Blair Road
Boss Nova’s House
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
“But that’s good news,” Syl Vor said brightly, when they were finally alone in his room at the top of Boss Nova’s house. He paused and considered her, eyes narrowed.
“Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Kezzi said miserably, and then, “No.”
“Both?”
“Yes,” Kezzi said.
They were sitting on the floor, on the soft rug next to Syl Vor’s tall bed. Kezzi sat cross-legged and straight-backed, because she was the luthia’s apprentice and one day would be luthia in her own right, and a luthia did not curl into a ball upon the rug and wail.
At least not where she could be seen, even by a brother. Kezzi swallowed suddenly, as a Truth woke in her.
A luthia has no brothers, she thought, or sisters, too. All the kompani are the grandchildren of the luthia.
Syl Vor, who had been stretched on his side along the rug, his head propped in one hand, suddenly rolled to his feet and went over to the desk.
He returned in a bare moment, holding a pad of paper and his pen of three colors, and sat facing her, cross-legged.
“Here,” he said, drawing a line down the middle of the sheet. He wrote “GOOD” at the top of the left space, and “BAD” at the top of the right.
Kezzi frowned. They had been learning about decision-making models in Life Skills. This thing that Syl Vor offered was a variation of the pro/con method.
“What decision will I make?”
He frowned slightly.
“Mike Golden says that sometimes a problem isn’t really a problem once you change the way you think about it. If you think about the problem as an opportunity, then that helps you to think of ways to use it, instead of having to fix or solve it. If we can look at what’s bad about the ship coming, then maybe we can think about it differently, and make it into something good.”
Kezzi frowned in her turn, thinking.
“Mike Golden should have been a headman,” she said slowly, and did not say the other thing that her Sight had shown her: that Syl Vor, too, should one day lead.
“So!” said he, clicking his pen. “What is good about the ship coming?”
Kezzi took a breath.
“We no longer need to worry that it was lost, along with our brothers and sisters,” she said.
Syl Vor wrote: “ship not lost” and “kin alive” under “GOOD.”
“What else?”
Kezzi thought, and turned her hands palm up, fingers curled.
Syl Vor waited as long as it might take him to count, slowly, to twelve, and said. “Let us go to the other side. What is bad about the ship coming?”
“We will need to leave Surebleak,” Kezzi said, the words spilling out. “I will—I will no longer be Silain’s apprentice, but will be required to take tests. If I pass the tests, I will be admitted to a class. If I do well in the class, then I will be seated as one of many luthia who advise the captain and the crew of the ship.
“I will never see you again,” she said, and then, despite all of her intentions elsewise, she cried out in real pain, tears starting…
“I won’t be able to bring Malda with me!”