We collected our food and separated for the morning's classes. I watched him go—silver-haired, straight-backed, unhurried—and felt the specific low-grade anxiety of someone who knows they're supposed to be doing something important and isn't sure they're doing it right.
Then I turned and went to find the Wood training yard. Instructor Nicole was a wiry woman in her fifties with sharp eyes and the patient, slightly tired expression of someone who had spent decades watching people fail at the same things in the same ways.
"Lady Clark," she said, when I presented myself. "Your first task is to move those sandbags to the cart. From a distance. Element only."
The sandbags were large, rough-woven things filled with what felt like actual sand; each one probably weighed thirty pounds. The cart was perhaps four meters away. Between me and it was a stretch of packed earth that, in the fresh morning light, looked like a very generous four meters.
I stretched out my hands the way I'd seen it done and reached for the thing inside me—the green-gold flicker I'd felt when I held the quartz the day before. The first sandbag rose. About forty centimeters off the ground, swaying, responding to my concentration with the nervous unpredictability of a kite in a changeable wind. I held it there for a full three seconds, feeling almost competent.
Then it exploded.
Sand rained across the training yard in a wide arc. Several nearby apprentices flinched. I stood in the settling dust with my arms still extended.
"Right," Instructor Nicole said, with the tone of someone updating a mental log. "Lady Clark, you have significant raw power. But power without precision is simply destruction. Continue with the remaining sandbags. Tell me when one reaches the cart intact."
She walked away. I looked at the remaining sandbags. Then at the scattered ruin of the first one. Then at my hands.
Too much force, I thought. Like maxing out a grip before the bar is ready. In gymnastics, over-gripping was a common beginner mistake—white-knuckle tension that threw off every subsequent motion. Control came from the opposite: from finding the minimum necessary force and staying there.
I tried the second bag with half the focus I'd used on the first. It didn't move. I tried more. It twitched, rose one inch, and then exploded more completely than the first.
"Oh, come on," I said to no one in particular.
I spent the next two hours destroying sandbags. By the time the bell rang for the midday break, I had reduced every sandbag in the training yard to empty cloth and scattered sand, solved nothing, and acquired a fine coating of grit on every available surface of my skin and clothing.
Drew appeared at the edge of the training yard carrying two pieces of fruit, taking in the scene with the steady gaze of a man cataloging information. "You didn't come to lunch," he said.
"I ran out of sandbags," I said. "Also, I forgot what time it was."
He looked at the field of empty sacks and scattered sand. "Did you explode all of them?"
"Every single one."
He held out one of the pieces of fruit. I took it, bit into it, and sat down cross-legged in the sand without caring about my trousers.
"I can't control it," I said. "Too much and it explodes. Too little and it doesn't move. I can't find the middle."
He sat down beside me—not close, but present, which I was starting to understand was how Drew Porter expressed most things. "What does it feel like?"
"Like trying to hold water in one hand," I said. "The harder I grip, the faster it goes."
He was quiet for a moment. "Metal is the opposite," he said. "You have to compress it. Force is the mechanism. For Wood—" He paused. "Maybe it works differently. Maybe it needs to be asked rather than told."
I looked at him sideways. That was unexpectedly perceptive for someone who had delivered a marriage proposal with the emotional temperature of a business memo.
"That guy Crawford told me you were his future wife," Drew said, moving on before I could comment.
I laughed. "He said that? Bold." I stood up and brushed sand from my trousers. "I suppose you'll have to make it clearer that I'm yours."
"I suppose I will," he said in the same flat tone.
And somehow, out of his mouth, it didn't sound like nothing at all.