He laid a hand on her shoulder as she joined him at the very edge of the courtyard. In front of them, a hundred or so people moved their arms in near unison. Their fingers left glowing lines in the air behind them—the trails of light that had once produced the magics of AonDor. Galladon stood at the front of the group, calling out instructions in his loose Duladen drawl.

“Never thought I’d see the day when that Dula taught people Aons,” Dashe said quietly, his other hand resting on the pommel of his sword.

He’s tense too, Matisse thought. She looked up. “Be nice, Father. Galladon is a good man.”

“He’s a good man, perhaps,” Dashe said. “But he’s no scholar. He messes up the lines more often than not.”

Matisse didn’t point out that Dashe himself was pretty terrible when it came to drawing Aons. She eyed Dashe, noting the frown on his lips. “You’re mad that Spirit hasn’t come back yet,” she said.

Dashe nodded. “He should be here, with his people, not chasing that woman.”

“There might be important things for him to learn outside,” Matisse said quietly. “Things to do with other nations and armies.”

“The outside doesn’t concern us,” Dashe said. He could be a stubborn one at times.

Well, most times, actually.

At the front of the crowd, Galladon spoke. “Good,” he said. “That’s Aon Daa—the Aon for power. Kolo? Now, we have to practice adding the Chasm line. We won’t add it to Aon Daa. Don’t want to blow holes in our pretty sidewalks now, do we? We’ll practice it on Aon Rao instead—that one doesn’t seem to do anything important.”

Matisse frowned. “What’s he talking about, Father?”

Dashe shrugged. “Seems that Spirit believes the Aons might work now, for some reason. We’ve been drawing them wrong all along, or something like that. I can’t see how the scholars who designed them could have missed an entire line for every Aon, though.”

Matisse doubted that scholars had ever “designed” the Aons. There was just something too … primal about them. They were things of nature. They hadn’t been designed—any more than the wind had been designed.

Still, she said nothing. Dashe was a kind and determined man, but he didn’t have much of a mind for scholarship. That was fine with Matisse—it had been Dashe’s sword, in part, that had saved New Elantris from destruction at the hands of the wildmen. There was no finer warrior in all of New Elantris than her father.

Yet she did watch with curiosity as Galladon talked about the new line. It was a strange one, drawn across the bottom of the Aon.

And … this makes the Aons work? she thought. It seemed like such a simple fix. Could it be possible?