* * *
On the second day, Casvar came without being summoned.
He knocked. That was the first unusual thing — Casvar had never knocked before. The knock was not the knock of a person requesting entry. It was the knock of a person announcing a presence that intended to enter regardless, giving a moment's notice as courtesy rather than protocol.
Kael said the word for enter.
Casvar came in and looked at the room — at the cloth strips on the wall, at the slate propped on the ledge, at Kael sitting cross-legged on the floor with his hands resting open on his knees — and then sat on the bench the way he always sat: straight, unhurried, the Fractures on his skin doing their slow river-motion in the room's coldlight.
He said: "You did not come to the lesson."
Kael said: "I know."
Casvar said: "The teal thread has advanced."
Kael looked at him.
Casvar said: "I checked it this morning. The arc is steeper than it was four days ago. The three weeks I estimated may be closer to two."
He said it with no inflection. Not pressure. Not urgency. The flat delivery that Kael had spent thirty-four days learning to read as its own kind of urgency — the urgency of a fact being stated by someone who has already accepted the fact and is waiting for the person it belongs to to accept it also.
Kael said: "What changes in two weeks versus three."
Casvar said: "The difference between a threshold approached gradually and a threshold arrived at suddenly. At three weeks, you would have felt the shift coming. At two, you may not."
Kael sat with that.
He said: "You knew what you intended to use me for before I arrived."
It was not an accusation. He used the same flat delivery Casvar used — a fact being placed between them for acknowledgment.
Casvar looked at him. He said: "I have been preparing for the possibility of a Kaer for eleven years. I did not know when one would arrive. I did not know the form the arrival would take. When you came through the ash field with no Fractures and the instruments broke, I knew what the preparation was for."
Kael said: "And the teaching."
Casvar said: "Was genuine. You cannot direct what you cannot control. An undirected release destroys the vessel and everything nearby. I was not teaching you to be spent carelessly."
Kael said: "Only precisely."
Casvar said: "Yes."
The word sat in the room. Kael thought about it — about the distinction Casvar was making, and whether the distinction held, and whether it mattered.
He said: "Seren has a theory."
Casvar's Fractures slowed. Not stopped — slowed. A single degree of change that Kael now knew was significant.
He said: "I know about Seren's theory."
Kael looked at him.
Casvar said: "She presented it to me two years ago. Before you arrived. Before there was a Kaer to test it on." He paused. "I told her it was theoretically possible and practically unverifiable. I told her that relying on an unverified theory in an irreversible situation was not a risk I could endorse."
Kael said: "And now."
Casvar looked at the window. At the permanent dark beyond it. When he looked back, his expression had the quality Kael had seen once before — in the eastern wing, standing in front of the fused stone circle. Not regret. The older thing. The assessment of someone who has weighed two losses and is choosing between them.
He said: "Now you have two weeks, and the theory is the only thing that changes the calculation."
He stood. He looked at Kael for a long moment — not the reading look, not the assessment look. Something less categorized.
He said: "I have not told you what happens to me if the southern Soul-Lords' working reaches this citadel. I will tell you now, because you asked to understand what you are holding before you decide what to do with it."
He said it in three sentences. Clear, short, precise.
Kael sat with what the three sentences meant for a long time after Casvar left.
He thought: it is not a world. It is the world. Everything in the territory — the citadel, the ash fields, the dead in their alcoves, the three bodies in the corridor outside his door — all of it ceases if the southern working reaches its completion.
He thought: twelve hundred directions pressing outward, or twelve hundred directions swallowed by something larger.
He thought: I have one day left.