A week passed in Saltmire, and Lyssa's existence settled into a fragile, hidden rhythm. She was a ghost in the keep—the quiet girl in the east wing, the Captain's mysterious guest. The maids whispered about her haunted eyes, the guards noted Kaelen's frequent, private visits to her quarters, and the councilors, for the most part, forgot her entirely. She was a footnote in a disturbing report, already being filed away.
But within the stone walls of her room and the private garden, a storm was brewing. Lyssa's power was not a tool she could sheathe. It was a sense, newly awakened and constantly on. She heard the groan of the keep's foundations, a slow, deep song of Earth stressed by centuries. She felt the trapped, stagnant Water weeping within the walls from the last storm. The torches in the sconces flared subtly when she passed, their Fire hissing a greeting. Drafts in the corridor would still and change direction, Air curling around her like a curious cat.
She was drowning in a symphony only she could hear, with no idea how to read the music.
Kaelen saw it. The tension in her shoulders, the distracted look in her eyes, the way she'd sometimes clamp her hands over her ears in a silent corridor. She wasn't going mad; she was overloaded. The "Magus Primordial" was a raw, exposed nerve, and the constant sensory barrage of a living city was sandpaper on skin.
He couldn't teach her. His knowledge was of steel and strategy, not elemental grammar. He needed experts. But announcing he was seeking tutors for a Quadra-Elemental would be like lighting a beacon for every remaining agent of the Gentle Dark. He needed discretion. He needed the overlooked.
His search began in the salt-stained underbelly of the city he commanded.
His first candidate was found not in a library, but in the roaring heat of the Royal Armory. Torvin was the head smith, a mountain of a man with a beard perpetually speckled with soot and forearms corded like knotted oak. He was a craftsman, not a warrior, but he had an almost spiritual relationship with his forge. Kaelen had seen him commune with molten metal, his hammer falls landing not as blows, but as questions, the steel answering with its ring and form.
Kaelen approached him one evening, after the apprentices had left. "Torvin. I have a… sensitive task. It requires an understanding of fire and earth not as elements, but as partners."
Torvin set down a glowing tong, the light glinting off the sweat on his brow. "You need a blade with a soul, Captain? Or something less pointy?"
"Less pointy. I need you to teach someone how to listen to them. To understand their nature, their… whispers. Without lighting a forge."
The smith was silent for a long moment, his intelligent eyes assessing Kaelen from beneath bushy eyebrows. "This for the lass you brought in? The one who walks like the floor might speak to her?"
Kaelen didn't confirm or deny. "Can you do it?"
Torvin grunted, picking up a rough, dark lump of iron ore. He hefted it in his palm as if weighing a heart. "Aye. Fire's not just rage. It's will. It's the desire to change. Earth isn't just stubborn. It's memory. It's what everything comes from and returns to." He looked at the ore. "This… it remembers being mountain. It dreams of being steel. I can teach that song." He met Kaelen's gaze. "We start with the dream. Not the flame."
The second candidate was found in the most unexpected place: the Royal Gardens, specifically, the overgrown, neglected medicinal herb plot. Maren was the keep's herb-woman, a wizened, sharp-tongued crone most people avoided. She was famously irritable, but her remedies worked with uncanny efficacy. Kaelen had once seen her ease a cook's wracking cough not just with a tea, but by having the woman sit in a specific, sun-drenched corner of the garden where the air, according to Maren, "was in a helpful mood."
He found her berating a patch of sluggish lavender. "Lazy clusters. The dew was perfect this morning. You've no excuse."
"Maren," Kaelen began.
"Busy, Captain. The flora are underperforming."
"I need you to teach someone about water and air. The persuasion of roots, the argument of pollen on the breeze. The… dialogue between a leaf and the sky."
She stopped, turning her keen, raisin-like eyes on him. "Dialogue, is it? Most think my garden's just a pantry. Who's got the wit for that?"
"Someone who might," Kaelen said, keeping his voice level.
Maren snorted, a sound like dry leaves. "The stone-cutter's girl. Saw her near the willow. She didn't touch it, but it sighed like she'd given it a compliment." She squinted. "You think the old sense woke up in her?"
"I think it's shouting, and she doesn't know the language," Kaelen admitted. "And you're the only person who hears the gossip of the groundwater."
A faint, proud smirk touched the old woman's lips. "Hmph. Well. Can't have a natural drowning in plain sight. Scares the chamomile. Bring her at twilight. We'll start with the evening primrose. Less judgmental."
It was an unorthodox academy: the soot-stained smithy and the fragrant, moonlit herb garden. The tutors were a philosophical smith and a conversationalist with weeds. There would be no grand lectures, no dusty tomes. Only practical, whispered wisdom.
That night, Kaelen brought Lyssa to the edge of the herb garden. Maren was waiting, a silhouette against the silver-tinged leaves.
"This is Maren. She's going to help you understand the… discussions… that happen here," Kaelen said.
Lyssa looked at the old woman, then at the thriving, tangled garden. A visible calm settled over her. Here, the "noise" had meaning, intention. She nodded.
Maren thrust a velvety leaf of sage into Lyssa's hand. "Eyes shut, girl. Don't listen with your head. Listen with your blood. What's it telling you? Not in words. In… in temperature. In pulse."
As Lyssa closed her eyes, her breathing slowing, Kaelen stepped back. From the forge, he heard the distant, resonant clang of Torvin's hammer, a deliberate, shaping beat against the anvil—Earth being persuaded by Fire.
In the smithy, there was a dream of steel. In the garden, a conversation with sage. Small, contained things. The first, safe vocabulary for a potential Magus Primordial to learn.