What-The-Stone-Could-Not-Weigh
The seasons turned, and Teo climbed where no one could watch him climb.
He learned the rules of his secret ledger the way another boy might learn the forms of the sword — patiently, by trial, alone. A kindness done for show gained nothing; the light stayed dark when he helped the reeve's son hoping to be seen. A kindness that cost him gained much. The day he gave the widow his winter coat and walked home shivering, the thread had blazed and the number leapt fourteen points at once. *Resonance is the measure of what the gift costs the giver.* Cheap kindness, cheap growth. The dearer it cost, the higher he rose.
By midsummer he had passed into Tier II, and the warmth in his chest had become a steady, low strength he could feel in everything — not the strength to lift a blade, but something stranger and harder to name. A calm that did not break. A clarity in the noise. The old widow said the fever-chill left a room when he entered it, and a sick lamb mended in his arms one night when by rights it should have died, and Teo began, very carefully, to wonder what the higher Tiers of a thing like this might be.
He kept it hidden. He was not a fool. In Harrowford, a low-Tier who claimed secret power was a low-Tier who got beaten for his arrogance, and besides, the moment kindness was done *for* the climbing it stopped counting — he had proven that to himself a dozen times. The ledger