Aimi's tongue stuck out slightly whenever she concentrated. It annoyed Proctor Jeddah more than any of the Masters, but she wanted to impress him, so she tried to remember to keep her mouth closed. As with many bad habits, it crept back whenever she stopped thinking about not doing it.
She suddenly became aware that he was watching her with a look of mild disgust. She closed her mouth quickly, and promptly forgot where she was in the calculation. The scryglass went clear and the lines on the drift chart lost their glow.
Jeddah sighed loudly. "What is it?" he asked with exaggerated tiredness. He didn't add "this time," but they both knew he was thinking it.
"Sorry, Proctor, just a momentary distraction." She hunched over the chart and concentrated on the scryglass. Once again it showed her the waves and streams of the Synoptic. "Kadens," she said quietly, touching the stylus to the blue line that she had drawn earlier. It flared and began to slowly move across the page. "Dace," she intoned, glancing at the scryglass and touching the line again. The line reddened and a bulge clipped off into an oval that drifted ahead of the line. "A front is building," she murmured to herself.
"Novice! We all have work to do, so please keep your amateur observations to yourself!"
"Sorry, Proctor," she said softly, but this time her concentration did not waver. To the contrary, she dialed in her focus and immersed herself in the flow of the nishá. She allowed herself to pivot around dimensions, getting perspective from multiple projections, until she could visualize the transform matrix that would be needed to chart. She withdrew enough to put the stylus to the parchment and traced the transform. “Yetsen,” she breathed slowly. The chart deepened, whorls and spirals moving at various rates, sometimes twisting so that the entire map flipped. She felt as if she could reach in and touch the sigils that appeared alongside various features.
“Very good.” She turned with a little squeal at the new voice.
“Master Maroviha!” She rose and threw her arms open, then immediately drew her hands together and bowed solemnly. “Welcome Master,” she said, holding in her excitement.
Jeddah was staring down at the drift chart. “How did you…?” he began, touching the corner of the page gently, as if it might run from his finger.
Ilia Maroviha answered for her. “You need six dimensions for Tensir’s Transform. But here,” he turned to Aimi while indicating a region on the chart, “you should correct for the time shift. This is influenced by The Gyre. It pulls all space and time toward it, and so you must add a Lorrense term.”
“Master Maroviha,” she said with a tremble in her voice. “I do not know the Lorrense equations.”
“What?” He looked at Jeddah sharply. “Why not? Proctor, how can you have her working drift charts without the necessary preparation?”
“Master, she was only to practice with the stylus and the scryglass. We did not intend for her to-”
“Proctor, see to it that her belongings are moved to Kaddakin Hall. Aimi, come with me.” He turned without looking back, an artefex who was accustomed to being obeyed.
Aimi hastily scooped up the glass, stylus, and chart and hurried after him. She deliberately avoided looking at Proctor Jeddah, so her imagination supplied all the fury instead. Another unintentional enemy. She wondered, as she tried to put the scryglass into its case without losing Master Maroviha in the twists and turns in a section of the Ildrach that she had never been, what she would be doing had she stayed on the ‘stead. Probably running lunch up to her brothers in the high pastures this time of year. Weeding. Digging. Where did he go? She bit her lip.
Wait a minute.
She relaxed her jaw and widened her senses, listening to the winds of the Synoptic, feeling the currents of nishá. The ripple that marked his passing ended here. She narrowed her eyes. He likes simplicity, things others don’t think of. She gently collected light from the nearby window and fashioned it into an elementary shining. Then she blew it lightly from her cupped hands and watched as it rippled across the Synoptic, delicately outlining him standing right beside her.
She stepped back, startled, and he flowed back into sight. “Very, very good.” He gestured for her to walk beside him as he took a much more leisurely pace. “You have a gift, you know. Maybe more than I had at your age, but,” he paused looking at her with a grin, “maybe not.”
She laughed. “Probably not.”
“How are you fitting in here? Is your age a problem?”
Aimi looked down, hesitating.
“I’m about to make it worse, unfortunately. Kaddakin Hall is full of older students. You’re going to get a lot of jokes - and some serious inquiries - about being lost and looking for your mom.” He looked at her for a few strides. She still had some remnant of the roundness of childhood in her eyes and cheeks. Her hair fell in ringlets around the dark, smooth skin of her face and neck, the center pulled back into a single braid. “You should cut your hair,” he said abruptly, looking away.
She turned to him with a jerk. “What?”
“Will make you look older,” he said, gesturing with one hand. “If you want.” They walked on in silence.
“I was younger than you when they moved me to Kaddakin, which is why I know you’ll do fine. But this place is still dominated by boys and men. And for whatever reason, I think that makes the women a bit more…vicious.” He stopped again, turned and bent down to her. “Don’t let anyone mother you,” he said with an intensity that was hard to distinguish. It could have been anger, or maybe despair.
Then he smiled a little forcibly, and walked on. “You’ll do fine, just fine. Now, how are you doing with kinetics?”
