The Name of the Wind

My stomach dropped. I hadn’t expected that. Normally, whoever doesn’t pick the game gets to choose the source. I had been planning on choosing brazier, knowing that the quantity of heat would help offset my self-imposed handicap.

Fenton grinned, knowing his advantage. “No source.”

I grimaced. All we would have to draw from was our own body heat. Difficult in the best of circumstances, not to mention a little dangerous.

I couldn’t win. Not only was I going to lose my perfect rank, I had no way to signal Sovoy not to bet my last two jots. I tried to meet his eyes, but he was already caught up in quiet, intense negotiations with a handful of other students.

Fenton and I moved wordlessly to sit on opposite sides of a large work-table. Elxa Dal set two thick stumps of candle down, one in front of each of us. The object was to light your opponent’s candle without letting him do the same to yours. This involved splitting your mind into two different pieces, one piece tried to hold the Alar that your piece of wicking (or straw, if you were stupid) was the same as the wick of the candle you were trying to light. Then you drew energy from your source to make it happen.

Meanwhile the second piece of your mind was kept busy trying to maintain the belief that your opponent’s piece of wicking was not the same as the wick of your candle.

If all of this sounds difficult, believe me, you don’t know the half of it.

Making it worse was the fact that neither of us had an easy source to draw from. You had to be careful using yourself as source. Your body is warm for a reason. It responds badly when its heat is pulled away.

At a gesture from Elxa Dal, we began. I immediately devoted my whole mind to the defense of my own candle and began to think furiously. There was no way I could win. It doesn’t matter how skilled a fencer you are, you can’t help but lose when your opponent has a blade of Ramston steel and you’ve chosen to fight with a willow switch.

I lowered myself into the Heart of Stone. Then, still devoting most of my mind to the protection of my candle, I muttered a binding between my candle and his. I reached out and tipped my candle on its side, forcing him to make a grab for his before it did the same and rolled away.

I tried to take quick advantage of his distraction and set his candle aflame. I threw myself into it and felt a chill bleed up my arm from my right hand that held the piece of straw. Nothing happened. His candle remained cold and dark.

I cupped my hand around the wick of my candle, blocking his line of sight. It was a petty trick, and largely useless against a skilled sympathist but my only hope was to rattle him in some way

“Hey Fen,” I said. “Have you heard the one about the tinker, the Tehlin, the farmer’s daughter, and the butter churn yet?”

Fen gave no response. His pale face was locked in fierce concentration.

I gave up distraction as a lost cause. Fenton was too smart to be thrown off that way. Besides, I was finding it difficult to maintain the necessary concentration to keep my candle safe. I lowered myself more deeply into the Heart of Stone and forgot the world apart from the two candles and a piece of wick and straw.

After a minute I was covered in a clammy chill sweat. I shivered. Fenton saw this and gave me a smile with bloodless lips. I redoubled my efforts, but his candle ignored my best attempts to force it into flame.

Five minutes passed with the whole class quiet as stones. Most duels lasted no longer than a minute or two, one person quickly proving himself more clever or possessed of a stronger will. Both my arms were cold now. I saw a muscle in Fenton’s neck twitch spastically, like a horse’s flank trying to shake loose a biting fly. His posture went rigid as he suppressed the urge to shiver. A wisp of smoke began to curl from the wick of my candle.

I bore down. I realized that my breath was hissing through my clenched teeth, my lips pulled back in a feral grin. Fenton didn’t seem to notice, his eyes growing glassy and unfocused. I shivered again, so violently that I almost missed seeing the tremor in his hand. Then, slowly, Fenton’s head began to nod toward the tabletop. His eyelids drooped. I set my teeth and was rewarded to see a thin curl of smoke rise from the wick of his candle.

Woodenly, Fenton turned to look, but instead of rallying to his own defense he made a slow, leaden gesture of dismissal and lay his head in the crook of his arm.

He didn’t look up as the candle near his elbow spat fitfully to life. There was a brief scattering of applause mixed in with exclamations of disbelief.

Someone pounded me on the back. “How bout that? Wore himself out.”

“No,” I said thickly and reached across the table. With clumsy fingers I prized open the hand that held the wicking and saw it had blood on it. “Master Dal,” I said as quickly as I could manage. “He’s got the chills.” Speaking made me realize how cold my lips felt.