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"You've been thinking about this all morning, haven't you?" Ryeth asked, laughing.
"All morning and all last night," Ollo admitted, rubbing his eyes. "I mean, what do you think?"
"About what?"
"About my idea. Would it work?"
Ryeth gave him an amused look. "Your never-missing arrow?"
Ollo nodded, impressed with himself.
"I suppose it would work- in theory, at least. But you'd need to have an anchor secured to the bullseye, somehow. Behind the target, perhaps." Ryeth scratched his beard, mulling it over. "That being said, you'd run into problems."
Ollo wondered what could possibly go wrong. "What sort of problems? It seems like a simple enough setup to me."
Ryeth nodded in agreement. "Simple enough concept, sure, but there are limitations to how this stuff works. Rules, if you will."
"I thought it was magic?" Ollo insisted.
"There you go, using that word again," he said with a grin. "It's called binding, and like I said, there are limits on what we can and can't do with it. If I could just wave my hand and make anything happen, do you think I'd be riding a mule cart right now?" Ryeth gestured to the beasts pulling them, one of which dropped a load of dung without a moments hesitation.
"I suppose you have a point. But why wouldn't the arrow work? If it's bound to the target, surely it couldn't miss?"
Ryeth held up a finger. "Think about it this way," he said. "When you draw on a bowstring, you build up a lot of tension, and when you loose the arrow, that tension is turned into movement. You take your own force, store it in the string of the bow, and then unleash that force onto the arrow. Makes sense, right?"
Ollo nodded. "Right."
"Okay. Now, when that arrow is flying through the air, it has a lot of force behind it - all of the force that you used to draw your bow. Because that arrow has already been imbued with so much force, it would take a great amount of force to change its path while it's still flying."
"Ah," Ollo said, cluing in. "I think I see where this is going."
Ryeth grinned again. "If you created a bond between the arrow and the target that was strong enough to redirect the arrow to the bullseye every time, even with your aim being only slightly off, well..."
"It would be too strong a force to work with." Ollo finished for him. "It'd probably yank the arrow right out of your hand. Wow. Okay, I think I see what you mean by rules now."
Ryeth reached into the sack behind them and pulled out one of the ripest red apples. He cut it in half with his belt knife and handed a piece to Ollo. "That's just one of the things we have to keep in mind. But with all of its rules and limitations, there are still a lot of interesting things that we can do. Binding plays a role in all of the mystic arts, even alchemy."
Ollo thought about the scene in the town square the day before. "That's how you healed Fletch's arm yesterday, then? Was that some kind of alchemical potion?"
"Not quite," Ryeth said, and again he was smiling to himself. "It was water. And I think you're confusing alchemy with chemistry."
"What? But his arm was sliced open, how could you have repaired that with water?"
"Easy - I didn't"
Ollo shook his head. "If you keep up that stupid grin I may lose my mind."
The lanterner laughed loudly at that. "The water was nothing. Well, not nothing - a distraction, you could say." He took a bite out of the apple. "Everybody was already a little worked up by that time, so I figured I should distract them from the magic for a moment. While they were busy trying to figure out which demonic potion I was using, I used the opportunity to bind his skin back together."
"So, you did that on your own? Gods, Ryeth, do you know how many hands and fingers have been lost at that mill? If somebody here had been trained like you, so many people could have been healed. Lives saved."
Ryeth took another bite of apple. "I like your thinking, but again it's not as simple as that. I could heal that man's arm because it was barely deeper than the skin. Skin is a fairly simple material to work with, but still very tricky. All living material is complicated for binding. The deeper tissues - muscle, vein, bone - are vastly more complex and would take somebody much more skilled than myself to heal. I simply bound the skin together, and Fletch's own body will take care of the rest."
"Amazing," Ollo whispered.
The lanterner nodded. "It really is, isn't it? I suppose some of the wonder has worn off for me. I've been studying at the Academy for almost five years now, so all of this seems fairly commonplace by now. But there are so many possibilities - so many aspects of this power that are still being discovered and are yet barely understood."
"And I can learn all of this?" Ollo's mind was racing. Part of him still didn't believe it could be possible, be he had heard tales of the lightkeepers' wisdom and power. "Why don't more people learn about it? Why doesn't everybody practise the mystic arts?"
"Many reasons," Ryeth said. "And each of those is as valid as the last. Most importantly, these forces are difficult to control, and it can take a long time for them to be honed to the point of usefulness."
"How long?" Ollo asked.
Ryeth thought for a moment, contemplating his apple. "It really depends on the person. Sometimes months, sometimes years. I heard tell of a lanterner who studied at the Academy for seven years before quitting - the fellow never so much as moved copper, and he was a smart one too, mind you."
Ollo could feel the world dropping from underneath him. "How long did it take you?" He almost didn't want to hear the answer.
The other man scratched at his beard before responding. "It was just under two months. I remember it very clearly. I was walking from my studies to the market, strolling along the docks when everything just... came into tune."
"What do you mean?"
Ryeth smiled. "I'm not sure of the best way to describe it."
"Oh come on," Ollo persisted, "if I'm going to figure any of this out before I'm eighty I need some kind of direction. What do you mean, came into tune?"
Ryeth finished the last bite of his apple and spat the stem out onto the ground. "Most of this probably isn't going to make any sense to you, but... here goes." He took a breath. "Binding is all about making connections, links between substances. When two things are alike, this is easier, because their essences-"
"Essences?"
"Don't interrupt. When two things are alike, their essences are already very similar. Because of this, a connection already exists between them, even though we cannot see it with our eyes. Think of it..." He stopped for a moment, clearly struggling for words. "Think of it as the strings of a harp. Each has its own pitch. If two of the strings are tuned to the same note, they will ring in unison. If you pluck one, the other will ring, and vice versa. Follow me?"
Ollo nodded, not quite sure he understood, but captivated all the same.
"Well, you can actually make those strings ring without plucking either of them. All you need to do is get close enough and sing the same note with your own voice, and those strings will join in. Binding works in much the same way. We can manipulate the connection between separate objects by channeling our own essence by force of will. When we channel our own essence to match that of the objects we manipulate, it's called chanting."
"Hang on - this is starting to sound an awful lot like music." Ollo said.
"You're right," said Ryeth, "and for good reason. The principles of binding were first written down and studied by musicians. Those first practitioners of the mystic arts needed to record the properties they were discovering in a way that could be handed down for generations, and there didn't exist a vocabulary to properly describe what they were discovering. Naturally, they used a vocabulary and terms which they were already well versed in instead - the language of music."
Ollo took a moment to let that sink in. Already he was feeling way over his head and was having trouble making sense of all this. It was too much information - too much to understand all at once. Where he had originally felt excited, he now felt as though the odds couldn't be lower of him learning to use magic. "I don't know about this, Ryeth," he said, "I'm no musician. I've tried to learn to play before, the fiddle, kitar... I'm no good. I can hear the music in my head, but I've never been able to make it come out of my hands. And I'm no singer - my own mother would tell you that."
"Don't get caught up in that," Ryeth said, waving his hand as though swatting the comment away. "Chanting isn't about making music, it's hardly even about singing. The best of us can bind with barely more than a whisper, and it's really not necessary to make a sound at all - most people just find it easier to form a binding by vocalizing, humming. And don't worry about looking like a fool while sounding things out."
"I suppose, " Ollo said. He cracked his knuckles one by one, swaying with the slow momentum of the cart and the jerking walk of the two mules. "What was it like when things... came into tune?"
Ryeth took a deep breath. "It was like seeing the world for the first time. I was passing the docks, a couple of copper sents in my hand and focussing on them - trying to figure out the essence of the metal, wracking my brain. I remember it so well. There was a breeze coming off the harbour. Cold, salty wind. I was fed up with myself, tired of trying to make sense of it all. I was ready to take the coppers and throw them away into the ocean. I was a poor student, so you should understand how frustrated I was to be thinking this way. At that moment, the wind changed, the angle was somehow different, and the salty air rushed over the top of an open barrel nearby. That sound - that low, steady drone - must have mirrored the essence of the coins in my hand for a split second, and I felt them jump."
Ollo stared, unsure whether to be amazed or amused. "Jump?"
Ryeth nodded, very serious. "Just barely. And in that moment I thought back through my life. The many times I've been alone and heard peculiar sounds coming from the other room, or caught glimpses of things moving out of the corner of my eye, or found things in places where I hadn't left them. I'm sure this has happened to you, Ollo?"
"Of course, it happens to everybody. Suspicious people blame it on ghosts."
"That they do. But in that moment I thought to myself... How many of those times had I been deep in thought, lost in a daydream or whistling, humming to myself? What if - just maybe - it had been me causing all those little mysteries all along, without realizing it?"
"That sounds a little crazy, if I'm being honest," said Ollo. "But then again... all of this sounds crazy when you think about it."
Ryeth smiled. "Yes it does. But here's the thing, Ollo. I spent the rest of that afternoon waiting for the wind to change again, waiting for the breeze to catch that barrel just right and make that particular sound again but it didn't happen. So that's when I started trying to chant. I sat myself down on the docks for hours and hummed and whistled and sang and talked at those coins, making those crazy sounds and - I could hardly believe it - I found it. I found the essence of copper. Like a word I'd long forgotten about, or a name that had been on the tip of my tongue for years. All of a sudden it was there, and rest soon followed."
"Just like that?" Ollo asked.
"Just like that."
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