Chapter 3: Two Against Two

The practice ground lay in the shadow of the World Tree, a wide ring of packed earth where no grass had dared to grow in years. Sumpi and the Wizard stood at its edge, and in her arms Kaken lay awake, his eyes half-lidded, regarding the whole affair with the weary patience of a very small judge.

"Do you not wish to join them?" the Wizard asked.

Sumpi shook her head. "I'm a healer. I don't need to fight." She shifted Kaken higher against her shoulder. "I'll be here when it's over, and I'll fix whatever they break."

"Whatever they break," the Wizard echoed, with the faintest of smiles. "That, child, may be a considerable amount."

On the field, four children took their places. Schnee and John stood on one side, Steve and Dino on the other, and the Wizard's decree on partners had pleased exactly no one.

"This is going to be fun!" John announced, bouncing on his toes. He was already grinning, wide and bright, like a boy handed a gift.

Schnee looked at him the way one looks at a hole in the roof. "Why are you on my team?"

"Begin," said the Wizard.

Dino moved first. Blue light poured down her arms and guttered out, and in its place three slender needles hung above her palm, still as winter stars. Her face was calm. Dino's face was always calm.

"This might hurt," she said, and flung out her hand.

The needles crossed the field faster than the eye could follow. Schnee had time to open her mouth, and no more. 

A white shape leapt between her and the points, jaws snapping, and one needle burst to glittering dust between its teeth.

"Whoa," Schnee breathed. Then, grinning, she rubbed the great creature's ears. "Good boy."

It was a wolf, tall as a pony and white as fresh snow, and it shook itself like a dog out of water.

"That's her summon," Sumpi murmured.

Steve watched with folded arms and a curl of the lip. "Cute. But if it were me, I would have..."

He never finished. Something struck him from the side, and the next instant his face was in the dirt, pinned beneath a broad palm.

"Too slow," said John.

"He used the blast to throw himself," the Wizard observed, pointing to a scorched circle in the earth where John had stood a breath before. "A little thunder beneath the heel, and the whole boy becomes the arrow. Interesting."

John did not pause to be admired. He drove a fist toward the ground beside Steve's head, and a blast cracked behind his knuckles, doubling the speed and the weight of it. Dust leapt skyward. "Does that hurt?" he crowed, and struck again, and again, each blow faster than the last. "Does that hurt, huh?"

It ended with John airborne. A bloom of white fire caught him in the chest, and he flew backward across the ring and skidded to a stop on his back. Steve rose slowly, brushing the dust from his sleeves. His blasts never lingered. They bloomed in one chosen spot for a single second, and in that second they struck like a falling beam.

"Alright," said Steve. "My turn."

He spread his fingers, and the air around John exploded. Flash after flash drove him backward, step by staggering step, until his shoulders struck the great trunk of the World Tree.

"Hey!" Sumpi cried. "Don't hurt the tree!"

The bark did not so much as blacken.

John, pinned and bleeding, was laughing. "Is that all? Come on, Steve, I'm enjoying this!"

"You're insane," Steve snarled, and pressed harder.

Behind him, Dino drew a slow breath. Her two remaining needles hung at her shoulder, and she watched Steve's barrage hold John against the wood. Finish it, she thought. End it before the wolf returns.

She threw them both.

They went wide of Schnee's face by a hair. Schnee dropped flat into the dirt, and the needles whistled over her and buried themselves in the roots. Dino's hands were empty. She stood there, and for the first time that day, her face was not calm.

The wolf was already running.

It crossed the ground in three bounds and struck her full in the chest, and Dino went down beneath a weight of white fur and open jaws, a hair's breadth from her throat. She lay very still.

"...I yield," 

she whispered.

"A craftsman keeps one tool in reserve," said the Wizard, quite gently. "Dino spent every one on a single throw. Eagerness is not the same as skill."

"Dino is out," Sumpi said, and she was already moving. Kaken bobbed against her shoulder as she ran, and she dropped to her knees beside the fallen girl with a hand already glowing.

Across the field, Steve's blasts were still hammering the tree, until a white shape slammed into his side and teeth closed around both his wrists.

"Get off!" He wrenched free and drove a blast into the creature's flank. The wolf yelped and sprang back, and Steve rounded on John with a sneer. "Look at you. Needing a dog to save you. How pathetic."

"Everyone's help is welcome!" John called cheerfully.

Steve laughed, and turned, and found himself alone. Dino lay in the grass with Sumpi's hands upon her, and his smile died.

"What?"

The wolf lunged. Its teeth tore into his side, and blood darkened his shirt. He gasped and fell to one knee, and for a breath it seemed that all was done.

Then he raised both hands.

It was not surrender.

He did not aim at the beast's body. He aimed at its head, and fired, and fired again, every blast landing on the same bright point. 

The air shuddered. His palms blistered and split and smoked, and still he did not stop, until the white wolf stood motionless for one terrible heartbeat and then crumbled into drifting motes of light.

"No!" Schnee screamed. "No, no, no..."

The color left her face all at once, as though the thing she had made had taken a part of her with it, and she folded to the ground and did not move.

Steve swayed on his feet, blood on his shirt and ruin in his hands. One against two, and he had very nearly won. 

He lifted his eyes to the last of his foes, and found John standing two paces away with a burned arm, a torn sleeve, and a smile that had not faltered once.

"Wow," said John warmly. "That was amazing. Truly." His grin widened. "How weak you are."

His fist drove into Steve's gut with a blast behind it, and the world went dark.

Dust settled on the broken earth. Nobody spoke. 

"John and Schnee have won," said the Wizard.

Sumpi was already running again.

Night crept softly into the Garden, and with it came a fire.

The children sat in a loose ring beneath the World Tree, whose pale blossoms glowed above them like a second sky. Sparks climbed from the flames. Somewhere in the dark, crickets sang.

Steve sat with his hands in his lap, wrapped in clean white bandages. Where they had slipped, the skin beneath was red and shiny, the mark of a price paid in full. He regarded them like a man who had lost an argument to arithmetic.

Beside him, John lay flat on his back with his arms flung wide, staring at the stars.

"I can't feel my legs," he announced.

"You used them as rockets," said Dino.

"My eyebrows hurt. How can my eyebrows hurt?" He sounded delighted. "Everything hurts. It was wonderful."

"You are the worst," said Schnee, but she was smiling, and the color had returned to her cheeks. Curled beside her, nose tucked beneath its tail, the white wolf slept soundly, as though it had never ceased to be. 

She had called it the moment she woke, hands shaking and eyes wet, and it had come to her whole. Now her fingers rested on its fur, and every so often she checked that it was breathing.

Sumpi sat nearest the fire with Kaken in her arms. He had located a peach somewhere and was working through it with solemn, sticky determination, ignoring everyone. Her hands lay in her lap, and they were trembling, faintly.

"I still say I should have won," Steve muttered.

"You were two on one," said Dino.

"I almost won two on one!"

"Almost," said John, to the stars, "is a good word for you."

Steve threw a pebble. It bounced off John's forehead. "Ow," John said, with great satisfaction.

Dino drew her knees to her chest and looked into the fire. "It was my fault. I threw everything at once. I thought if I ended it fast..."

"You wanted to win," said Schnee. "Everybody wants to win."

"Wanting isn't a plan."

"No," said the Wizard.

They looked up. He had sat just beyond the firelight, so quiet they had half forgotten him. Now he leaned forward, and the flames gilded his white beard.

"One strength, however great, is still only one strength," he said. "John is reckless, and he knows it. Steve is powerful, and he knows that too. Alone, neither would have won today." His eyes moved from face to face. "Remember that, whenever you are sure that you need no one."

The Wizard's gaze fell upon Sumpi, upon the small tremor in her fingers that she had been trying to hide beneath Kaken's blanket. He rose, crossed the firelight, and laid his weathered hand over hers.

"Healing four weary children is no small work," he said quietly. "Let me take some of the weight."

The trembling stopped. A shiver ran through Sumpi, a thin, cold prickle that crept up her arms and faded away, as if a winter wind had passed through her and gone on.

"That's the Exchange," she whispered.

"A small one," said the Wizard. He tucked his hand back into his sleeve and sat down again, and Sumpi did not see him flex his fingers once, slowly, as though they were stiff.

"Father," said Schnee, "can you tell us a story?"

He looked into the fire for a long moment.

"I have one," he said at last. "It concerns a Dual."

A rustle ran around the circle. Even John turned his head.

"In the elder days," said the Wizard, "there lived a man who held both halves of the atom. He could raise a wall in a breath and unmake it in the next, and the world forgot he had any limits at all. He took up every challenge, and he never lost. Having never lost, he forgot that he could."

The fire cracked.

"Then, one summer, two children came to the town where he lived. One was an Aethel girl who could build but could not fight. 

One was an Umbral boy who could break but could not build. Alone, each was weak. Everyone laughed at them, and the Dual laughed loudest, for they dared to challenge him."

"Did they lose?" Schnee asked.

"The girl raised walls, and the boy broke them, and each wall he broke pushed the Dual a step farther along a road the girl had laid. 

A Dual is one mind carrying two powers, but these two were a pair of minds carrying one purpose." The Wizard smiled. "By dusk, the greatest Dual of his age was sitting on the ground with his mouth open."

John burst out laughing, then groaned and clutched his ribs. "He got wrecked."

"He did. And then, for the first time in his life, he stood up and asked them to teach him." The Wizard's voice softened. 

"The old tales say a Dual makes a leader, but that is not because he is stronger than other men. It is because he has stood on both sides of the river, and learned that neither side is whole without the other."

The fire settled. A single blossom drifted down from the canopy and landed in the coals, where it flared once and was gone.

"Is it true?" asked Dino.

"Every word."

"How do you know?" said Sumpi.

The Wizard looked at her, and the firelight danced in his old eyes, and he said nothing at all.

Kaken, who had finished his peach and found it wanting, offered the stone to the Wizard with a very serious face. The Wizard took it, solemnly, as if it were a treasure.

"Sleep, children," he said. "The Garden will keep."

The fire sank to embers, and one by one the circle fell asleep. John snored. Steve muttered insults to the dark. Schnee and Dino had curled up around the white wolf as though it were a hearth.

Sumpi stayed awake, Kaken warm against her, and so she alone saw the Wizard rise and walk to the foot of the World Tree.

He laid one hand against the bark. For a long moment he stood there, an old man with his head bowed. Far above him, the pale blossoms flickered and dimmed, together, for the space of a single breath, as if the tree itself were paying for something.

Then the light returned, and the Wizard let go, and he did not look back.