Page 130 of The Gods Veiling
“Practical, yes, but you didn’t have to accommodate her. That makes the gesture thoughtful.”
Huh. I hadn’t considered that.
He rises and moves to the next chair, my choice, and makes an appreciative sound in the back of his throat. My silence stretches and when he realizes I have nothing to say, he carries on.
“Don’t worry too much about her catching up. She’ll get it. She always does. I’m afraid the strange sense of comfort she seeks when she studies is my fault. I study better standing.”
“How would your standing affect her comfort while learning?”
He laughs a little as his eyes lose focus and he grows still in the seat. “When we were growing up, she’d pace back and forth around me while talking. It was distracting. I tried to avoid her, but she always found me. So I started keeping snacks in my pocket for her. If she continued to talk, I’d pass her something to eat. But then she’d pace and eat.
“When she started doing that, I’d grab my book and lower myself to the ground wordlessly. She’d follow me. I did that wherever we were if I was doing something. After a while and many times of her complaining she wasn’t hungry and to stop giving her food, I exchanged the snacks for books. I always picked one I knew would hold her attention. It became habitual. She’d find me in the library, sit down on a chair or the ground with her legs crossed and I’d pass her a book.”
Fascinating.
That conditioning approach could be very beneficial for me. If I could get her comfortable enough to focus, make Kyzen stand in here and slow down time, I could have her caught up in no time.
“Can you define the time it took for this to become habitual for her? Were there other factors you tested? Did you use any sort of rewards system for her?”
He snorts and shakes his head with a small smirk on his face. “Thayla’s far too observant to be conditioned. She knew the entire time what I was doing. She just never called me out about it.”
“That simply can’t be true.”
“It is. It took me a really long time to realize she was trying to bond with me over my interest. She recognized I wasn’t going to verbally tell her to go away, but I didn’t want her interrupting me. She picked up on my…quirks as my mother calls them, immediately.
“So she altered the way she spent time with me by adjusting her approach to a method I responded to. I like to read in peace. She likes to talk. Once I realized that’s what she was doing the whole time, I tried to reciprocate by dedicating time to just having conversations with her. One thing led to another and now she’s my best friend.”
That leads me to believe she’s adaptable to both her environment and the people surrounding her if she’s seeking to relate to them.
“So you’re saying your relationship was built on her putting your interest above her own and she found comfort in doing so. Then you replicated what she did?”
“Yep. Now she likes to read, and I know how to talk to people. We both benefit greatly from our relationship.” He stands from the chair and looks back down at it. “This one. It’s plenty wide, but it also has more length than that one, so her knees won’t hang off the front. There’s also better lumbar support.”
Those are the exact variables I concluded as well.
I nod my agreement as I grab the other chair. “Thank you for your help, Lambrit. That’ll be all.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Shut the door behind you…please,” I instruct him as he makes his way through. He continues back to his area while I take this chair back to where I found it. He’s given me a lot to think about when it comes to Thayla.
I know everything that’s available to us to know about Binders. The most obvious fact about them is they’re going to have the same Designation as their Valtrue and a similar domain.
Despite believing we’d never get one, I prepared myself for the fact that if we ever did, she’d be nothing like me.
Due to my brothers and I having differing domains and Designations, the likelihood of us getting a Binder that was a Guider was one in five. Only five female Chosen come in each year, then you add them into the entire pool of people waiting to complete their Valtrues. The odds become even lower.
From the short time I’ve spent observing everything Thayla does and her Equalized Designations, it seems that she relates to each of us in some way. That’s something I never considered to be a possibility.
If she had been dominant in one of the Designations, I’d know how to approach her based on how I approach my brothers or how I want someone to approach me.
As I pointed out to her last night, the way her interest piques at things relates to me. She does enjoy discovery and knowledge, but she can be careless with her words and actions like Riven.
She has a humorous side but also calculating, observant as Lambrit called it, that relates to Kyzen and his method to most things. Her ability to strategically plan in the face of danger but also her reservations and mistrust are very much like Creed.
The woman is an anomaly. It annoys me to no end to admit, she’s out of my scope of knowledge.
“Amick, why in the realm are you carrying a chair?”
