He met Torvel properly on the fourteenth day.
Before this, Torvel had been a peripheral figure — appearing at the tavern two or three times, conferring with Bren in the yard, nodding at Kael in the careful way of someone who has made a decision about a situation and is waiting to revisit it. Kael had watched Torvel the way he watched everything now, with the specific attention of someone cataloguing facts against a future need.
Torvel was old in the way that some people are old — not frail, but thoroughly seasoned, the way wood that has been through many weathers achieves a density that newer wood doesn't have. He was shorter than Bren and very upright, with white hair worn close to the skull in a style different from the elaborate braids most Varath residents favored. His hands were marked by an unusual number of small scars, too regular to be accidental — they formed patterns on the backs of his hands and along his fingers, geometric shapes, each scar about the width of a thumbnail. His eyes were very dark and moved with the particular quality of attention that Kael associated with people who made their living by noticing things.
On the fourteenth morning, Torvel arrived at the yard while Kael was in the middle of unloading grain sacks from a wagon. Torvel watched him work for a few minutes, then said something to the person Kael was working with — a large, quiet man named Doss who had been a reliable work partner — and Doss nodded and took over Kael's end of the work.
Torvel looked at Kael and made a gesture: come.
He came.
Torvel led him through the tavern and out the front door and into the street, and then into an alley and through the alley to a smaller street that ran parallel to the market square. The buildings here were less commercial — fewer market stalls, more closed doors, more residential in character. Torvel stopped at one of these doors, produced a key, and opened it.
Inside was a room — one room, large, with windows on three sides and a table in the center that had seen many years of use. The walls were lined with shelves, and on the shelves were things: objects of clay and metal and wood, jars with contents he couldn't see, books. The books were the first he had seen in this world, and he made himself not stare at them, though the pull of them was strong.
Torvel sat at the table and indicated the chair across from him.
Kael sat.
Torvel looked at him.
Kael looked at Torvel.
Then Torvel said, with the careful slow enunciation he had heard Yisse and the market vendors use when speaking to him: "How many words do you know?"
He understood the question. He had all the pieces: the words for how many, and know, and word.
He said, in Verath: "Perhaps one hundred and twenty." The number was imprecise. He had stopped counting in strict terms, but he had a general sense of his vocabulary's size.
Torvel's expression did the thing of recalibration Kael had come to recognize as a sign of new information being incorporated. He said: "You have been here fourteen days."
"Yes."
"Where did you come from?" Not which town, not which road. The specific construction used for origin, for what Kael had already identified as a kind of deep or fundamental source.
Kael considered his answer. He had considered this question before — he had known it was coming. He said: "From very far away. The language is different there. Everything is different there. I don't have the words to explain it."
This was true. He literally did not have the words, or most of them.
Torvel looked at him. He said: "Do you understand what I am about to say?"
Kael said: "I will try."
Torvel said: "I have lived in Varath for many years. I have been many places before that. I have seen people arrive in Varath from far away. I have never seen someone arrive from nowhere, with no word, no currency, no knowledge, and learn one hundred and twenty words in fourteen days."
He had lost some of this — the middle section was beyond him — but he caught enough. He said: "I am sorry. I don't know how to explain how I got here."
"I am not asking you to explain it," Torvel said. Then, switching to a mode of speaking Kael had begun to identify as more formal: "I am asking what you intend to do."
He considered this carefully. Then he said: "I intend to understand this world. I intend to learn the language fully. And then I intend to move through this world and see it."
There was a pause.
Torvel reached to one of the shelves and brought a book to the table. He set it in front of Kael. It was small, bound in something that was not leather but similar, and the cover had text on it in the script of this world — an alphabetic script, he had been observing it on signs and crates and market stalls, assembling a tentative understanding of its characters.
He looked at the cover and worked through the characters one by one, slowly, applying what he had learned.
He said, slowly: "The… road and the… world."
Torvel said: "A travel account. Older. The language is different in some ways but the same in others. I am going to teach you to read Verath."
He looked at Torvel. He said: "Why?"
Torvel looked at him for a long moment. He said something that Kael did not entirely follow — something about useful things and rare things and something he didn't have a word for yet, something that Torvel seemed to consider important.
He said: "I don't understand all the words."
Torvel said: "I know." He said: "That is the point."
He had to sit with this for a moment. Then he said: "You want to teach me because I am learning quickly?"
"Because you are learning the right things," Torvel said.
He didn't know exactly what this meant. He filed it.
He opened the book.
The text was dense and close-written, the characters smaller than on market signs, the words running together in ways that would require him to understand spacing conventions he hadn't worked out yet. But he could see the shapes of individual characters. He could see, very tentatively, the outlines of words.
Torvel said: "We will meet here every morning. Before your work."
Kael said: "I understand."
Torvel said: "You are staying in Varath for a while."
It was not a question. Kael said: "Yes. Until I know enough." He paused. "And then I will go."
"Where will you go?"
He looked at the book on the table. He said: "Where the road goes."
Torvel looked at him with an expression he couldn't read — too many components, too many things he didn't have context for. Then Torvel made a sound that was, he was fairly certain, a laugh. Short and controlled and private, but a laugh.
He said, one more time and now with real precision: "What is that word? The word for what the merchant did in the market. The light in her hand."
Torvel was still. Then he said the word Maret had given him.
"And the thing underneath it," Kael said. "The source."
Torvel looked at him. He said: "That is a more complex question."
Kael said: "I have time."
Torvel said: "Yes." He looked at the book and then at Kael, and his expression had shifted to something that might, in a person with more visible affect, have been called pleased. "Yes, I believe you do."
They sat together in the room with the shelves and the books and the jars of unknown contents, and Torvel opened the book to its first page and pointed to the first character and spoke its name.
Kael listened, and repeated, and remembered.
One hundred and twenty-one.