Field notes. Collected across a season in the Boundary Lands and the outer Vaulin stands. Subject: what can be observed in a person before they awaken, if anything.

Why

I've four years of files on practitioners and nothing on the years before.

This turns out to be true of everybody. The Houses document training, technique, doctrine and outcome. Nobody documents the interval, which is the longest part and the only part every person in the dominion has in common with a practitioner, because everybody was unawakened once and almost everybody stayed that way.

I went looking for the institutional literature first, on the assumption that a House placing anything in a child must be reading something. There is very little. What exists is procedural rather than descriptive, and it assumes the reader already knows the signs.

So I asked the people who actually watch children.

Who knows this

Midwives and grandmothers. In two villages, a particular aunt whose function was described to me at some length but never actually named.

It took me most of the season to accept what that meant. Folk practice here is older than House practice and better calibrated. A Vaulin tender watches a child for six years and is genuinely excellent at it. A midwife in the Boundary Lands has watched four hundred children across forty years and therefore has a rough sense of how often the signs come to nothing, which no tender I've interviewed has, because no tender sees enough children in a career to get one.

The Houses have professionalised something that village women were already doing, adding rigour to the individual case and losing the one figure that matters.

None of the midwives were mystical about any of it, and two were visibly impatient with me for arriving expecting them to be.

The signs, as reported

I collected these from nine people who read children professionally or semi-professionally. I've kept the disagreements rather than smoothing them out, because the disagreements are more instructive than the consensus.

Sleep. Universal. Everyone I asked led with sleep. The pattern goes one of two ways and there seems to be no middle: the child stops sleeping properly, or the child cannot be woken. A midwife in the eastern Boundary Lands told me every awakening she's seen was preceded by about a year of one or the other, and that this is the only sign she would stake anything on.

Appetite. Contested. Four said yes and gave the same account, that the child eats enormously for a season and then normally. Three said this is simply growth and that the connection has been credited with adolescence for centuries. One said both are true and that this is exactly why it's a poor sign.

Animals. Agreed in fact, disagreed in interpretation. Dogs go either particularly attentive or particularly avoidant, and there is no predicting which. Cats reportedly don't care, which two people volunteered and clearly enjoyed telling me. Bees came up more than once and I couldn't get a consistent account.

Small things going wrong. The one I find most interesting and the one the midwives trust least. A period of what looks like clumsiness, with objects behaving very slightly incorrectly in the child's vicinity, nothing anyone would notice unless they were watching for it. Two of my subjects called this the unlucky year and said families who don't know what they're looking at usually just conclude the child is careless and are unkind to them about it for eighteen months.

Not being surprised. Three reported it, in almost the same words, and none of them could explain it. The child is already looking at the door before the knock.

Source-specific tells

This is where folk practice is far ahead of anything the Houses have written down, and where I was told most firmly that I was going to get it wrong if I wrote it as a table.

I'm writing it as a table anyway and recording the objection.

The objection, given to me twice and forcefully: these are tendencies observed after the fact, in children who did awaken, and the same behaviours occur constantly in children who do not. A cold-resistant child is usually just a cold-resistant child.

Which brings me to the part of this enquiry I didn't anticipate and which took over most of the season.

The ones who do not

The overwhelming majority of children who show every sign never awaken.

I couldn't get a firm number and I don't think one exists. Every experienced person I asked put it somewhere between one in twenty and one in fifty, and the midwife with four hundred children behind her said one in forty, though she wouldn't defend the precision.

So: for every practitioner in the dominion there are something like forty people who slept badly for a year, ate their family out of house and home, dropped things and were watched carefully by somebody who loved them, then simply grew up.

Nobody writes about them either. There is a great deal about awakening and nothing whatever about the far commoner event, which is the year the signs stop.

A man in the western stands

He's fifty-one and he agreed to talk to me because his wife made him, and then talked for three hours.

Every sign, textbook, for two full years between eleven and thirteen. He didn't sleep and he ate constantly, and things fell off shelves near him, which his mother kept a note of. A Vaulin tender came out from the stands twice, which for that village was an event.

"They didn't promise anything," he said. "They were careful, they said it might come to nothing. But you're twelve. Somebody comes out from the Groves to look at you twice and you understand what that means. So does everyone in the village, and so does your brother."

I asked when it became clear.

"Fifteen, sixteen. It just went. Slept fine. Ate normal. Stopped dropping things." He was matter of fact about it. "The worst bit isn't the day you find out, because there isn't one. It just stops being mentioned. Nobody says anything. That's how you know."

I asked whether he had been angry.

"For about ten years, and not at anyone in particular, which is no use to anybody." He laughed. "Then I got on with it. I've had a good life. I've got a trade, a wife who's cleverer than me and two children who never showed a thing, thank God."

I asked, at the end, whether he thought the signs had meant anything at all.

He took a while.

"I think something was going to happen and then it didn't. I don't think I imagined two years." He shrugged. "But I couldn't tell you what nearly happened. Neither could the tender, and she said so, which I've always been grateful for."

From the inside

Three people who did awaken described the preceding year to me, and all three used some version of the word ill.

Two of them didn't know what was happening. One thought they were sick and the other thought they were losing their mind. The third was a House child who'd been told exactly what was coming, and said the knowing made almost no difference to how it felt.

A Sablemire-raised woman put it best. "They tell you it's an aperture opening. What it is, is you can't sleep and you're frightened and nobody will say the word when."

Where that leaves it

The signs are real. Nine people who have never met, working four regions apart, gave me substantially the same list, and in this line of work that's about as good as evidence gets.

They're also not predictive, and that distinction is what the season found. They tell you something is happening, and nothing about whether it will finish. Every competent person I spoke to says this out loud, unprompted, in almost the same words, which suggests they have all learned to say it early and often.

It doesn't help. A tender says this may come to nothing and a mother hears a professional taking an interest in her child, and both of them are behaving reasonably.

So the ordinary outcome of showing every sign of awakening is that you do not awaken. It happens to somebody's child about forty times for every practitioner this dominion produces. There's no word for those people and nothing written down, and the way you find out it's over is that the subject stops coming up.

I went looking for an article about how practitioners begin. What I have instead is a fairly good account of the commonest disappointment in the Heartlands, which nobody has ever bothered to describe and which was sitting in plain view in every village I walked through.

I would like to do it properly. It needs a year with about four hundred families, and somebody willing to pay for it. I've none of those.

Nine folk practitioners, three awakened subjects, one who did not. Two asked for their names to be left out, so I have left all of them out, which is untidy and seemed fairer than deciding whose anonymity was worth honouring.

The man in the western stands asked me, at the door, whether I would send him whatever I ended up writing. I said I would. I've been putting it off for a month, because what I've written says that what happened to him is common, and I don't know whether that will help.