* * *
He told Casvar in the morning, standing in the doorway of the upper room the way he had stood thirty-six days ago when he first said: teach me.
He said it plainly: they had tested the connection. The channels had received the pull and oriented it correctly. The backlash path was confirmed in the small version. They wanted to move forward with the release using Seren's method rather than Casvar's.
Casvar listened without moving.
When Kael finished, the old man was quiet for a long time. Not the productive quiet of thinking — the other kind. The quiet of someone sitting with the distance between what they planned and what has actually arrived.
He said, finally: "She did not tell me about the test."
Kael said: "She asked me not to tell you in advance."
Casvar said: "I know why." He did not say it with any particular weight. It was a statement about the mechanics of the situation, not a complaint. "She did not want me to adjust the conditions."
Kael said: "Yes."
Casvar said: "And the channel held."
Kael said: "Yes."
The Fractures on Casvar's skin moved in their slow river-motion. He turned toward the window. He stood with his back to the room for a moment and Kael watched the Fractures move and waited.
Then Casvar said something that Kael had not expected.
He said: "I hoped she was right."
He said it quietly. Not with the assessment voice — with something underneath that, something that had not been a tool in any of their thirty-seven days of lessons. Something that Kael recognized, from twenty-four years in a different world, as the sound a person makes when a fear they have been carrying for a long time lifts slightly.
He said: "I needed the Kaer. I have needed it for eleven years, since the southern working began. I structured the teaching, I structured the conditions, I structured what I showed you and when I showed it. All of that is true." He turned from the window. His face was the assessment face — but Kael could see, now, the thing underneath it. "It is also true that I did not want to lose you. The distinction between those two things has been — unclear to me for longer than I would prefer."
Kael sat with that.
He said: "You could have told me what Casvar's predecessor used the circle for. The first day."
Casvar said: "Yes."
He said: "Why didn't you."
Casvar said: "Because a man who knows he is going to be spent does not learn. He waits to be finished."
Kael thought about that. He thought about the thirty-seven days and the one hundred and thirty words and the question he had asked on the first day in the upper room: teach me. He thought about whether he would have asked it if he had known what the teaching was for.
He thought: probably not. He thought: Casvar was right. He thought: that does not entirely excuse it.
He said: "I know."
Casvar said: "The circle in the eastern wing needs to be restored before the release. Three days of work, perhaps four. The accumulation is still within a viable window, but the window is shorter than I calculated."
He said it as a fact. Back to assessment.
Kael understood: this was Casvar returning to the mode in which he was reliable. The honesty of clear operations, concrete next steps, the precision that had no room for the thing that had briefly been underneath it.
He said: "Then we start tomorrow."
Casvar said: "Yes."
They stood in the upper room in the world without a sun and looked at each other for a moment.
Then Casvar moved toward the wooden case, and opened it, and arranged the three instruments on the bench, and the lesson continued.