The Rival

The academy mage arrived on the seventeenth day, young and Patna-trained, carrying expensive instruments and polite contempt in equal measure. He set up fifty feet from Meera's shaft and drilled fast and loud and impressively. His workers watched hers with the anxiety of people wondering if they'd backed the wrong team. By the fourth day he had gone deeper than Meera in less time. By the evening of the fourth day, his shaft was dry.

She found him sitting in the dust at its edge, looking at his instruments. She sat beside him. "You can't command water," she said, not unkindly. "It has no pride to overcome. It simply goes around force, the way it always has." He was quiet a long time. The desert wind moved through the city. A child cried somewhere, and then laughed, and the world kept going. "Would you teach me?" he asked. Meera thought about what her grandmother would have said. Then she said: "Come to my shaft tomorrow. Leave the robes up top."