Ansel
Who he is
Apprentice to Dareth, a cellarer whose gallery lies in Hushvault, on the ridge above Veylan Steps on Tiravel. He sleeps on a cot above the cellar, calls Dareth “Master,” and has walked the racks with him for as long as he can remember: Dareth taps the casks while Ansel chalks the marks.
The faces
At the edge of sleep, Ansel sees faces looking down at him. They are always blurred and their voices muffled, but he is certain he knows them. When he reaches for them, the effort brings headaches, blinding light at the edges of his vision, nosebleeds, and sometimes unconsciousness. Dareth has begged him to stop. He keeps promising he will, knowing he won’t.
A good eye
People say Ansel has a good eye, the way they say Dareth has a good nose, and he has always let them. It is easier than explaining that some things simply show themselves to him, whether he wants them to or not.
Habits
- Chronically late. Ferra keeps count: eleven this harvest by her reckoning, ten by his, because “the time with the lift” shouldn’t count.
- Lies often to Ferra and Dareth, especially about the reaching, and badly: neither of them ever believes him. When no lie will pass, he says nothing.
- Thinks in cellar terms: leaning on his mind like a stuck cask lid.
People in his life
- Dareth: his master and the closest thing he has to a parent. They get along in nearly everything except the reaching.
- Ferra: his closest friend.
- Maudry: the crew boss on the reserve rows, who never misses a chance to tease him.
- Tolliver: an offworld cellar agent who visits every harvest.
- Ruthe: the old keeper at Auvren Groves, who calls him “Dareth’s boy.”
As the story unfolds
These details come from the story itself. Choose the last chapter you’ve read, and only what has been revealed up to that point will appear.
The voice
On the night before the inspection, for the first time, Ansel hears laughter from the faces, and then his own name, perfectly clear, in a voice he almost knows.
What his eye can do
Ansel’s “good eye” is more than a knack. On the market road he sees through a Quickener working an estate’s old vines in a picker’s smock: she looks to him like a glass held up to a lamp, with a second shape beneath the first. At Auvren Groves he sees the life folded inside the dormant cutting, “like a breath being held.” Neither costs him any effort. It works on everything except the faces.
Looking, not reaching
That night, instead of reaching for the faces, he simply looks. There is no pain. The faces don’t sharpen, but he can see the blur itself: not fog, not distance, not a fault in him, but something laid over them like cloth, tucked in at the edges. Someone wrapped them, so that whatever was underneath would keep. For an instant, he feels that the faces aren’t the only thing looking, and that whatever it is, it is looking at him.
Keeping things back
Ansel starts keeping secrets. He tells Dareth nothing happened at the market, and he puts Ferra off about the voice: “Tomorrow. After.”
The man he couldn’t read
In the court, out of habit, Ansel looks at one of Hessary’s buyers and finds the man isn’t ordinary: “he wasn’t anything.” He blames the wine and tells no one.
It came on its own
That night, without reaching, he sees Carys’s chalk mark on a cask head, wine going into cups, Wendel’s laugh cut short, others in the room with no faces, and a gloved hand closing over Carys’s on a latch. He wakes with blood on his pillow, not knowing whether it has happened or is still to come.
Through the door
At Morwal’s door he looks instead of reaching, and the door “simply stopped being in the way.” Carys is on the floor inside.
Everything but why
Dareth tells him to tell no one what he saw. To the magistrate he explains only the frozen cups at Morwal’s stall, every word of it true. “It had come easier than no and nothing ever had, and he didn’t like that at all.”
Was it me?
Two apprentices opened twenty-one-year casks this harvest, Carys and Ansel, and he comes to believe the four came for one of them. In the berth he asks Dareth, “Was it me?” Dareth answers only, “Get on the ship.”