Briar Colton
From Corvane, the Free Holds. He introduces himself by dropping into a seat uninvited.
The introduction
Ch. 257.
BRR: You're the Lyerm one, aren't you. The lightning thing. ART: Word travels fast. BRR: Word travels fast everywhere, but especially here, where half the students have nothing better to do than gossip about the other half. Briar Colton. Corvane.
His hand is "sun-browned and calloused in a way that suggested real work rather than academy softness", and the chapter reads him as the opposite of Corin:
the particular unguarded warmth of someone who had never learned, or never bothered to learn, the more careful social calculations Corin seemed to operate by.
He is willing to be overheard
BRR: You'll want to watch this one. (of Yseult) YSE: I can hear you, Briar. BRR: I know. That's rather the point.
And on Vance emptying a coil of water over Yseult's head:
BRR: I've been here one day and that's already the best thing I've ever seen.
He is "wiping actual tears from his eyes".
The notebook, and the soil
Ch. 258. He carries "a small, battered notebook [...] apparently everywhere", and he will defend geology at any length.
BRR: Interesting. The soil composition there's supposed to be almost entirely different from Corvane's. Something about the coastal mineral deposits. FNN: Here we go. BRR: It IS interesting. FNN: It's SOIL, Briar. BRR: Soil is the foundation of everything, Finn. Show some respect.
He is also the one who briefs Arthur on everyone. He does it for Finn in ch. 258 the way Yseult did for Corin in ch. 257.
His ability is foresight
Ch. 275, and he has told nobody, "not even Finn, who knew almost everything else about him".
His soul had given him foresight, the strange, disorienting gift of seeing briefly through his own future eyes, but the gift came bound in cruel limitation:
- never more than two minutes ahead
- sustainable only for a handful of seconds at a time
- usable roughly once each hour
the effort of it leaving him wrung out and shaking whenever he pushed even close to those edges.
His own verdict on it:
It was, he had privately decided years ago, a nearly useless gift, dressed up to look like something impressive.
The device
He stays at the academy over winter recess and builds one, in a disused workshop in the lower science wing.
a tangle of copper wire and carefully carved crystal lensing, powered by a small essence conduit he'd spent considerable time and no small amount of his own limited coin acquiring, and it was meant, in theory, to do something no scholar had ever successfully documented before.
He meant it to hold his foresight steady. Longer. Further.
That is a device intended to extend a soul ability past its natural limit, which nothing else in the saga has attempted. See ../systems/soul-abilities.md.
Why he did not go home
He wrote to his mother that the coach fare would eat into what little the family had set aside, and that he would stay and study instead.
He had not told her about the actual coin his scholarship provided, which would have covered the fare easily enough. He had simply decided [...] that whatever coin existed was better spent on his younger brothers' boots, which had, in his last letter home, been described as more hole than leather.
It was easier, he'd found, to let his mother believe the absence was about money rather than choice.
So: a mother, at least two younger brothers, no money, and a scholarship he does not spend on himself.
Bevan
The groundskeeper finds him on the fifth day and stays. See bevan.md.
BVN: Realized somewhere along the way that a gift not amounting to much isn't the same as a life not amounting to much. Different things entirely, whatever it feels like at the time.
BRR: I'm trying to make mine into something. Something that matters. BVN: Nothing wrong with that. Just don't let the trying eat you whole before you've got anything to show for it.
Briar's first doubt about the device arrives immediately after that conversation.
Bevan changes the question
Ch. 277. Bevan keeps coming back with more bread than one groundskeeper needs and the same excuse.
BVN: Made too much again. BRR: You keep saying that. BVN: It keeps being true. BRR: You're a terrible liar. BVN: Never claimed to be a good one.
Briar's account of why the device is hard, which also explains what foresight cannot do:
BRR: I can't simply look ahead and confirm whether the thing I'm building will actually work. The ability doesn't work that way. It only shows me what's already going to happen, not what depends on choices I haven't made yet.
And his honest summary of it:
BRR: Two minutes ahead, a few seconds at a time, once an hour if I push it. I've used it to avoid stepping in mud puddles more often than I've used it for anything genuinely important.
Bevan then asks a different question, and it redirects the whole project:
BVN: you're trying to stretch the gift itself. Longer looking, further seeing. Nothing wrong with that, if it works. But there's other ways to make a small thing matter more, besides making the thing itself bigger.
BVN: Getting cleverer about when you use it, maybe. Or what you use it for. [...] there might be a handful of moments where two minutes, used exactly right, matters more than two hours would in the wrong one.
Briar starts sketching something different in his margins the same evening.
BRR: I think you're considerably wiser than you let on. BVN: Maybe. Or maybe I've just had a long while to sit with disappointment about my own gift, and picked up a thing or two about making peace with limitations along the way.
The second failure
Ch. 279, day ten. He has spent three days rebuilding the device around Bevan's question, aiming at precision within the two minutes rather than at more minutes.
theorizing that if he could not see further ahead, he might at least learn to see more clearly within the narrow window he already had.
The crystal lens cracks clean down its centre before the foresight engages at all.
BRR: No. No, no, no!
The diagnosis is the part that matters, because it is not a design flaw:
The theory, as far as he could determine, was sound. The construction simply hadn't been able to hold it.
BRR: I don't have the materials for this. Or the technique. Or possibly both.
The thing he will not do
Ask Yseult.
He had thought of her several times across the past week, turning the idea over and setting it aside each time, some stubborn, prideful part of him resisting the specific admission that her particular expertise, drawn from an entirely different discipline than his own, might succeed where his own careful, methodical Science had repeatedly failed.
He suspected [...] that his pride had been the only thing actually preventing him from finding out.
He did not write to her. Not yet.
He keeps the broken pieces rather than discarding them.
He shelves it
Ch. 281. Three more days, and then the acceptance arrives "the way most honest realizations did, slowly, in pieces".
His foresight was two minutes, a handful of seconds, once an hour, and no amount of copper wire or careful crystal lensing was going to change the fundamental shape of what his soul had actually given him.
He packs the components away rather than discarding them.
BRR: I'm giving up. [...] I've decided my soul is exactly as large as it's going to be, and I'm done trying to argue with it. BVN: How's that feel? BRR: Better than I expected. Worse than I'd hoped. Somewhere honestly in between.
The plan he lands on is Bevan's question, finally accepted:
BRR: Maybe I simply accept that two minutes an hour is what I've got, and find clever ways to use it instead of clever ways to force it into being something bigger. BVN: I merely asked a question. You're the one who's spent two weeks arriving at the answer the hard way.
Writing to Yseult remains open and undone: "Maybe I write to Yseult eventually. Maybe I don't."
BRR: I don't think I would have made it through this break in one piece without you turning up in my workshop uninvited. BVN: Wasn't uninvited. You never once told me to leave.
He wins the academic relay
Ch. 287 and ch. 288. The "relay" is a staged murder mystery in a dressed room, run head to head against Rosalind, Corin's cousin.
The scenario: Aldric Fenmore, a wealthy merchant, dead in his locked study after a dinner party. Five guests. Five witnesses, played by Finn (the business partner), Yseult (the young wife), Talon (the estranged son), Elsie (a trade rival), and Julian (the household physician).
The solve
Rosalind spots the wine glass. Briar reads the stain.
BRR: It's spread too widely for a quick spill. Look at the edges, they're gradual, not sharp. This wasn't knocked over suddenly. It leaked out slowly, over time, after he was already down.
BRR: Which means whatever was in that glass took time to work. A slow-acting poison, not something that would kill within minutes.
And then the contradiction:
BRR: the physician's own testimony placed death within the hour before discovery, a timeline that doesn't match the physical evidence at all. He would have known the poison's actual working time, being the one with medical expertise.
Motive, from Finn's inability to stop mentioning financial records he had not been asked about:
BRR: I'd guess the physician was paid to eliminate Fenmore before the embezzlement was discovered, making it look like natural causes given his known heart condition.
Full marks. Finn had bet against him.
JUL: Well reasoned. Most competitors miss the leakage pattern entirely.
With Rosalind
Neither of them resents the other for it.
ROS: You spotted the wine glass first. BRR: You made the connection to the timeline faster than I did. Credit where it's due.
ROS: Corin didn't exaggerate about your group, you know. He said you were all considerably more interesting than most people he'd met. BRR: High praise, from him. ROS: The highest, actually, though he'd never admit as much directly.
He asks
Ch. 304, after a fourth prototype fails.
BRR: I need help. [...] I've spent four months not asking you because I wanted to solve it myself, and I've finally accepted that wanting to solve it myself was costing me more than my pride was actually worth. YSE: That's a genuinely mature thing to admit. BRR: It cost me quite a lot to say.
He also tells her what his ability is, which he had told nobody:
YSE: That's considerably more interesting than you've ever let on. BRR: It's considerably less useful than it sounds.
She diagnoses the whole four months in one sentence:
YSE: You've been solving the wrong side of the equation.
Then she demonstrates Catalysis on him by wrapping both arms around his shoulders from behind, and his foresight holds for four minutes with no fatigue.
BRR: FOUR MINUTES. And I'm not tired.
The new design
Not a device to stretch a fixed supply, but a device to store essence during the hours the ability sits unused and release it on demand.
BRR: Neither discipline could have built this alone. YSE: No. That's rather the point, isn't it.
See ../systems/soul-abilities.md.
What his ability is actually for
Ch. 322, at Roselle's ledger table in Beckwith. This is Bevan's ch. 277 question answered by circumstance rather than by design.
BRR: My ability's foresight. It's not useful for anything, before you get excited. [...] ROS: That sounds enormously useful. BRR: It sounds enormously useful. It's mostly good for avoiding puddles.
And then:
BRR: But if I look about one second ahead, I can see what I'm about to be looking at. Which means I don't have to shuffle between four books, because I've already read the figure in the version of me that's about to open the right one.
ROS: That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. BRR: It's genuinely ridiculous. It's also saving us about forty minutes an hour.
Two minutes an hour, used exactly right, in a mill office rather than a fight. Bevan's version, ch. 277: "there might be a handful of moments where two minutes, used exactly right, matters more than two hours would in the wrong one."
It costs him, visibly, and Roselle puts water beside him without saying anything about it.
He also spots an eleven percent error in a four year old ledger in eight seconds, and tells her to write down a conversion nobody has ever written down.
ROS: Four years, and nobody has ever said that sentence to me.
Later, from the author's notes
Marked as planning rather than text. He is one of the core group of eight, and ch. 323's summary has another character report that a villager called him "the quiet one with a head on him", which does not match this introduction and may be a later register. See ../volumes/09-the-scholar.md.
Ch. 262
He and Finn plan something for a week and deliver it mid-duel, badly.
BRR: So. Arthur. [...] We've been talking, and we've decided. We want you. ART: You want me for what? BRR: We just want you. That's the whole of it, really.
What they mean is advice about girls. What they say, at increasing volume, is not that. Arthur asks the obvious question, out loud, in front of the cohort:
ART: Are you two asking me on a date?
Both blades then meet both temples at the same instant and both boys faceplant into the dirt in unison. Sutton, unmoved:
SUT: ...Match called. Someone get them to the infirmary.
Neither of them is polished with a blade. The chapter calls the duel "charitably, enthusiastic".