Kenthim -Apprentice to Diatre

The mostly mute bard Diatre was surprised when she was approached to teach a young and over-eager young foliad the ways of music. It was only 4 years since she had buried her own mentor, and the human woman was feeling way out of her depth, especially when the eager child – Kenthim – started asking so many questions.
  “Slow.” She said, signing the same word in the symbology that she used with her old mentor and friend, the troll Sen’thal, adding context in a series of signs that Kenthim’s eyes had no time to understand and brain had no knowledge of how to do so.
  “What’s with your hands?” He’d asked innocently but intently, staring into blue eyes that shined with silver of implants long made mostly dormant, in a brain littered with human circuitry. Her cottage – grown using the Levis way by a passing gardener who traded the work for a song of his home town, was traced inside and out by circuitry of the realm around her, painted by mages who traded work for knowledge.
  She had not become a bard in the local way, more a musician and kept out of the wetwork of politics that her mentor had engaged in right up until the end. Diatre had looked at the boy, wondering how she would lead him to that space if she picked him up, taught him what she knew – for she was the exception rather than the rule of how things were done.
  “I don’t speak well.” She laboured through each of the words, their sounds rough on a mouth not built for all their words. Her mind seemed to refuse the study that came with the large vocabulary of the land, the dialects that spread the regions and their subtle mechanics. Plus she had always tried to remember the language of her home, lest she forget who she was and what she could become again if she was caught out. So she stayed the mute bard that Kenthim had sought out.
  “You’re using some sort of pictography or hand language? It’s certainly not one I’ve seen at the Gracetown Academy, and certainly not from any of the bards I’ve approached before you.” Kenthim had said, getting more into her space with ceaseless questions, forcing her to back up towards her cottage, and bring up a walking stick to place a physical barrier between them.
  “You asked others?” She tried that one, slightly offended along with the shocked and scared. The fact that he’d at least started with an academy, and had approached other bards that turned him down had set an uneasy feeling within her, knowing that they too must have seen something to make them send him away.
  “Of course, I had to find the one that was right for me and so many of them are so slow. I’m just go go go and they kept trying to get me to think about more than what I was willing to try for. I can’t stop my brain and it seems all the bards of Levis just want to play their music and turn their minds off when their minds are their most powerful tool. You don’t keep a tool in a toolbox, you just keep it well maintained and ready, just as you keep your mind analytical, ready to absorb music and new instruments and new languages. Did you know they have a dialect in the east that steals words from a language that someone’s forbidden travellers to speak here? And I can’t half tell if the sanction is our side or theirs?” It is somewhere around there that Diatre’s mind had shut off, glazing over like the constant overshare and overstimulation from home. And it was that revelation that had made Diatre lower the stick – only to clock him in the ankles.
  “Bards are quiet and contemplative because we know the best place to strike is the place unguarded, and you don’t see where a guard is down when you are constantly prattling. Weather that be with words or with weapons.” She had gone for his ankles again, watching him dart back with wary eyes. Her voice stumbled over every word and it sounded alien to her but she was determined to teach him at least one lesson before she sent him on his way with a walloped ass.
  “Only combat mages use weapons, or so my tutor used to claim.”
  “Your teacher dumb.” Her voice had felt raw from the last sentences, and she had returned to the stilted, dropping the hand gestures for keeping her staff out, ready to strike should he try to take her space again.
  “You’re not local. That’s why you –“ She had clocked him in the neck, careful not to crush anything, but enough that her bruise had lasted a few weeks that had been filled with regret, but in that moment she had just not wanted that thought completed aloud.
 

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  Dragging him to the cottage had not been the hard part, her cover story hid her strength built up over the years, and while she dyed her hair green and grey now, beneath there was still darkness that showed she was likely spry.
  These days she had been using her makeup to sculpt crows feet at the corners of her eyes, to deepen her frown lines, and paint raised veins all over her body. She wanted the myth to be one long retired, not much younger than her mentor instead of the almost father-daughter relationship they’d had towards the end, even if her real father had been much shorter and much more ruthless.
  Brewing the tea that would help heal his throat had been barely a challenge, the root acquired from a witch who acted like she knew too much, but had much too much common sense to say anything, though Diatre knew the witch did not approve – what of the bard had never found out.
  No, the challenge had been trying to work out how to say yes without saying sorry. And what ground rules to set.
  The most obvious rule she’d thought up had been no questions about Diatre’s past unless the bard brought it up first. The second would be that Kenthim would have to live in the nearby town; that was going to have to be non-negotiable if Diatre was to maintain her cover. The makeup alone if discovered would raise questions.
  She had not brought him inside, but left him on the porch, draped in her rocking chair – a thing that had been traded from travelling creature-kin for some birds that laid good eggs, neither party questioning the taboo nature of the trade, nor looking too hard for papers or questions. The forbidden of Levis was some of Diatre’s favourite parts.
  Kenthim had woken suddenly, Diatre sweeping the leaves along the porch to be fed to the mulch heap when he’d come away with a hoarse scream. Diatre had screamed too, though mainly because of fright. The tea had been passed, laced with honey and sap as septum was too rich in all senses of the word. He had struggled with the sipping, mainly because he was a gulper and his throat was too swollen to allow that tom-foolery. He’d glared at her the entire three gulps and she had cursed his stubborn pride – root-run they would call it locally though her mind would always think first in Tyr style thoughts.
  After he had sputtered and puked all over her patio, she had passed him the cleaning brush, and made him work his own mess out of her home, “I will smell this long while.”
  “If you had not hit me across the throat, I would not need to –“ Her stick had thudded the living patio with enough force to make Kenthim doubt the wisdom of continual speech. Boy learnt, eventually.
 

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  Zooming out, the next week along had been teaching Kenthim patience. He could leave anytime, but seemed to find something in the bruised neck that kept him around, just as his persistence and acquiescence to her increasingly precise precautions had her trying things just to see if he would jump.
  The runs with the local aspiring hunter had just been for amusement, but when he came back clearer headed and more eagar to obey – she suspected that Kenthim might be as the elders put it ‘neurospicy’. She had locked her cottage, set her walking stick and gone in search of the local witch, and the local apothecary – two different oddballs for the same question – could she make his brain as calm as coming to this land had made hers. Mainly because she did not have the patience of Sen’thal, and she needed him calm before she taught him the first of the instruments, and how to use his voice.
  The witch had been unhelpful, saying such feats required knowing the symptoms and that Diatre barely knew the boy to start working out his problems with witch magic. The apothecary, a patient young man had concocted a salve to apply to the temples to slow the mind and bring inner peace – Diatre suspected a narcotic, something often used to quell the masses when they got rowdy back home.
  She had guided Kenthim in its first usage, mixing it with Tyr mediation that she’d often see on the ads blasted into her mind but never used herself, so it had been a fitful rest for her, and a blissed out rest for him, both forced to move when cramps overtook their bodies far sooner than she expected.
  Further attempts had been mixed, soon happening on her porch as she strummed the fuzzylyre, hiding the split ends from her student as it took way too many hair strands to string the instrument. Her hair dye always kept her hair more brittle than she needed for the instrument, but by this age the sound alone had been worth the hassle of constantly damaged hair.
  Kenthim had asked if that would be their first instrument, his curt bob of hair nowhere close to long enough and there was the realisation that if this was her main instrument then he would have a long time waiting. The laugh that had bubbled from her throat had lasted way longer than the young lad had been comfortable with. And then a few chuckles more.
  Deciding that enough delay was there, Diatre had set him on a routine, runs with the hunter-to-be, breakfast of fruit, meditation, a sand bath, and then dance lessons - set to her seed-castanets, until he would beg for mercy or another sand bath.
 

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  Months passed into years, and the boy grew to a youth, and for a moment she almost lost him to the pretty eye of the brewer’s son, or was it the scribe’s daughter, and she realised peace might have been more scary than his overactive mind.
  Those days she tended to her garden and tried writing in a binding she found; the local written language easier to understand for her than the spoken word. Kenthim when he was around was confused that she found the written word easier to learn than the listened one, but her mind just worked that way. But while he was away she had the free time to just be herself without interruptions. Not even the transients passed by those months without her knowing and she almost vanished from public view. It sucked but it was peace.
  When he returned it was a little quieter. The burn of first love had scored a scar over his vitality, and he refused to elaborate on the hurt. Diatre could not sympathise herself, having left before life gave her a chance to feel, and then being so on the move and so afraid of being caught that love was the least of her thoughts. Friendships had passed through her life, but Diatre often thought that love required something more akin to the possibility of forever, and no one was that for the older bard.
  Still, she gave him comfort by channelling consistency, each day the same pattern, even as days passed into weeks. His growth spurt and changing hormones had delayed his lessons with the fuzzylyre when his hair became too brittle to keep the length he’d been growing it to, but lessons with new and fun instruments during their instrumental time had meant that his mind was constantly on the go while his body kept up a constant routine.
  The ache of lost love is an aching scar by the time she starts to get him to pen his own songs. Her own songs are instrumentals for the most part, or she hums the words of others, but when he chose to pen his words, they had turned out to be these lyrically complex things, more wordplay and poem than something that would accompany music. And certainly when he had tried playing to them he had not been able to regulate his voice and his fingers into one cohesive statement.
  Duets were a thing the pair tried, her own music weaving in as response to his words – but Kenthim still had the need of the young to be the centre of a thing, and the few times they had performed to someone from the town or someone passing Diatre would have to field critique about how much mentor and student did not mesh in harmony.
 

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  “I think journey is needed.” Diatre had broached at the eve of Kenthim’s 20th birthday. “I think you need experience as your mentor.” She left herself breathless again, as had happened each time she spoke for long. The bard wanted to be able to call him more than musician in training, and that could not happen without growth from them both.
  “Where do you want me to go?” There was a look in Kenthim’s eyes that day, something that spoke of a second rejection that reflected too much the one in unspoken past. His constant fidgeting, subdued by training, stopped cold at her remark.
  “Two years, a circle of the eastern forests, maybe down to the lake? Visit many towns for me?” Diatre massaged her throat, wanting to say more, to explain herself and her thoughts. How seeing this realm had expanded so much for her, how it was only the fear of being caught out now she was without Sen’thal that kept her here in routine. That Kenthim would thrive once he found the music of him – or even the rhyme.
  “Will you be here when I return?” Kenthim’s voice had cut through her thoughts like a knife and she had looked to him with shock. She had not even considered that line of thought when she had planned his lesson.
  “This my home, this your home too as long as you want it. Lessons first.” Diatre had pulled the lad into a hug – something she did not really see around Levis as affection, but that had felt right to her in that moment.
  He’d squirmed out of the embrace too soon for the warmth she’d tried to impart her adopted son. “I should at least get you more honey, for your tea and throat.” His voice had sounded sad, but there was a little bit of teasing acceptance in his eyes. That day before he’d left. She was always out of her depth with him.
 

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