Learning to Fall

Rishi set Maeril’s bowl on the Root-House table.

Nothing stopped him.

The table curved through the central chamber, a broad root trained level and worn smooth by hands and bowls. Smaller roots rose around it as benches. A low fire burned in a stone-lined hollow near the wall. Its smoke found a dark opening above and travelled through the wood.

Lamps hung from the living ribs of the ceiling. Their light caught on polished cups, woven sleeves, and the last steam rising from supper.

Maeril stood beside Rishi with the serving spoon held too tightly.

Lirae touched the place between herself and Caereth.

“Here.”

Maeril sat. Rishi took the place beside her.

No one watched them chew yet. They were all watching them sit.

Caereth reached for the covered bowl and lifted the lid.

Steam carried thyme, onion, and roasted root across the table.

“This is yours?”

“Ours,” Maeril said. “Rishi argued with the seasoning.”

“She asked me to taste it.”

“He abused the position.”

Caereth served himself.

Nessari leaned around Sirael to see the dish. Faelar drew it toward him after Caereth, inspected the grain from three angles, and took a spoonful large enough to disprove his suspicion. Lirae tasted more carefully. Two elders Maeril did not know accepted smaller portions when the bowl reached them.

At the far curve, Elenya kept both hands around her cup.

The Root-Mother did not reach for the dish.

Not yet.

Other food moved around it. Lirae’s stew held soft roots, wild onion, mushrooms, and shreds of venison in a dark broth. Thick slices of nut bread filled one tray. Another carried smoked meat, late berries, and a small dish of honey.

Maeril tasted the stew.

The broth warmed her mouth first. Juniper followed, then thyme and the sweetness of browned onion.

She took another spoonful before speaking.

“Who roasted the roots?”

Lirae raised one hand.

“I may have to steal you.”

Lirae tore bread in half. “You will find me difficult to carry.”

“I have a spell for that now.”

Rishi’s knee touched hers under the table.

Maeril looked at him.

“Visible ground,” he said.

“I said I had a spell. I did not say I was using it.”

One of the unfamiliar elders lowered his mouth to his cup. His shoulders moved once.

Lirae pushed the bread tray toward Maeril.

Nessari already had a second spoonful of the grain. She picked out one roasted root, tasted it, then tried a berry with the next bite. Her ears lifted.

“It is sweet and not sweet.”

“That was the intention.” Maeril glanced at Rishi. “See? Some people understand me.”

“I understand you. I requested salt.”

Faelar grunted into his bowl. “And thyme.”

Rishi looked at him.

The storykeeper took another bite of Maeril’s dish. “I can taste an argument.”

Maeril leaned nearer. “Who won?”

“The food.”

Faelar reached for more.

Beside Nessari, Sirael sat straighter than the others. An unoccupied space remained on her far side. No bowl had been set there.

Thiarel had not come.

Lirae’s gaze touched the empty place whenever food reached that end of the table. Sirael kept her own attention on her bowl. Elenya gave no sign that she noticed.

Maeril left the absence alone.

Rishi did the same.

He ate slowly. The bruise Sirael had left on his neck had faded. The deeper ache across his lower abdomen answered when he twisted for the bread, then settled when he straightened. Across from him, the branches woven into Faelar’s mantle rose and fell with the old elf’s breath. One of the visiting elders watched Rishi’s hand on the cup and looked away when he noticed.

Caereth asked about Lirae’s weaving. Rishi described breaking the river-flax and stripping the nettle stalks. He held up his thumb when Faelar asked how the work had gone.

The red line across its pad remained visible.

“The stalk defeated him,” Maeril said.

“One stalk,” Rishi said.

“A formidable opponent.”

Lirae dipped bread into her stew. “It taught him to pull less.”

“Sirael keeps trying to teach him that,” Nessari said.

Sirael stopped with her cup halfway to her mouth.

Nessari noticed too late.

Her eyes moved from Sirael to Rishi and widened with the force of the question already escaping her.

“Is it true she defeated you the first time?”

The room went quiet.

The visiting elder nearest Faelar set down his spoon. Lirae closed her eyes for one breath. Sirael lowered her cup with care and stared into it.

Maeril swallowed before she laughed into her stew.

“Yes,” she said. “Thoroughly.”

Rishi rested his spoon across his bowl.

Nessari turned toward him. “She put you on the ground?”

“Twice.”

“Three times,” Maeril said. “If we count the part when he stayed there.”

Rishi glanced at her.

“We do.”

Faelar’s laugh broke the silence first. It came out short and rough. Caereth covered his mouth with one hand. Even Lirae’s disapproval lost its edge.

Sirael’s ears darkened.

Faelar leaned toward her. “Do not hide in your cup. You are a fine warrior. Let the story be told.”

Sirael looked to Elenya.

The Root-Mother did not intervene.

Every face turned to Rishi.

He felt the choice in his shoulders.

Rishi set both hands on the table.

“It is true. She defeated me.”

Nessari sat taller.

“She chose two practice staves and left the living one on the rack. That mattered. She came to train, not to judge.”

Sirael’s gaze rose from her cup.

Rishi described the first exchange. He kept it to the necessary movements: his step behind her ankle, the pressure across her arms, her decision to yield before he could throw her. She had turned under the pull, hooked his leg, and put him flat on his back with the force he supplied.

Nessari looked at Sirael as if she had just grown antlers.

“He made a very educational sound,” Maeril said.

Rishi inclined his head. “I had lost my breath.”

“All of it.”

Faelar rubbed one hand over his mouth.

Rishi continued. He told them how his strike beneath Sirael’s ribs had stopped her body for one beat, and how she had driven through the interruption with shoulder and knee.

Then he touched the side of his head.

“At the end, I gave her my wrist. She used it to turn me. Her staff came from below my sight.”

He looked at Sirael.

“I saw the strike too late.”

“I struck too hard.”

The words were quiet, but no one at the table could pretend not to hear them.

“You did,” Rishi said.

Sirael’s fingers tightened around her cup.

“The strike was still excellent. We corrected the force when we trained again.”

Her grip eased.

“You stopped it here.” Rishi held one hand beside his ear. “Before it touched me.”

Nessari looked between them. “So she won, and then she learned?”

“We both did,” Rishi said.

Sirael met Rishi’s eyes at last.

“It was good training.”

“Yes.”

Elenya set down her cup.

“Learning to fall matters as much as learning to strike. The forest will put each of us on the ground. Better to rise knowing what brought us there.”

Maeril raised her own cup.

“To rising,” she said. “Preferably before the stew gets cold.”

Faelar lifted his. Caereth followed. Nessari raised hers with both hands.

Sirael looked at Rishi over the rim of her cup when she drank.

Conversation returned in a different shape.

Faelar demanded a second telling at some later fire, with more noise and less modesty. Nessari demonstrated the hook behind Rishi’s ankle using a spoon and a strip of bread. The bread landed in her lap. Sirael caught the spoon before it followed.

Lirae muttered that one injured guest had been enough. She served Rishi more stew while she complained.

The older elves asked how monasteries trained novices to fall. Rishi explained the packed-earth yards, the long practice of meeting ground with forearms and shoulder instead of a locked wrist. Caereth compared it to a hunter’s first lessons on wet branches.

Maeril answered a question about the peppered leaves in her grain. Faelar wanted to know what Baldur’s Gate cooks would do with them. Her explanation reached onions, hot oil, and three kinds of bean before Rishi touched her knee beneath the table.

“No spell theory,” she said.

“You are discussing beans.”

“Then why did you stop me?”

“You had not taken a breath.”

Maeril inhaled. The elder across from her smiled into his bowl.

At the far curve, Elenya reached for Maeril’s dish.

The bowl had passed almost all the way around the table. Only a little grain and two pieces of roasted root remained. Elenya served herself one of them. She tasted it while the talk continued, her face giving away nothing.

Then she took the second piece and passed the empty bowl toward Maeril.

Maeril accepted it with both hands.

Beside her, Rishi reached for another spoonful of stew.