Read A Succession of Bad Days for Free Online

to make that possible. I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired.
    Nine days ago, I thought I had no talent at all.
    I wasn’t awake for most of those days.
    I sit down, and do my best not to gibber.

Chapter 6
    “Up, students!” Wake’s cheerful, still, though now with the kind of cheer you’d have to be three heroes to want to argue with.
    I’m not the only one sitting.
    “Briskly, now; no sense in letting the weeds in here.” Wake makes a couple of strange broad gestures, both arms going wide. There’s a corner-of-the-eye coiling shape, like a rope that’s woken up. It has the colour of the feel ofdeep cold dust.
    I lurch up, and take three steps forward, and grab. Change the number of steps, and in one case skip the lurch, and everyone does.
    “The trick is to push on the rope.” Wake says this the same way as everything else. I’m willing to try, Kynefrid, who is wobbling a little, looks like an opinion will arrive in just a second, and Zora says “You can’t push on a rope,” like you’d say‘the sun is a star’.
    Chloris is nodding vigorously, and Dove nods just once, but it’s got more certainty behind it than Zora and Chloris put together.
    “Barge towing,” Dove says.
    Wake nods, grimaces, says “Imagine winding on one ply, each of you, to make a larger rope,” and starts walking.
    I haven’t wound rope, but I think I’m the only one who hasn’t. It doesn’t take much watching before I figureit out. All the individual colour-sensations blend into the deep cold dust of what must be Wake’s warding.
    We walk, not very fast, all the way around; it’s bigger than the space we staked out, maybe a bit bigger than the thirty hectares Wake seemed to think was our reasonable limit.
    It’s strange; the trees go right up to the edge of the new space, and stop. There isn’t an understory, there isn’tan edge where there’s a bunch of bushes because the trees can’t shade them from the side, it’s straight in all the way around. The trees have all the good dirt, and thousands of years of fallen leaves, and outside that it’s the broken crumbly rock that can’t grow much.
    So it doesn’t, and there are trees seven or eight metres thick and eighty metres tall over the back of a hill that’s changed shape,it’s higher and steeper and there’s full-on meadow right up on top of it now.
    I remember the meadow rustling against my legs. Don’t remember what’s in it, don’t really remember starting to walk. It’s all breathe, step, breathe. The effort of using the Power has no thought itself, but makes it hard to think.
    Adding to the ward, it has to be a ward, while walking is a good reason to go pretty slow.I can do it, everyone can do it, but it’s like trying to walk in a straight line when you’re really tired. You have to think about it, and not stop thinking about it, or you stagger. Staggering makes the rope wiggle, strangely, as though it was both heavy and wet.
    No water, not that I can see. The bottom of the little wood, the southern, lowest edge, isn’t all the same trees; they’re not as talland the bark looks like it spirals.
    Back up the hill is hard; Wake’s fine, no change of pace, it’s the same deliberate stride it was all the way around, but it’s hard work to keep up on the uphill, and to keep winding Power into this rope-thing, the wind against me getting stronger.
    Up toward the crest of the hill, there’s what’s almost a small cliff, three metres of nearly vertical hillside;we go around it to the east, going up, as we went around it to the west coming down, though I didn’t notice it then.
    Breathe. Step. Breathe. Bind, to the texture of dust.
    The top of the hill is meadow, low meadow, not much past knee-high, but it’s thick turf, you can feel the cushion underfoot.
    Wake stops, turns, looks at us one by one, and we all follow along with the gesture when Wake raisesboth hands and grabs across, hands on forearms, hands at face height.
    There’s a snap,