Exile

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Wren had hidden her abilities for many years, living quietly with her parents and brother on their farm. All through that time she had heard the entelechs – especially the Autumnal – calling to her. Inviting her to bring them into the world to work wonders. Her parents did not want that. They knew that any child displaying such a talent would be found and swept away by the School. The whole village knew it, for Wren was not the first of her kind to be born there.

There had been a boy, a few years older than her. He was taken when she was very young, so she remembered only fragments. Strangers dragging the child along the lane. Shouting. Screaming, even. Blue men – Clade warriors, she would understand later – among the houses. Swords. The boy’s mother knocked down, his father held on the ground, face pressed into the dirt. And, most clearly of all those fragments, the song her mother had sung to her when she was too frightened to sleep that night. The song of water willows and weaving wrens. The only thing that had been able – for a time – to make her forget those screams and those swords.

That was the fate her parents foresaw for her: carried off into the distant, faceless labyrinth of the School to serve the King, his Kingdom and the School’s own interests. They did not want to lose their child for ever to those high and haughty powers. They did not want their child dying young, damaged, because of her use of the entelechs.

It could never have lasted, Wren knew now. For years it seemed like it might, and the illusion had been a happy one. But to ask a Clever to close out the entelechs and wilfully turn her back on them was like asking a young bird not to fly. It had wings, and the air was constantly offering to carry it aloft and show it the whole world.

Inevitably, there came that day when she finally spread her wings. The day when she found her brother in a ditch, breathing through blood and trembling in pain. The day when she had to run.

There had been nothing else to do, for she had transgressed. No Clever could use the entelechs unless they were a part of, or sanctioned by, the School. Any Clever bringing harm to others by such use was subject to the judgement of the School, and that judgement was uncompromising. They had executioners.

She ran, and though it broke her heart to do it, it filled her with relief as well. She was not pretending any more. She had been running, one way or another, for all the years since. Her heart had never healed, but the relief had never entirely gone away either. And always, as she ran, there had been the hope that one day she might find a place or a way to stop. To rest and simply be.

‘Go away,’ Lame Ammenor said to her, and the words numbed her. Dulled the light of the sky and the sounds of the forest.

‘I have nowhere else to go,’ she said.

He ignored her. He turned and hobbled back towards his little house.

‘I outran the School and the Clade to get here,’ Wren snapped. ‘I’ve left everything behind. Why save me from those men only to turn me away?’

Ammenor stopped at that, on the very threshold of his hut. He angled his head so that he was almost, but not quite, looking back at her over his shoulder.

‘You’re a Clever?’ he asked gruffly.

‘Autumnal.’

‘It seemed likely,’ he grunted. ‘The Clade don’t chase many other kinds of folk.’

‘You’re an Autumnal too, aren’t you?’

He turned reluctantly to face her once more, glowering.

‘What do you want from me? Congratulations?’

‘No,’ Wren said indignantly. ‘I want you to help me understand what it means. How to live free and unafraid.’

‘I didn’t interfere to save you from the Clade, you fool. I did it to keep them from my own doorstep. It seems you know who I am, so you know I’m not the sort to welcome visitors in blue.’

‘I can’t go away,’ Wren exclaimed with more than a hint of exasperation, or perhaps desperation. ‘I don’t – I want to learn to be who I am, not be told who I am by others. Not live my life as a servant to others.’

Ammenor wrinkled his nose as if amused.

‘I killed two of the Clade,’ Wren said flatly.

‘Ho ho,’ Ammenor snorted. ‘You went to war with the School. Well, good fortune to you, my lady. I hope your armies are numerous and your allies potent.’

He disappeared into the shadows of his dwelling. Wren was left standing amid the Cold Men and the berry bushes, struggling to believe just how terribly this was all turning out.

‘Were yours?’ she shouted at the hut. ‘Were your armies and allies at your back when you warred with the School?’

Silence. Just the chirping of some little birds foraging in the clearing.

Then: ‘Do you suppose I came all the way out here, to live with bears and blizzards, because I craved human company?’ came Ammenor’s voice from out of the darkness. ‘Go away.’