The first thing they did that m was sweep with the straw brooms that had been brought for just this purpose. Bertrand had balked at that, but Simon had insisted it was a vital part of the process. It wasn’t, truthfully, but it would make what was i easier.

  , they went back up to the clifftop, and in the full light of day, Simon bid his student study the dark yon floor below. “Tell me, Bertrand, do you see the vas repared?”

  “I do,” he agreed, “But it is too dark for charcoal. Are we going to use chalk to draw this time?”

  “Draw?” Simon asked. “You said that your hand would not obey your mind. I think we will cease with the drawing and try something else.”

  “Oh?” the young man expressed surprise. “What did you have in…”

  Bertrand’s words trailed off as Simon moved to the wagon, picked up the closest vase, and then, without a word of expnation, threw it over the cliff, where it shattered into a million pieces on the ground below.

  The boy only looked on in shock as Simon reached for the one. “Well, what are you waiting for?” Simon asked. “Help me get these down there so we get started.”

  “Get started? What? Master, stop!” Bertrand cried out as Simon through the sed vase down to join the first. “What are you… why are you destroying such beautiful…”

  Simon stopped the boy’s speech by thrusting the third oo his hands. “You said that your art was getting nowhere because your hands would not produce the beauty you could imagine, so we are going to try something else,” Simon said closely, f Bertrand to meet his eye. “I have found you the most beautiful cerami all of northern Ionia. You could ask for no finer materials, and together, you and I will try our hands at mosaistead.”

  “Mosaics?” the young man asked.

  “Yes, mosaics,” Simon nodded. “Now, get the rest of our tiles together while I take the t and the grout down.”

  Simo him standing there holding that vase. The boy didn’t say a word, but then he didn’t o. The look on his face made it clear that he thought Simon had gone pletely mad, and Simon was ined to let him.

  It took him another five mio throw the vase down, and it was more than half an hour before the cart was emptied. They spent much of that sed day sweeping a sed time. The first time, it had been to remove the rocks and sand, and the sed time, it was to gather the thousands of shards they’d created into one giant, glittering, multicolored pile.

  The experience was hard orand, but Simon ighat. Instead, after they had dinner, he started to pick out the pieces of pin white and build a giant border on the floor of the yon. The work would take days to plete, but in his mind, it was an important part of the process.

  “Mosaics, I uand,” his student pined, “but why out here? Why not in our mountain summer home or with—”

  “Iy, you will be distracted by your friends, and in the try, you will be distracted by the serving girls,” Simon answered simply. “Here, there is only me, and I will keep all distras far away from you until you make progress.”

  “What is it I’m supposed to make anyway?” The boy asked, still looking for dire instead of making his own. “I’ve never even thought about—”

  “Your subject matter be whatever you like, so long as it fills the vas I am making for you,” Simon expined. “But her of us will leave here until you have something worth showing to your father. He’s ied signifit funds into this lesson and will want to see it pay off.”

  Bertrand protested that he could leave whenever he wanted, even after Simon expio him that he would not be wele at his estates unless he came back with a satisfied teacher, so eventually, Simon’s most powerful rebuttal was to y down by their fire and go to sleep.

  In the days that followed, the boy sullenly sorted the rge pile of shards by color, cutting his fingers a handful of times in the process. He made no further progress, though, tent to pin instead of seeking inspiration.

  Simon found it tiresome but ig. It seemed like a vital part of the process. Instead, he used his chalk to decorate the walls of the yon, leaving the illustrations up until the infrequent rains washed them away. Sometimes, he drew people he’d known, like Gregor or Freya, but more often, he drew monsters he’d fought before. Sometimes, it was goblins and other times, it was wyverns or spiders, but all of them were terrifying when drawn as close to life-size as he could manage on the vast dark walls of the yon.

  Simon didn’t do it to inspire his student, though it turned out that’s what he did, eventually. He was just doing it to pass the time between hunting trips. Still, on one occasion, after almost two weeks of waiting, he fourand busily moving pieces around the vast twenty-foot-wide vas that Simon had framed for him.

  Simon didn’t ask what the boy to. Not for a long time. Instead, he waited for him to voluhat information. It arent that he had no pns to do that, though. He obviously wanted Simon to guess, but Simon refused to, so the two shared an amiable sort of silehey would still talk about other things like the weather or his most ret hunting trip, but those versations never wandered quite to the subject of the artwork that was slowly but surely taking shape.

  The thing started with a piece of the sea, using eborate little swirls of light blue on dark to indicate the waves. Simon could see at ohat the limitations of the medium were helping his student. He was no lorying to make things perfect. Instead, he was using the best he had, which was exactly what Simon had hoped for.

  Still, for as long as he thought the boy was making a map of Ionia, he was a little disappoihat showed a real agination, even if it was exactly the sort of art his father would have approved of.

  Ihird week of the endeavor, though, as the boy started off on a differeion, Simon finally uood what it was he was making. Unfortunately, that was also when they were attacked by bandits.

  “What do we have here?” a rough-looking man asked, intruding on them one m while they were making frybread over an open fire. “All this food, and you didn’t ask us to join you. How shameful.”

  Of course, they had very little in the way of food, but men like this didn’t really care. They would take the st crumbs from a starving man if they could. Still, even as the small gang of ruffians approached the fire, Simon did not stand, nor did he draw his sword or his dagger, though he had them both belted on uhe robes he favored these days.

  “You are wele to warm yourselves by our fire,” Simon said. “Though we have little else to offer you.”

  “Two fancy men making art in the middle of nowhere?” the leader ughed as he came to a stop, standing over the two of them. “You may not have much, but I’ll wager your families would pay a hefty ransom to see you safe again.”

  “My father—” Bertrand started, but Simon cut him off.

  “Send ransom letters to whoever you like,” Simon spat. “I’ll help you draft them if you don’t know how to write, but I must insist that you do not interrupt our projeot when Andus the Uable is so close to taking shape.”

  “Oh yeah,” the leader asked, brandishing a knife while his friends chuckled. “What are you going to do if I cut an ear off the boy to include iter to his—”

  He never had a ce to finish that statement. It was clear he didn’t think much of Simon as an old man, but he wasn’t half so old as he preteo be, and even as the bandit leader looked away, he grabbed the handle of the cast ir pan and sprang to his feet.

  By the time the man had turned back to face Simon, it was just in time to take the hot metal across the face, and his skin sizzled even as his nose was crushed by the force of the blow. The other three men looked fused as their leader crumpled and scampered back, but that only gave Simon the ce to draw his ons.

  He didn’t give them the same courtesy. Though he very much missed his shield, it wasn’t a good fit for the person he was in this life, so instead, he wielded a dagger in his offhand to parry certain blows. This time, he took the sean in the chest with it and the third man across the throat with his saber before the fourth man had even drawn his bde.

  There were screams and chaos as everyoried to fight him then, but as far as he was ed, the fight was already done. One man was dead, one was dying, and though he took a few shallow cuts that proper armor would have prevented, he was soon surrounded by bodies while his student sat there gawking.

  “Master Ennis, you’re bleeding,” Bertrand gasped when it was all done.

  “A little,” Simon agreed, “But not so bad as any of them.”

  The truth was that at least one of the stabs was quite deep, and Simon had a hard time disguising his pain while he went to fetch the donkey and use words of lesser healing to mend the worst of it. He made sure not to burden his charge with that, though. He simply sent the boy off to tih his art, and once Simon was ed up, he dumped the bodies far enough away that he wouldn’t have to smell them rot.

  Simo much of that day recuperating, and by the evening, he decided he might have to heal himself further. No matter how much he tried to walk it off, he wasn’t as young as he used to be.

  “Where did you learn to fight like that, master Ennis,” Bertrand finally asked softly ohe cook fire had all but dimmed ter that night.

  “I am an old man,” Simon answered with a shrug. “I have done many things in my life. Haven’t you noticed the monsters I draw? Do you think they e solely from my imagination?”

  “I mean, you’d mentio before, but I always thought such things were just stories,” he added.

  “Even things that are just stories have a measure of truth,” Simon agreed. “I was once a fierce warrior, but I turo art to find some peace, and as you see, those men took a few pieces out of me because of that. In my prime… in armor… I would have cut them down like the mangy sgers they were.”

  Bertrand hen said, “I have oher question. When did you know what I was w on? In the mosaic?”

  “From the very beginning,” Simon lied. “I could see it in the colors you chose when you id down the first few pieces.”

  Bertrand accepted that answer. Indeed, he treated it almost as a form of praise.

  Simon thought that the act of violence would have disrupted the flow that his student was slowly building, but he only sped up after that. The first part of the rge mosaic had taken over a week to y out, but the sed took half that time, and the third was faster still. As the man that had fouhe nation finally appeared in the ter as Bertrand slowly moved to fill i of the space with a flock of harpies desding from the jagged mountains, Simon was reasonably certain that the boy had chosen to make the legendary hero look just a bit like him, and he was touched by the gesture.