour. He kept blinking to clear his eyes, and every time he blinked, the green of the grass looked a little less green.
[Progress: 9%]
He tried to watch one more swing. He caught the thread at his father's heel, and followed it up to the knee, and-
[Stop.]
The word slammed across his vision, larger than anything the window had written before.
Adrian stopped. He stood swaying with the rake in his hands and the world tipping gently back and forth like a boat.
[You are not ready for more today.]
[Rest.]
Why? he thought, dizzily. I'm so close to ten.
[Ten is a number. You are a boy.]
[Rest.]
It was, Adrian thought, the closest thing to kindness the window had shown. It was also, somehow, an insult. He did not have time to decide which, because his knees chose that moment to fold, and he sat down very suddenly in the cut hay.
"Adrian?"
His father was there, crouching, the scythe dropped carelessly in the grass - Tomas Vale, who never, ever left a blade lying where someone could step on it. A big rough hand pressed against Adrian's forehead.
"You're burning. Too much sun." Tomas swore under his breath, a soldier's word Adrian wasn't supposed to know. "I'm a fool. I had you out here since dawn with no hat. Your mother'll have my hide." He pulled the stopper from the clay jug and held it to Adrian's lips. "Drink. Slowly. There."
The water was warm and tasted of clay and it was the best thing Adrian had ever drunk. He drank until his father took it away.
"It's not the sun," Adrian said, before he could stop himself.
Tomas went still. "What?"
Adrian's head pounded. He looked up at his father's face, sunburnt and worried and close, and felt the truth rising in his throat like water in a well. He wanted to say it. He wanted, more than anything, to tell someone - to hand the grey window to his father the way he'd handed him a broken toy when he was small, and have him fix it.
Never let anyone see. Not your father.
"I didn't sleep," Adrian said. "Last night. Because of - the chapel. I kept thinking about it."
It wasn't a lie. It just wasn't the truth.
Tomas's face softened, and something in Adrian's chest twisted hard, because he could see his father believing him.
"Aye," Tomas said quietly. "I didn't sleep much either." He got an arm under Adrian's shoulders and hauled him up. "Come on. We'll finish tomorrow. The meadow's not going anywhere."
He retrieved the scythe, and they walked home through the long gold evening, Tomas limping on the bad knee and Adrian limping on nothing at all, and neither of them said anything.
❖ ❖ ❖
That night, lying in the loft with a wet cloth on his forehead that his mother had put there without asking a single question, Adrian closed his eyes and looked at the window one last time.
[Comprehension:]
[ - Scything (Tomas Vale): Observation 9%]
Nine percent. A whole day of watching - of headaches and burning arms and a band around his skull - for nine percent of one thing. Of the one thing his father had said took a lifetime to do right.
Hollis Brandt had gotten his whole Trait in a heartbeat.
For a moment the unfairness of it was so huge that Adrian had to press his fists against his eyes to keep from making a noise that would wake Elsie. What good was a Trait that gave you nothing? What good was a window that made you pay for every scrap, when everyone else was simply handed a gift, finished and polished and bright?
The window flickered.
A line wrote itself beneath the others. Adrian had not asked it anything.
[Hollis Brandt's back will never be stronger than the Canon allows.]
He lay very still.
[Nothing will be given to you.]
[But no one can take away what you have learned.]
The window went dark.
Adrian lay in the loft for a long time after that, listening to the house. The hearth stones ticking. His father's heavy breathing through the wall. Elsie's cold feet. And far off, at the other end of the valley, the faint sound of someone laughing at the Crooked Plough, where the High Examiner of the Temple had taken the good room and asked for fifty years of records.
Nine percent, Adrian thought.
It wasn't much. But it was his.