Tulila led Ortahn to his cell, said goodbye with a thoughtful glance, and left. Ortahn remained standing in the middle of the room (though any part of it could be called the middle, especially for such a large man), still feeling the salty taste of blood on his lips and the phantom sting of the healed bruises.

  But the door had barely begun to close when Faya, who had been circling nearby, darted to it and caught the panel, needlessly worrying that the broken door might actually shut.

  "So this is where you live," with these words, the girl stepped inside, looking around. "I'll tell you, this school is a real labyrinth. I've been here for six months, and I still get the turns mixed up." She stuck her head back into the corridor. "Taut, occupy yourself. Invent a problem and pretend to solve it."

  The listless figure of her shadow-porter flickered in the doorway. He turned and froze, staring at the opposite wall.

  "Good enough," Faya approved, making an unfamiliar gesture.

  Ortahn sat on the bed, making way for the unexpected guest. Faya closed the door and turned to him, planting her hands on her hips in a business-like manner. Her large eyes shone in the dim light of the light-weave. They looked at each other for so long that Ortahn decided to cough and was on the verge of speaking, but she spoke first:

  " He who knows the power of words is a man of few words. A true man. Don't worry, if you are worrying—Taut taught me how to fill pauses for two. My name is Esh-Faya, and you're Ortahn, right?"

  He felt exhausted after the outburst of rage, but he still decided to squeeze out a crumb of politeness.

  "Ortahn. Ortahn-son-Stella. And your matronymic?"

  "We don't do that in Zazara," she waved it off, but then grew serious, rubbing her chin. "Although... 'Faya' is the name of my clan's foremother. So in a way, we do." She smiled, having found something new in the familiar.

  "So I should call you Esh?" he asked, not knowing why he was doing it. Why he was keeping the conversation going. He should be lying down right now, staring into the void, but that would be rude to a woman, even an unblessed one.

  "Yes. And I'll call you 'Ort' then?"

  "No!" Ortahn bellowed, surprising everyone. "No," he repeated, calmer this time, trying to smooth over his outburst.

  Esh jumped in fright and held up her palms in a placating gesture.

  "Alright, alright! I didn't know it was so important to you. Men and their hot blood... But I'm not going to spend that much of my life on your full name. Just two letters. Although, if we talk a lot, it might take away a couple of hours."

  Ortahn didn't answer. Her stream of consciousness didn't require a response. Considering the speed and volume of her speech, she wasn't conserving her life's time at all. This thought, or the fact that he was talking to a person who wanted to talk to him for the first time in a long while, or all of it together, made him unexpectedly smirk.

  "What?" Esh noticed the smirk and froze, trying to understand its cause. Failing, she decided to check on Taut and peeked out the door. He was still carrying out his important mission of watching the wall. The girl returned to the dialogue. "Why did I come here? You didn't ask, but I built our entire mental conversation around that question. So, I just asked it myself. Or did you want to?"

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  "Please. I'd even be grateful if you took on the larger share of our conversation."

  "Really? Or is that sarcasm? Although in any case, I should probably start now," Esh giggled nervously, but then immediately exhaled and became serious (just as Ortahn had been in his previous sentence). "I want to learn about magic. Everything you can tell me. How it... feels. How it works. What you're studying. Everything." Taking another gulp of the room's air, she continued even faster. "Now, according to the conversation plan, you're going to say that I can't use it, neither male nor female magic, so why would I need it? Let's just skip that torture spell on my wound, we both know this information. I cannot do magic—but I can know." A note of steel entered her voice, surprising for such a delicate girl with such a word-softening accent. "And knowledge is its own kind of magic, isn't it? I think you can make discoveries just by understanding the theory. It's even easier, without wasting time on practice!"

  Ortahn was stunned by this onslaught. When Esh finished her speech, two dark, expectant eyes stared at him. He spoke, not even noticing that it was in his normal, living voice:

  "You want to possess what you cannot touch? Like... I don't know, studying the stars without ever seeing the sky." This was said as if tasting a thought, not as a question or a statement.

  "Exactly!" Her eyes were burning. "I'm glad you grasped the very essence of my words, Ort...ahn. An excellent analogy! Magic is like the stars. I can't fly to them, but I can know their names and their history, understand how they move." She spoke with a heat that he felt, it seemed, from no one else in this place, or even outside of it. "And when you know a star's name... it's as if it becomes a little bit yours. You look at the sky and you don't just see glowing dots, but old friends. It's the same with magic.

  She looked at him with such sincere and insatiable curiosity that his own apathy retreated for a moment, giving way to a slight bewilderment. In this iron tomb, there was someone who thirsted for knowledge. Someone who could never apply it.

  "Why me?" he found himself asking.

  "Who else? Yaron?" Esh snorted. "I chose you because you have sad eyes."

  "Everyone here has sad eyes. Even the homunculi."

  "No," Esh shook her head, her sharp tuft of hair twitching amusingly. "Everyone here has evil eyes. But with eyes like yours," she continued, taking a step closer and violating his not-so-large personal space, "people usually do either great deeds or great follies. I don't know which it is in your case yet, but I'm hoping for the former."

  "Help an unblessed? This is... This is... Viya would have..." The thoughts in Ortahn's head started moving, but from long disuse, their movement was fragmented and chaotic.

  "Live."

  "You know, I actually can help you," he finally said, getting up.

  "Really?" Esh exclaimed and took a step back, once again holding up her hands in a placating gesture. "I mean, I'm not surprised that a man possesses knowledge of magic (I'm not supposed to either, after all), but that someone actually decided to help me. I was starting to think maybe I'd offended the world somehow, and it's a touchy one. But it seems to have tossed me a handout in the form of you. Don't take that as an insult to you (it's just a figure of speech that popped into my head). How it works, I thought, was: the world hurts you, and you hurt it back. But you... you're not hurting it back."

  In her joy, not only did her eyes exceed their limits, but so did her speech. It became faster, crazier, and began to resemble a tangled pile of wet, multicolored socks. It was as if Esh wasn't speaking but swimming underwater, and during one of her deep inhalations, Ortahn managed to insert a sentence:

  "I need tools to shave a head."

  "I hope not mine, as some kind of initiation rite for apprenticeship? Although, of course, magic is more important to me than my hair. And I don't even like it that much, you see how it sticks up? It's awful."

  "No, I want to shave my own head bald," Ortahn said, and as he watched the joyful bustling of his new student, he didn't even notice the first healthy chuckles in a long time escaping from his chest.