Kvothe

I agreed for the sake of argument, then reached out to move one. But Ben stopped my hand, shaking his head. “You’ve got to remind them first. You’ve got to convince them, in fact.”

He brought out a bowl and decanted a slow blob of pine pitch into it. He dipped one of the drabs into the pitch and stuck the other one to it, spoke several words I didn’t recognize, and slowly pulled the bits apart, strands of pitch stretching between them.

He set one on the table, keeping the other in his hand. Then he muttered something else and relaxed.

He raised his hand, and the drab on the table mimicked the motion. He danced his hand around and the brown piece of iron bobbed in the air.

He looked from me to the coin. “The law of sympathy is one of the most basic parts of magic. It states that the more similar two objects are, the greater the sympathetic link. The greater the link, the more easily they influence each other.”

“Your definition is circular.”

He set down the coin. His lecturer’s facade gave way to a grin as he tried with marginal success to wipe the pitch off of his hands with a rag. He thought for a while. “Seems pretty useless doesn’t it?”

I gave a hesitant nod, trick questions were fairly common around lesson time.

“Would you rather learn how to call the wind?” His eyes danced at me. He murmured a word and the canvas ceiling of the wagon rustled around us.

I felt a grin capture my face, wolfish.

“Too bad, E’lir.” His grin was wolfish too, and savage. “You need to learn your letters before you can write. You need to learn the fingerings on the strings before you play and sing.”

He pulled out a piece of paper and jotted a couple of words on it. “The trick is in holding the Alar firm in your mind. You need to believe they are connected. You need to know they are.” He handed me the paper. “Here is the phonetic pronunciation. It’s called the Sympathetic Binding of Parallel Motion. Practice.” He looked even more lupine than before, old and grizzled with no eyebrows.

He left to wash his hands. I cleared my mind using Heart of Stone. Soon I was floating on a sea of dispassionate calm. I stuck the two bits of metal together with pine pitch. I fixed in my mind the Alar, the riding-crop belief, that the two drabs were connected. I said the words, pulled the coins apart, spoke the last word, and waited.

No rush of power. No flash of hot or cold. No radiant beam of light struck me.

I was rather disappointed. At least as disappointed as I could be in the Heart of Stone. I lifted the coin in my hand, and the coin on the table lifted itself in a similar fashion. It was magic, there was no doubt about that. But I felt rather underwhelmed. I had been expecting…I don’t know what I’d been expecting. It wasn’t this.

The rest of that day was spent experimenting with the simple sympathetic binding Abenthy had taught me. I learned that almost anything could be bound together. An iron drab and a silver talent, a stone and a piece of fruit, two bricks, a clod of earth and one of the donkeys. It took me about two hours to figure out that the pine pitch wasn’t necessary. When I asked him, Ben admitted that it was merely an aid for concentration. I think he was surprised that I figured it out without being told.

Let me sum up sympathy very quickly since you will probably never need to have anything other than a rough comprehension of how these things work.

First, energy cannot be created or destroyed. When you are lifting one drab and the other rises off the table, the one in your hand feels as heavy as if you’re lifting both, because, in fact, you are.

That’s in theory. In practice, it feels like you’re lifting three drabs. No sympathetic link is perfect. The more dissimilar the items, the more energy is lost. Think of it as a leaky aqueduct leading to a water wheel. A good sympathetic link has very few leaks, and most of the energy is used. A bad link is full of holes; very little of the effort you put into it goes toward what you want it to do.

For instance I tried linking a piece of chalk to a glass bottle of water. There was very little similarity between the two, so even though the bottle of water might have weighed two pounds, when I tried to lift the chalk it felt like sixty pounds. The best link I found was a tree branch I had broken in half.

After I understood this little piece of sympathy, Ben taught me others. A dozen dozen sympathetic bindings. A hundred little tricks for channeling power. Each of them was a different word in a vast vocabulary I was just beginning to speak. Quite often it was tedious, and I’m not telling you the half of it.