Yseult Marchant
Arthur's roommate from his first morning, and the first person at Solmere to have already decided what he is.
The introduction
Ch. 257. Arthur wakes to her unpacking a trunk across the room.
ART: I think there's been a mistake. YSE: Was there? I was told room fourteen. Is this not room fourteen? ART: It's room fourteen. I just thought- YSE: You thought they'd give you a roommate who matched your general shape and disposition. Understandable assumption. Wrong one.
She explains the dormitory policy herself, and gives the administration's reasoning as she reads it:
YSE: Sorted by anything so old-fashioned as gender? They're not. Solmere sorts by academic merit and administrative convenience, and apparently the administration decided the boy who does the impossible and the girl who intends to invent the impossible belonged in the same room.
She is tall and blonde, dressed already at an early hour, with "a smear of something faintly metallic across one knuckle that she hadn't bothered to wipe away".
She already knows who he is
YSE: I know. Everyone knows. You're the one who parried lightning with your bare hand and no ability to speak of. You're rather famous, in certain circles. ART: I didn't realize the story had traveled this far already. YSE: Astoria's not a large province, in the ways that matter. [...] And I care very much about that sort of thing.
That is the first evidence in the saga that ch. 250 travelled. It reached the provincial capital six years later and is still current.
What she is like
She narrates her own observations without apology.
YSE: I'm simply making an observation. I make a great many observations. You'll get used to it.
Her assessment of Arthur, offered as a scheduling reason:
YSE: I intend to walk into my first Alchemy lecture beside the most interesting person in this entire academy, and I'd rather you weren't late for it. ART: Is that what I am? YSE: Currently, yes. Ask me again in a year. I reserve the right to revise my assessment.
The water
She spends Instructor Vance's first lecture giving Arthur a running critique of Vance's own demonstration.
YSE: She's underselling it. That's a much finer thread of control than she's letting on [...] that's someone who's spent years refining a much simpler trick until it looks effortless.
Vance detaches the coil of water she is holding and empties it over her head from the platform.
VNC: There. Now you have opinions AND a demonstration to compare them against. I find that's usually the more educational combination.
Yseult's response, dripping, is the measure of her:
YSE: Well. Now you've seen me at my absolute worst. ART: I don't think that's your worst. YSE: No? ART: I think your worst would involve considerably more talking.
She laughs, "loud and genuine and entirely unselfconscious despite the water still dripping from her chin".
YSE: Careful. Keep that up and I might have to revise my assessment of you sooner than a year.
Ch. 259
Arthur's working theory after a week:
Yseult Marchant did not experience embarrassment the way ordinary people did, and possibly did not experience it at all.
Her method, which the chapter is explicit is deliberate:
YSE: I've decided you should walk me to breakfast. ART: Isn't that what we already do? YSE: We happen to leave the room at similar times and end up walking the same direction. That's different from you deciding to walk me. I'd like the deciding part. It matters more than you'd think.
She delivers all of it "so plainly and without any of the coy hesitation Arthur might have expected from someone flirting" that he has nothing to answer with, "which was, he suspected, precisely the effect she was going for".
When he does decide, she is briefly caught out:
YSE: Look at you. Learning. ART: I have good teachers. YSE: You have one excellent teacher and several adequate ones.
The refectory scene that follows is played for comedy, and its point is that she knows exactly what she is doing while appearing not to.
YSE: Arthur. You've gone very red. ART: I haven't. YSE: You have. It's rather sweet, actually.
Against Elsie
Ch. 261. Sutton pairs them, and Yseult opens by saying what she thinks a duel is for, with a pointed glance at the sidelines.
YSE: I find duels tell you a great deal about a person. Their instincts. Their priorities. Who they're really performing for. ELS: I'm not performing for anyone. YSE: Neither am I. ELS: You just said duels reveal who people perform for. YSE: I said it reveals things. I didn't say it was flattering.
Both of them then spend the duel checking whether Arthur is watching, which Arthur notices with "faint horror" and Briar with delight.
ELS: Your surroundings are a training yard. Arthur is not part of your surroundings. YSE: Isn't he?
She concedes the skill assessment without hedging:
YSE: You really are good. ELS: I told you. YSE: You did. I chose not to fully believe you. That was likely an error.
Sutton calls it an even match. Afterwards they cross the yard together, "the earlier tension of the contest dissolved into something closer to mutual, grudging camaraderie", and Elsie repeats Sutton's footwork note back to her.
The harvest market
Ch. 269. Elsie deliberately leaves the two of them alone, and Yseult says so out loud:
YSE: She's matchmaking. ART: She's not subtle about it. YSE: No. I appreciate that about her. Subtlety wastes time.
She cheats a strength test
ART: You don't have a strength-based ability. YSE: I don't need one. I have Alchemy, and I have spite, and between the two I've never once met a carnival game I couldn't out-think.
She redirects essence into her forearms and rings the bell.
BTH: That's not- you're not supposed to use Alchemy on the strength test. YSE: There's no sign forbidding it. BTH: It's implied! YSE: Implication isn't a rule. I'd like my prize, please.
YSE: I prefer to think of it as identifying and exploiting an oversight in the rules. Cheating implies I did something wrong. I simply did something no one thought to prevent.
The lantern
At the harbour, with hundreds of paper lanterns rising, she drops the performance entirely.
YSE: I'll tell you mine, if you like. ART: You don't have to. YSE: I know I don't have to. I want to.
YSE: I wished that you'd eventually let me in properly. Not just as a roommate you find amusing. Properly.
Arthur has no answer, and she does not require one:
YSE: You don't have to say anything. I told you because I wanted to, not because I expected anything back.
Then she takes his hand. His own wish is not stated.
This is the first time the chapter drops her armour. Compare her reading of Corin in ch. 264, where she identified exactly this problem in somebody else.
What her Alchemy actually is
Ch. 290, the demonstration arena. She wins three matches and Instructor Vance counts the disciplines afterwards.
VNC: I counted no fewer than five distinct disciplines across your matches this morning. Fire, earth, air, some manner of conjured adhesive substance I don't believe has a formal academic name yet, and, in your second match, something resembling controlled crystallization. Most third-year Alchemists have committed themselves fully to one, perhaps two, disciplines by this stage.
Her reasoning:
YSE: Why would I [commit to one]? Fire's decisive but limited. Air's flexible but requires precision to make it matter. Earth's solid but slow to shape properly. Used together, each one covers what the others lack.
YSE: Specializing is efficient. It's also predictable. I'd rather be difficult to prepare for than simply excellent at one narrow thing.
And her technical answer to why fire beats a wall of hardened air rather than feeding it:
YSE: Most people don't control the ratio properly. Too much fire and you're right, it simply fuels the thing. Get the proportion correct, and the heat differential tears the structure apart from the inside instead.
The slime
The one technique nobody recognises. She anchors an opponent's foot to the arena floor mid-step with "a thick, viscous substance [...] dark and glistening".
DES: That's not a technique I've ever seen taught. YSE: It isn't taught. I built it myself, adapting principles from three separate branches of standard theory into something none of them cover individually.
That is ch. 257's "the girl who intends to invent the impossible", delivered.
The cost
Vance names it, and Yseult does not deny it:
VNC: The essence cost alone, maintaining competence across that many separate applications, must be substantial. YSE: It is. I don't mind the cost.
Vance's verdict:
VNC: You have real talent, Miss Marchant. The kind that occasionally exceeds what formal instruction can properly cultivate on its own. I'd encourage you to keep experimenting.
The rejection
Ch. 301, weeks after the harvest lanterns, in the dark of their shared room.
ART: I don't know if I feel the same way. [...] I care about you enormously. I don't think I could properly explain how much. But I don't know if what I feel is the same thing you were describing.
YSE: That's entirely fair, Arthur. It's considerably more fair than most people would have managed.
YSE: I'm not going to make you responsible for how I feel, Arthur. That's not fair to you and it's not particularly dignified for me.
She turns to the wall and says goodnight. Arthur cannot work out what feels wrong about it.
She had been, in fact, considerably more gracious than the situation had required of her. That was, he realized slowly, precisely the thing that felt wrong.
Then he hears her crying, "so restrained that he might have missed it entirely if the room hadn't been so completely silent".
ART: Yseult?
The sound stopped instantly.
YSE: I'm asleep.
ART: Are you alright? YSE: Yeah. I'm okay.
the particular flawless delivery of someone who had spent considerable practice learning to sound fine.
When he touches her shoulder she knocks his hand away, and he finally sees her face.
Her family
Ch. 302, told from the floor beside her bed, in the dark.
YSE: My mother was ill for most of my childhood. Not the sort of ill that resolves. The sort that simply continues, getting slowly worse, for years, while everyone around it adjusts to a shape of life that keeps narrowing.
YSE: My father left before I could properly remember him. I've been told several different versions of why. I stopped asking eventually.
YSE: There was a stepmother, afterward. She wasn't cruel. I want to be accurate about that [...] She simply never once looked at me the way she looked at her own son. Not once, in eleven years. She fed me and clothed me and made absolutely certain I understood, without ever saying it aloud, that I was an obligation she had accepted rather than a person she had chosen.
And then:
YSE: And there was a stepbrother.
Her voice changed on the word, something hardening beneath the exhaustion.
YSE: I don't want to talk about him. I'm not going to talk about him. I want you to understand that there's a reason I don't ever intend to see his face again, and I want you to understand that I'm not going to explain it further, tonight or otherwise.
Her account of what she is ashamed of:
YSE: I'm so sorry for asking to be loved. It's an embarrassing thing to want out loud. Most people have the sense to keep it quiet.
What she felt on the first morning
This is the load-bearing detail of the whole chapter, and it is a fact about Arthur rather than about her.
YSE: The first morning. When you woke up and I was unpacking my trunk. [...] I felt something. When I looked at you. Right at the start, before we'd exchanged a single word.
YSE: It felt like hope. That's the only word I've ever found for it. Not attraction, not curiosity, something underneath both of those. Like something in my soul simply looked at you and decided things might be alright after all.
YSE: That sounds insane. ART: It doesn't.
It is the same word ch. 293 uses for what the crowd felt while he ran. See ../systems/the-built-ability.md.
She also names the thing she cannot account for:
YSE: I don't know why I trust you this much. I genuinely don't. I've known you less than a year, and I told you something at that harbor I've never told anyone, and I'm telling you all of this now, and I can't account for any of it.
What Arthur says
He takes her hand, presses it to his own cheek, and says the line the chapter is named for.
ART: Don't worry, Yseult. [...] I'll protect your fragile soul for as long as I live.
She breaks completely, and then asks:
YSE: Can I sleep in your arms tonight? ART: Of course.
Asleep, the chapter says, "she looked younger [...] every carefully maintained defense finally, temporarily lowered".
Her soul ability is Catalysis
Ch. 304, stated by her, after four months of nobody knowing she had one.
YSE: My ability is called Catalysis. [...] Very few people have [heard of it]. It doesn't do anything visible, which makes it deeply unimpressive to demonstrate and consequently rather badly documented. Through physical contact, I can increase both the potency and the abundance of soul essence. In myself, in another person, or in an object.
BRR: You can increase how much essence someone has. YSE: Temporarily. It fades within an hour or so, and there are limits I haven't fully mapped. But yes.
That is why she can carry five Alchemical disciplines and shrug off the essence cost in ch. 290: she is topping herself up.
She demonstrates it on Briar by putting both arms around his shoulders from behind without warning. He goes rigid and scarlet and stops being able to talk.
YSE: You've gone very tense. BRR: I'm FINE. YSE: You're extremely tense. BRR: I'M FINE, YSEULT.
His foresight, spent two hours earlier, answers immediately and holds for four minutes instead of a few seconds, and leaves him not tired at all.
See ../systems/soul-abilities.md.
The dream
Ch. 303 is hers, in three parts, and it fills in what ch. 302 left out.
At six. A sickroom that smells of medicine, "until the smell and the woman have become the same thing in her mind". She asks where her father went, and her mother opens her mouth, and no answer comes. "In every version of the dream she has ever had, across eleven years of having it."
At nine. A graveside in the rain, in a dress that does not fit, and a hand on her shoulder that "does not tighten. It does not comfort."
STM: What a terrible fate. [...] I hope that man burns in hell for what he did to you.
In the dream, Yseult does not know which man she means. She has never known.
At thirteen. A room with a door behind her that will not open, and someone in it whose face the dream will not resolve.
the place where his face should be is simply dark, an absence rather than a feature
She can see them [his hands] clearly. That is the cruelty of it, that she can see the hands with perfect, unbearable clarity while the face remains an absence, that the dream withholds everything except the specific thing she would most like to forget.
She has had that one for four years. It is the stepbrother she refused to describe in ch. 302.
She wakes screaming. What ends it is Arthur, with a toothbrush in his mouth, at the washroom door:
ART: You good?
The absurdity is what steadies her, and the chapter says so: "the sheer, stupid ordinariness of it more steadying than any amount of concern would have been".
What she is actually doing
Ch. 315, in the middle of the semifinal, delivered flat and without performance.
YSE: I'm going to be the best Alchemist the world has ever seen.
It was not a boast. That was what stopped Elsie.
YSE: Humans aren't built for it. Everyone knows that. Our souls are too dense, we're made for soulcraft, and every single instructor in this academy has told me at some point that I'd get further specializing in something I was actually suited for.
YSE: I've spent a year in that workshop finding out what happens if I refuse.
See ../systems/species-asymmetry.md.
And why she shows it to Elsie specifically:
YSE: I'd like you to see it. You specifically. You're the only person who's made me work all year.
The combinations
Four, in sequence, each one built out of the last.
- Fire and water together flash into "a dense white column of steam" that walls off the whole marked ground.
- Fire compressed on itself until it is no longer flame: "a small dense point of blue-white that hurt to look at directly [...] Yseult had done something to fire that fire was not supposed to permit." The chapter calls it plasma.
- Plasma into wind produces lightning, and she does not throw it:
it did not disperse the way real lightning disperses, it stayed, coiled and writhing around Yseult's raised left hand like something being held rather than something being cast.
- Earth and water, fired low as a burst that soaks the ground and Elsie's legs in a spreading slick, and then the lightning into the water.
She takes the archer's stance to fire the fourth, "left hand raised with the lightning still coiling in it, right arm drawn back and bent".
Elsie sees what is coming half a second before it lands and cannot move fast enough.
YSE: Yield. [...] Elsie. You cannot move. ELS: ...I know. YSE: Then yield, or they'll call it for you, and I would genuinely rather it came from you.
She also lets the fight run rather than finishing it, and the chapter says why:
Yseult was simply not finishing it, because finishing it would require doing something she had not yet decided to do.
Drennick
Ch. 325 places her childhood, in passing.
YSE: I grew up in Drennick. There was one tree in the whole district and getting to the top of it was the single most contested achievement available to anybody under twelve. FNN: Did you get to the top? YSE: Repeatedly. Loudly.
Drennick is the Iron Reach: mining and metalwork, "harsh country, harsh people" (ch. 243). See ../locations/maeris.md.
The magic at the beck
Ch. 325. Finn promised two children "a considerable amount of magic" and cannot safely deliver any, so she does it instead and makes him carry things.
YSE: Finn, your ability is a coin flip that once left you blind and unable to move in front of four hundred people.
She lifts an arch of water out of the beck and drops it, eleven times, until both children are soaked to the shoulders and shrieking.
TAM: Could you make it stay? YSE: For a while. Not forever. TAM: How long? YSE: A minute, perhaps. It gets harder the longer you hold it. TAM: Why? YSE: Because it isn't what water wants to do.
That is the Alchemy rule of ch. 257, explained to a nine year old in one sentence.
And what she says to Finn afterwards:
FNN: It was the one thing I had. YSE: You carried a sleeping six-year-old a quarter mile without complaining once. That's considerably harder than lifting some water and you're the only person in this village who could have done it. FNN: That's not magic. YSE: No, it isn't. [...] It's better, though.
Later, from the author's notes
Marked as planning rather than text.
- Her track is Alchemy, multi-discipline, plus Catalysis, which lets her replenish herself mid-fight.
- She beats Elsie in a Trial of Power quarterfinal on sustainability rather than on skill.
- She is one of the four who leave Solmere together at the end of Acts 12 to 14.
- The notes refer to "their parallel histories with Arthur", which ch. 257 has already begun.
See ../volumes/09-the-scholar.md.