“Moshel made guesses. Good guesses, but they were guesses. He didn’t know everything about every shaper, just a whole lot about most of them. I’ve been thinking on this. I know you can’t charm none, but there’s a trick to charming that might work for you.” He held his hand up. “I know you can’t charm. I know. It’s a technique, Ariah, that charmers use, but that’s not to say it might not be a technique shapers could use, too.”

No walls. What is a shaper without walls? Lost. Mad. A hermit.

“Ariah. Stop ruminating.”

“When you tell me to stop, it just makes it worse.”

He sighed. “Ah, it’s the same for me. Let me tell you the trick. There is a thing in red magic called a litany, which I think is some convoluted mishmash of charming and shaping. It’s complicated, but the gist is you charm someone so much, so deep, that you make a lasting mark. It’s a charm that lingers. It’s a charm that takes something of yours and puts it in someone else. Not like other charms, where you coax something in them to the surface. You understand what I’m saying? And you have to maintain a litany. And the way you do it is you have to feel yourself and you have to feel them at the same time. It’s like you’ve got two hearts inside you: yours and theirs. To learn a litany, you have to learn to be yourself and not yourself at the same time. Ariah, if you could do that, you might make some progress.”

“There’s not enough space in a person for more than one heart.”

He frowned slightly. “Well, no, not literally.”

“I know you didn’t mean it literally,” I said. “When it happens, I get…pushed out. There’s nothing in me but them, what they want, what they feel.”

“You’re not pushed out,” he said. He spoke fast, with a smile playing around the edges of his mouth. His palpable excitement was contagious. I started to wonder whether this would work. “You’re pushed to the side. You’re still in there. It’s your brain, Ariah! Where else would you be? So, what we have to do is we have to let them wrap around you. You stay right there, right in the center, and they fill up all the rest of the space on the edges. You see?”

“No, not really.”

He sighed. “Six months and we’re still stuck in place. It was so much faster with Dirva.”

“He can build walls. And he can charm. And he…”

“Ariah, you’re not him, but that don’t mean you’re hopeless.”

I nodded, even though I didn’t really believe him. After a moment or two, I looked over. “How would I do it? How does it work?”