Exile

XI

Wren did not go away because it was not in her nature to do so. And because she had told Ammenor the truth. She really did have nowhere else to go.

She spread her one remaining blanket on the ground just outside the ring of the Permanence, within clear sight of the door to Ammenor’s hut. She sat cross-legged on it and ate wizened berries plucked from nearby bushes. If he objected to her foraging, let him come out and tell her so.

She stayed there even when it began to snow lightly. The dense woods around the clearing could offer a bit of shelter but snow was snow and sooner or later it would drive her from this high ground no matter how many trees she got herself beneath. Her situation was, in short, verging on the disastrous. Therefore she ignored it and simply sat there and chewed and stared fixedly at the doorway.

Before long, the scent of food cooking reached her. A faint mist of pale smoke was rising from slots cut in the peak of the hut’s roof. The smell made Wren’s stomach clench and ache. Meagre handfuls of berries were no real answer to her yawning hunger.

Moving stiffly in the cold she shuffled over to the nearest hazel bush. She knelt and took hold of one of its thicker branches. Amid the hardship and disappointment that had decided to gather about her, she at least did not need to slowly starve to death.

Bounty could be shaped from the Autumnal. Other entelechs might express themselves through other forms of abundance but fruitfulness and ripening, these were facets of the Autumnal. She envisioned those things flowing through her, rising up from the ground and moving through her chest and her arm and seeping into the hazel wood. There was a warmth to it.

In only a few moments she would have fine and fat hazelnuts to feast upon, and the prospect was deeply pleasing.

‘What are you doing, you stupid woman?’

The harsh voice broke in upon her so abruptly that her connection to the entelech snapped out of existence. She let go of the hazel bush and turned. Lame Ammenor was standing, massive and glowering, in the door of his hut.

Wren said nothing. It was no doubt entirely obvious to him what she was doing.

‘You’d spend your very substance for the sake of a few nuts?’ the exiled Clever growled. ‘A whaler wouldn’t break apart his own boat to make one harpoon. Do you forget there’s a tomorrow to come after today?’

‘I’m hungry today,’ Wren snapped.

A snowflake settled upon her eyelashes, and she had to blink and then rub it away, which she supposed rather spoiled the effect of her indignation.

Ammenor glared at her, and she glared back. They remained thus – he standing, she kneeling – for long moments.

‘I’ve got pigeons cooking,’ Ammenor said grudgingly. ‘Do you want some of that?’

The pigeons were boiling in a clay pot which sat directly on the fire inside Ammenor’s hut. They were small and untender, but they tasted good.

Lame Ammenor watched her as she ate. It made her uncomfortable. She did not complain, since he was not telling her to go away for the moment and that felt like a great victory. The first she had won in a long time.

He gave her water to drink, and kept watching her while she gulped it down. Eventually she tired of it and stared back at him pointedly. He sniffed and began to stir the fire with a stick. Embers sprang up and faded like momentary fireflies.

‘Letting the entelechs loose feels good, wouldn’t you say?’ he asked at length. ‘As if you’re touching the truth about the world.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Wren without hesitation.

‘It feels right,’ Ammenor said. He sounded more resigned to her agreement than pleased by it.

Wren frowned at him. He was so completely not what she had expected, and not what she had hoped, that she found it all bewildering.

‘Why didn’t you want to be taken in by the School?’ he asked quietly.

‘Because once they have you, it’s for life. They might not call it such, but it’s slavery. A lifetime of serving them and their ambitions and their rules. Because they kill folks who break those rules, and no part of it is justice.’

‘True.’ Ammenor nodded. ‘Not entirely, but more or less. So what life is it you dream of instead, Clever-girl?’

‘Only to understand what I am, and to be it without others caging me, commanding me. Using me.’

‘Those are immodest dreams.’ Ammenor snorted. ‘Some people worshipped us, years – centuries – gone by. There’ve always been more who want to use us, so you’d best get used to that. They don’t know half of us are mad. They don’t care that all of us die a little each time we perform for them.

‘We’re condemned, everyone like us. Born to hear and sing the song of the world’s raw essence. And doomed to suffering and decay if we ever do sing.’

By way of demonstration he tapped his wooden foot with the stick he had been using to stir the fire. A little cloud of ash and cinders plumed and then sank away.

‘At best we pay with body or soul for any use of our powers. At worst, if we reach too far or lose control for even just a moment, we become nothing more than dead-mother to a Permanence.’

He glared at her, all bitter pain. It had nothing to do with her, she realised. Not really.

‘Gone.’ Ammenor snapped his blunt fingers. ‘As if we never were. There’s the wonder of being a Clever for you. Wither yourself away working a few little tricks or try for a big trick and be snuffed out and forgotten.’

He threw the stick into the fire. He and Wren both stared as it crackled into flame.

‘None of it makes any difference,’ Ammenor went on. ‘People still live, die, suffer, breed. The seasons still turn. The entelechs ebb and flow. Us Clevers are twigs on the water just like everyone else. And whenever someone’s tried to be more than that… When Clevers think they might actually change something, that’s when the really terrible things start to happen.’

‘All I’m asking for is the freedom to live my life as I wish, and to be what I was born to be,’ Wren insisted.

‘Wrong, am I? Wait, let me think… no. I’m not. When you’ve lived as long as me, then decide whether I am wrong.’

‘I’ve seen enough,’ Wren said. She was getting angry herself now. ‘You’re wrong and you’re life-weary. You fought the School for your freedom. It turns out you didn’t know what to do with it once you won.’

‘Oh, you think me a fool. Who is the greater fool then? Me or the dreamer who came looking for me?’

And to that she had no answer. None that she wanted to contemplate just yet anyway. She stared at her feet, and the rather pathetically ragged boots that enclosed them.

‘You can sleep here, I suppose,’ Ammenor said softly. ‘One night.’