To the Qin, he was his work: a cultural and linguistic resource. To the Semadrans, he was his magic: an auditory mimic and a man who had once been considered for training by a shaper. Exactly like me. He wasn’t there to teach me his trade, exactly. That’s not what we do. We had been paired because his mind worked the way mine did, and he could show me how to live with a mind like mine. That he was a linguist was not really important. He was supposed to help me hone my gifts, understand them, grow comfortable with them. I very much needed training. Mimicry nagged at me, surfaced at inopportune times and in odd places. When I grew nervous, I sometimes repeated what was said to me in the same voice in which it was said. More than once I’d been thrown out of places, assumed to be mocking someone. Before my training, it had already gotten me arrested twice by particularly bad-tempered Qin policemen. Shaping was even worse. I had no control over it. It was a needling curiosity, a need to know, and it was unearned knowledge that got me in trouble. I didn’t always know when I’d read something, and when I was reading someone, I didn’t know how to stop. This particular set of gifts I have is not common. It took my parents some time to find a match.

Dirva was supposed to train me in the skills that let me control how the magic expressed itself. I’d gotten some training in school, but school was primarily to teach literacy and math and mechanics and our history. The five years of mentorship is how we dealt with magic. Dirva was supposed to sit with me at night and drill me through established exercises. He was supposed to talk me through what scared me and what didn’t. I was supposed to have the time during the day to reflect on what I’d learned, and to make myself useful around his house. That’s what was supposed to happen. What happened instead was Dirva and I had one short conversation about my gifts. I told him I picked up languages easily, both if I heard them and if I read them, and I was extremely insightful when it came to other people. He asked me if I was a shaper, and I told him emphatically that I wasn’t. The Ardijan shapers had met with me, felt me out, but decided the gift was not present enough to benefit from training. He decided I would make a good linguist. He decided to mentor me in action instead of through abstract evening exercises and heartfelt conversations. I have wondered in the years since if he decided that because he had so little patience.