Conversation: q_sor_conv

*She hands the staff over and steps back to look at you holding it, head on one side.* That is the first part done. There is more -- the speech that dragons answer to, the sceptre they drowned with Armenelos, the unbinding -- and none of it is mine to give you today. Go and be an inconvenience to somebody. You are very well suited to it.

*She is up before you have finished crossing the grass, which she has never done, and she takes both your hands and turns them over and looks at them rather than at your face.* Say it. Do not tidy it up for me. I have heard four hundred years of tidied versions and they are worth nothing. Say the actual price, in the actual words, while you are still angry about it. That is the whole of the lesson, and it only works once.

*She glances at the pocket where you are keeping the glass and goes back to feeding the fire.* Still cheap, then. Good. Nobody sensible hurries that part. Go on. It will find you.

*She digs in a pocket and comes up with a scrap of pale green glass, worn round at every edge, and holds it out on a flat palm.* This came off a window in Armenelos. It has been in the sea for an Age and in my pocket for ninety years and it has never once done anything. That is why you are getting it. It is not a charm. It is a bill that has not been presented. Keep it on you, and go on with what you were doing, and one day the blood will cost you something -- a friend, a door shut in your face, a thing you did that you cannot put down. Everyone of our sort pays it. The ones who go bad are the ones who never noticed they had. When it costs you, come back and say out loud what it was.

*She looks up from the fire, recognises you, and does not get up.* Back already. It has not cost you anything yet, then -- you would be walking differently. There is no exercise I can set you for this part. Go and be a sorcerer in front of people until it costs you something. Eight levels deeper into the blood than you are now, near enough, and you will have paid something you did not agree to. Come back to me then. I will still be here. The lake is slow.

*The woman at the fire looks up without any surprise at all, the way people do when they have been watching you cross open ground for ten minutes.* Sit down if you like. It is a public fire, more or less. You have the look. I do not mean the robes. There is a pressure that comes off people whose power was not given to them by anybody -- no order, no god, no teacher who could take it away again if you disappointed him. It simply woke up in you one day like a second heartbeat, and you have been carrying it since and mostly pretending it is under control. I am Erendis. My people drowned. What is left of them is standing in front of me being polite. *She turns her hand over so the grey ring catches the fire.* I cannot teach you a spell -- nobody taught me one, that is the whole difficulty of our sort. So I will give you the only piece of it that hands on. Stop fighting it. Not indulge it; stop *fighting* it. Half of what a young sorcerer calls losing control is the blood shoving back against a hand held over its mouth. Take the hand away and it goes quiet and does as it is told, which is more frightening and a great deal safer. Come to the fire and let me say what you are out loud. It will be the first time anyone has.

*The woman at the fire nods you toward a dry piece of masonry.* Sit, warm yourself, it costs nothing. I am Erendis, and this heap of stones was the capital of the world once, which nobody believes until they are standing in it. No, I do not tell fortunes. I sit with sorcerers. If you are not one, you are welcome to the fire and to the story of how Numenor went under, which is long and has no moral in it whatsoever.