Maethril did not teach her to fight for two full years.
She taught her locks, first: the fat honest tumblers of Dolanaar storehouses, then the sly dwarven puzzles that traders brought through Rut'theran, then knots, which Maethril said were only locks that had not made up their minds. There was no schoolroom. Lessons happened wherever Maethril happened to be standing: a storehouse loft that smelled of dried moonberries, the back of the docks among crates stamped with dwarven runes. She was somebody's aunt in brown one week and a temple sweeper the next. The grey came out only at dusk, and only for the game.
To her mother Nyssara said she was learning the lock trade from a strongbox-mender at Rut'theran, which had the merit of being true. Her mother told the loom the girl would want the brown wool again.
Maethril taught her to sit in a hollow log from moonrise to moonset and afterward recite every creature that had passed and what it had been afraid of. The log was soft with rot and full of beetles that walked on her neck. The first night she named eleven creatures and was pleased with herself.
"Fourteen," said Maethril. "And you have told me what they were. I asked what they were afraid of."
"The doe was afraid of the nightsaber. The nightsaber wasn't afraid of anything. She was hungry."
"Hunger is a fear. Go on."
"The Sentinel on the path was afraid of being late. She kept looking at the moon. I don't know about the owl."
"Nobody knows about the owl. And the girl in the log?"
"Afraid of getting it wrong."
"Yes," Maethril said. "It carried."
She taught her to lose. Every dusk they played the same game: a silver leaf on a cord at Maethril's belt, and Nyssara to take it. It was the length of a thumb joint, veined like a real leaf and worn smooth. Every dusk Nyssara's wrist was caught in two cool fingers, gently, like a moth.
"You want it too loudly," Maethril would say. "I can hear you wanting."
Nyssara sulked. She trained. She learned which roots held weight and which only pretended to, the second kind mostly by landing. She learned poisons mostly by learning their antidotes, because Maethril held that anyone who could not undo a thing had no business doing it. For a whole season she brewed nothing but cures: a bitter bark tea for spider venom, a charcoal paste for nightcap, a grey powder for something Maethril would not name until the powder was right. Only then did the other vial come out of the case. They were corked in pairs, each with its answer beside it.
"Is there one in there you can't undo?" Nyssara asked.
"If there were," said Maethril, "I should have no business making it."
"Why not just teach me the daggers?" she demanded once, bruised and sixteen.
Maethril considered her for a long moment.
"Because a blade is an answer," she said, "and you have not yet learned to ask the question properly. Our people have Sentinels for war, and druids for the dreaming, and priestesses for the light of Elune. We are for the places that light does not fall. That is not the same as being creatures of the dark. Remember the difference. It is the whole of the craft."
It was the first time she had said "we." Nyssara noticed, and knew better by then than to ask who else.
In the second year Maethril began to send her places with things in her sleeve.
A purse to a net-mender at Rut'theran. Once a single button, which she carried the whole length of the bough feeling like a fool. There was one rule, and it was given once.
"You do not read what you carry. Not the outside of it, if you can help it. What you have not read, nobody can make you tell."
For months she kept it. Then, on a wet night near midwinter, a man who raked leaves on the paths of the Cenarion Enclave met her at the low gate, looked through her as if she were a draft, and left a scroll of bark in her hand. It was no longer than a finger and bound with cord.
She went home by the roofs. Darnassus was easy from above, all broad eaves and living wood, and she could cross the Craftsmen's Terrace without touching a street. On the roof of a cooper's shop she stopped to let a patrol go by below, and while she waited she looked at the knot.
It was a poor knot. Somebody had tied it one-handed in a hurry, and it itched at her the way two tellings of one story itched. She did not want what was in the scroll. She wanted to know whether the knot could be undone and done up again so that nobody would know, which was a far more dangerous thing to want, and which she had now wanted twice in her life.
It came apart in three breaths.
The hand inside was cramped and small. Third night of the waning. Morrowgrain, eleven sacks, in by the low gate. None out. That is forty since the frost. Below that: The Archdruid's bower lit until dawn. Two of his circle with him. And below that: A priestess, hooded, after moonset. She had a scroll going in and none coming out.
Nyssara read all of it by the glow of the terrace lamps. She did not know what morrowgrain was. She knew what the rest was, because she had been doing it since she was six. It was a count. Somebody was sitting on a root inside the Cenarion Enclave, counting the Archdruid.
She thought of a hand and a sleeve at a moonwell. She thought, very clearly: we spy on the druids.
Something landed on the ridge of the roof, three feet from her head, with no sound whatever.
It was an owl. A big one, barred grey, with a strip of blue leather on one leg. It folded its wings and looked at her with flat gold interest, and Nyssara, who had counted owls all her life, understood for the first time that an owl might be counting on someone else's behalf.
"Stand up," said a voice behind her. "Keep your hands away from your belt."
She should have heard the armor. A Sentinel had come up the cooper's outside stair in full mail and Nyssara had not caught one tick of it, because she had been reading. The scroll was already up her sleeve. It had gone there by itself.
The Sentinel wore a captain's crest on her pauldron, and she looked at Nyssara as the owl had, only without the interest.
"I would ask your name," she said, "but if I had it I should have to write it down. You are one of Quietstep's."
Nyssara said nothing.
"Don't trouble to lie. There are certain people in this city I am not to see, on an authority nobody will put in writing, and when my owl finds one of them on a roof I am to discover that I was looking at the moon. How old are you?"
"Sixteen."
"Sixteen. She gets them young, then." She smelled of oiled leather and wet cat. "My Sentinels stand in the open with their names on a roll. When one of them does wrong there is a hearing, and the person she wronged can come and look her in the face. Who looks you in the face, girl? Who would even know where to go?"
"I haven't done anything."
"Not yet. You haven't got a knife yet, either. Both are coming." She said it without heat, which was worse. "Knives in the dark are how the Highborne began. They had excellent reasons too. They were also protecting us."
She lifted her fist and the owl went to it.
"Whatever is in your left sleeve, I do not want to know what it says. That I am obliged not to want to know is the whole of what is wrong with you people. Go home. Use the street. Roofs are for owls and for those with something to be ashamed of."
Nyssara used the street. She walked the lamplit length of the terrace with her ears burning, as they had burned once beside a well, and it was not the same. She had been scorned then for a thing she had not done. This was the first time she had been despised for a thing she had.
She retied the cord under the last lantern before the gate. She took care over it.
Maethril was in the storehouse loft at Dolanaar, sorting dried moonberries into a crock by lamplight. She held out her hand for the scroll and did not open it.
"You read it," she said.
"How?"
"The man who tied this is left-handed and wanted to be anywhere else. You have tied it beautifully. You tie everything beautifully. It is your worst habit. What else?"
"A Sentinel caught me on a roof. A captain. She had an owl. She knew whose I was. She let me go. She said knives in the dark are how the Highborne began."
"That will be Shaleth Moonspear." Maethril picked a stem out of the berries. "She is the most honest officer in Darnassus, and she is not wrong. Remember that she is not wrong. The day you forget it you will be exactly what she thinks you are." She pushed the crock aside. "Sit down. You have decided to know half of something, and half is the dangerous amount. You had better have the rest."
Nyssara sat on a sack.
"There is a company with no roll and no hall," Maethril said. "The few who call it anything call it the Hidden Bough. It has seven places, and six of them are filled. We watch. We watch the corners the Sentinels cannot enter without a banner and the priestesses cannot enter without a blessing: a cellar where somebody is saying the wrong prayers, a dock where the tallies do not match, a magistrate who has begun to enjoy his work."
"And the druids."
"And, among others, the Archdruid's circle."
"He grew the tree." It came out as a child's protest, and she heard it. "We live in it."
"We do. Every one of us sleeps tonight inside a thing one man made. He is proud, he has not been easy in himself for a long time, and he answers to nobody. Someone ought to know how much morrowgrain goes in at his gate. I do not say he is doing wrong. I do not know. That is why there is a list."
"And if the list says he is? Who do we tell?"
"That is the second question. You are still on the first."
"The man who gave you this has raked the Enclave's paths for nine years," Maethril said. "Until tonight, four people living knew what he is. You are the fifth. You are sixteen, and you stood on a roof in front of a captain of Sentinels with his handwriting up your sleeve. Had it been any officer but Moonspear, one who did want to know, he would be in a cell by sunrise and I should be deciding whether he could be left alive in it."
Nyssara's mouth had gone dry. She had thought about the knot and about the list. She had not once thought about the man, who had looked through her at the gate as he had been taught to.
"I am not going to punish you," Maethril said. "You are going to carry him instead. Every day, for as long as he is in that garden, you will know his face and know that you could end him with a sentence. It is heavier than a scroll." She pulled the crock back toward her. "Help me with these. The soft ones go to Ilyenne."
On the last evening of the second year Nyssara did not reach for the silver leaf at all.
She was tired. It had been a week of roofs and one bad night in the log, and the leaf had come to seem a small thing beside a gardener's face. They sat on a high root west of Dolanaar, where the ground fell away and a person could see far along the bough, and they shared a heel of bread and a soft cheese and talked of nothing. Ilyenne had finally taken an apprentice, a niece from Darnassus with flour in her eyebrows, and Maethril held that the tarts were already not what they had been.
Far off, the lamps of Darnassus kindled, one terrace and then the next. Nyssara watched them and wanted nothing.
When Maethril rose to leave, the cord at her belt was empty.
She looked at it for some time. Nyssara looked too, and then at her own hand, which was closed. She opened it. The leaf lay on her palm, warm, as though it had been there a while. She could not have said when her fingers had done it. They had not asked her.
Then Maethril laughed, which Nyssara had never heard before, and went to fetch the daggers.
She came back with a roll of oilcloth and opened it on the root. There were two of them, a hand and a half long, the blades dark and plain, the grips bound in grey cord gone smooth with use. They were not new.
"Whose were they?"
"The last person to sit in the seventh place."
"What happened to her?"
"She did the work for a very long time, and then one winter she got old. It happens to us now."
Nyssara held out the leaf. Maethril closed her fingers back over it.
"That one was never mine. It has hung on that cord for two years, waiting for someone to take it properly. Seven places. Seven leaves." She sat down again. "Now. Your first work that is truly your own, and you will not need those for it. Wear them anyway. Learn the weight. There is an acolyte in the Enclave. Two years in, well liked, quick. He has lately been noticed by the Archdruid's circle. He runs their errands and is let into rooms. He believes in the Archdruid as some people believe in the moon. I do not want anything stolen from him. I want someone near him. Someone to sit and listen while he talks, which I am told he does. I am also told he once had a friend who was good at that."
Down at the bridge the frogs were starting.
"You knew," Nyssara said. "At the well."
"Before the well. I counted you behind a rain barrel when you were six, and I counted a boy with a lamp pole the same week. I did not arrange it. I only declined to waste it."
"Say his name."
"Faelen Starbough," said Maethril.
Nyssara did not pause. She had learned that much. She looked down the bough to where Darnassus burned, and found the cluster of lights that was the Enclave, and thought of a boy with a pole twice his height, glancing back over his shoulder to see who was watching.
Then she buckled on the daggers.