Slowly, I Devour the Sky
Chapter 10: What Vosh Already Knew
Wren didn't sleep much that night, and by the time morning bells rang he'd made a decision he suspected Kael wasn't going to like.
He found Instructor Vosh before her first class, catching her in the narrow corridor outside the lecture hall with the letter folded tight in his fist, and didn't bother easing into it.
"The Choir contacted me."
Whatever reaction he'd braced for, it wasn't the one he got. Vosh didn't startle, didn't reach for the letter, didn't even slow her pace toward the lecture hall door. She simply exhaled, slow and heavy, like a weight she'd been expecting had finally landed.
"Show me," she said, and it wasn't a request.
He handed it over. She read it twice, expression unreadable, before folding it back along its original creases with the careful precision of someone who'd handled letters like this before.
"They're earlier than I expected," she said, almost to herself. "That's not good news."
"You knew they'd come."
"I knew someone would." Vosh finally looked up, and for the first time since he'd met her, Wren saw something in her face that looked almost like guilt. "I simply hoped I'd have more time to prepare you before they did."
She cancelled her first lesson without explanation, which Wren understood, from the murmur that went through the students gathering outside the hall, was not a thing Instructor Vosh had ever done before in recorded academy history, and led him instead to a small private office two floors up, door closed and warded with a quiet murmured word he didn't recognize.
"Sit," she said, and for once, he did exactly as told.
...
"Nineteen years ago," Vosh said, settling into the chair across from him, hands folded on the desk with the careful stillness of someone about to say something they'd rehearsed many times and never actually spoken aloud, "before I ran this academy, I was a field researcher. Old ruins, mostly, the kind scattered across the Hollow Reach that nobody funds properly because they don't produce anything the Concord council can tax. I found one, deep in the eastern reach, that wasn't like the others."
"Like the one under the Spire."
"Similar. Not identical." She was quiet a moment, choosing her next words with visible care. "There was a tame there. Old, dormant, exactly the kind of thing your Kael appears to be. I wasn't the only one who found it. The Choir found it within the same season, and they were considerably better funded, and considerably less patient about waiting for anyone else's opinion on what should be done."
"What happened?"
"They destroyed it." Vosh said it flatly, without drama, which somehow made it land harder than if she'd dressed the words up in grief. "Not carelessly. Deliberately, methodically, with what I later learned was genuine conviction that they were preventing something catastrophic rather than simply committing one. I watched them do it. I was twenty-six years old and considerably too idealistic to understand, at the time, that conviction and correctness are not the same thing."
Wren sat with that for a long moment, the office quiet except for the faint murmur of students filing past somewhere below the warded door.
"Do you think they were right?" he asked finally. "That it needed to be stopped?"
"I think," Vosh said slowly, "that I have spent nineteen years trying to decide, and I have not yet reached an answer I trust completely. That uncertainty is, in part, why I built my career around this academy instead of returning to field research. I wanted to be somewhere I could watch carefully, and act slowly, and never again be the kind of person who stands by while a decision that size gets made by someone else's conviction alone."
"Is that why you didn't report Kael. To the Concord council, or wherever things like this are supposed to go."
"Partly." She met his eyes directly. "Partly, Wren, it's because I watched you kneel down in that courtyard and pick up something the entire crowd had already decided was worthless, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it since. The Choir believes elder tames are inevitably catastrophic. I am no longer certain that's true. I think, perhaps, it depends enormously on whose hands they end up in, and what those hands choose to do with what they're given."
Something in Wren's chest tightened at that, the weight of it settling somewhere he wasn't fully prepared for.
"That's a lot to put on someone you've known for six weeks."
"I'm aware." A faint, tired smile crossed her face, gone as quickly as it arrived. "I'm not asking you to carry the whole weight of that decision alone, and I'm not asking you to trust me completely simply because I've told you a difficult story. I'm asking you to let me help you prepare, properly, for what's coming, rather than facing it with nothing but good instincts and a snail's stubbornness between you and people who've made an ideology out of certainty."
"What does preparing actually look like," Wren asked, "practically."
"Training beyond what the standard curriculum offers. Contacts I still have from my field years, people who study old-lineage tames without the Choir's particular conclusions about what should be done with them. And honesty, going forward, between the two of us, about anything that happens involving Kael, no matter how small it seems." She paused.
"In exchange, I intend to keep doing everything in my power to keep this contained to people who've earned the right to know, for as long as that remains possible. I won't pretend to you that it will remain possible forever."
"And if the Choir doesn't wait for forever."
"Then we'll have had however much time we managed to buy, and we'll use it as well as we can." Vosh stood, the conversation apparently reaching whatever boundary she'd set for herself before it began.
"I won't lie to you and tell you this ends easily, Wren. I've seen how these things tend to end when the wrong people run out of patience first. I would simply prefer, this time, to be someone who did something about it before that happened, rather than someone who only watched."
Wren stood too, the letter still folded in his hand, heavier now than the thin parchment had any right to be.
"Thank you," he said. "For telling me. You didn't have to."
"I should have told you sooner. I told myself I was protecting you by waiting until you needed to know." Something rueful crossed her face. "I'm beginning to suspect that instinct has cost more people more time than it's ever saved, in the long run. I'd rather not repeat that particular mistake with you."
He left her office with the letter still in hand and Kael quiet in the satchel at his side, the corridor outside filling again with the ordinary noise of students moving between lessons, none of them aware of the conversation that had just reshaped, quietly and completely, the shape of the year ahead.
"You heard all that," Wren said, once they were alone in the stairwell.
"I did."
"And?"
"And I find," Kael said slowly, "that I trust her rather more than I expected to, for someone who once watched something like me be destroyed and did nothing to stop it." A pause, thoughtful rather than accusing. "Perhaps that is the more honest kind of ally, in the end. Not the one who claims certainty. The one who admits, plainly, that they are still working out where they stand, and chooses to try anyway."