Elsie Tanner

The girl on the well who decides, without much ceremony, that Arthur is worth sitting beside.

Surname confirmed in text at ch. 255, read off the academy's arrival ledger. Ch. 241 gives only "Elsie".

How they meet

Ch. 241, Arthur's first day at the village schoolhouse, aged five. She is already there, sitting on the well's rim watching the other children.

She reads him immediately and says so:

GIRL: You look nervous. ART: I'm not nervous. GIRL: You're holding your hands really tight.

And she gives the reason she is being kind, which is that nobody was to her:

GIRL: Everyone's nervous the first day. I was nervous my first day, except I didn't have anyone sitting with me at the well, so I just had to be nervous by myself, which is worse.

Then she moves over on the stone without saying anything about it.

ELS: I'm Elsie. ART: Arthur. ELS: That's a good name. Sturdy. ART: What does sturdy mean? ELS: Like a good chair. Doesn't wobble.

Her ability

Wind, and she introduces it modestly.

ELS: I can make the wind do small things. Not big things. Just little things, like making leaves spin or carrying my voice further than it should go.

She demonstrates on the spot, "a small gust curling around them both, lifting a few fallen leaves from the ground in a lazy spiral".

She has a brother, and he is the measure she uses against herself:

ELS: My brother can do much bigger things. Makes me feel a bit small, next to him. ART: I think it's amazing.

That exchange lands harder than it looks, and the chapter says so: "the particular warmth that arrived when someone offered you a kindness you hadn't expected and weren't quite sure how to receive gracefully."

The question

She is the first person to ask Arthur what his ability is, and the chapter uses her to establish how ordinary the question is here:

The question arrived the way it always seemed to arrive between children this age, casual and assumed, the particular unthinking confidence of someone who had never once had reason to consider that the question might not have an easy answer.

ART: I don't have one yet. ELS: Yet? ART: That's what my mama says. That it'll come when it comes.

She accepts it without a second thought, and the relief of that is the first thing Arthur feels about his own lack.

Where the good seats are

ELS: Not too close to the front, not too close to the back. Right in the middle, where the teacher mostly forgets you exist. ART: Is that good? ELS: It's the best. Trust me.

The schoolyard

Ch. 245 is hers as much as Arthur's, and it is the first time the saga shows what she is actually like.

She comes through the crowd rather than around it:

children twice her size had gotten out of her way without being asked, because there is a particular way a person moves when they have stopped being careful, and every child recognizes it on sight.

She puts herself between Arthur and Felix, who is a head taller and holding live lightning in both hands, and does not raise her voice.

ELS: Touch him again.

That was the thing everyone remembered about it afterward, that she did not shout.

ELS: Go on. Touch him again, in front of everyone, and see what happens to you. FEL: This is nothing to do with you. ELS: He's my friend. It's everything to do with me. FEL: He's an Unmarked, Elsie. You're embarrassing yourself. ELS: And you're a coward.

Then the speech, which the chapter says cracked louder than his lightning ever had:

ELS: You waited three years. Three years, and you only did this today, in front of everyone, with him alone, because you knew, you have always known, that he'd stand there and take it rather than give you the satisfaction. That's not strength, Felix. Strength wouldn't need an audience. You're a coward with a parlor trick, and every person in this yard just watched you prove it on someone half your voltage, and they laughed because they're cowards too.

Felix lets the lightning die and walks away. Nobody laughs.

Afterwards she kneels in the dirt, still shaking with "everything she had not gotten to do", and brushes his sleeve.

ELS: You're alright.

She said it as a fact, the way she said everything.

She does not know what it costs him. Arthur cannot look at her, and the reason is that she was magnificent and she had to be. See Arthur Lyerm.

The walk home

Ch. 246. She reads that he is lying and lets it go, and the chapter says exactly why:

he was eight and she was eight and there is only so far one child can dig into another before the shovel hits something neither of them has words for.

ELS: Then why won't you look at me? [...] ELS: Alright. Tired.

She touches his sleeve once at the fork where their paths split.

This is the first thing in the saga that Arthur hides from her, and it works.

The one warning she gives him

Ch. 248. Arthur has stopped flinching at Felix, and she is the only person who treats that as a mixed result rather than a win.

ELS: You didn't even flinch. ART: Why would I flinch. It's just Felix. ELS: It used to bother you. ART: It still bothers me. ELS: You don't look bothered.

And then:

ELS: I'm glad. I really am. I just don't want you turning into someone who doesn't feel anything. That's not the same as being strong.

ELS: I like you feeling things. You're better at it than most people.

The chapter calls it "a compliment shaped exactly like an accusation", which is her register throughout.

Afterwards

Ch. 251. She is at his side before he registers her moving, "her hands hovering near his arm without quite touching it, uncertain where it was safe to hold him".

ELS: That needs looking at. Properly looked at, not just wrapped in something. ART: I'm fine. ELS: You are not fine, you're burned, don't be stupid about this.

The chapter notes that this is the same fierceness she brought to the fence a year earlier, "except this time it was aimed entirely at making sure he took care of himself rather than at anyone who'd hurt him".

She is also the one who tells Hobbes what happened, when a dozen children are waiting for somebody else to say it first:

ELS: Felix threw a bolt at him. A real one. Not a showing off one. [...] He was going to hurt him. Properly hurt him. And then Arthur-

She cannot finish the sentence.

She chooses to go

Ch. 254. Across six years it becomes "simply understood between their two families" that she will go to Solmere too. Nobody asks her to, and when Wren checks:

WRN: You're certain, Elsie. It's a long way from home. ELS: I've never once let him walk into anything alone. I'm not about to start now.

Her wind has grown across the same six years, "carrying voices further now than Arthur imagined she'd once thought possible", which is the exact thing her brother promised to teach her in ch. 242.

They go at fifteen, which is the age Calder named six years earlier, and the chapter puts her in the picture without comment:

The morning Arthur turned fifteen, he stood at the edge of the village with a pack over his shoulder and Elsie beside him.

Her brother is Rowan

Named at the academy gate in ch. 255, by the woman with the ledger rather than by Elsie.

WOM: You'll have a brother already here, then, an upperclassman. ELS: That sounds like Rowan.

See Rowan Tanner.

East and West

Ch. 256. The clerk puts Arthur in East Hall and her in West Hall, and the first thing the academy does to them is separate them.

the small geography of it settling between them, East Hall and West Hall, the particular administrative distance that would now sit between two people who had shared a single road for the better part of ten years.

ELS: We're not even in the same building.

She names what is actually bothering her, and it is not the walk:

ELS: It's just the first time in a long while that something's going to be mine and not ours. Or yours and not ours. I don't know which way round it goes. ART: Both, probably.

Then she settles it herself, in the register the schoolyard established:

ELS: Well. It's not the end of the world. I'll come find you at breakfast, and if your roommate turns out to be dreadful, you can complain to me about it at length, and I expect the same courtesy in return.

The chapter is explicit that this is the same expression she wore between Arthur and Felix, "a lifetime ago". She squeezes his arm once and goes.

This is the first thing in her arc that is hers rather than theirs, and the work she does alone from ch. 273 onward follows from it.

The watchfulness

Ch. 259 plants something and does not explain it. She teases Arthur about Yseult through the whole refectory scene, and then:

She was still smiling when she said it, but there was something underneath the teasing that Arthur, absorbed as he was in his own flustered retreat, did not fully register, a small, careful watchfulness that had settled into her expression sometime over the past week and had not, despite everything, entirely left it since.

Whatever it is, the chapters have not said. Recorded as a plant.

She fights with a blade

Ch. 261 establishes it in one exchange on the sidelines, and it is Arthur who explains it.

BRR: This is better than I expected. ART: Elsie's been training since before I was. BRR: Has she? I hadn't realized. ART: Her brother started her early. Wind's not much use in close combat if you can't also hold your ground with a blade.

So Rowan trained her from earlier than ch. 247, and the wind was never meant to be the whole of it.

Sutton's verdict on the duel against Yseult: "Even match. [...] Tanner, solid throughout."

Ch. 268

Two months into the term, under a tree, with the horizon.

ELS: I don't miss the village, exactly. I miss knowing exactly how every day was going to go.

She has been counting his letters home for him without saying so, and when he thanks her for coming to Solmere at all:

ART: Thank you. For coming here. With me. ELS: Where else would I have gone?

She said it simply, as though the question itself barely made sense.

The breakthrough

Ch. 273. She has been getting up before the fifth bell for weeks and going to an unused stretch of the training grounds where nobody has any reason to be.

She had not told anyone she'd started this. Not Arthur. Not even Yseult, who noticed most things. It was easier, somehow, to fail privately.

What she is measuring herself against:

She thought of Yseult's easy, flawless mastery [...] She thought of Arthur [...] She thought of her own wind, competent and pleasant and, for the whole of her life so far, entirely, comfortably ordinary. She was tired of ordinary.

What Rowan tells her

Rowan has known for a while and said nothing. When he does speak, he dismantles the comparison rather than the feeling.

RWN: You know I didn't earn mine. My ability, I mean. It arrived when I was barely old enough to walk, and it's simply been getting stronger the way a tree gets taller, without any particular effort on my part beyond existing and getting older.

RWN: I didn't work harder than you. I was simply given more, earlier, and it's compounded ever since. That's not skill. That's luck, mostly, dressed up to look like something else. ELS: That doesn't make it feel any less like I'm behind. RWN: I know it doesn't. I'm not telling you the feeling's wrong. I'm telling you the comparison is.

And the line she acts on:

RWN: You've always had more patience than I ever did. Patience builds things luck can't.

What she finds

She stops sending the wind outward and asks it to stay.

What, she wondered [...] would it do if she asked it to stay closer instead? If she asked it to wrap around something, rather than strike outward at it?

The wind settled around her forearms in a tight, controlled current, holding there instead of dispersing.

That is the first step of the compression the author's notes give her in Year 3.

She tells nobody, including Rowan.

It was small. It was nothing like Arthur's impossible parry, nothing like Yseult's flawless Alchemical mastery. It was entirely, completely hers.

The precision course

Ch. 289, against Rowan, on the northern field. Suspended rings to pass wind currents through, then distant targets.

He states the arithmetic before it starts:

RWN: I don't need to see you train. I've got four years and considerably more raw output than you do. That's simply arithmetic.

What compression looks like

Two applications, both new, both from ch. 273.

Footwork:

She drew the wind close instead of sending it outward. It gathered around her feet in a tight, controlled compression, dense and concentrated in a space no larger than her own soles, and she felt the particular unfamiliar power of it propel her forward with a speed that startled even herself.

Pellets:

instead of the wide, dispersed gust she'd always used before, [she] drew the wind into a tight, compressed pellet, dense with concentrated force, and released it. It struck the target's exact center with a precision that punched clean through the wood.

Rowan hovers, cuts across the course rather than following it, and destroys his targets wholesale. He wins on time.

Power against precision. Scale against concentration.

What it gets her

Not the win. The chapter is explicit that this is the point.

RWN: I've never seen anyone do that. Compress it like that, I mean. Most people who try simply lose control of it entirely. ELS: I lost control of it plenty, before I managed to hold it.

RWN: You still won. RWN: I did. But I don't think that's going to stay true forever, if you keep finding things like that.

Her own account, still deliberately vague:

ELS: I found something new. In the way I hold it. I don't send it out anymore, not always. Sometimes I keep it close instead, and it gets stronger for staying small.

She never tells him how long she has been at it.

she had also, for the first time in longer than she could properly measure, genuinely surprised the one person whose ability had shaped her whole understanding of what her own gift's limits were supposed to be.

Forty-three mornings

Ch. 306. She has kept count since the day after the festival, and told nobody, including Rowan, who has asked twice.

It was not secrecy exactly. She had simply discovered [...] that she preferred the work unwatched, and had stopped interrogating herself about why.

Compression is reliable now. The difficulty has moved to duration.

arriving at competence simply relocated the difficulty somewhere further along rather than eliminating it.

Her ceiling is eleven seconds, twice, three days ago, and not since.

What she notices

That the failures are not identical.

When she concentrated hard on holding the structure, it collapsed at seven or eight. When she let her attention drift slightly, thinking about the shape of the wind rather than gripping it, she reached ten or eleven consistently.

She had been holding it too tightly.

And that this is the same mistake she made the first time:

She had solved the initial problem and then immediately reverted to the same wrong instinct when the difficulty relocated.

ELS: You'd think I'd learn faster.

She loosens her attention, "holding the structure the way she might hold something delicate rather than something escaping", and reaches fourteen seconds.

That is the ceiling the author's notes give her.

She still tells nobody

There would be a moment, eventually, when the work had accumulated into something worth showing rather than describing, and she intended to wait for it, and she found the waiting itself had begun to feel less like secrecy and more like something closer to anticipation.

The Trial: what the work was worth

Ch. 311. Her third round is the first time anyone else sees what forty-three mornings bought. Arthur reads the quiet as nerves and is wrong.

She had been focusing.

Her opponent is a third-year with "a considerable raw output of something that looked like directed heat", and the chapter says the match should have gone against her quickly by every reasonable measure of power.

She did not try to out-power him. She never once tried. She simply kept being somewhere else

She puts a compressed pellet through his shoulder guard at the fourth minute and he yields inside thirty seconds. Nobody watching knows where it came from:

BRR: When did she get that fast? ART: I don't know.

Arthur does know. He has noticed her leaving before the fifth bell for months and decided not to ask, which is the same courtesy she extended to him for a decade. The number arrives to him unbidden: "Fourteen seconds, he thought, without knowing why the number occurred to him."

Against Yseult

Ch. 314. See The Trial of Power for the bracket. Yseult opens with a plain earth wall, and the insult is that it is unimaginative.

ELS: Don't. YSE: Don't what? ELS: You know what.

She is inside the guard in nine seconds, which nobody has managed all tournament, and the whole of what she spends is the fourteen:

She had fourteen seconds and had used six of them and she committed the remaining eight to a single decision, driving forward through the heat rather than around it because around it no longer existed

Her sleeve catches fire. She goes through anyway, strikes into the ribs, and puts Yseult on one knee.

YSE: That was very good. ELS: I know. YSE: I mean it. That was genuinely the best thing anyone has done to me all year.

Then Yseult puts her palms flat against her own sternum and stops being hurt.

YSE: Sorry. ELS: For what? YSE: For this part.

She loses, and will not be told so

Ch. 315. The ceiling is the whole of the answer: Elsie has one and Yseult does not.

Elsie went again. She had nothing left worth spending and she went anyway [...] Yseult caught her. Not blocked. Caught. [...] Elsie, who had been operating for eleven minutes on the understanding that she was faster, discovered that this had stopped being true while she wasn't looking.

She is dropped by lightning conducted through water fired at her feet, and she still refuses the call:

YSE: Yield. ELS: ...no. [...] YSE: 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 closes her eyes first, and then says it.

The infirmary

Ch. 316. Julian treats the burn. Everything else is the current wearing off, and she takes that as an insult rather than an injury.

Elsie could move her fingers again by the time they got her to the infirmary, which Julian described as a good sign and which she personally found insulting.

Her verdict on the match, and his:

ELS: I lost badly. JUL: You lost. I don't know that badly is the correct measure. ELS: I was on the ground in a puddle unable to move. JUL: You were. You were also, according to the two students I've already treated who watched it, inside her guard twice, which nobody else has managed all tournament.

JUL: I'm not consoling you. I'm reporting what came through that door before you did.

Mira arrives twenty minutes later and sits down without asking whether she is welcome, "which Elsie appreciated more than she could have explained".

MRA: I'm not being kind. I'm stating an assessment. [...] I have concluded that you were extraordinary and that you also lost, and I don't think those two things are in conflict. ELS: You're the only person who could say that and have it land as a compliment.

Her next question is not about the match she just lost.

ELS: Is Arthur fighting?

She gets as far as her elbows, and Julian stops her without turning round.

ELS: I haven't done anything. JUL: You've thought about it very loudly. Lie down.

Then Mira reports a fight she has watched closely and cannot describe, and Elsie stops accepting the bed.

ELS: I want to see it. JUL: Absolutely not.

He gives her terms instead. Sit up slowly, and if she reaches the corridor without falling over, he will consider the doorway.

She gets to the doorway

Ch. 317. She reaches it, and the chapter prices it in one sentence.

From the arena's eastern doorway, forty feet up and leaning hard against the frame with one arm bandaged and her legs still not entirely answering her, Elsie watched them carry Arthur out. She had made it in time for the last ninety seconds.

Both of them saw it and neither can say what it was.

ELS: Did you see it? MRA: I saw it. ELS: Do you know what it was? [...] MRA: No.

What she says to Arthur afterwards

Ch. 318. Everybody ends up in one room without discussing why. She is against the wall with her bandaged arm folded across her chest and "her legs, by her own report, still not entirely convinced by the concept of standing".

ELS: Twenty-four minutes. ART: I've heard. ELS: Against the defending champion. ART: I've heard that too. ELS: You know you don't have to keep trying this hard to impress me. We've been friends ten years. The bar is genuinely very low at this point.

And then she gives away that she wrote it in advance:

BRR: That's the funniest thing you've ever said. ELS: I know. I've been saving it since the doorway.

Ch. 319 puts her in the eastern stands, arm still bandaged and Arthur beside her, watching Corin take the ground against Dane. She reads it before anybody else says anything.

ELS: He hasn't drawn.

Back in the yard before the fifth bell

Ch. 320. The dressing comes off on the Thursday afternoon and she is in the western yard the next morning. Arthur finds out because he has gone back himself for the first time since the Trial.

ELS: You're early. ART: So are you. ELS: I'm always early.

The work has not changed, and neither has the silence around it.

She compressed the wind at her forearms and held it, and he watched her count something silently, and after a while she let it go and shook out her hands and did it again. He did not ask what number she was counting to.

Nobody in the group mentions the Trial across the three days. The chapter closes on the ordinary things instead, and she is one of them: "Elsie was counting something in the yard at dawn."

Beckwith

Ch. 321 to ch. 323. Eight students are sent to a village of forty buildings with no list, no schedule, and nobody coming to check on them. See Beckwith.

Her first reading of the place is a comparison, and she will not let it go:

ELS: It's smaller than home. ART: It's about the same. ELS: No, it's genuinely smaller. Ours had the two mills.

The shape of the assignment unsettles her more than the work does:

ELS: That's genuinely uncomfortable. [...] ELS: I'd rather have the list. COR: So would I. I suspect that's the point.

Ch. 322 finds the edge of what compression is for, and she is the first to hit it:

Elsie discovered this first and reported it with real indignation - that she could compress wind hard enough to punch a hole through hardened air and could not use it to lift a sack of grain by so much as an inch, because compression was not lift and never had been.

Everyone in this village is stronger than everyone at that academy

Ch. 323, from the settle by the fire, which she has taken lengthwise with one arm over her eyes. It is the sharpest thing she says in the act.

ELS: Everyone in this village is stronger than everyone at that academy. BRR: That's not- ELS: Briar, Odell Crane is fifty-something years old and he carried more sacks than Corin today.

She has the arithmetic ready:

ELS: He carried more sacks than Corin, and then he went and did something with the wheel housing for an hour, and then he ate supper and looked completely fine. I have a soul ability and I have been training since I was four and I currently cannot feel my legs. COR: He also does it every day. ELS: That's my point. That's exactly my point. We do difficult things twice a week in a marked circle and call ourselves competitors.

See Odell Crane and Hesta Bray.

The cave

Ch. 326. An hour and a half of climbing, two sheep holes, and then a third opening that is not one.

ELS: Oh. ART: That's not a hole. BRR: That's genuinely not a hole.

Ch. 327 gives her the line the whole trip has been building to.

ELS: We should go. COR: We've been in eleven minutes. ELS: I know. I still think we should go. COR: Why? ELS: I don't know. I want to look at it for the rest of my life and I also want to be outside. Both at once.

Ch. 328: fourteen seconds, spent in twos and threes

The whole fight is in the dark, so she cannot aim. She fires on Briar's one-second warnings and on sound.

She had fourteen seconds and she spent them in twos and threes, compression and release, aiming at the shifting dark by sound and by Briar's one-second warnings

The first hit is audible rather than visible, "a wet percussive sound and then a shriek". She puts a pellet through the base of a leg and another into the joint Corin had already opened, and that is the pair of hits that changes the fight:

It had stopped simply arriving and had started choosing, testing, drawing back after each exchange instead of pressing through it.

Her reading of that, corrected on the spot by Mira, is the sharpest exchange in the chapter:

MRA: It's hesitating. ELS: It's hurt. MRA: Those aren't the same thing.

Her belt is what straps Arthur's arm across his chest on the way out.

Ch. 329: she names the actual problem

Everybody else is arguing about how to keep people out of the cave. Barriers, then a sign.

ELS: It doesn't have to come down.

Everyone looked at her.

ELS: That's not the problem. The problem is Tam.

Arthur watched the whole shape of it arrive on seven faces at slightly different speeds. A nine year old who knew every path in these hills. A six year old who followed him. Eight students who would be on the eastern road at the end of the week, and one of them, the only one of them who could walk into that chamber and come out the other side, going with them.

It is Rufus Hale who answers it, with a story rather than a fence, but Elsie is the one who works out what the danger actually is. Her belt is also what Arthur's arm is strapped to his chest with on the way down.

Ch. 330: she notices twice, and says nothing comforting either time

Two small things, and the chapter turns on both of them.

The bench

Arthur is benched with the sling and given the gate. She finds him counting carts that are not arriving.

ELS: You've gone quiet. ART: I'm counting carts. ELS: There haven't been any carts...

She sat down on the bench for a minute she did not have, and did not say anything comforting, which he appreciated more than he could have explained.

ELS: Odell's right, you know. ART: I know. ELS: I know you know. I'm saying it anyway, because you're going to argue with him again at midday and I'd like it on record that I told you first.

He argued with him again at midday, and lost. She had already priced it in.

Talon didn't ask

At the long table, Mira has just told seven people what she is and Finn has just broken the silence after it. Elsie is the one who works out what has not happened.

It was Elsie who noticed, a minute later, and she said it without any particular emphasis, which is how she said everything.

ELS: Talon didn't ask.

She then runs it down to the end in four words.

ELS: You knew. TLN: Yes. ELS: How long? TLN: A while.

This is the same move as ch. 329. There, seven people argued about barriers and signs and she said the problem is Tam. Here, seven people are absorbing what Mira said and she says the thing about the eighth. She is not the one with the answer in either chapter. She is the one who sees which question is actually on the table, and she says it flatly enough that nobody hears it as a challenge.

She is also the reason Mira walked onto the rock in ch. 328, which ch. 330 is where we find out:

MRA: because Elsie said it was hurt and I said those aren't the same thing, and I was the only person in that room who could tell the difference.

Ch. 332 and ch. 333: she says the quiet part twice

On the last night, when Talon finally raises what Corin did at the Trial of Power, she is the one who explains the twelve weeks of silence in a sentence:

ELS: We all noticed. Nobody knew what to do with it.

That is her third chapter running of naming the thing the room is working around, after the problem being Tam in ch. 329 and Talon not asking in ch. 330. She does it here in seven words and does not follow it up.

Her summer: the same road as Arthur for three days and then the same village.

On the eastern road she raises the problem of what the week even was.

ELS: I keep trying to work out what to call it. [...] If somebody asks me what we did, I've got nothing. We carried sacks. That's the honest answer and it's a rubbish one. BRR: We fought a spider. ELS: We're not telling anyone about the spider. BRR: No. That's rather my point. The one interesting thing is the one thing we can't say, so we're left with the sacks. MRA: The sacks are the true answer anyway. ELS: I know. It just doesn't sound like anything.

It is Rufus's argument arriving from the other end. He told them the night before that the week is worth a table on a post and a story told right, and that anybody who says it is the feelings is selling something. Elsie is discovering the same thing as a problem rather than a comfort: what they actually did does not make a story.

Ch. 334 to ch. 341: home, and what she is in that house

She walks the four days west with Arthur and the two who cannot go east, and the entry's long-standing claim that she decided to be his friend at the well is given its full weight when they arrive: she peels off at the Tanner gate, and after ten months and a year and four days of road she simply stops at a gate.

ELS: I'll come over after. ART: You don't have to. ELS: Arthur, your father is about to open that door. I am absolutely going to be there and I'm annoyed I'll miss the beginning.

She arrives at seven without knocking, comes in through the back, puts down a dish her own mother sent on forty minutes' notice, tells Wren she looks well, tells Calder he looks older, takes Nami off Arthur's lap without asking, and sits in what is evidently her chair.

YSE: You've done that before. ELS: About nine hundred times. WRN: She had her tea here twice a week for six years. ELS: Three times a week. WRN: Three times a week in the bad winter. ELS: Every winter was the bad winter, Wren.

She tells his mother about the Trial of Power

Arthur has described the whole year as training. She does not let it stand, and does it by repeating one word.

ELS: Training. ART: Elsie. ELS: I'm repeating the word. I find it interesting. ART: It's not interesting. ELS: It's mildly interesting. I'd say it's mildly interesting that a boy who reached the semi-final of the Trial of Power in front of four hundred people and then turned a drying loft one-handed for four hours has described the whole of his year as training.

That is the fourth chapter running in which she says the thing the room is working around, after ch. 329, ch. 330 and ch. 332. Here it is aimed at Arthur and it is aimed on purpose.

The two of them going home

Ch. 336 has her and Arthur "go strange" on the last day, nine miles out, and conduct a conversation in place names and half-sentences that the other two cannot follow.

ELS: The Farrow gate's gone. ART: When? ELS: I don't know. It was there. ART: It's been ten months. ELS: I know how long it's been, Arthur. MRA: Are they always like this? YSE: I've never seen it. It's fascinating and I want it to stop.

At the top of the rise, neither of them can produce anything:

ELS: Say something clever about it. ART: I haven't got anything. ELS: Good. Neither have I. I've been trying for a mile.

The flower field

She has been going up there with him for nine years and was six the first time.

ELS: Nobody's ever said anything good up here. He brought me up when I was six and I said it's very yellow. ART: You said it twice. ELS: I said it twice, yes, thank you, Arthur.

She gets the first flower, "which was the correct order and which everybody in the field understood was the correct order", and lets him do it without making a joke about it, "which for Elsie Tanner was a considerable statement".