And yet, when Runnel went down into the cellar during the master’s dinners with his visitors, he would press against the hearthroot stones and hear snatches of their conversations, for the stone carried sound that wooden doors and floors hid from hearing. Though the conversations were never clear, he began to realize that their language was guarded. Their laughter was out of proportion to things that were said; answers made no sense in relation to their questions. There must be double meanings hidden in their words.

  Why, in the home of the stonemage of Mitherhome, would visitors speak with veiled intent? It occurred to him that these merchants and traders were also worshippers of Tewstan. Perhaps some of them were stonemages themselves.

  Runnel’s curiosity would not leave him alone. What were they saying? More to the point: What weren’t they saying?

  If only Demwor were not always in and out of the great hall: Conversations never took an interesting turn when he was there. Not that Demwor’s spying was inappropriate—perhaps there was some conspiracy of stonemages. But Demwor would never hear of it, not the way he was going about it. Nor would Runnel ever hear the conversation of mages.

  The only hope of it was to get Demwor out of the great hall. And Demwor would never stop spying…unless he had another spy.

  Runnel began to find excuses to be in the kitchen during dinner, then took any excuse to carry this and that into the great hall. This way he could see the visitors, even though he heard less than he did when he listened in the cellar. Gradually, he transformed his own role until he waited in the room throughout the meal, ready to carry messages, run errands, or carry away finished bowls and platters. He remained absolutely silent, except when he had to deliver a message from the kitchen.

  At first Demwor seemed irritated with him, until Runnel came to him one morning and began to ask him about the things Lord Brickel’s visitors had spoken of the night before. In the process of asking him questions, Runnel made it obvious that he had memorized most of the conversation—and his questions were about the very things that seemed to be hinting at stonemagery. “Come to me anytime with your questions,” said Demwor.

  So Runnel was now welcomed in the great hall—by Demwor, anyway. The more Runnel was able to repeat the conversations of the night before, the more Demwor left him alone in the room with Lord Brickel and his guests.

  Runnel’s weekly coin was doubled.

  He felt guilty for his double betrayal. For he was, indeed, spying on Lord Brickel. But he wasn’t spying as well as Demwor wanted. He always reported the kinds of things Demwor himself used to hear. But he never reported when Lord Brickel and his visitors slipped and revealed more than they meant to. So he was taking Demwor’s coin under false pretenses.

  As Demwor began to let Runnel do all his listening, Runnel would catch Lord Brickel gazing at him now and then, studying him. Each time Runnel tucked his head into a properly servile position, hiding the arrogant expression that he now knew his face always bore. Runnel assumed that Lord Brickel knew he was Demwor’s spy; he also guessed that Brickel was pondering just how stupid Runnel might be and how much could be said in front of him.

  Gradually, as Runnel’s reports to Demwor omitted anything unusually incriminating, Lord Brickel grew more candid with his guests. They would glance at Runnel, but Lord Brickel would only smile. He could never speak aloud about Runnel’s new role as ineffective spy, in case Runnel was not an ally but merely obtuse; still, it was clear to the guests that Lord Brickel did not regard him as much of a danger.

  As high summer came, the visitors became more common, sometimes two or three in a week, and sometimes overlapping their visits. Meanwhile, Demwor was often out at night, pursuing his own business, relying on Runnel’s report the next morning to tell him what was said in the great hall.

  One of the guests was a dealer in marble named Stokhos, and it was plain he was important—the other two visitors and Lord Brickel himself attended to his every word, and he was full of inscrutable sayings that must be codes that only stonemages could understand. If Demwor had been in the room, the very meaninglessness of their conversation would have made him suspicious, and Lord Brickel’s interview with him the next day would have been difficult. Runnel would report none of the oddities. But he would remember them, and try to make sense of them later.

  In the midst of the conversation, Stokhos arose from the table to piss into the fireplace; with Demwor gone, they all did this, as if it were some kind of offering to the stone, or perhaps just marking themselves as belonging here, like dogs that peed their way around the fields and fences of Farzibeck. But when Stokhos rested his bare hand against the hearthstone, he suddenly stopped, dropped his tunic back down to cover himself, and turned to face the others.

  “When did this come to life?” he asked.

  The words were too plain, and Lord Brickel glanced at Runnel nervously. Runnel tucked his chin and looked at the floor.

  Footsteps told him that the guests were all going to the hearth and touching it.

  “Alive all the way down to the heart,” said Stokhos. “I didn’t think you had it in you, friend.”

  They called Lord Brickel “friend,” and Runnel had long since guessed that by this they were giving him his title cobblefriend, the lowest degree of stonemage—but still a true mage, and not just a worshipper of Tewstan.

  “Currents hide under still water, brother,” said Brickel, who alone seemed not to have risen from the table. The title “brother” implied that Stokhos was a rockbrother, the middle degree of stonemage.

  “So you do your work under the very gaze of the birds of heaven?” asked Stokhos—which, Runnel guessed, meant, You practice stonemagery here in the house with Demwor watching?

  “The nest is twigs, but the bird still builds it in a sturdy tree.” To Runnel, that meant: I have to live in a wooden house, but that doesn’t mean the stone parts can’t be connected to the deepest living rock.

  The trouble was that Runnel knew the hearth was not alive. Or at least it hadn’t been. It touched the earth, with no wood under it like the flagstones of the cellar floor. Small stones linked it to bedrock. But Stokhos was saying that it was living rock—all of one piece.

  “Clever,” said one of the other guests. “It all looks loose from the surface, but yes, it is all of one piece, deep inside.”

  “Subtle,” said another. The admiration in their voices was obvious.

  “You were never that good a student in school,” said Stokhos, chuckling—but the chuckle was artificial. He was genuinely surprised.

  “A man never stops learning,” said Lord Brickel.

  “But a wise man does not show his enemies what he has learned,” said Stokhos. Runnel understood: You risk being discovered.

  “The fish sees only what’s in the water,” said Lord Brickel. Meaning: The watermages of Mitherhome can’t tell what’s going on deep inside the stone.

  “But when the spring flood rolls loose cobbles down the stream, the fish sees that.” Meaning: What if they tried to repair or remove some of this stone and found it was no longer loose?

  “Living stone doesn’t roll with the flood,” said Lord Brickel. Meaning: Why would anyone repair this hearth when living rock will never need repairing?

  “Well,” said Stokhos, resuming his seat, “a bird like me can tell if the tree is sound before building his nest—but such as I cannot heal a dead tree and bring it back to life.”

  Did that mean that Lord Brickel had leapt past the level of a rockbrother to do work that only stonefathers could do? No wonder Stokhos sounded surprised. A true stonefather was rare; a fathermage was rare in any of the houses of magic. That’s why in Lark’s story of the great battle with the Verylludden, the stonemages had been only cobblefriends and rockbrothers, and had to work together to do what a stonefather could have done alone. There might not have been a stonefather in all the world, or not one close enough to get to Mitherhome in time to save it.

  From things he had heard all his life, he had always believed that magery was a combination of what you were born with, what you learned, and what you earned. The stories of wolfmages that alternately terrified and fascinated the children of Farzibeck talked of how a child would find that dogs were always drawn to him, then his parents would fear he might be a wolfmage, and kept him away from dogs. In the stories, the child always found a wolf pup out in the forest and fed and protected it, and thus gained in power among the wolves, not just because of his inborn ability, but also because he took risks and spent many hours serving and saving a wolfkin. But the stories all implied that a mage could never surpass the level of ability born in him.

  Even if greater power could be earned, how could Lord Brickel have earned it when he was expressly forbidden to serve the stone? Of course, under that circumstance, it might be that any small service he gave could be magnified by the risk. That must be it.

  What surprised Runnel most, however, had nothing to do with Lord Brickel. It was when Stokhos said, “A bird like me can tell if the tree is sound.” To Runnel, this clearly meant that only a rockbrother could sense whether stone was living or not.

  But I can do that.

  The idea of this took his breath away. He was like the wolfmages in the stories. He was like Lark—having a mage’s power without realizing it. He had thought that at most he might be a pebbleson, a person who liked stone but had no power over it. After all, wasn’t he a worshipper of Yeggut, like all his village?

  And how had he ever served stone? How could you serve stone, except to bring it back to life when it was dead? And since that was a thing that only a stonefather could do, how could stonemages earn any increase in power? Yet Lord Brickel had done it.

  Then it dawned on him. If he was indeed a rockbrother, or at least had one of the powers of a rockbrother, then when he came to this house, perhaps the power of two stonemages—one trained and one raw and untrained—combined so that the trained one, Lord Brickel, could do things beyond his ability alone.

  I’m serving here in ways that I hadn’t even guessed, thought Runnel. It made him proud to be useful, not just in the housework but in the magery itself.

  The meal went on, but the conversation shifted to safer subjects—or else the code was more obscure, and Runnel didn’t know how to understand it. No matter—they began to send him out for more ale and finally for a second round of food, which he knew would irritate Sourwell, though Nikwiz never seemed to mind. It was a late night, and when Demwor came home and saw the dinner was still going on, he sent Runnel to bed. “I’ll tend them myself till they finally notice it’s late,” said the steward. “I’ll tell the master myself if I have to—he has much work to do tomorrow.”

  “Can I go along?” asked Runnel.

  “Ebb will be glad of the help in carrying the master’s touchstones.” It was the first Runnel had heard of “touchstones,” so he was all the more eager for morning. He would learn something about what stonemages actually do—he had only realized his own magery just in time to realize that he could profit from the learning.

  As always, Runnel “went to bed” by climbing up to his attic room and sitting in the middle of the floor, practicing controlling his dread of being so far from stone. Tonight he managed it easily, for now he understood why he needed the stone so much and why he feared being in structures that to other people felt safe and solid. Here he would wait until the house was fully quiet, then creep down to the cellar to sleep. It never mattered to him that he got less sleep than anyone. As long as he could sleep with his hand touching the stone of the hearthroot, then he could get his full rest in only a few hours and awaken refreshed long before light. But if he slept away from stone, then his rest was fitful, waking often, and in the morning he felt as though he hadn’t slept at all.

  Because I’m a stonemage!

  He wondered how Lord Brickel managed to sleep. There was no channel of stone from his bedroom down to the earth. The master slept on a wooden bed, which rested on a wooden floor, which rested on wooden beams and joists.

  Runnel lay down on the attic floor and closed his eyes as he listened for the sounds of the house to quiet down.

  He awoke in darkness and silence.

  The floor trembled under him. He sprang to his feet. How had he slept? That had never been possible before on this high wooden floor. But maybe he could do it, now that he knew why he feared being away from stone.

  The things he had learned tonight flooded back into his mind. He felt ridiculous.

  I was even more blind than Lark, he thought. She knew she might be a mage, and refused to believe it. It never even crossed my mind about myself.

  He was hungry to get down to the cellar and feel what Stokhos had felt in the hearthstones. Lord Brickel must have bonded the stones into a living whole during the day yesterday, or surely Runnel would have felt the change the night before. It must have been a great undertaking.

  But Lord Brickel had been out at the dock of Hetterferry most of the day, keeping company with his visitors and greeting Stokhos, who only arrived that afternoon. How could he have done it in the few hours he spent at home?

  Because he was so excited, Runnel found himself being careless and making a bit of noise on the stairs. That was no problem on the way down to the main floor—he could always say he was going out to pee. But then he really would have to do it, and put off going down to the cellar till later. Better not to waken anyone. So he was extra careful going down the rest of the stairs.

  There were still a couple of candles guttering on their sconces on the main floor, but they were nearly gone. To his surprise, going down the cellar steps, there was a light ahead of him. Someone was down there, but by now his feet were visible. He had been seen. So there was nothing for it but to continue, and decide what lie to tell based on who was down there. If it was Demwor, he could tell him that he was looking for him to report to him now, since they’d be busy in the morning.

  It was Lord Brickel himself, holding a candle and pressing the other hand on the hearthroot stones. As soon as he recognized Runnel in the dim light, he set down the candle and beckoned.

  When Runnel was close enough that they could talk in whispers, Brickel took him by the shoulder and brought his lips close to Runnel’s ears.

  “What are you doing to me?” he asked.

  Runnel thought he was asking about the things he told to Demwor. “I never tell him anything that you didn’t used to say in front of him.”

  The hand squeezed harder. “Where did you study?”

  Now Runnel was confused. “I never studied anything, sir.”

  “To do this—I tried to dislodge a stone down here, any of them, an easy thing. Dislodge it, pull it out, push it back in—it’s what I do. Only I can’t. The stones are all of a piece. They’re alive, as Stokhos said. And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I know you understand us. I trusted you.”

  No point in pretending now. “It wasn’t alive when I first came down here,” said Runnel.

  “So you can tell which stones are living and which are dead?”

  “I didn’t know that it was magery,” said Runnel. “Nobody told me.”

  “You can’t be that stupid.”

  Runnel grew angry. “I grew up in a village that’s faithful to Yeggut. Who would teach me anything about stone?”

  “It’s not just the hearthstones, it’s the flagstones, too. They underlie the floor with wood, but you bound all the stones together into a continuous sheet of living stone. Do you think they won’t be able to tell? All he has to do is walk down here and feel how they don’t spring back up under his feet.”

  “He” had to mean Demwor. “He sends me down here,” said Runnel.

  “But one day he won’t. You’ll be on another errand, and he’ll come down himself, and he’ll realize what you’ve done. Only he’ll think I bound them together, and I’ll lose my position. And if he realizes that it’s living rock, I’ll lose my life.”

  “But didn’t you do it?” Runnel reached for the hearthstones, then shook his head. “My lord, these hearthstones are no different from the way they were when I got up this morning. I mean yesterday morning.”

  “Why would you have checked them yesterday if you didn’t know something was changing with them?”

  “I didn’t check them,” said Runnel. “I sleep down here.”

  “So you can’t tell if these stones are living rock?”

  Runnel pressed his hand against the stone and deliberately traced the stone inside, to find where it ended…and it didn’t. It kept going down into the earth, in a single column. It never rested on hard-packed earth. All the tiny stones that had once formed a thousand chains down to bedrock were now a single great sweep of stone that grew out of the bedrock and soared through soil till it came out here as hearthstones and flagstone, creased where they had once been separate pieces, but now fused inside, where it was hidden from view.

  “I didn’t…I didn’t look,” said Runnel. “I never noticed a difference. It felt the same every day.”

  “You’ve been sleeping down here?” asked Lord Brickel. “Show me.”

  Runnel lay down where he always did, and pressed his hand against the stone.

  “Aw, Tewstan, what a fool,” said Brickel. “A natural mage sleeps every night with his hands in the stone.”

  “Not in the stone, my lord,” said Runnel.

  “Of course your hand is in the stone, and the stone is in your hand. You’ve been pouring your life into the stone, and the stone has been pouring strength into your body. Look at your face; I should have seen it, it’s half stone already.”

  Runnel touched his hand to his face. It felt like ordinary flesh to him.

  “And Demwor tells me you can carry full water jars without ever stopping to rest, and I don’t even wonder? I deserve whatever happens to me.”

  “Why should anything happen to you, my lord?” asked Runnel.

  “Because I swore an oath that I was nothing but a cobblefriend, and by Tewstan it was the truth. But they’ll never believe that it’s sheer chance that brought a…a stonefather here to my house.”