Chapter 16. The Craft

Dorn's shoulder took a long time to heal. An old body mended reluctantly, and for two weeks we did not descend into the Verge. That did not mean we were idle. During those two weeks, the old man trained me in an entirely new way.

Before the northern dungeon, he had taught me to hide: strike with half my strength, draw no attention, keep the leash tight. Now that he knew what waited at the end of that leash, everything changed.

“Show me how you hit,” he said on the first morning, when we went to the empty ground behind the tavern. With his good hand, he tossed an old section of timber at my feet. “All of it. Don't hold back. I'm the only one watching.”

I struck. The log, thick as my leg, burst into splinters, and my fist drove wrist-deep into the frozen earth beneath it.

Dorn studied the hollow in the ground. Then he looked at me and spat aside.

“Absurd strength,” he said. “More than you know what to do with, and not a grain of sense behind it.”

“Anything I hit like that will go down,” I pointed out.

“It will,” he agreed. “If you hit it. You fight like a battering ram. A ram is useful against a gate because the gate stands there waiting. A creature won't. It'll move, you'll bury all that magnificent strength in the stone, and it will have all the time it needs to answer.” He approached and traced the edge of the hollow with his boot. “You brought down the Carapace Beast with one blow, and now you're proud of yourself. Do you know why it worked? Because it was enormous, slow, and standing over my head with its forelimbs raised. Only a blind man could have missed it. The depths won't give you many gifts like that. You'll meet things that are quick, small, poisonous, and clever enough to come at you together. Brute strength won't save you there. Something else will.”

“What?”

“The craft,” Dorn said.

And that was what he began driving into me—patiently, mercilessly, one day after another.

It turned out I knew almost nothing. I could strike hard and move quickly because this body had been made that way, but that was not skill. It was a gift I had received for nothing, no different from an inheritance dropped into a rich man's hands. I used my strength the way a child might swing his father's sword: with effort, without judgment, and without understanding.

Dorn knew everything I did not. Age and old injuries had taken much of his strength and speed, but they had not taken his knowledge. He understood timing, distance, and balance. He could read a creature's intention from the shift of its shoulders or the way it settled its weight an instant before it moved. He knew how to conserve energy, protect his back, and let nine useless attacks go unmade so that the tenth landed precisely where it mattered.

“You can see their weak points,” he said as he circled me, using a stick in place of a sword. “That thing in front of your eyes shows them to you. Good. That's half the task. But seeing a target isn't the same as reaching it. The creature won't stand there waiting while you decide what to do. The ability to turn knowledge into the right action—that is everything. That is the difference between a butcher and a Seeker.”

He worked me without mercy, and for the first time since entering this world, I became tired. Not in the body; this body seemed to know almost nothing of fatigue. My mind exhausted itself instead. Teaching blind strength to think was harder than clearing dungeons.

During those two weeks, I came to understand something else. The old man was not merely giving me techniques. He was giving me himself: everything he had gathered over more than twenty years in the Verge, every lesson that had kept him alive where all his companions had fallen. He had no one else to leave it to. His students were gone, and he had never had children. Then a stranger appeared, blessed with senseless power and an empty head, and became the last vessel into which the old wolf could pour his knowledge before his own time ran out.

He trained me as though he were in a hurry.

Perhaps he was. I never asked.

I took everything he offered, greedily. Not because I loved the craft, but because every lesson was another step downward, and downward was the road home.

When his shoulder finally healed, we returned to the Verge. Neither of us was the same man who had entered the northern dungeon.

Kess kept his word. The contracts improved. No more clearing troublesome animals from a field for a handful of copper. He gave us real dungeons, the kind previously reserved for Silver-rank teams. Dorn chose among them with severe care, rejecting anything he believed remained beyond us. Not even the Source itself could have burned caution out of him. But the contracts he accepted, we completed.

That was when I learned what the craft was worth.

The old man could no longer carry every fight himself, so he fought through me. He followed a few paces behind, reading the dungeon and its creatures, giving brief commands—“the one on the left first,” “wait, it's drawing you in,” “back, make them come through the narrow passage.” I obeyed, and beneath the guidance of his voice, my reckless strength became precise, controlled work. I moved when he told me to move and struck where he directed me. Tier by tier, we reached the heart, and I brought down the masters—not by throwing myself forward like a blind ram, as I had against the Carapace Beast, but as Dorn had taught me: remain patient, recognize the opening, and make the deciding blow count.

The number above my status began rising again, steadily and confidently.

Twenty. Twenty-two. Twenty-three.

I was closing the distance to Dorn's thirty-four, slowly but surely. We both saw it, and neither of us spoke of it. Silver accumulated in my purse. I gave Kess his share, kept mine, and for the first time in this world, I had enough to think beyond the following day.

But silver was not what I counted at night.

I counted steps.

And then the rumors began to follow us.

Greyfall was small. Everything happened in plain sight, and other people's success was always noticed before one's own. At first, people merely glanced at me: the novice who had come out of the forest in autumn and, before winter, was carrying silver and clearing dungeons beside veterans. Then they began to recognize me. Hald, who had once greeted me with a spear, now nodded at the gate with the respect offered to one of their own. Conversations in The Grey Griffin would falter when I entered. Some people looked away. Others sought my eyes with open curiosity. A few watched with the heavy envy of people who had labored for years without rising, only to see someone else climb in months.

One day, two other Greyfall Seekers blocked my way outside the Guild office. They were the same men with copper badges I had seen on my first day. There was no open hostility in the gesture. They were testing me.

“They say you and Dorn closed the northern dungeon,” said the older one, a lean man with a crooked nose. “Truth or tavern talk?”

“We closed it,” I said.

“Just the two of you.”

“Just the two of us.”

He studied me slowly from head to foot, searching for something that would explain what he had heard and failing to find it.

“Strange,” he said at last. “You don't look like much.” It was not a threat. He simply did not understand, and the absence of an answer troubled him. “Well, watch yourself. The Verge has a special fondness for the lucky. It shelters them for a while, then collects everything at once.”

He stepped aside.

I did not answer. He was more right than he knew, though not about luck. I was a riddle to them, as I was to Kess and perhaps to the world itself, which did not know what measure to use for me. The higher I climbed, the more faces turned in my direction. Kess had warned me: The stronger you become, the more eyes will turn toward you.

I was rising, and I could feel those eyes between my shoulder blades.

In the evenings, when Dorn withdrew to his usual corner and the tavern quieted, I sat alone beside the hearth with the ring in my palm.

I wore it only at night now. In the dungeons, I feared losing it or damaging it against a creature's armor. The months had worn it smoother and thinner. Whenever I turned it between my fingers, I caught myself thinking the same thought—and it frightened me more than every envious stare.

Life here was becoming… bearable.

I had a name. I had a teacher who was placing the sum of his life in my hands. I had a patron, slippery though he was. I had a corner to sleep in, a hearth, silver in my purse, and people who nodded when I passed through the gate. This foreign life, the same one that kept inviting me to stay, was closing around me more tightly—and more comfortably. That comfort was both temptation and poison, because the easier it became to live here, the quieter grew the cold voice that drove me downward and home.

I had no right to let it fade.

I turned the ring and forced myself to remember. A tower of blocks taller than Leo. The yellow bucket beneath his bed. Promise-promise. Mira's freckles. Her hand at my collar. Her quiet words: I'm here. I remembered deliberately, until the memory ached, because the ache kept me from taking root.

The old man gave me his craft so I would survive. Kess offered his protection so he could profit. Greyfall offered warmth so I might stay. But I would not be buried here, bought here, or kept here. I would take everything they gave me, turn it into strength, and leave.

I would go beyond Korvengard, toward the place even Kess preferred not to name, where I could feel the road home lay hidden.

Now I had the beginnings of a craft. My strength was growing. Silver rang in my purse. Rumor ran ahead of me.

It was still not enough.

But it was no longer nothing.

I slipped the ring back onto my finger, stirred the coals, and went to sleep.

Dorn had promised me a deeper dungeon in the morning.