knew it was a mistake; he had never told anyone the name by which he thought of himself, and now he had blurted it out, a boast, a brag, a demand, to this most unsympathetic of listeners. This man who was most likely, of all men, to repeat Calvin's secret dream to others.
"Well, now it seems to be unanimous," said Taleswapper. "We're all pretending to be something that we're not."
"I am a Maker!" Calvin insisted, raising his voice, even though he knew he was making himself seem even weaker and more vulnerable. He just couldn't stop himself from talking to this slimy old man. "I've got all the knack for it that Alvin ever had, if anyone would bother to notice!"
"Made any millstones lately, without tools?" asked Taleswapper.
"I can make stones in a fence fit together like as if they growed that way out of the ground!"
"Healed any wounds?"
"I killed a bug crawling on my leg just a moment ago without so much as laying a hand on it."
"Interesting. I ask of healing and you answer with killing. Doesn't sound like a Maker to me."
"You said yourself that Alvin killed a man!"
"With his hands, not with his knack. A man who had just murdered an innocent woman who died to protect her son from captivity. The bug - was it going to harm you or anyone?"
"Yes, there you are, Alvin is always righteous and wonderful, while Calvin can't do nothing right! But Alvin hisself told me the story of how he caused a bunch of roaches to get theirselfs kilt when he was a boy and - "
"And you learned nothing from his story, except that you have the power to torment insects."
"He gets to do what he wants and then talks about how he's learned better now, but if I do the same things then I'm not worthy! I can't be taught any of his secrets because I'm not ready for them only I am ready for them, I'm just not ready to let Alvin decide how I'll use the knack I was born with. Who tells him what to do?"
"The inner light of virtue," said Taleswapper, "for lack of a clearer name."
"Well what about my inner light?"
"I imagine that your parents ask themselves this very question, and often."
"Why can't I be allowed to figure things out on my own like Alvin did?"
"But of course you are being allowed to do exactly that," said Taleswapper.
"No I'm not! He sits there trying to explain to those boneheaded no-knack followers of his how to get inside other things and learn what they are and how they're shaped inside and then ask them to take on new forms, as if that's a thing that folks can learn - "
"But they do learn it, don't they?"
"If you call an inch a year moving, then I guess you can call that learning," said Calvin. "But me, the one who actually understands everything he says, the one who could actually put it all to use, he won't even let me in the room. If I stay there he just tells stories and makes jokes and won't teach a thing until I leave, and why? I'm his best pupil, ain't I? I learn it all, I soak it in fast and I can use it on the instant, but he won't teach me! He calls them others 'apprentice Makers' but me he won't even take on for a single lesson, all because I don't bow down and worship whenever he starts talking about how a Maker can never use his power to destroy, but only to build, or he loses it, which is nonsense, since a man's knack is his knack and - "
"It seems to me," said Taleswapper, his voice sharp enough to cut through Calvin's raging, "that you are a singularly unteachable young man. You ask Alvin to teach you, and he tries to do it, but then you refuse to listen because you know what's nonsense and what matters, you know that a man doesn't have to make in order to be a Maker, you already know so much I'm surprised you still wait around here, wishing for Alvin to teach you things that you plainly have no desire to know."
"I want him to teach me how to get into the small of things!" cried Calvin. "I want him to teach me how to change people the way he changed Arthur Stuart so the Finders couldn't Find him anymore! I want him