Learn Its Reach

Rain silvered Sirael’s bowstring, darkened Rishi’s sleeves, and ran from the end of Maeril’s nose while she tried to keep both feet on a root.

“Try that again,” Sirael said.

Maeril wiped her face against her shoulder. “The root has already won.”

“Then stop fighting it.”

Sirael drove her practice staff at Maeril’s ribs.

Maeril stepped down from the root. Her boot entered mud to the ankle. She caught Sirael’s shaft across her own, turned with the impact, and dragged her foot free before the mud could keep it.

The next strike passed her shoulder.

“Keep moving like that,” Sirael said.

Rishi waited on the far side of the course with the living staff loose between his hands. Wet leaves covered the stone beneath his rear foot. He knew it was there because he had slipped on it twice.

Sirael turned toward him.

He opened his lower hand before she reached the wood.

Her pull sent the staff across his body. Rishi stepped inside the turn, guided the upper end past his shoulder, and found her back before she could close the angle.

The living staff stopped beside her ribs.

Sirael looked down at it.

“A little sooner.”

She reset the exchange.

Morning after morning, the course changed under the weather. Rain filled its hollows. Mud took the edge from the slopes and added weight to every boot. Frost glazed the fallen log, melted under weak daylight, and returned before dawn.

Sirael used all of it.

She made Rishi cross wet roots while changing grips. She made Maeril build a ward with one foot lower than the other. If either looked at the ground too long, a padded arrow struck the space their attention had left.

Rishi learned the course through his soles. The root near the upper target rolled a foot outward under weight. The shallow ditch narrowed beside a stone. Three strides carried him from the fallen log to firm earth if the second was short.

Maeril learned it through complaint and repetition.

“That hollow was not there yesterday.”

“It was,” Rishi said.

“Then it has become malicious.”

She planted her staff, let the slope turn her, and caught the next arrow on a ward without stopping.

One morning, Sirael set her own staff aside.

She took a blunted short sword from the rack and came close.

Steel changed the work even without an edge. Rishi could not let the blade slide past his body as freely as wood. He caught Sirael’s wrist instead, moved outside the point, and turned her elbow only as far as the joint allowed.

“Here,” he told Maeril.

He held the position. Sirael stood with her sword arm extended and her shoulder protected by the angle of his grip.

“If you are this close, be outside the blade or behind it. Anywhere else belongs to her.”

Maeril looked at the point near his sleeve. “I prefer farther away.”

“So do I.”

Sirael shifted her hips.

Rishi released before her balance took his.

“You let go in time,” she said.

On other mornings, one sword became two knives. The knives became thrown blades. Sirael made them read her shoulder, wrist, and the foot that carried her weight. The weapon left her hand only after the body had already chosen its line.

At first Rishi watched the knife.

It was too late by then.

He learned to watch the throw begin.

Maeril learned to put trees between herself and Sirael before reaching for magic. A flash of light covered one retreat. A false footstep drew a knife toward an empty patch of leaves. When she made the illusion too neat, Sirael sent the next blade into the mud at Maeril’s toes.

“Real feet slip,” Sirael said.

Maeril looked down at the knife. “Mine have demonstrated that extensively.”

“Use what you know.”

When Sirael brought the bow, Maeril called her familiar.

She planted her staff and touched the blue-grey feather tied below its grip. Pale wings formed above her hand. Light gathered into a hooked beak, breast, and talons. The hawk settled on the staff without bending it. Yellow eyes matched Maeril’s.

The hawk launched into the rain.

Maeril looked through its eyes.

The course flattened beneath the hawk’s wings. Branches hid the hollows but exposed paths between trunks. Sirael moved below as a dark green break in the wet brown ground.

Maeril stood beside Rishi.

One hand gripped her staff. She wiped rain from her face with the other.

Rishi shifted closer.

Through the hawk’s eyes, Maeril saw Sirael kneel behind the upper root.

“Left.”

Rishi moved. A padded arrow struck where his chest had been.

But Sirael learned to wait until the hawk banked behind the canopy. She crossed three paces, changed trees, and loosed before Maeril found her again.

The arrow caught Rishi’s upper arm.

Maeril stopped chasing Sirael through the hawk’s eyes. She used the view to mark three possible routes, then watched the empty space between them.

The hawk banked overhead.

At the foot of a tree ahead, leaves moved without wind.

“Down,” Maeril said.

Rishi dropped. The arrow passed over him.

Sirael emerged from behind that tree and nodded once.

The rain kept falling.

Mud climbed their boots and dried on the lodge floor until Maeril began leaving a brush beside the entrance. Bruises layered over fading bruises. Rishi’s ankle stopped turning on the hidden stone. Maeril still fell, but she learned to choose the shoulder that met the ground and keep her casting hand clear.

During a pause, Sirael touched a muddy place beside her knee.

“How did you move me?”

Rishi returned to the position. He placed her forward foot where it had been and set one hand at her wrist.

“Your weight passed this foot before the strike.”

He turned his hips. Sirael’s balance followed the line without force.

“The breath gives it away. Not the first breath. The one you keep before you commit.”

Sirael repeated the entry against him. The second time, she released the held breath and changed direction before his hand closed.

Rishi found himself facing empty ground.

“Yes.”

Maeril shook water from her sleeves. “I dislike how quickly she learns.”

“Again, from there,” Sirael said.

Afternoons began with dry clothes and food.

Rishi went to Lirae’s alcove when her healing work allowed it. His first bundle of nettle stalks became two small piles: fibre worth keeping and everything he had broken too short.

Lirae weighed both in her hands.

“Less waste tomorrow.”

The next day, there was.

She taught him to drag the freed fibre through a bed of wooden teeth. His first pass caught. He pulled harder, and three strands broke.

Lirae put her hand over his.

“You are fighting it again.”

Rishi loosened his grip.

He held the fibres nearer their middle and drew only the ends through. Then he reversed them. The teeth took the woody fragments and left the strands aligned across his palm.

“Better.”

Crack. Scrape. Draw.

The work entered his hands. He learned to hear when a stalk would split badly and stop before it did. The comb no longer held more fibre than it released.

Lirae laid a cloth beside his work.

“A good spring,” she said, touching the border. “This tells how many children were born that year.”

She showed him another pattern.

“For mourning. Never in bright thread.”

The branch and water design on the loom recorded the stream’s older course.

“A cloth remembers who made it?” Rishi asked.

“Hands leave choices. Tighter here. A joined thread there. We know some.”

She ran one finger along a narrow change in the weft.

“My mother.”

Rishi returned to the comb with less speed.

Across the homestead, Maeril covered her table in failed shapes.

Polymorph would change a living body, all of it at once. Maeril began with the smaller workings she could separate from it: holding a new shape, changing its weight, bringing the original back.

Metal blurred into the colour and grain of a twig, then struck the table as a spoon again. A stone held the lightness of a feather for one breath. A cloth scrap took the veins and green surface of a leaf without losing its woven edge.

Each failure left a note.

Boundary slipped at third syllable.

Weight returned before shape.

Do not picture “bird.” Choose bone, balance, breath.

When the objects obeyed more often than they resisted, Maeril called Rishi to the lodge.

She sat on her platform with the end of her tail across her knees.

He sat opposite her and set both hands on his knees.

“What do you intend?”

“One small change. No new joints. No change to the spine. If it travels past this mark, I release it.”

She had drawn a charcoal line around her tail a handspan from the tip.

Rishi studied the mark. “And if you cannot?”

“You break my focus.”

He moved one hand nearer her wrist.

Maeril closed her eyes.

The lesser shaping caught at her outline. The tail-tip shivered. Scales flattened, softened, and opened into pale feathers that lay across her palm.

Her balance changed by almost nothing.

Her body noticed anyway.

Maeril’s shoulders pulled tight. The feathers lifted. The change stopped at the charcoal line.

She released it.

Scales returned from base to tip. Her tail struck the blanket once.

Maeril opened her eyes.

“That was horrible.”

“You held the boundary.”

“It was still my tail. It was also very certain it had never been a tail.”

Rishi waited until her breathing eased before moving his hand away.

She recorded every sensation.

Later, she rounded one ear for two breaths. Sound flattened on that side. Rishi’s voice seemed to come through cloth. She changed it back and wrote until the ink on her quill ran dry.

They repeated the small changes on other afternoons. Rishi kept his hand nearby until she could hold each one, speak to him, and release it without having to close her eyes.

The full transformation took longer.

Whenever she tried to hold an entire animal in mind—bone, weight, breath, instinct—the structure divided. She could keep the body or herself. Not both.

She did not push through.

That refusal went into the notes too.

She settled on a panther. Four feet, a long spine, a tail to balance it. Wings could wait.

While Rishi worked with Lirae, Maeril went to a small clearing beyond the lodge. She chose two roots a few paces apart and laid her cloak beside the farther one.

The first attempt ended with her on her knees, still herself. She went back to the drawing of the spine and corrected where the shoulders would carry her weight. The next day, paws caught her before the spell slipped and left her hands in the mud.

She had been trying to direct every joint while holding the spell. On the fourth afternoon, she fixed the shape in her mind.

Just reach the cloak, she told herself. Then change back.

This time, the shape held.

Damp earth pressed beneath her paws. Something moved in the leaves, and her head turned before she meant it to. She found the cloak again beside the root.

She took one step. Then another.

At the cloak, she released the spell.

Her own knees struck the ground. She caught herself on both hands and began to laugh.

There was no one to hear it.

“I am going to need to practise walking. Again.”

She returned on other afternoons. She learned to cross the clearing, turn, and change back before the unfamiliar body tired her. She walked every crossing.

She meant to show Rishi once she could reach the cloak without watching her feet.

Evenings returned them to the outer dining hollow.

Maeril brought roots, grains, and city methods adapted to what the forest stored. Lirae told her when the salt was too heavy. Faelar returned to her stories of Baldur’s Gate in winter and listened as if crowded markets were a form of strange weather.

Nessari sat near enough to collect every story.

Later, Rishi returned to the course alone.

He practised releasing the living staff. One hand opened as the shaft crossed him. His freed side stepped inside the imagined pull. The other hand guided the wood around his shoulder, and the open hand caught it on the far side.

At first the staff struck the ground or his forearm.

Then it began returning to his palm.

On some nights, fatigue flattened his hunger. He ate what he served himself and failed to notice it was less than the work required.

Maeril noticed.

She caught the change when his robe hung looser across his ribs.

The next evening, she set a second bowl beside him before he left for the course.

“Eat.”

“I have.”

“You have begun.”

Rishi looked at the bowl, then at the tension around her mouth.

He sat.

“I misjudged it.”

“Yes.”

“I will correct it.”

“Now.”

He ate while she finished cleaning the pot. Only when the bowl was empty did she hand him the living staff.

Wind drove the rain sideways across the training course.

It found every opening in their cloaks. Water ran into Rishi’s wraps and numbed his fingers. Maeril’s hood blew back twice before she left it there.

The course had become slick earth and shallow pools.

Sirael fired into the wind.

The padded arrow curved. Rishi saw the correction too late and caught it on the thick end of the staff. The impact drove the wood into his shoulder.

Maeril’s ward covered the opening he left. Rain flashed white across its surface. A second arrow turned away.

“One more crossing,” Sirael shouted.

Maeril dragged one boot from the mud. “This is no longer training. This is weather attempting murder.”

“Then learn its reach.”

They crossed the course again.

During the next pause, Sirael lowered the bow. Rain ran from her braids and jaw.

“Soon, we stop.”

Maeril pushed wet hair from her eyes. “A persuasive offer.”

“The Feast of the Moon comes. We honor the dead and remember the year behind us. We put aside weapons. No sparring. No tests.”

Rishi let the staff’s end touch the mud.

“The whole household?”

“The whole Moonglade. Some stand with family. Some remember alone. No one trains.”

The rain struck the leaves between them.

“What do you require of us?” Maeril asked.

“Make time to remember your own past. Think of those you have lost. Caereth will explain the rite.” Sirael raised the bow again. “For now, keep moving.”

Rishi lifted the living staff from the mud. Maeril set her feet, one higher on the slope than the other.

Sirael drew.

This time, both of them saw the rain change direction before she loosed.