Recorded in Greytower, five days after the tournament. Tender Olesk fought the first match and lost it in eleven seconds. My own notes, made at the time, are in brackets.

(I found him in a common house on the market square, over elderflower tea. The bark-patterning of long Grove work showed on the backs of his hands. He agreed to talk before I'd finished asking.)

Scholar: You were the first match.

Olesk: I was the first match.

(He turned the cup without drinking from it.)

Olesk: Everyone says that to me like it's a delicate subject. It's fine.

Scholar: Tell me what you did.

Olesk: Thorned binding, up through the sand. It's foundational work, I've had it since I was nineteen, and I'd used it twice already that day and both times it did exactly what it does. Roots are patient. They take hold, and then a practitioner has to spend something to get free, and while they're spending I'm building the next thing.

Scholar: And against Cross?

Olesk: They went up. They reached them.

(He stopped.)

Olesk: And then I didn't have a technique any more.

Scholar: They broke it.

Olesk: No, it didn't break.

(He put the cup down.)

Olesk: Breaking is fine. I've had bindings broken, everyone has, it's a normal afternoon. When a binding breaks you feel it break. There's a snap back along the connection, and you know exactly what happened and roughly how much it cost the other person. None of that happened. There was nothing to break against. I was holding a working, and then it was gone.

Scholar: Did it hurt?

Olesk: It was worse than hurting.

(He didn't say anything for a while.)

Olesk: I've had five days to find words for this. You know how you can tell, in a dark room, whether it's a small room or a big one? Before you touch anything, something in you knows. It was like that going the other way. Something in me knew there was less room than there had been.

Scholar: You reached for it again.

Olesk: Twice. Thickened the thorns, pulled harder, all the things you do.

(He almost smiled.)

Olesk: I've since worked out that I was doing the equivalent of shouting at somebody who isn't in the house. There was nothing wrong with my working. It just wasn't arriving anywhere.

Scholar: And Cross?

Olesk: Walked, and that's genuinely all. Everyone keeps telling me they were fast, and I was watching the entire time and I could see every step coming.

(He shook his head slowly.)

Olesk: Walked to where I was, and one strike took my guard apart, and I could feel the second one being decided on, so I yielded. Eleven seconds, and about nine of them were walking.

Scholar: How do you account for it?

Olesk: I've tried three explanations. None of them hold.

Scholar: Please.

Olesk: First one was training. Somebody's taught them something we haven't got. I liked that one for about a day because it's comfortable, and Houses have been keeping things from each other for four hundred years, so it's not even unlikely.

(He turned the cup again.)

Olesk: It doesn't survive contact with what actually happened. A technique does something. You can see the doing, there's a shape to it and a cost and a moment where the practitioner commits. I saw no doing at all.

Scholar: The second?

Olesk: That they'd reached a tier the rest of us haven't. Presence, maybe higher, and it works so differently up there that it looks like nothing from underneath.

(He was shaking his head before I could answer.)

Olesk: I've stood near Presence twice in my life. You can't mistake it. The air is different, animals leave, your own working goes strange in your hands. Half of Greytower would have felt it from the market. Nobody felt anything.

Scholar: And the third?

Olesk: That they weren't drawing at all. That they're a very good mundane with a sword and everything else is us inventing a story.

Scholar: Do you believe that?

Olesk: No. A mundane can't do what they did to my roots. And there's the other thing, which is the part I actually wanted to say to somebody.

Scholar: Go on.

(He took a while over this, and when he started he didn't look at me.)

Olesk: I'm a tender. I've spent forty years learning to feel what's alive around me. I don't switch it on and off. I'm sat here now and I can feel the moss on the sill, the man behind the bar, the horses in the yard, and about a thousand other things I'm not attending to. I've never once in my life been anywhere that didn't have that.

Scholar: And in the arena?

Olesk: It came within four feet of me at the end, to check I could stand.

(His hands had gone still.)

Olesk: There was a place where it was, and the place was empty. I've felt quiet things and hidden things, and this was neither. There was a person-shaped absence of anything at all standing over me asking if I was all right, and it was polite, and I've never been so frightened in my life.

Scholar: Frightened of them?

Olesk: Of it.

(He caught himself.)

Olesk: Of them. I don't know. I've said that wrong every time I've said it. They were perfectly decent to me. Helped me up, waited until I had my feet, didn't say anything, walked off. There was nothing threatening in a single thing they did, and I went back to my room and sat on the floor for two hours.

Scholar: What do you think you were reacting to?

Olesk: Everything alive is joined to something. It's the plainest fact I know. The whole world is one enormous conversation, and even the things that hate each other are in it.

(He finally drank some of the tea, which had gone cold.)

Olesk: They weren't in it. Something walked into that arena that isn't in the conversation. It beat all six of us, and then it bowed and left without taking the money.

Scholar: Have you told anyone else this?

Olesk: Two people. One of them thought I was being poetic.

(He put the cup down.)

Olesk: I wasn't being poetic. I've been trying very hard for five days to keep poetry out of it. That's why I'll talk to you and not to the people from my own House, because they'll want it to mean something about growth, and I don't think it means anything about growth at all.

Scholar: One more. There's a theory going round Greytower that Cross is Ironvale.

(He looked genuinely surprised, and then he laughed.)

Olesk: Somebody said that to me on the second day, and I've been so far inside my own head I forgot about it entirely.

Scholar: You don't think so.

Olesk: I think people are frightened, and Ironvale is the obvious guess.

(He waved a hand vaguely north.)

Olesk: Ironvale is fire in the chest. I've been to the Chiming Snow, I've watched them train, and they're the loudest House in the dominion when they work. You feel an Ironvale practitioner drawing from two streets away, and they'd tell you that's the point. Whatever came into that arena was the opposite of that. If any House had it I'd expect it to be Sablemire, and I've asked, and it isn't.

Scholar: Then where do you land?

Olesk: Nowhere. It's taken me five days to say that.

(He looked away toward the window.)

Olesk: I lost a bout to something I can't describe. Being outmatched I'd understand, I've been outmatched plenty.

Scholar's note. Olesk is the only one of the five defeated practitioners who volunteered to speak on the record, and the only one who asked me, at the end, to write to him if I found anything. I have his address in the western stands. I haven't yet had anything worth sending.

He's also, so far, the only witness who has described the absence as a property of the world rather than a property of Cross. I don't know whether that's Vaulin doctrine talking, or whether he's simply the only one paying the right kind of attention.