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Izamal takes a breath, and his voice turns mild. “You’re right, Dalca. Cas doesn’t deserve an apprentice. After all, didn’t I hear something about his last apprentice running away in the middle of the night?”
“I heard something of the same.” Dalca keeps his voice equally mild. “I heard he was too afraid of Cas to tell him to his face. Fine boy from the second ring, old Wardana family, wasn’t he?”
Iz shakes his head. “That was the one before. This last one was a girl, wasn’t she?”
Dalca makes a sound of agreement. “Nice second-ring girl. Wore ribbons in her hair, face always in a book? She seemed clever. She was clever, wasn’t she, Cas?”
“She was an imbecile,” Cas snaps. “We don’t take just anybody, Dazera. Contrary to what you might believe, ikonomancy is an art. It takes dedication and intelligence.”
“I’m not an imbecile.” I don’t need Dalca to make my case for me. Before we got here, Iz gave me the rundown on Casvian and the opportunity we’re seizing. Cas has a trainee problem: he’s required to have an apprentice, but no one lasts long under his thumb. Which is fine by me. I don’t need long, but I do need him to take me on.
Pa’s words tumble from my throat, words that now belong to me. “I know the power of ikons. I understand what it means to be able to affect the world with just a symbol. Ikonomancy is more than art. It’s power. And I respect that.”
I ignore Dalca and Izamal in favor of meeting Casvian’s gaze. He tosses his hair over his shoulder, puts down his pen, and leans back in his chair. “Those are just pretty words.”
“There is nothing ‘just’ about words. Words create meaning from chaos. When you name something—let’s takearroganceas an example—then that thing becomes something else, something that can be understood. That can be beaten.”
Casvian’s eyes narrow atarrogance. “More pretty words.” He grabs something from the table and throws it to me.
I catch it on instinct. It’s a red fruit, a little larger than my palm. I’ve only seen its kind once before.
“What words would you use to describe this?” A test.
“I know it is called a poma,” I say, but that’s not what he’s asking. “It is the deep red of a garnet, more of a purple-red than a blood-red.” I dig a thumbnail into the skin and pull. “The skin is firm, and the seeds inside are delicate, each no larger than a baby’s tooth, each a deeper shade of the same red as the skin.”
“Is that it?”
Dalca shifts his weight. I fight the angry flush that rises to my cheeks. “It’s larger than my fist, and perhaps a pound in weight, but I’d rather weigh it than guess. And I suppose it’s not uniformly red. It turns brown near where it would have connected to the stem, and there are tan spots on the bottom. The shape is loosely spherical, with a four-pronged crown at one end.”
Dalca speaks. “Cas, youdoneed a trainee.”
Neither Cas nor I look to him.
Cas holds up a hand with his fingers splayed. He folds one down with each word. “Color, size, weight, texture. Mediocre analyses. And you missed the obvious—taste and smell. But ikonomancy goes much further.” Cas extends a hand for the poma, and I toss it over. He holds it like he’s examining a large jewel. “Knowing something doesn’t just mean describing it.”
Cas pulls out a piece of paper and dips his pen in the ink, sketching an ikon. “This is a poma, in approximate. But at its core, ikonomancy isn’t just the naming of things—it’s the naming of actions applied to those things. We can ask a stone to burn, a clay pot to siphon water from the air, metal to pull a charge from the air and make light. But to ask, we must have the instinct to see beyond what a thing is.”
A silence hangs in the air. Izamal rubs the back of his neck.
“No.” Cas pins me with his cold gaze. “I cannot teach the mediocre.”
I hate him, for good reason, and yet I’m desperate to impress him. “What about potential? You mentioned nothing of the seeds the poma holds. Each could make a new tree, and each tree could make hundreds of fruits over its life. Or the energy that a person or animal could get from eating it. What of that? What of time? This is only a poma at this moment. A week from now, it is a mass of decay. What about two, or maybe three weeks ago? When it was just a flower?”
Cas doesn’t speak. My chances are slipping through my fingers.
“You’re right. I’ve missed the obvious. Right now, it’s not a poma at all. It’s a test. It’s a symbol for the gap between your knowledge and mine. That’s brilliant. You’ve turned it into something that has meaning beyond its name, so that only someone half blind would be satisfied by calling it a poma.”
Low laughter sounds from behind me. Dalca—Pa’s jailer, Amma’s murderer—laughs into a hand, his eyes shining with mirth.
Casvian looks about ready to spit acid. Holding my gaze, he bites into the not-poma’s half-peeled side. “Tastes like a poma to me.”
It’s such a ridiculous response that I get it. There’s nothing I can say to a man like Casvian Haveli.
“You’re an elitist bigot—” Izamal starts, stepping closer as if he’d like to get his hands on Casvian.
Dalca cuts him off. “Cas has a right to choose his apprentice—”
Cas’s lower lip is red with the poma’s juice. “That’s right. And I don’t oweyouanything. Should I put every forsaken low ringer on my back, just because you say so? Ikonomancy is for those who know what it means to handle it—your sister couldn’t—”
