Chapter Thirteen: A Gifted Girl

Val had dreamt of getting the Gift ever since she learned about it. Which, granted, had only been a few weeks before, but she'd been sure she'd get it and she'd been correct. Getting it right there in the middle of Taagsnit had done a lot to clear the air between Val and Priestess Oestel, especially because the goddess had seen it fit to use the priestess as her conduit.

Oestel had raised her arms before the altar and stated, "I've seen a true vision - let no one doubt that this girl has been touched by Valkyrie herself."

That was a pretty big deal, apparently. It wasn't end-of-the-world big, though. Oestel had been touched as well and subsequently underwent an amazing transformation that nobody could deny. She was an important figure and a testament to the faith, but then life had gone on as it always did and the priestess was now only a minor celebrity among the Old Sudren devout. Now Val had gone from being an orphan who couldn't get an apprenticeship to the chosen of a goddess, which sure felt like a big deal. It was a lot of responsibility.

It was also a bit of a let-down, because a girl invariably got the Gift at the same time as her first period, which meant she had to put up with four days of bleeding and mild discomfort and Ginn and Sabine telling her everything they knew about dealing with 'Cousin Crimson'. That was the cheeky term for periods in Arleng.

They held a little party, which was nice. Ginn got to reconnect with some of her friends in the city, some of whom brought daughters a few years older than Val, and they ate tea cakes and gave Val various products, along with cream sweets and (for some reason) a hot water bottle. The girls were all very interested to learn about the Gift, which was rare enough that only one in thirty or forty people had it, and half of them only ever managed two or three useful tricks. And, for some reason, Ette was very mindful about not entering the room during the party.

"Didn't want to disturb things," he explained afterward.

Ginn and Ette wound up staying with Sabine for another two days, after which they found a place a ten minute walk away, a modest home that a family in the sept was moving out of. They paid for the whole building in cash, producing a sum of money that Val found frankly stupefying. It was at least twenty golden talents, paid with a single embossed bank note, which was about the same sum in crowns.

The house was a bit smaller than the Vinzenno residence back in Wayfair, but it had more rooms, which meant Val didn't have to sleep in Galvan's room. She'd only ever met the boy once during one of his visits with his parents back in Wayfair (he hadn't been thrilled about Val sleeping in his bed) and it was still up in the air whether he'd be joining them in Verdenlecht. Ginn and Ette hoped it would work out, but Val secretly wanted to be an only child. Not that she was a child. And not that she belonged to anybody but herself.

There was quite a bit to fix up around the new house. It wasn't in poor repair, especially not by Val's standards, but Ette was quite insistent that they get everything ship-shape before they settled in. Ette turned out to be quite the handyman, and Val learned a lot about carpentry, plumbing, and roofing that she hadn't known before.

She helped him hammer a new roof onto the place, helping to cart a big load of shingles to the new house and then painstakingly tearing the old ones up, repairing any water-worn beams in the roof, applying sealant, and then hammering new shingles on top. Val liked to sit on the edge of the roof during breaks and watch the city beyond and below.

"Are you going back to being a bondsman?" she asked Ette. Learning how to fix up a house was great, but it was also boring compared to the life of a bondsgirl. Or an orphan, for that matter.

Ette looked up from his roofing and shook his head. "Not in Verdenlecht - I don't want to step on Sabine's toes, given that the city is a lot smaller than Wayfair, and she knows the city better than I do in any case. But there's still plenty of work for security and we'll get started before too long. Why? Roofing's not dangerous enough for you?"

"It's fine," Val said. "But I don't want it to be my job."

"True. But there are two upsides to knowing how to do lots of things. First, you save a lot of money. People everywhere will try to fleece you, and even the ones who don't still have to make a living. And second, whatever you can do reasonably well you can pretend to do as a cover identity."

"A cover identity?"

"Sure. When you don't want people to know who you are - when you're pretending to be somebody you aren't so folks won't see you as a threat. You're pretty decent at that already, but being able to pass yourself off as a professional at something else is helpful when the person you're protecting doesn't want people to know they're being protected. And you, Valkyrie, already have a huge advantage in that regard."

"Really? Because I'm good at lots of things?"

Ette chuckled and pushed himself to a sit. "Don't get too full of yourself, Val. No - because you're a young woman. People tend to underestimate women. Think they can't fight. Think they're less intelligent than men."

Val laughed. "Really? People believe that?"

"Some do. People who don't know Sabine or your auntie very well. And if we're to take advantage of that, we'll want Ginn to teach you some proper and ladylike things that'll trick people into underestimating you even more than they're already apt to do. Oh… and as for carpentry and roofing? How do your arms feel?"

Val alternated flexing her arms. "Fine?"

"And how did they feel after your first day hammering nails and carrying lumber around?"

"Pretty sore. So this is good for building muscle?"

"Not as good as proper training, but it's a good start. It builds endurance so you'll be able to work for hours without getting tired." Ette squinted and measured the sun's elevation in the sky with his outstretched hand. "Say, shouldn't you be getting ready for your afternoon lessons?"

Val sighed. "Yeah… but that's even more boring than roofing."

"True, but maybe even more important. Go on - get yourself cleaned up and grab a snack before heading off. We'll finish the rest tomorrow."

+++++

One of the infuriating things about having the Gift was knowing that she had it but not being able to use it. First off, Val wasn't supposed to use it in public at all. It would draw too much attention to her and plenty of people distrusted folks with the Gift. But beyond that, she couldn't really to anything with it - hence the need for lessons.

Val already knew how to make chem-hardened leather, but it had taken an additional five hours of practice (with considerable help from Ginn) to be able to actually make the magic part of the process work. And, when she finally got it to work, the leather wasn't nearly as strong or consistent as the stuff that Ginn made.

"It's not fair - I did exactly the same thing as you," Val said.

"It's exactly fair, and no you didn't," Ginn said. "I've been doing this for longer than you've been alive, so of course I'm better. You did close to what I did, but you don't know enough yet to know what to pay attention to and what to improvise with." Then she'd handed Val a stack of ten more leather circles and told her to try ten slightly different ways and pay very close attention to what she did different each time. She pointed to a second stack of ten circles. "And once you find a better way, practice that one ten more times."

Those weren't even Val's real magic lessons. Those happened three times a week for three hours at a time along with eleven other young people recruited from the Hale Jerob sept and the two other Old Sudren temples in the city, since their priests didn't have the Gift. Since Val's Gift had presented itself a bit earlier than average, she was among the youngest in the group, and some of the older students looked down on her for being both young and poorly-read.

The twelve magic students (a lucky number!) met at the temple to learn under Priestess Oestel, who usually only taught them for about thirty minutes before sending them to practice on their own - she was a busy woman. However, she had three Gifted gotkosens to supervise and teach as well, including a 'greenspear' named Levin, who was only a year or two older than the oldest student in the class.

Most of the study was dreadfully boring, and they even gave Val 'homework', which she found intolerable… but she had to do it anyway, since Oestel would know if she hadn't done it. If she hadn't memorized half of the Old Sudren alphabet, it would be pretty obvious. And most of the good magic books were written in Old Sudren.

"Why can't they just write them in Arleng?" Val asked. Half of her classmates agreed, while the other half had already learned Old Sudren pretty well since they'd been learning magic for a year or two longer.

"Arleng is a practical language," Levin said. "The written alphabet doesn't have directions for how to move your spirit…"

"What does that even mean?" Val said. "You say the words and put your will out into the world, right? What has spirit got to do with it?"

Her magic was still pretty rough, but she could get it to work. Since the language of the words didn't particularly matter, Val didn't see why the directions had to be written in Old Sudren, which was a weird hybrid between a proper alphabet and a pictographic system. All you had to do was mutter an incantation about what you wanted to do (practiced mages could just say the words in their head)… saying the words artfully was apparently better… and then you just willed the magic to happen. The trick was knowing how to will something to happen, which was a lot harder than it sounded. It wasn't like wishing for things. It was more like envisioning how you wanted the present world to change into the future one.

"What do you think you're doing when you push your will into the world?" Levin said. He was tall, slim, and dark-skinned with a cocky smile and eyes that seemed to see through everything… most of the girls in the class liked him, though Val just thought he was too cocky for his own good. "Your will is the shape of your spirit, and if the written directions can approximate that shaping, it makes for a lot less guesswork on your part. You can't make a force, but you can make what goes into a force… you can't make a fire, but you can make what goes into a fire. Then the universe makes it happen. Understanding what forces make up the events in our world takes a spell effect that could take you years to learn and compresses it into weeks or even days. Everybody knows what a house is, but who can actually build a house? It's the same way with making spells work - if you study right, you can learn a new spell in just a few weeks."

Weeks still sounded like an awful long time to Val. She'd mastered chem-hardening in about a week, to the point that she was nearly as good at is as Ginn. Ginn thought that was plenty impressive, but it still felt like an awful lot of work and she still wasn't as good. Apparently, most people with the Gift learned three or four tricks and got really good with them, whereas Val's impression had always been that you should be able to do pretty much whatever you wanted with magic. Wasn't that the whole point of magic?

"No, the whole point of magic is that it's a gift," Levin said. "You've been given the tools for a reason, and you'll find that you have different aptitudes. That's also for a reason. If the gods make you great at hardening materials, it's because that's what they want you to do…"

"That was just the first thing I learned. Maybe I'll get better at other things?"

Levin shrugged. "Maybe. But nobody is good at everything. Life just doesn't work that way, let alone the Gift."

Obviously, Val knew that life was unfair. That was basically baked into being an orphan. Obviously, it was unfair that some people were born rich, some were born poor, and some were urchins from the time they could walk. Obviously, it was unfair that some people had the gift and others didn't. Obviously, it was unfair that some people were small for their age and some weren't. Though Val's clothes fit pretty well now, when she'd bought them a bit big on purpose. Ginn said she was at least two inches taller - and she measured her at two inches under five feet, which was only a bit small for her age.

"You'll be taller than me in no time," Ginn said, and she started a little spot by Val's bedroom door where she could chart her growth with little marks of oil pen, even though Ette said it would ruin the paint.

"What've we got going on today?"

Ginn shrugged. "I've got to submit some paperwork to the ducal authorities so we can start working security. Ette's going out with Sabine for a bounty, and if he hasn't asked you, then it means you aren't invited to come. From the looks of your desk, you've got about a dozen books that need reading…"

That was true. But, just because Val had a dozen books that needed reading, that didn't mean she was going to read them right now. Not when it was a cool and sunny day outside, warm enough to be comfortable in a jacket and cool enough to make snowball fights fun. If she was lucky, she could find Iselde, whose crowd inevitably ranged over to a four- or five-block area not so far from the Riverway after their morning lessons at the orphanage.

Val took half of her savings - two low marks in total - and slipped them into the hidden pockets in her jacket. Her chem-hardened jacket. She'd completed treating her jacket the week before. If she got much better, then she could always apply the treatment again. According to Ginn, though, even professional alchemists didn't do much better than her jobs, and Val's was only a shade worse than that.

"I'm going to go study with friends," Val said.

"Without your books?"

"She's got books enough for the two of us."

Ginn probably knew that Val wasn't going off to study, but she wasn't Val's mom and couldn't very well tell an assistant not to do as she liked with what was ostensibly free time. As long as Val didn't get into any trouble, her time was her own.

Val buckled her boots on - good boots that she bought with the money from her Cousin Crimson party - and crunched out into the snow, loving how her feet felt impervious to the cold and the wet. Even her good 'Clyve' shoes couldn't withstand snow for more than a few minutes. With her new boots, she could stand in an ice puddle up to mid-shin for weeks without feeling cold or wet (not that she'd want to). She'd hardened the leather on them, too.

She headed down toward Riverway, carriages splashing through slush in the streets. The temperature hovered just above freezing and so traffic was pretty much normal on the streets. When things froze up that night, the going would be treacherous.

Val looked along the row of shops and loft apartments and realized she was less than half a block from Gustinia's place. Gus was one of the other girls learning magic at the temple and one of a few she'd befriended. Gus was a tall and awkward girl, but she was really smart, maybe smarter than Val, and not shy so much as unsettlingly straightforward. Now that Val thought on it, people with the Gift ranged from quite sharp to very, very sharp, and she wondered if there was a connection. Even Ginn was secretly very smart, though she often underplayed it for some reason. Val wandered into the shop owned by Gus's parents - Regent's Engraving & Fine Metalwork - and asked Gus's mother whether she was in.

Mrs. Regent craned her neck to look at the clock - Gus's mother was even taller than Sabine and probably weighed about half as much. "Gusti will be in lessons for another twelve minutes, and she'll need to be back in the shop at four o'clock. You're welcome to wait."

"Can I watch you work?"

"Sure. I'm just doing the fluting on a decorative plaque."

Only Gus's parents ever called her Gusti. For everybody else, it was either her whole name or Gus. She was named after her grandmother, who'd been a pewtersmith. Gus's mother specialized in scraping fancy patterns into metal, while her father did engravings of people or animals. They usually left the lettering to Gus's brother Hoacio, who was their apprentice. Since Gus got the Gift, it was unclear whether she'd be following the family tradition of artistic metalwork.

Gus came down twelve minutes later on the dot with her tutor and Beni in tow. Beni was another of the kids… young adults… in their magic group. Apparently, he and Gus had the same tutor, and so they'd doubled up on some of their lessons.

"Hey, Val. What's going on?"

"I have the afternoon off and was going down to Riverway if either of you want to come."

"Sounds good," Beni said. He was almost as tall as Gus and significantly broader - he reminded Val a lot of Pudge. She had mixed feelings on that, since they had great rapport but she missed her friend back in Wayfair.

"Give me a minute to put on some breeches, then," Gus said, and she dashed right back up the stairs.

Just as in Wayfair, in Verdenlecht, women of means did not wear trousers or breeches ever, unless they were riding (even then, it was iffy). Women of the lower classes wore trousers while doing rough or dirty jobs, and women in the middle classes wore breeches, but only when doing outdoorsy things. Since Val had found herself in decidedly middle-class company with the Vinzennos, her wardrobe was all skirts and breeches, though she sometimes missed the ruggedness of trousers. Boys were luckier, since you could wear sturdy trousers to almost any occasion as long as they looked nice enough.

+++++

With Gus and Beni and tow, Val made her way toward Iselde's haunt near the Riverway. They found her when Iselde tried to nick Val's petty change purse off her. At this point, it was all in good fun - Iselde tried to nick things without Val noticing and Val tried to catch her.

"Ow!" Iselde yelped.

"Don't think I didn't notice you," Val said - in truth, she hadn't noticed Iselde until it would have been too late if Iselde wanted to snatch the coins and run.

"What was that?" Iselde asked. She sucked on three beet-red fingers.

"Just a magical trap," Val said. She beamed at her friends - she was quite proud of it. She'd had to track it down in Priestess Oestel's small magical library after reading about the spell in another book. She could make the trap hurt a lot more than that - and, in time, she might learn to make it into a real hand-mangler - but she hadn't wanted to injure Iselde, obviously.

"That ain't fair! Stop laughing!"

"It's not fair to be sneaking up on people and nicking their stuff, neither," Val said.

"Yeah, but I only do that to folks that deserve it…"

"Like Beni?" Val asked.

"What in hell's bells?" Beni yelped, suddenly noticing that his own pockets felt a bit lighter.

"Hullo, Niko," Val said. Nikoli was a girl just a bit older than Val, but taller and blonder like she imagined the sturmmidden, the storm-maidens in the Goddess Valkyrie's retinue, to look like. She was one of Iselde's friends from the orphanage who had slowly come into Val's growing orbit of orphan and non-orphan friends in the sept.

"Just for fun, isn't it?" Niko said. She handed Beni's coin's back and he carefully counted them. That was a reasonable response, since Niko might short him a few pfennigs just to see if the boy was paying attention.

"I'm short three pfennigs," the boy said.

"Well worth the lesson, no doubt," Val said. She'd give Beni three pfennigs of her own money later, as Niko no doubt needed it more than either of them. "What's going on?"

Iselde shot Val a plaintive look, which meant she wanted money. "Heard there's a woman renting skate-shoes by the frozen-over spillage pond. It's two red for a pair…"

"I've got my own pair," Gus said. "Nicer than whatever old leather scraps she's got. You guys go ahead and I'll meet you there."