Just here, at the table, with the red and blue lines and the too-bright yellow she hasn't touched yet.
I add a yellow dot to the centre of my circle. Sun, completed.
"Do yours have meaning?" I ask. "The pattern."
She is quiet for long enough that I think she is not going to answer. Then: "The borders my mother did had specificmeanings in the old style. Not wards, exactly. More — this room is a room where bread rises. This room is a room where children sleep well. The pattern said something about what the space wasfor." A short pause. "I don't know if I believe it works. But the principle is sound. A room where you've taken care is different from one where you haven't."
I look at the lines on her egg. The blue between the red, the cross at one end starting to form a corner that will probably become something more complete. She has taken care with it.
"Yours is going to be the most powerful talisman at the table," I say.
"It's going to be the mostgeometrictalisman at the table, which is different."
"What if geometry is the power?"
"What if you're not as clever as you think you are."
"Statistically unlikely." I dip my brush back into the yellow and look at the egg. "What should I add?"
She glances at it. "Are you asking me?"
"You have the most transferable expertise present."
"You have an enormous circle."
"Asun?—"
"Add something that isn't a circle," she says, the flat authority of someone who has decided to take this seriously now that I am asking, which I find genuinely excellent. "Even one thing. A line. Give the sun something to shine on."
I put a line at the base. It comes out crooked.
"Hmm," she says.
"That's a horizon."
"That is a horizon in the same way that was a sun."
"It's thespiritof a horizon?—"
"Ursik." She points at my egg with her brush, and there is something so specific about the way she addresses the problem directly — no preamble, no softening — that it gets mesomewhere under the ribcage in a way that has nothing to do with sparring. "Give the brush a moment. Don't push it. You're forcing the line."
"Am I?"
"You do it in sparring too. When you want something done, you push through it. Sometimes you have to slow down." She demonstrates on her own egg, a line pulled with clear, even pressure. "Let the tool do the work."
I watch her do it. Her hands are steady. Whatever is underneath the vigilance, underneath the sharp-glass defiance and the early mornings and the inventory she keeps of every threat in her radius — whatever sits under all of that, it has good hands. Patient hands.
I try the line again. It's better. Not straight, but better.
"There," she says.
"Are you teaching me?"
"I am correcting you, which is different."
"You said slow down in sparring."
"I said—" She stops. She did say that, in our third session, after I'd overcommitted to a sequence and she'd used it against me. I'd told her afterward it was the sharpest read she'd made. She hadn't responded then. Now she is doing the pressed-lip thing again, this time without trying to stop it, and it opens slightly at the left corner. "Fine. Maybe it transfers."
