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“…Be…all…right…just an instant…”

He wasn’t. Even when he straightened up and stopped coughing, he was pale. For the first time since I had come to Fenard, I reached out with my feelings beyond the woodworking to touch Destrin…and nearly recoiled from the impact. The threads of order within his body were faded, dying a fraction of a span at a time. Yet there was no chaos, no tinge of evil, just as though he were far older than he was, as if he were an ancient.

Almost without thinking, I lent him some internal order, a touch of strength.

“Who are you?” he repeated, as though his coughing attack had never occurred, but he edged closer to the hearth.

I wiped my forehead. “I’m Lerris.”

Destrin shook his head. “A master trained you, Lerris. I’m a poor excuse for a crafter, and I know it, but I can recognize quality and skill. Sometimes you look like Dorman when you touch the wood, or just let the plane graze an edge. You are in a different world. When you look at a piece of wood, you look like you see all the way through it.”

I did, but there wasn’t any reason to tell Destrin that. So I shrugged, and I was shrugging a lot in Fenard. “Like you, Destrin, I’m trying to make a living.”

“…accuffff…acuuu…” He waved me away.

This time, with what I had given him, he recovered quickly.

“Damned chill…” he mumbled. Then his eyes met mine, and, as if he recognized what I was, he shook his head. “What will I do when you leave?”

I looked back at the chair. Destrin had raised a real question. “You had this shop before I came,” I said firmly, but it was no answer, and we both knew it.

Outside, the wind whistled, shaking the front shutters and rattling the display window.

“Are you ready for supper, Papa?” Deirdre stood by the stairs, looking as petite and fragile as always, as if a good breeze would carry her away. Yet there was iron behind that seeming fragility, as I had discovered watching her negotiate with a merchant’s wife over some curtains she had provided.

“Good time to stop,” agreed the crafter.

While Deirdre served a barley soup, it was a hearty soup, and the biscuits were fresh. Young or fragile-looking, she could cook, and she always had a pleasant, if shy, smile.

That night, with my back against the brick of the wall and my feet up on the pallet that served as couch, bed, and study area, I eased out The Basis of Order. The cover was getting battered, perhaps because I had read through the slim volume at least twice.

Reading didn’t mean understanding, unfortunately. Some things were easy enough, like the business with the sheep had been. Or like helping strengthen Destrin’s body to fight the wasting disease. I could understand what the disease did to Destrin, but there was nothing I could do. Oh, Destrin looked better after my intervention, and I would do what I could, but slowly, slowly, he was dying.

Even the damned introduction to the book didn’t help: “Learning without understanding can but increase the frustration of the impatient…”

Or how about “…All things are not possible, even to the greatest…”?

Wonderful, just wonderful.

I closed the book and looked at nothing.

Too many questions kept nagging at me, even as I continued to force my way through the damnable Basis of Order. At times, I would sit there under the lamp, later than I should have been up, knowing that my eyes would burn the next day, struggling with the conflicts and the ambiguities.

I couldn’t read the book from front to back. That I had given up early. So I read the back sections first, the ones on the mechanics of order, and I tried some of them out, like aligning metals to strengthen them or change their characteristics. Those were easy, at least on nails or scraps, after a little practice.

And, using a pot of water and a candle as a burner, I could figure out how the weather modifications worked…sort of. What scared me there were all the qualifications and warnings about large storms changing harvests later in the year and creating droughts elsewhere. But the pot of water and the burner weren’t going to change anything except make the