The Talented

by J. R. McGinnity

  Adrienne felt a sliver of sympathy slide into her, but it did not dispel the anger. “It’s horrible what your people went through,” she said, “But you can’t continue to make such generalizations about soldiers. The commission brought me here because you needed me, yet the lot of you dismissed me as a violent brute before you ever saw me. I am a tactician, and I can read and speak Old Samaroan as well as any scholar.”

  “We had no way of knowing that about you before meeting you,” Ben said. “And I don’t believe you to be a stupid. In fact, it’s vital that you aren’t.”

  “Why?”

  “So you didn’t figure out everything after today.” He smiled. “You already know that everyone who was able to develop an ability was part of a difficult professions. Now tell me what those professions have in common.”

  “Discipline.”

  “And?”

  Adrienne hesitated. “It takes continuous effort to improve?”

  “Study, yes. And?”

  Adrienne thought about it and finally had to admit defeat. “I don’t know.”

  “Intelligence. There are no stupid healers, or scholars. Blacksmiths need to know when and where to strike the metal to get the desired result, and how to quench the metal afterwards. Weavers need to know how to dye wool for the most vibrant colors, and how to work the yarn without weakening it.”

  “I suppose.”

  “The training and intelligence needed in these professions is unique. You cannot train yourself to be a healer; you have to learn. And we have discovered that you cannot train yourself to develop these abilities, either.”

  “You did.”

  Ben looked embarrassed. “It took a long time, and I wasn’t truly teaching myself. I read the journals, developed theories, worked with the other scholars and commissioners. And it was still a miracle that I was able to develop an ability at all.”

  “Sometimes miracles and luck are enough.”

  “Paired with dedication. And now that you know more about what it takes to develop one of these abilities, do you think I will I be able to train you?” He looked concerned, and as if he did not realize that his questions could be taken as insults. “It hasn’t worked on any of the guards we’ve attempted to train.”

  Adrienne barely resisted the urge to show him just how different her skills were from those of the insipid guards she’d seen on the gate. “I’ve a bit more dedication and training than the guards.”

  “Very good then. Since you seem to have a good idea of the apparent requirements of developing an ability, maybe it is best to begin the next stage of your training,” Ben said. They were nearing the southern end of Kessering, where beyond the city walls civilization gave way once more to grassland.

  “How do we begin?” Adrienne asked, willing for the moment to set aside trying to convince Ben that soldiers did not by nature lack intelligence.

  “One of the most essential steps in your training will be the ability to enter into a state of Oneness.”

  “Oneness?” Adrienne asked.

  Ben blushed. “That is what I call it. Some of the others with abilities have taken to calling it that as well, although the commission doesn’t like us naming things. When you achieve that state, you feel like you are one with everything. The trees, the grass, the sun. Everything just feels…”

  “Connected?” Adrienne asked.

  “Exactly,” Ben said. “How did you know?”

  Adrienne nearly rolled her eyes, a habit she had broken years ago but felt coming back now. “Asmov wrote about people with special abilities being connected to the universe. I had wondered what he meant, until you started talking about Oneness. Is it the same thing?”

  Ben nodded. “I remember that, of course.” He tapped a finger against his temple and laughed. “There was a lot of argument about what Asmov meant there. Some of the commissioners thought that those people must be essentially different than the rest of us; that the connection to the universe couldn’t be taught and must have been lost forever over the years. We almost didn’t try, but there were some, myself included, that thought perhaps that connection was not inborn but could be learned.”

  “And it can be,” Adrienne said. “You learned.” Although his ability was hardly one that Adrienne had thought about, she realized now that Ben truly was one of the Talented. They no longer existed only in her mind and in the pages of an old book. “Tell me more about this Oneness.”

  “After reading Asmov’s journal, Oneness is really the first step in your training. You—”

  “Wait, explain this to me first. Why did I have to read Asmov’s journal.”

  Ben seemed surprised by the question. “Because that was the beginning of everything.”

  “I don’t understand. It’s hardly about Talents at all.”

  “But it’s the first one we found that talked about them. Without Asmov’s journal, we wouldn’t know anything about people with abilities, or Oneness, or any of that.”

  “Even so, the people you’re training don’t need to know it. You could tell them everything they need to know and more. You know more than Asmov ever wrote about.” It was clear from Ben’s expression that it had never occurred to him that the people he was training didn’t have to read the book. “You’re a scholar,” she said, “you want to know the history of it all. But it isn’t necessary, not for everyone.”

  Ben looked unconvinced, and she decided to save that discussion for a different day. “Tell me about Oneness.”

  “You have to focus,” Ben said, clearly grateful for the more comfortable topic. “You have to learn to block everything else from your mind until it is just you and nature and nothingness, no intruding thoughts or feelings.” Ben’s voice took on a smooth, lecturing quality as he spoke. His shoulders were no longer hunched, his voice no longer hesitant. It was amazing how much more confident he seemed in that moment. “It is just you and nature, and eventually you will realize that you are not a separate being; you are one with everything around you.”

  His eyes had a distant look, as if they were seeing something that was not really there. Adrienne wondered if he was experiencing Oneness at that moment. Surely something had caused such a change.

  She pursed her lips in thought. “How do I do all that?” she asked. It seemed like a lot of things to do while trying not to think about anything.

  Ben smiled apologetically, his eyes focusing on Adrienne, and he seemed once again to grow smaller; whatever change had occurred slipping away. “I tend to get carried away. You start by just clearing your mind. Most people find that it helps to sit out here, away from the distractions in the city. Try sitting down with your eyes closed.”

  Adrienne gave a little laugh and went to sit under the lone pago tree a hundred feet away. “Just sit here with my eyes closed?” she called. It seemed ridiculous, and a waste of time. Surely there were other means of training.

  The thought made her think of Jeral, and the doubts he had voiced about her training methods at the beginning, especially the meditative moves she had made him learn and practice every morning. The young soldier had seen no purpose in them, but he had been wrong, and Adrienne thought she might be unfairly judging Ben as well.

  The young Talented scholar had trained others; surely he knew what he was doing.

  “Yes. Try to clear your mind,” Ben reminded her. “I can join you, or I can leave if you’d rather be alone.”

  “Since I doubt I’ll achieve Oneness in the hour or so before dark, you might as well go,” Adrienne said. She’d feel awkward enough without Ben sitting there, waiting to see what happened. If this required concentration, she thought she’d have a better chance of succeeding if Ben was not there watching her.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow morning then,” Ben said cheerily. “Good luck.”

  Ben left, and Adrienne concentrated on not thinking.

  ••••••

  “I can’t do it,” Adrienne told Ben. She had been working on clearing her mind and achieving
Oneness for over a week, and the closest she had come was falling asleep under the thick branches of the pago tree. Her mind had been clear then, but there had been no connection to the universe involved.

  “You have to give it time,” Ben told her. “It takes some people months to reach Oneness for the first time. You’ve only been at it for nine days.”

  Adrienne resumed her pacing. They were in Ben’s room at the library. The room was much larger than Adrienne’s room at the inn, but filled as it was with a desk, overflowing bookshelves, and more books scattered on chairs and stacked on the floor, it seemed much more cramped than her own small room. “I’m not making any progress,” she told Ben, her voice sounding perilously close to a whine. “Every time I try, I think more and more.” The task of clearing her mind hadn’t seemed so hard when Ben had first explained it. How hard could not thinking be?

  It turned out to be much harder than Adrienne had anticipated. She would have understood if her progress had been slow—training in various disciplines over the years had taught her that, despite her natural aptitudes, not everything came easily to her. Still, there had always been some sign of progress, no matter how small, to encourage her to train more, study harder. “I don’t think it’s going to work,” she said. “I sit there and my mind runs through different scenarios and my body gets all twitchy.” She exhaled hard through her nose. “It’s not calming.”

  Ben was quiet, but his expression was one that Adrienne was familiar with. He wore it when he was thinking hard about something. She hoped whatever thought he was having would be helpful.

  At length, Ben turned to her, eyeing her athletic body covered in functional leathers and the sword at her hip. “Maybe all of your training makes it hard for you to just sit with your eyes closed,” he said. “You’re always looking for signs of trouble, even when you’re somewhere safe.”

  Adrienne stopped her unconscious scan of the room and looked at Ben. She had not even realized she had been checking the room for signs of danger. Doing so was as instinctual as breathing. “So what do I do?” She refused to think that this first setback would keep her forever from reaching her goal. She had never given up before, and she was not about to start now, when supernatural abilities were within her reach.

  “Is there anything you do that does clear your mind?” Ben asked. “Maybe sitting is the problem. You never do it.”

  Since Adrienne was standing now, and typically chose to stand or lean against the wall when she and Ben were talking, she knew he had a point. Adrienne thought about the calm state that settled over her before a fight, that moment when everything ceased to exist but her and her opponent. Time, in that moment, ceased to have meaning. But she knew that was not what Ben meant. Although her mind was calm, void of any emotions or distractions that could interfere with her ability to fight, it was not empty. In that timeless moment before a fight, Adrienne’s mind was filled with clear, precise thoughts. It was not Oneness as Ben described it. When she was in that timeless moment before a fight, she was not connected with the universe. She was connected only with her own body and that of her opponent.

  She was about to tell Ben no when she remembered the smooth, controlled moves of her morning routine. On the surface, it was the complete opposite of sitting in a field with her eyes closed—every part of her was active as she went through the meditative motions she had learned from Karse in childhood. But when she focused on her breathing, on her balance and the smooth transition from pose to pose, her mind was silent. Despite her eyes being closed, she was always aware of herself and the small changes and steady permanence of her surroundings. “Yes,” she told him.

  “Yes?” Ben asked, surprise coloring his voice. “You already know how to clear your mind and never mentioned it?” He didn’t sound entirely happy, and looked a bit suspicious, as though Adrienne had been purposely keeping a secret from him.

  “I do it differently than you describe,” Adrienne said in her defense. “I didn’t connect the two until just now.”

  “Then maybe it isn’t the same,” Ben said, looking much less excited than he had moments ago, but also more relaxed. Ben had always been polite, and at times Adrienne thought they were just on the verge of friendship, but she knew he was ever aware of the sword at her hip. Even without it, Adrienne doubted the Talented scholar would ever forget that she was a soldier. Despite her initial hopes, she didn’t foresee a bond like the one she and Jeral had shared forming between her and Ben.

  It saddened her that Ben would not trust what she said, but Adrienne had no doubts. She knew now that the Oneness that had eluded her for days was something she had been doing unconsciously for half her life. “I can show you now, if you’d like.”

  Ben looked around his cluttered room, with precariously balanced stacks of books, loose pages of parchment, abandoned quills and empty inkwells. It was not the most soothing of atmospheres to practice clearing the mind, at least not for the first time. “Here?”

  Adrienne shrugged. “Here is fine.” She studied the space around her, judging how far she could move in any one direction before she would bump into a chair, the wall, or one of the many stacks of books. Then she closed her eyes.

  Her breaths came slowly in and out through her nose. She inhaled as she raised her arms, exhaled as she lowered them and bent at the waist, and then her mind was clear, her thoughts of why she was doing this gone as she moved automatically, adjusting her moves to fit the smaller space without conscious thought, never deviating from the smooth, fluid transitions.

  As she began to bend and raise an arm over her head, some instinct told her to change the motion, and she did. More obstacles appeared, felt instead of seen, and her body adapted, twisting and turning but never breaking from the essence of the routine. Adrienne’s eyes remained closed through it all.

  “That was amazing!” Ben said when Adrienne finally stopped and opened her eyes. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Adrienne shifted uncomfortably. She was more used to apathy than admiration when someone saw her run through her routine. “Thank you,” she said uneasily. Although she had taught her meditative routine to Jeral and the other Yearlings, it was not widely accepted amongst the soldiering community. Even Ricco had occasionally teased her about the strange habit, and it was unlikely he had kept that part of the program going after she had left Kyrog.

  Ben still looked amazed by what she had done. “I kept putting things in your way: my arms, books, rolls of parchment. You just moved around them like you could see them there, but your eyes were closed the whole time. Weren’t they?” He seemed suspicious again.

  “They were closed. I could sense that something was in the way,” Adrienne said. “Not consciously, and I couldn’t say what it was, but my body knew and avoided it.”

  “That’s really fantastic,” Ben said. “It took me nearly five months to gain that much awareness of my surroundings, and that was after having been able to clear my mind for a month.” His excitement was back, and his smile was full of pride for his student.

  “I started learning those moves when I was four,” Adrienne told him, a small smile capturing her lips as she remembered those days. “An old soldier took me under his wing for a couple of years, and he taught me. He was the one who taught me Old Samaroan as well.”

  “A soldier taught you all of that?”

  Adrienne didn’t appreciate the obvious surprise in Ben’s voice. She wished there was at least one person in the city who didn’t consider soldiers dumb brutes. “I’m a soldier,” she reminded him.

  “Yes, I know, but you seem…different.”

  “Different than what?” Adrienne asked, her temper spiking. “Different than all the other soldiers you have met and gotten to know?” Ben wisely said nothing. “How many other soldiers have you spoken to? Seen? Have you ever looked past their weapons and seen them as people?”

  Ben’s face took on a belligerent look. “I’ve heard stories. I read a lot about soldiers before you arrived
so that I would be prepared.”

  “You heard the same stories you heard as a child,” she said. “You read books that confirmed that bias.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “So the library here contains a lot of books that supports soldiers? I—” Adrienne clenched her jaw. She didn’t speak until she was sure she could control the anger in her voice. “I started training to be a soldier when I was four. I have no family, no friends, except other soldiers. I’ve never been anything but a soldier,” she said, every word a staccato note. “If you don’t see me as a soldier, then your view of soldiers is wrong, because I am more a soldier than anything or anyone else.”

  Adrienne left him standing alone in his room, stunned.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Despite the argument with Ben, Adrienne followed his advice and began entering her morning routines with more purpose than simply balancing her mind and body. The meditation was no longer just for her peace of mind and to keep her body limber, it was the first step in a search for something deeper, a conscious connection to her surroundings. Sometimes it was as simple as closing her eyes; other days she could try for hours without being able to sense anything about her surroundings that she had not seen when her eyes were open. It was frustrating, and she wanted to move on to whatever came after Oneness.

  “This training is less exciting than I thought it would be,” Adrienne told Strider as she combed out the warhorse’s mane. She had taken him out for the first time in days, and she had decided to groom him herself rather than hand him off to Thom. It felt good to do something so easy and uncomplicated, where there were no expectations except the occasional scratching behind Strider’s ears. “I just do the same thing day after day,” she told the muscular destrier. He might not be able to understand her, but directing her words at the horse made her feel more stable than simply talking to herself.