Vincent

It would be a long time before he could look anyone in the eyes again.

Everywhere he looked, he found condemnation. The seething, restrained rage of witnessing an injustice that couldn't be made right, like a stain on a shirt that would never come out. The people of Barleybarrel would curse his name for the rest of their lives, possibly longer. And it wasn't as if they were wrong to do so.

Nine names were now branded on the inside of his heart. Nine people who died because he was careless with his power.

Vincent waited at the front of the platform, near the engine. He knew he was supposed to get on, the Fourth Platoon was his. But to mingle with so many people, especially Barleybarrel's most vulnerable, struck him as insult to the town and its people. And so he waited, in a silence that could be mistaken for sullen, torn between wanting to weep and wanting to run away.

"You planning to wait out the rest of the invasion here?" Mackaroy asked.

Vincent hadn't heard or him approach. Had he been holding even a sliver of his power, he could never have missed the old shadow approach. Much as the idea of a shadow was to be inconspicuous, most of them stood out like a broken thumb stuffed inside a too small glove. Mackaroy stood out more than most; his job had given him scars both inside and out, and the old shadow made no effort to hide either.

"Just until the last train, perhaps," Vincent said. "It should be easier to find some space away from the townsfolk then."

"Afraid one of the locals might try to shiv you?" Mackaroy asked.

The accusation struck hard and dug deep, like a knife being wrenched about in his chest. With the guilt, the shame, the confusion over how to answer any of it, and the pain he knew everyone else was feeling, the idea of being worried for his own safety was a small and pathetic concern. And the accusation, insulting. Vincent turned on Mackaroy and frowned. "Do you really think so little of me, Mack?"

"Good," Mackaroy said, to Vincent's surprise. He had been expecting a confrontation with the old shadow. "Your spine's still in one piece."

Vincent was only starting to get used to the emotional whiplash Mack could put someone through. "That was a test?"

"Any good shadow tests their charges regularly. It's the only way to get to know the person you're watching, and I really need to know you right now."

"Why is that?" Vincent asked.

"Later. For now, let's get on the train. I'd like to put some miles between us and that ash-bitten monument to the army's failure," Mackaroy said, gesturing towards the train. Mercifully, pointing to the car closest to the engine. Vincent followed without resistance up the short stairs and into a crowd already in the middle of a heated conversation.

"I burning told you already," an older, imperious looking woman announced as she tapped Barleybarrel's lead hand, Mister Barrowright, on the chest. The strike, despite being done with a singe finger, was hard enough to to make the man stagger. "These are medical cars. I'll take your wounded, but this is a workspace, not a cargo carrier. Regular passengers keep to the back cars, my people need space to work, and your people that I let in here need rest."

"There's no guarantee more trains are coming. We should get as many people on as we can. I don't see any trains behind you."

"By that logic the Gloam doesn't exist right now," the old woman scathed. "The reason there isn't another train on this platform is because this one's here. The medical train arrived first to make sure you didn't stuff your injured on the first available car and you let a hundred people breathe their germs on an open wound for three hours. Blood infections are a miserable way to go, and they're almost as certain a death sentence as a firing squad."

"But..." Mister Barrowright began to say, but it was Gwen who stepped in next.

"This is the first train," Gwen said, and there was a power in the way she spoke, a depth of conviction that stunned Vincent, and he wasn't who she was speaking to. "It is not the last. The City is here for you."

"You're right. Sorry," Miste Barrowright said quickly, nodded as he wiped his eyes with his sleeve. "It makes sense for this to be the first train. The most vulnerable should leave first."

"The passenger trains are about six cars down," the old woman said as she passed, already back to wrapping a bandage with her eyes fixed on someone else's injury. "Michael, he's bleeding too quickly. Open that bandage up and take a look. Have a pair of clamps handy."

"Thank you, but I'll just step back out. Lead hand still means something. The only boots that should leave after mine will be the rest of your fellow Rangers," Mister Barrowright said, as he turned to leave.

Gwen thumped her chest hard, twice. The Rangers' salute. The sound was echoed by every other person in hearing who wore the white scarf, a thundering echo that had even the busy medical staff standing up straight and stopping for a moment. Vincent thumped his own chest along with Mack, and something about the moment made the pain of the last few hours sting just a little less.

It was a promise kept. Answering hope, and faith in the City.

We are the walls.

"Special Talent Hearthsward," Emily Varnell barked.

Vincent just about jumped, spun in place to face her, and waited as impassively as he could. His face still stung, and he felt more than a little shame when he saw her.

It was her orders he obeyed. Her orders he failed at when he intervened. She probably wanted to throttle him.

"With me," she said. Firm, but most orders given by an officer were. Vincent cringed, and turned to follow.

Emily walked straight past, and stopped in front of the old woman who seemed to be running the medical staff. "You're the one giving orders on this ride?"

"That I am," Miss Eridwen answered. "And I've had entirely too much of army officers giving me orders today."

"Pity that," Emily said. There were layers to her statement Miss Eridwen was likely not meant to understand. "Is our planned route a stop at Godichelli's Wall?"

"It is."

"I'm told the last medical car is your surgical room. I'm also told it's not currently in use."

"Both of those things are true. But you can go lie down on the tracks if you think I'm letting you stuff more passengers in there," Miss Eridwen insisted, as she rounded on Emily with an extended finger.

"We're not taking on anyone else. We should be leaving momentarily," Emily said, with a smile as warm and unthreatening as the sword she wore on her belt. "But I need that car for the rest of the trip."

"You can't-"

"I most certainly burning can. No one is to go into that car, from either direction. The only consolation I'm offering is it will keep the passengers in the far cars come coming to visit."

And surprisingly, the imperious old woman accepted it. "Fine. But you had better not be doing this just to drink my sterilizers. That's medical grade alcohol, it can strip pain or rust off steel."

"Fine. Sergeant Redgrave, if you see me drinking the lady's scalpel-cleaning hooch, throw me off the train. While it's still moving."

Vincent wasn't sure when Valen had boarded the train, but his presence was a comfort. Redgrave was a solid, reassuring presence, like having a wall between you and the Gloam. Valen made a show of leaning against a window, and nodding. "Aye, ma'am."

"Vincent," Emily said. "Let's go."

Vincent followed her through four cars in silence, their only other companion being Mack, who held back just a few feet, and followed for the moment without comment. It wasn't until they reached a largely empty car, with little more than a single table and some small shelving, that Emily stopped and turned to Mack. "You can go. I need to talk with Vincent for a little while."

"About what?" Mack shut the door behind him as he asked, and leaned on it.

"What he's capable of."

"Is this about what he did in the last fight?"

"No, Mack. This is about the next one."

Mackaroy grinned at that, and pushed off the door. But instead of opening it, he walked across the car, and began pulling the blinds down. "I'll knock again when we're getting close to the other side."

Vincent crossed the room and put himself in the old shadow's path. "Mack, you said it was important that you knew me. Why is that?"

"Ask her." Mackaroy gestured with a tilt of his head to Varnell, before he stepped around Vincent and opened the door to the next car. "In fact, it's better she knows. With me, you might be allowed to step into your own. With her..."

Mackaroy opened the door, and said, "with her, you could be another Garland Kohl. Abyss below, do we ever need one."

Mack shut the door behind him, and a direction his life could have taken shut along with it. Vincent turned around, surprised to see Emily shoving the single table off to the side of the room. "So," she said as she gave the table one last shove. "Tell me about the Craft."

"I wield the flame. Or more precisely, I seize heat and make it a part of me. When the fire is mine, I can make it take a shape and intensity as I wish." Vincent demonstrated by holding out his hand and willing fire into a shape in his palm. Easily, easier than he ever remembered, it took the familiar bird shape he had used dozens of times already today.

"So when it's your Craft, you can make it do anything you want?"

"It's a part of me," Vincent said, hoping that was an answer. It was strange trying to explain the Craft to someone who couldn't. Like trying to explain math to someone who didn't know what a number was.

"You can also see and hear through the Craft?" Emily asked. "You talked to me by writing in fire onto the ground, when you were miles away."

"Yes," Vincent confirmed. "I see, hear, and feel. I suppose I can smell, too, but that sense is confused by the nature of what fire is."

"If you were in a pitch-black room, and you made a fire, you could see in that room?"

"Obviously."

"Even if you weren't in that room?"

"But I am in that room. I am the flame."

"Your fire can see by the light it casts?"

"I can," Vincent admitted, surprised by her insight.

"So if someone was stuck in the Gloam, your Craft could stay with them without any light but your own," Emily nodded.

The floor beneath Vincent shuddered, and pulled forward for just a moment as the train began to move. That shudder seemed to echo the sudden worry in his own heart, of what Emily Varnell might imagine could be accomplished with his power. The fear was etched on both sides of a page, both the fear that whatever she imagined she might be wrong, and that it might be right.

"Is this why you left me with her, Mack?" Vincent whispered.

"Your sight through the Craft, is it any different than through your eyes?" Emily asked, either not hearing him worry, or ignoring it.

"Very much so," Vincent admitted. "I think I'm partially colourblind, because when I use the Craft, there are at least a dozen colours I didn't know existed. I can see stars in daylight if I focus, and I can actually see heat."

"What colour is heat?"

"It's heat. It doesn't have a colour."

"And you see through the flame, and your eyes, at the same time? That doesn't cause vertigo, or madness?"

The answer slipped out of Vincent like water from an overturned glass. Not his words, but the words of every teacher he had during his first year as an apprentice. "Fire doesn't feel vertigo," Vincent said. He frowned, and thought about it for a moment, recalling how few of his original classmates really proved that lesson true. "Though some apprentices are never able to let a Craft extend very far from themselves. I suppose it depends. For those that can't, suddenly being able to is a sign that they're losing themselves to their power."

"So you could look at an object from two directions at once?" Emily asked.

"You do it already," Vincent said, and he tapped one of his eyes, and then the other.

"How many eyes can you have? Is there a limit to how much fire you can make yourself into? And when does going mad begin to be a worry?"

It was strange just how much, and how little, Emily understood of the Craft. "Every time I Craft, I turn myself into fire. Fire burns, and I lose a little of myself each and every time I use my power. Every time, no matter how small. But the Craft isn't given equally to every potential. I am strong in the Craft, a candle's worth of flame is so small I could likely leave one burning for years without suffering any ill effects. I've only ever tried to split myself into fifty-four different Crafts. I used thirty-eight earlier today."

"Okay." Emily nodded, turned, and started pacing back and forth. "So the more you split yourself into Crafts, you become more like the flame and less like you, because more of you is fire. If you're split across many, is it even more dangerous to make a large fire than it would be normally?"

Vincent gaped at her, mouth open, for a long and frightened moment. That insight was something Master Polden had to sit him down to explain, as she began to teach him to split his awareness into dozens of Crafts. "That's, that's exactly right."

"So that intervention of yours today, that cost you?"

"It did," Vincent admitted. "I don't know what, it's not like your emotions, thoughts, or memories let you know they're being burned."

He regretted trying to be glib. Emily's cheeks went pale, and her eyes were wet. Trying to mollify her, he carried on. "Burn me, sorry. Master Polden, Crafter Kohl, and Mack all say the first thing to be lost is your compassion and your empathy, your sense of others' pain. I suppose the guilt that's been gnawing at me since I found out I killed those people means it didn't take too much out of me."

"You didn't kill them," Emily said. "They panicked when you did your duty. They weren't killed by your power. They were killed by being shoved from behind and being kicked and trampled to death. If you face any discipline over it, you will face it as a soldier. As a Ranger. But since you brought it up, tell me about what you did. Start with this 'heat haze'."

"The heat haze," Vincent repeated, and dozens of lessons washed over him. His first year of tutelage, and the hundred times or more he would practice it with his master. "It's both a shield, and a show of power. You seize all of the air immediately around you, hold it, and make it yours. This way, anything trying to hurt you has to strike your power first. And because I can see and hear through it, it's almost impossible to miss a threat. When a Crafter says 'you are in my heat haze', it means more than just being in their protection. The air you breathe belongs to that Crafter, not you."

"That's more than a little frightening."

"When we are the flame, we can also respond far, far faster than we could without. For instance, if you fired a Salamander at me from outside my heat haze, I could decide if I wanted to block it, seize and turn it back, or make a picture with it."

"All right," Emily said with a wave of her hand. She rubbed at her forehead with her hand as she paced. "Now, how divided can your attention be?"

"Pardon?" Vincent asked.

"When you Craft, how good are you at doing more than one thing at a time? When you were talking to me out in the field, could you have been working or talking to someone else at the same time?"

"I botched it a little with Sergeant Lorec. I was a little too eager to help you, it kept me from focusing," Vincent admitted. "But the ability to wield more than a single Craft at a time requires the ability to use your awareness with the flame to do more than one thing at a time. I was controlling all thirty-eight of those Crafts I used earlier independently, using each one differently at the same time."

"So you could, using the Craft, have more than one conversation at the same time? I know you can write with the Craft, and use it to make letters."

"Yes, I can."

"How many?"

"I don't know. It's not a skill I've practiced much."

"All right, I'll get back to that. Now, could you fire a shot from a Valkyrie without a charge?"

Vincent frowned at that. "Easily."

"Could you focus the explosion so it doesn't heat the barrel as quickly? Or fire the ball faster without damaging the gun."

"I've never tried, but that's very similar to what I had to do for that tunnel."

Emily nodded, and stopped pacing. "One last question, before we start."

"Before we start?" Vincent asked, but if Emily heard him she was very good at pretending she hadn't.

"When I struck you, earlier. You didn't react. Your head barely turned. It was like hitting a statue. You didn't even seem to feel it until you let go of the Craft. Is that an accurate impression?"

"It's an incomplete explanation. I felt it. But when I'm holding the Craft pain stops being, well, painful. One of our first lessons we go through as apprentices is a boxing match, where we start by Crafting and holding a candle-sized flame nearby before we spar. It's to teach us that when we become fire, everything we feel is felt in the context of being fire, rather than flesh and blood. I felt it, but it was like using pain as a passive sense, like sight or hearing. There's no pain in feeling pain, not when I'm holding even the smallest Craft."

"So I could jam a sword into you, and unless you bled out you'd still be able to turn me into smoke?"

"Not if you used that sword," Vincent admitted, pointing to the blade at her belt. "It's hard to Craft when holding the stuff, let alone being impaled. And before you ask, no I really don't know why. Crafter Saval was absurdly secretive of what it was or how to make it."

"So, you can split your awareness, your conscious thoughts, almost as if you can do several things at the exact same time," Emily concluded. "It's more dangerous as you split it further, or do something bigger. The less like you your behaviour turns, the more prescient the risk to yourself. Now, take eight sheets of paper from that stack over there, and set them in various places around the room."

Despite his curiosity, Vincent complied, and the two of them set paper all across the room. Emily didn't seem to have any particular placement in mind, leaving two pages on the floor in the corner, and stuck three onto the windows. She then pulled out several linen strips from one of the bins in the corner.

"Wrap these around your head. Cover your eyes," Emily ordered.

"It'll be hard to see," Vincent said as he took the bandages.

"Not for you," Emily countered.

Vincent seized the flame, and claimed every lamp in the car at once. Half a dozen torches along the walls of the car became his eyes as he wrapped the linen around his head, and he heard Emily's next order through eight different ears. "In the spirit of your apprenticeship, you and I are going to spar."

"I take it there's more to the lesson? Even most rejects pass this test," Vincent said.

"At the same time, I want you to write something on each and every piece of paper we set up. I don't care what, this time. But each page should have something unique. Do you understand?"

"I understand," Vincent said, but he held up his hands, palms out. "We should open a window, though."

Emily frowned. "Why?"

"That much Crafting could change the air pressure in this car. It could get uncomfortable, pop your eardrums, or break a window."

"No," Emily said. "You deal with it, with the Craft. The air in your heat haze is yours, after all. Don't do anything irresponsible with it."

"Even as you try to dislocate my jaw?" Vincent asked. "Wish you'd take off those gloves this time."

"Too bad," Emily replied. "You ready?"

"Aye ma'am." Vincent raised his hands. "On your mark."