The education was not linear. It was not a path, but a deepening.
For Lyssa, the hours with Torvin in the smoky, rhythmic heat of the smithy were lessons in intent. He did not let her near the forge fire at first. Instead, he sat her on a rough stool and placed objects in her hands: a cold, rough lump of iron ore; a smooth river stone; a brittle, porous piece of pumice; a nail, bent and discarded.
"Tell me," he would rumble, his voice barely audible over the sigh of the bellows. "Not what they are. What they are."
At first, she could only stammer. "It's… heavy. It's cold."
Torvin would shake his great, sooty head. "You're listening to your skin. Listen past it. That ore. Is it sleeping? Is it waiting? Is it angry it was pulled from the dark?"
She would close her eyes, trying to quiet the clamor of her own thoughts, to hear the object's subtle hum. The ore felt… dormant. A deep, patient slumber full of metallic dreams. The river stone was content, smoothed by a long, peaceful story of travel. The pumice was frantic, light, and airy, still holding the scream of the fire that birthed it. The bent nail sang a small, sad song of failed purpose.
"You see," Torvin said when she haltingly described these things. "They have a nature. Fire's nature is to change. Earth's is to endure. To work with them, you must understand what they want to become, not just what you want to make of them. You can force the ore into a sword with enough heat and hammer. But a sword that understands its steel was once a dreaming mountain… that's a different creature."
One afternoon, he let her hold a piece of metal as he heated it in the coals. "Don't command the fire," he instructed. "Ask it. The metal is afraid. It thinks it's dying. Tell it it's being born."
Lyssa focused, pouring not will but reassurance towards the orange glow. The flames, which had been licking hungrily, softened. They wrapped the metal like a blanket, not a predator. The metal's song of terror shifted, not to joy, but to a tense, curious anticipation. When Torvin drew it out, it glowed with a more even, serene light.
"A gentler temper," he grunted, impressed. "Less brittle. You didn't forge it, girl. You midwifed it."
In the moon-drenched chaos of Maren's garden, the lessons were about connection and conversation.
Maren was a harsh but brilliant teacher. "Stop trying to hear words!" she'd snap when Lyssa concentrated too hard. "You're not decoding. You're eavesdropping! That rosemary—is it bragging about the sun it caught today, or is it complaining the basil is stealing its water? Feel the gossip!"
Lyssa learned to differentiate the "voices." The deep, slow pull of the Water in the well was a constant, patient bass note. The Air was capricious, a tenor that carried snippets of conversation from the distant streets and the secrets of pollen. The plants themselves were a chattering chorus: the proud, sharp song of the thyme; the thirsty, sprawling plea of the pumpkin vine; the drowsy, nocturnal hum of the moonflowers.
Maren taught her manipulation through suggestion, not command. She had Lyssa urge dew to gather on a specific, parched basil plant not by summoning moisture, but by suggesting to the evening air that the basil was the most interesting, deserving place to condense. She taught her to divert a gust of wind from knocking over a seedling by having a nearby, sturdier sunflower ask the breeze for a dance, pulling its attention away.
"It's all about introduction and inclination," Maren cackled one night as they watched a mist, coaxed by Lyssa, settle perfectly over a row of seedlings. "You're not a queen barking orders. You're a matchmaker at a very strange party."
Kaelen watched the transformation from a distance. The overwhelmed, haunted look in Lyssa's eyes began to recede, replaced by a focus that was both powerful and serene. She moved through the keep with new awareness, not flinching from the elements, but acknowledging them with a faint nod of her head or the slightest touch to a sun-warmed stone wall. She was learning her own grammar.
He also saw the bond forming between student and tutors. Torvin spoke to her with a gruff respect, seeing not a helpless girl but a prodigy with a feel for the primal truth of his craft. Maren, for all her sharpness, watched Lyssa with a fierce, protective pride, like a gardener who has discovered a rare and precious bloom in her patch.
One evening, about three weeks after their lessons began, Kaelen found all three of them in the walled garden. Torvin was there, a strange sight amidst the herbs, holding a small, newly forged medallion—a simple disc of steel. Maren stood beside him, holding a sprig of vibrant, flowering thyme.
Lyssa stood before them, looking from the metal to the herb.
"Your final test for now," Torvin said, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. "The steel is young. Confused. It remembers the ore, fears the fire, doesn't know what it is. The thyme is alive, but cut. It's afraid it's dying. They're both afraid of the same thing: the end of what they were."
Maren thrust the thyme forward. "Introduce them. Comfort them. Use what you know."
Lyssa took the cold steel medallion in one hand and the sprig of thyme in the other. She closed her eyes. Kaelen felt the air in the garden grow still and attentive.
She didn't speak aloud. She hummed, a low, resonant tone that seemed to vibrate in Kaelen's teeth. It was a song of Earth—the deep, enduring memory of the mountain and the soil. She wrapped that feeling around the steel, reminding it of its strong, patient origins. Then, the melody shifted, weaving in the gentle, sustaining flow of Water and the soft, carrying breath of Air, directing them to the cut stem of the thyme, promising continuation, not termination.
Finally, she introduced the concept of Fire—not as destruction, but as transformation, as the spark of change that leads to new forms.
She opened her eyes. The steel disc in her hand was no longer cold. It was warm, not with retained heat, but with a kind of vibrational life. The tiny flowers on the thyme sprig, which should have been wilting, seemed to pulse with a fresher, brighter color.
She pressed the sprig against the warm steel. There was no flash. But where the living plant touched the forged metal, a subtle, perfect tracery of golden veins—like tiny roots or lightning bolts—spread across the surface of the steel, a permanent, beautiful marriage of the enduring and the ephemeral.
Torvin let out a slow breath of pure awe. Maren cackled in triumph.
Kaelen simply stared. It wasn't a weapon. It wasn't a grand feat of magic. It was an act of profound, compassionate understanding. She had taken two frightened, disparate truths and woven them into a new, harmonious one.