* * *
The first of the three days he spent entirely alone.
He did not go to the lesson room. He did not seek Casvar or Seren or Dren. He closed the door of his room from the inside — the latch on his side, still the smallest luxury Valdrek had given him — and he sat on the floor and he listened to what he was carrying.
Not metaphorically. He had learned, over thirty-three days of practice, that the pull had texture the way sound had texture — not loud or quiet but present in ways that rewarded attention if you were patient enough to sit still for it. He had been treating it as a problem to be managed. Today he tried something different.
He treated it as information.
He breathed slowly and let the pull move outward without directing it, without the channeled narrowing Casvar had taught him — just the tide, going where tides went, touching what was nearest. The three dead in the corridor. The preserved bodies in the alcoves farther along the hall. The deep stone of the citadel walls, which had their own quality when the pull moved through them, something old and compressed, like the smell of a room that had not been opened in a very long time.
He paid attention to the differences.
The dead in the corridor felt close — not physically close, though they were, but close in the way a thing feels close when it is oriented toward you. Their momentum, which he now understood as the direction of unfinished lives, pressed toward him with the same patient insistence the pull pressed outward. Two things seeking the same point from opposite sides.
The preserved bodies farther along were different. Less directed. Their momentum had dispersed slightly over time — not gone, but diffused, the way a sound diffuses as it travels. He could still feel the shape of what they had been moving toward, but it was blurred at the edges, approximate.
He thought about twelve hundred of those, all at once, all pressing outward through him in a single moment.
He thought about what it would mean to release that. Not as a weapon — not in the direction Casvar intended, not through the circle in the eastern wing. Just release. The pull let go. The accumulation dispersed.
He sat with the question of what happened to twelve hundred unfinished directions when the thing holding them simply stopped holding.
He did not have an answer. He noted the absence and moved to the next question.
The next question was this: what did he want.
He turned it over carefully, the way he turned over every question — by function, not sentiment. What did he want, and what was the mechanism for obtaining it, and what did each available path cost.
He wanted to understand what he was before he agreed to be used as it.
That was the honest answer. Three days was not enough time to understand it. But three days was what he had, and insufficient time had never been a reason to stop working — it was a reason to work more precisely.
By the end of the first day he had not arrived at a decision.
But he had mapped the shape of the question more accurately than he had before.
He thought: a man who does not know what he is cannot make a sound choice about what he does with it.
He thought: I have two days left.
He breathed. He held the pull steady. Outside, in the corridor, the three dead stood and waited with the patience of things that had nowhere else to be.