The Chronicle of Epic Words
Tamsin
The Order's most promising student, spending the long walk out deciding whether leaving was brave or merely overdue.
At a glance
Young enough that leaving the only life she was ever trained for still feels like the end of the world. Old enough to have spent three years learning to doubt it.
- Home On the road, lately
- Kingdom XXXII (The Polysyllabic Peak)
- Faction Neutral · left the Order of the Blank
Tamsin will tell you, if you sit with her long enough, exactly how the arithmetic went: three years to see what she was being trained to do, one more to admit she'd known for most of the three, and then the walk — which is still going, and which she suspects will keep going for a while yet. She recites it without drama, because drama was one of the first things the Order taught her to do without. What she can't quite recite without flinching is the first line of it. I used to be very good at my job. She says it before you've asked her a single thing, the way a person confesses the part they're most afraid you'll find out on your own.
She was, until very recently, the sharpest apprentice in a school full of sharp people — the Order of the Blank's most promising student, everyone said so, and she believed it the way you believe a thing your whole life is arranged around. Precision was her gift and her discipline both: she could read the flaw in an argument the way a jeweler reads the flaw in a stone, correct an error the instant she saw it, and hold a straight spine through a scolding that would have folded anyone softer. The Order rewards exactly that. For three years it rewarded her handsomely, and she mistook the reward for proof that the work deserved doing.
The trouble with training someone to spot every error is that eventually they aim the skill at you. Tamsin turned her precision, late and by accident, on the institution itself — and once she'd seen the flaw there she could not make herself unsee it, could not file it under not my place to say the way the careful people around her had learned to. She won't tell you, not on a first meeting and maybe not ever, the exact thing she can no longer justify; she keeps that folded up small and carries it. What she'll tell you is that it took her a shamefully long time, and that the shame is the freshest wound of the several she's nursing.
She won't easily name the woman who trained her, either — though she doesn't have to, because you already know the shape of her. Precise. Thorough. Entirely, unshakably convinced of her own institution's legitimacy, the kind of mentor who never once had to raise her voice to be obeyed. She isn't cruel, Tamsin says, arguing with someone who isn't there. That's the part that took the longest to stop being an excuse. She trained Tamsin for three years, and the defection ends the apprenticeship on Tamsin's terms rather than her mentor's — which is, Tamsin admits, the only clean thing about it. Everything else leaving cost her, she left owing.
Because leaving cost her every certainty she had. That's the piece she keeps turning over. She knows what she's not going to do next, which is apparently supposed to feel like more progress than it does; what she's going to do instead she has no idea, and the not-knowing sits on her heavier than the walk. She left the only structure she'd ever fit inside, the only place her particular exactness was ever entirely welcome, and she traded it for a road and an opinion and the cold comfort of no longer having to lie to herself before breakfast. Ask her whether it was the right thing to do and she'll tell you, honestly, that she doesn't know — only that she couldn't keep doing the other thing.
If you're carrying the memory of a certain bard's verse, she'll admit the smaller, stranger truth of why she came looking for you in particular: a line she overheard once, in a tavern she wasn't meant to be in, about names being a courtesy and not a right — and a rumor, two provinces on, of a traveler that verse seemed to describe from the inside. She crossed the distance on the strength of a song and a secondhand reputation, which is either the most reckless thing she's ever done or the first genuinely free one, and she hasn't decided which.
You'll leave her at the edge of Longname with her life over one shoulder and the Overlong Summit rising behind her, offering you something close to a smile — sharp-edged, young, entirely unconvinced by its own bravado — before she heads off toward wherever the road takes people who've just stopped being what everyone told them they were. She'll be all right, probably. She was very good at her job. That, in the end, is exactly the problem she's still walking off.
Tales & Rumors
By her own accounting it took her three years inside the Order to see what she was actually being trained to do, and one more to admit she'd known for most of that. She recites the arithmetic flatly, the way you'd read out a sum you'd checked too many times to still doubt: three to see it, one to stop excusing it, and every day since spent walking away from the total.
A bard sang a verse once, in a tavern she wasn't supposed to be listening in — a line about names being a courtesy and not a right, said plainer than she'd ever heard anyone dare. She never forgot it. When word reached her, two provinces on, of a traveler that verse seemed to describe from the inside, she decided the rumor was worth the walk, and set out to find you before she'd fully decided what she'd say when she did.
She sits with her spine straight and her hands folded, still braced for a correction from a mentor who is no longer anywhere near her — a posture the Order pressed into her so thoroughly that she carries it out the door like a debt she can't set down. Watch her long enough and you'll see the moment she notices she's doing it, and the smaller, sharper moment where she decides not to stop.
How They Measure Up
The Order taught her to keep a precise ledger of every error. She's turned that training, lately, on herself.
Three provinces on very little sleep, her whole life arranged into whatever fits over one shoulder. Less than a soldier's; more than she'll take credit for.
Precise even in exhaustion — hands folded like she's still bracing for a correction from someone who isn't in the room anymore.
Walked a very long way on very little sleep and arrived furious rather than finished. The Order trained the wavering out of her; the wavering is the only part she misses.
Reads the shape of your answer the way a jeweler reads a stone for the flaw. Was the sharpest student in a school full of sharp students, and knows it, and can't enjoy it.
Took four years to admit what one year had already shown her. Counts that late admission as wisdom now — and isn't at all sure it should.
Doesn't warm a room so much as measure it. Guarded, exact, and — once she's decided you're not a complication she recognizes — startlingly honest.
Precision — the thing that made her the Order's best, and the thing that finally wouldn't let her stay. She was trained to correct any error the moment she saw it. The trouble is that she saw it, eventually, in the institution itself — and precision, once you've aimed it inward, does not politely look away.
Where you'll meet her
You'll find Tamsin at Basecamp Hollow, the supply-village high on the Polysyllabic Peak in Kingdom XXXII — the last waystation below the Overlong Summit, where expeditions provision before the final climb — sitting apart from the usual expedition bustle with the specific stillness of someone who has just walked a very long way on very little sleep. She's young, precise even in exhaustion, and visibly furious, though not at anyone currently in the room. She'll announce that she used to be very good at her job before you've asked her anything at all, and how she reads you from there depends entirely on what she's heard: travelers who've said in public what she couldn't, she trusts on sight; the carefully-spoken she tests with three quiet questions; the ones who like to mean several things at once get her most guarded look of all. Whichever way it goes, she'll eventually walk with you out past Longname's formal name-sign — the one nobody uses, all those extra syllables piled on for form — and tell you, at last, the whole shape of what she left.