On how the craft, and the line of the craft, is passed on in the world of the cycle. Menders, vaulters, masters of the wind and keepers always appear in the books "already knowing how", but the story of how they learned runs "across the plot": in reflections, in inset tales, in late drafts. This page gathers those fragments together.
Nareon in the original rarely uses the word school and prefers the turns the line of N., under N., those who came after N.; the Russian "school" was fixed by translators, and in fan collections it became the standard term.
Most of this material remains in the "service" zone of the canon, apparently because it was precisely in this zone that readers were most allowed to fill in their own.
What counts as a school
The word "school" in the cycle is rarely used in the everyday sense of "educational institution". Most often it means "a row of craftsmen that rests on one common master", usually living, or dead within the memory of his pupils, after which the school "unbinds" into two or three.
Schools of menders
Menders study the longest, from seven to twelve years. The first years pass in a "nameless rounds": the pupil walks with the master through other people's houses, doing nothing with the hands. The cycle describes this stage in the greatest detail in Norven over the Archive.
Schools of vaulters
Vaulters grew out of the library crafts, and their "schools" are closest to the "scribal chambers" of earlier times: a system of "tables", where different "vaults" live in different rooms (there is a "vault of testimonies", a "vault of attunements" and a "vault of marriages"), and the pupil is "led" through them in turn.
The line of the master of the wind
The master of the wind "does not teach several at once": it is precisely this rule that makes their system resemble a lineage: one master, one pupil, one line. Such chains are spoken of in earnest in Plitsa at the Seventh Span, and already with irony in Kahenor: The Winter Dolnik.
Keepers' houses
Keepers study "inside the house", and this is the only kind of school in which there is no "going out into the town" at all. The novels call "keepers' houses" those houses in which a row of generations of mistresses "passed the craft on under one and the same threshold".
The passing on of knowledge
Unlike the "ordinary" crafts, in the family of "house-bound" crafts the teaching is never wholly "verbal". The main form of transmission is presence alongside and the repetition of gestures without explanation.
The master spoke exactly as much as needed to be said about what had already happened, and never about what was only about to happen; and the pupil stood beside him, and held what he was told to hold, and handed what he was told to hand, and after a few years, without a single admonition, began to do it himself. And if it did not form in him of its own accord, no school could help, for here one could not be taught what the master himself preferred not to teach aloud.
Ruptures and lost schools
Some schools appear in the novels precisely as already ruptured: the master left during the Rift, the pupils "under-learned" and "grow old without pupils of their own". These "unborn lines" are especially numerous in The Archive without Wind, a late novel about the world "after the craft".