The Steerswoman

To protect the hope of an answer: that was the goal, the duty and the pleasure.

“Why does anyone do anything?” Attise replied. “To make their lives better, or to prevent them from getting worse.”

she was doing what her spirit had designed itself to do. She was answering questions.

She had spent her life alone in her strangeness, and had met only one other person like herself. When she joined the Academy, she was like an exile who had returned home.

“What is the most basic statement of the problem?” Rowan asked, half to herself, musing.

“Facts, ideas fit together. It’s the fitting, the paths that connect them, that matters. The pieces can change, but the fitting lies beneath it all. The world is made of such fittings.”

The need of precision in knowledge, adaptability in action, clarity in thought, and always the need to know more, to complete one’s understanding—all these grew from the dangers of the changing sea, and from the endless sky.