Morning in Stonebridge came in with the smell of river mist and warm bread, and Kaelen Verenth woke to find his mother already elbow-deep in flour.
"Up, my sleepy millstone," Maelin called from the kitchen, voice bright enough to pass for a sun charm. "Your father's name day waits for no one, and these eggs will not separate themselves unless you intend to plead with them."
Kaelen rolled out of bed with the kind of heroic groan usually reserved for battlefields. The house was narrow and tall, three rooms stacked like books on a shelf, with a stair that made soft complaining sounds beneath his feet. He dragged on trousers and a tunic that had more patches than original cloth, ran a hand through hair that never made up its mind whether to be brown or black, and pretended not to notice the smear of flour on his cheek in the tiny tin mirror by the door.
He stepped into the kitchen and stopped, because every surface was occupied by something that looked either delicious or catastrophic. Two bowls, one the size of a helmet and one like a basin, both filled with mysterious white drifts. A block of butter that glistened like treasure. Honey cooling in a clay pot. A line of pears, green as new leaves, and an orange-brown mound of cinnamon. On the hearth, the oven door sat open, swallowing heat, while the old iron kettle hissed faintly as if disapproving of everything.
"You came," Maelin said, relief and delight in a single breath. She had tied her dark hair back with a ribbon and dusted her nose with flour entirely by accident. "Good. Fetch the spices, then help me rescue the first attempt. She collapsed on me."
Kaelen circled the table like a scout in enemy territory. "What are we rescuing, precisely?"
"Your pride, my pride, and a cake," Maelin said. "In that order. I tried to hurry her along when your Aunt Ceris knocked, and the crumb sunk like a barge with a hole in it. We will make the second one behave."
Kaelen peered into the pan on the cooling rack, where a cake drooped in the middle like a tired mattress. He poked it, and his finger left a crater. The crater did not rise again.
"I do love a cake with a valley," he said. "You can herd pastry goatherds in there."
"Do not taunt the fallen," Maelin said, but she fought a smile. "Pears, boy. Peel five. No knife songs or elaborate speeches. Peel and slice, as even as you can manage."
"Yes, chef." He reached for a knife and a pear and tried to look competent. "This is for Father's name day, you said? You are certain we should not produce something more practical, like a roast boar or a helmet made of sugar?"
"He has a helmet and will not eat a boar for breakfast," Maelin said. "Also, your father loves pear cake. When you were a baby, you could be coaxed into stillness only by the smell of honey and spice. You would sit in your basket and blink, like a little owl."
"I deny it," Kaelen said with dignity. "I have never blinked like an owl in my life. They blink far more gracefully."
He set to work, the pear cool and tacky under his hands, the blade whispering through its skin. The kitchen window gave a view of the lane, where the cobbles were uneven and friendly, and banners hung crookedly from shopfronts. Stonebridge was shaped by the river Lark and the bridge that named it, a stout arc of stone older than living memory. The House of Verenth leaned into the lane like a gossip, and this morning the whole street was awake. Across the way, Mrs. Kettle had already spilled an argument onto her stoop, gesturing with a broom at a cat that stood on her fence post shaped like a pig and narrowed golden eyes at her with clear contempt. Someone struck a lute in a courtyard and got three notes in before forgetting the fourth. Farther off, the bell for the Daywatch shift change tolled, and Kaelen could almost see his father in his mind's eye, checking his buckles and scowling at the scuffs on his boots.
"Careful," Maelin said, and Kaelen realized he had zoned out and was perilously close to peeling his thumb. He adjusted, resumed his slicing, and tried for even. The pear flesh parted neat and wet and stubbornly sticky. He stole a piece and tossed it into his mouth.
"Hey," Maelin said without looking up. "I counted that."
"I maintain that you counted wrong," Kaelen replied around the mouthful. "Also, the quality of these pears must be tested. I am making a sacrifice for the greater good."
"Then sacrifice yourself to the flour bin," Maelin said. "There is a dry bowl and a wet bowl. Flour, baking powder, the spice mix we made last night, and a pinch of salt in the dry. Butter, honey, milk, and eggs in the wet. It is not a conjurer's rite. Measure properly."
Kaelen stood straighter and squared his shoulders at the flour bin as if it were a training dummy. The bin, a stout barrel with a lid on crooked hinges, had endured the Verenths for years and had the scars to prove it. He lifted the lid, and a soft plume rose, fragrant and pale. He inhaled and coughed and tried not to look as though the flour had leapt into his lungs and declared ownership.
He measured a cup, then another, then a careful third, checking Maelin's recipe board. Maelin had written on wood with charcoal, neat script and numbers. When he reached for the spice jar, the smell of cinnamon and clove made his nose itch. He sneezed into the crook of his elbow like a civilized person, then added the scoops with solemnity as if dropping coins into a shrine bowl.
"Salt," Maelin reminded.
"In the dry," Kaelen said, with the tone of one who had been warned seventeen times and finally engraved it upon his soul.
"Good," Maelin said, and looked up at him, and her eyes softened. "Thank you."
He shrugged, awkward and pleased, went to the hearth, and tried to look as though he belonged there too. The oven coals glowed, and the heat brushed his cheeks. A cooking charm etched in faint lines of silver along the oven mouth gleamed softly, a common household rune for even baking. Everyone in Stonebridge knew at least a few house glyphs, small and simple aids learned young. His mother could coax a flame higher with a knuckle tap and a murmured word; his father could dash a spark to life in damp wood with the old guards' trick; even the weird boy down the lane could levitate an onion with irritating skill.
Kaelen could not. He had tried. He had mouthed lines, convinced his hands to paint symbols in the air, memorized rhymes, said them backwards to see if that helped, copied the swing of wrists of every friend who would slow down enough to let him watch. Sometimes, on a summer night, he imagined he felt a hum in his bones when the sky filled with witch-fire and festival lights. He would lift his hands as if warming them at a campfire. Nothing happened. It was like leaning into a song that refused to include him.
He had learned flint. He had learned patience. The oven respected neither.
Kaelen set a thin stick into the coals, waited for it to catch. Smoke curled up around his fingers. He twisted the stick, guided the flame to a thicker log, coaxed heat where it would do the most good. The heat licked at his skin, friendly enough if one respected it. Maelin watched and did not comment on what she did not need to.
"Did you hear the Nightwatch bell at third dawn?" she asked, returning to the batter. "Two long rings and three short. That means a brawl."
Kaelen glanced back, surprised. "At third dawn? Who fights that early? You would have to get up before the fight just to be angry."
"Inns empty at strange hours," Maelin said. "And sometimes people bring their anger with them to the street. Your father said they had to pull two lads apart outside the north gate because one spilled ale on the other's boots. As if boots were not made to be offended."
"Father's boots are always offended," Kaelen said. "He polishes them until they could blind a bird at a hundred steps."
"He thinks it looks proper," Maelin said, fond and exasperated. "And he is proper. I will not hear otherwise. He once wrote a letter to the council about the angle of the benches in the watchhouse, because no one should have to sit sideways to eat soup."
Kaelen snorted a laugh, and some of his hesitation evaporated. "I will not mock him. He will make me sit on one of those benches as punishment, and eat soup sideways."
"You will do as he says because you should," Maelin said, but her smile made it kind. "The Kingdom of Avarinth does not run on soup, but on people who care about benches."
"Kingdom of Avarinth," Kaelen repeated. He liked the sound of it, the way words built a map in his mouth. Avarinth, of the green banners and silver hawk, of the high citadel in Lathmere where Queen Alisora held court beneath a ceiling painted with stars. He had seen the citadel only once, on a trip for his father's guard oath renewal. It had been too big to be comfortable, but he had loved the press of bodies and the smell of horses and oil and the great announcement horn that could be heard for miles. He had loved watching his father straighten and step with the other guards and answer to his name. "Daran Verenth," the captain had called, and his father had replied, "Present," in a voice that carried in the chest.
Maelin tapped the side of the bowl with a spoon and glanced at him again. "Have you grown another inch?"
"No," Kaelen said. "Sixths of an inch. No more."
"You tower over me already," Maelin said. "Cease immediately. I cannot afford to feed a giant."
"I am a very small giant," Kaelen said.
"You are a very large boy," Maelin replied. "Fetch the honey. We are at the moment of truth."
He brought the clay jar close, undid its wax seal, and breathed. The honey was deep, more amber than gold, gathered from bees that lived in sage and thistle along the river. It smelled like summer had decided to keep a secret.
Maelin tipped the jar with a care that made Kaelen hold his breath, let honey pour in a ribbon that lay itself down in generous loops. The sight made a sound in the kitchen that was not sound, more a contented hum that sent an old contentment wandering up Kaelen's spine, a ghost of childhood afternoons and sticky fingers and Maelin humming notes she did not know she knew.
"Here," she said. "Stir. Gentle. We will make this batter think it has been alive all along."
Kaelen took the spoon with reverence and stirred. The batter pulled against the spoon and then yielded, as if it had learned manners. The bowl's weight grounded his hands and made his arms ache in a good way. He stirred in the pears and thought about the way his father laughed with his mouth closed when he was truly delighted and about the way he set his jaw when a problem needed to be hauled like a fishing net. He imagined the moment tonight, when Daran Verenth would step through the door, set his helm on the peg, see the cake, and fight not to grin as if he were still a boy himself. It was possible that Kaelen wanted that moment more than he wanted anything else.
He wanted to hand his father something he had made that did not need to be fixed. He wanted to hand him a cake that did not sink in the middle.
"Pour half," Maelin said. "Lay the pear slices in a pretty ring. Then pour the rest."
He did, and the batter made its own small geography around the fruit, like a map of rivers and islands that promised to come together later. When he was finished, Maelin slid the pan into the oven with a confident thrust, the heat a quick slap against wrist and cheek. She closed the door, made the small knuckle tap on the charm, and murmured the line under her breath. The charm flickered, then found its steady glow.
"Now we do not touch it," she said. "We do not open the door to peer at it. We do not shout at it to encourage rise. We let it be."
Kaelen nodded and wiped his hands on a cloth that had once been white. "We make another one," he said, because the kitchen counter was still a battleground and they knew his father's shift would end at midday. The cake would be cool by then if they timed it correctly. If the first sank like a house with a secret basement, they could pretend that was intentional for custard.
Maelin blew a strand of hair from her face. "We do."
They set to work. Kaelen measured, and when his hand hesitated over a freehand scoop, Maelin nudged it toward a spoon. He cracked eggs, and if one shell shard tried to swim, he fished it out with patience and a curse whispered into his teeth because the kitchen spirits did not need to hear that word in full. He wove between counter and hearth, the oven's heat rising around him like the sigh of a very tired dragon. Maelin took the lead on the cake that involved frosting and complicated timing, the kind of frosting that needed to be beaten to soft peaks and then beaten again, and if you did it wrong it looked like you had tried to make butter and defeated it too much.
When the second cake was in the oven, Maelin straightened with a creak in her spine that made Kaelen frown. She caught his look and waved him off.
"I am not old," she said.
"I did not say you were," he said.
"You thought it," she said, then softened. "It has been a week. Your father worked two double shifts already, and the night market is noisy. I dreamt of turnips arguing with me last night. I told them to take it up with the stew pot."
"You won," Kaelen said. "No one wins an argument with a stew pot."
"Put the kettle on," Maelin said. "Tea cures the stubbornness of both vegetables and men." She paused. "And boys. Sometimes."
Kaelen stoked the coals and set the kettle to boil with mechanical confidence, because he knew that particular dance well. He set out two clay mugs that had survived his childhood through a combination of miracle and the fact that Maelin had hidden the third one so he could not drop it. He put the tea leaves in one, mint and nettle in company that smelled like a kitchen garden in the rain, and honey in the other. The kettle sang lightly, a high note that lifted his attention without alarming it.
The door banged open.
Kaelen jumped. The kettle sloshed and hissed on the hot stone. He grabbed a cloth and moved it aside.
A small whirlwind of a person entered the kitchen without asking permission because she never had and never would. Tamsin Ellowe, hair like a haystack that had admitted defeat, eyes bright with the kind of interest that had nearly gotten her set on fire more than once, skirt hitched up at one side for running. She held out both hands like she had acquired something alive and dangerous.
"I brought you a present," she said.
"It had better not be a ferret again," Maelin said without looking up. "I am not harboring a fugitive ferret twice in one spring."
"It is eggs," Tamsin said, lowering her hands enough that Kaelen could see the basket, a ridiculous thing woven from reeds that had aspirations to grandeur. The eggs inside were small and speckled. "From my aunt's goose. She laid, listen to this, two dozen in a single night. Two dozen. My aunt swears on her grandmother's grave that someone hexed the goose because no animal should lay two dozen anything without exploding."
"Tell your aunt that the goose is not hexed," Maelin said. "Spring does this to geese. Spring does ridiculous things to all creatures. Kaelen, tea."
Kaelen handed a mug to Tamsin, who drank as if she had not seen liquid in days and then sighed as if the world had been made correctly. She plunked her elbows on the table, peered into the frosting bowl, and then glanced up at Kaelen with delight.
"Did you do this?" she said. "You did, did you not? Look at you, conqueror of sugar. I knew there was hope for you after all."
Kaelen raised his chin. "You doubted me."
"Not you," Tamsin said, and reached into the frosting and swiped a finger through it and put it in her mouth despite Maelin's gently murderous stare. "I doubted sugar."
"Do not touch the frosting," Maelin said mildly. "You will lose the finger. Tamsin, put those eggs by the hearth. They will be safer there. If we are using them, we must charm them for freshness."
"Right," Tamsin said, and set the basket down with the kind of caution she rarely used on anything. She clapped her hands, spoke a neat, precise charm, and the eggs hummed softly with a green-tinged light. Magic had always sounded to Kaelen like song he did not know the words to, sung behind a door. Tamsin made the lock click as if it had always liked her best.
"Show-off," he said, without heat.
"Always," Tamsin said, and then softened. "It will come to you."
"It will not," Kaelen said. He spoke lightly, as if it were a joke he did not mind. "It has tried to come to me. It took one look at me, decided I was unpromising, and went in search of your aunt's goose."
Tamsin angled her head and had the grace not to argue. She leaned toward the oven instead. "Smells like a good day."
"It is your father's name day," Maelin said. "We are trying to make it happen."
"Watch will be busy, then," Tamsin said. "Name days bring out strange behavior. People think the gods look the other way for a few hours. Either that or they think the gods are looking at them alone. Either way, someone gets thrown into the Lark for a laugh."
"I will throw your father into the Lark for a laugh if he tracks muck into my kitchen at midday," Maelin said. "Kaelen, check the time."
Kaelen checked the sandglass on the shelf. "We have twenty minutes before he comes home. He takes his shift change seriously."
"He will stop to talk to Hobb at the corner," Maelin said. "Subtract three minutes. Unless Hobb's tooth is giving him bother, then add five and subtract two for the way he pretends to be fine."
"He never pretends," Kaelen said. "He declares that he is a pillar of strength and then whimpers when he thinks no one hears."
"True," Maelin said, amused. "Set out the plates. Tamsin, you can stay and eat if you wish. If you do, you will carry a slice to your aunt along with my recipe for goose peace. It involves leaving the animal alone and giving it a bowl of water to glare at."
Tamsin grinned. "She has been glaring at a bowl of water since last winter."
"And yet," Maelin said, spreading frosting with the certainty of a general drawing lines on a map. "The bowl provides structure to the glare. There. Kaelen, as soon as the cake cools enough, the frosting goes on."
Kaelen nodded, his stomach fluttering because this mattered. It mattered in a way sword drills and market errands did not, in a way that was not small. He set plates on the table, mismatched and full of chips that had stories. He took the old blue knife from its peg, the one with the worn wooden handle his father liked to use because he claimed it cut more honestly than newer ones. He arranged pears on a plate like a garland not because anyone would notice but because he would.
The warm cake came out. The room smelled like honey had learned to be bread.
"Where is the sugar bowl?" Tamsin said.
"There," Maelin said. "No."
Tamsin froze, hand hovering. "I was not doing anything."
"You were about to do everything," Maelin said. "Kaelen, you do it."
Kaelen took the bowl of frosting. His hands were steady and careful. He set the first dollop atop the cake's center, waited a breath for the heat to soften it, and began to spread from the middle outward. The frosting obeyed. It did not tear the top of the cake. It did not decide to slide into a molten river off the edge. It listened. He circled the cake until it wore its coat properly and then smoothed the top like the surface of a pond when wind had just died.
"And now," Maelin said, ceremony in her tone, "we place the pears."
Kaelen placed them in a spiral, each slice like a petal, and did not hurry. He thought of his father's hand on his shoulder the time he had fallen out of the pear tree and cracked a branch, and his father had said nothing, only checked all his bones, then laughed with pure relief and told him to apologize to the tree. He thought of Daran Verenth telling him stories about the Old Road and the time a goose with an temper had bitten a sergeant who deserved it and how the entire watch had laughed behind their hands. He thought of the way his father took care of small things. Benches. Boots. People.
Footsteps in the lane. The particular cadence of a guard who had carried a spear since before Kaelen could walk. His heart climbed into his throat like a hopeful thief.
The door opened, and Daran Verenth stepped into his home as if returning from a small war. He shut the door with his hip because his hands were full of trouble. In one arm he held a stack of folded, slightly damp watch cloaks that needed mending, and in the other he held a gift, wrapped badly in brown paper and tied with string.
He stopped, took in the room, blinked, and smiled that closed-mouth smile that did not stop his eyes from crinkling at the corners. The armor of the morning fell off him as if removed by a spell more powerful than any Kaelen would ever cast.
"Smells like victory," he said. "And pears."
"Happy name day," Maelin said, and crossed the room like a storm she had decided to enjoy. She kissed his cheek, smacked the cloaks out of his hand, and seized the gift to put on the shelf because that was what mothers did to gifts when they threatened to distract their people from cake.
"Happy name day, Father," Kaelen said.
Tamsin raised her mug. "Happy name day, Guard Verenth, Sir."
"Miss Ellowe," Daran said, acknowledging Tamsin with solemnity. He set his helm on the peg, then immediately took it down and placed it more carefully because he trusted pegs only to a point. "I can smell the river on you."
"You can smell the whole river from here," Tamsin retorted. "I am made of mint and honey and disapproval of geese."
"That last is a scent," Daran said. He turned to Kaelen and studied the cake as though it were a suspect in custody. "That is a proper frost. That is a set of pears that knows what it is doing."
"Kaelen did it," Maelin said, a gentle triumph in the way she said his name.
Daran's eyes flicked from the cake to Kaelen's hands, where a smear of frosting proved the truth. Pride did a quiet thing in Daran's chest, and Kaelen saw it, because he had learned to read his father's face.
"Good work, lad," Daran said. "I have seen wedding feasts with less dignity."
"Do not make him swell," Maelin said, though she, too, failed to hide the swell inside herself. "Sit, you oaf. Before your soup goes sideways."
"Soup is my enemy," Daran said gravely. "It waited for me on a crooked bench for five years. I have the scars still."
He washed his hands at the basin, found the towel by instinct, dried, and sat. The table dipped slightly toward him because the table had learned to love him. Kaelen cut the cake with the blue knife, and the slice fell away as if happy to do so. Steam rose, fragrant and kind. He plated pieces and put one in front of Daran with ceremony. Maelin set the first forkful rules in motion with a look that said there would be no speeches until this had been tasted. Tamsin hovered like a hopeful bird.
Daran took the bite. His eyes closed. He chewed. The room waited.
Then Daran made a noise that was almost impolite. He set his fork down, to the table's credit, and looked at Kaelen with all the weight of a father's best kind of approval.
"You have made a criminally good cake," he said. "I am willing to perjure myself if anyone asks where you acquired it."
Kaelen's mouth remembered how to smile. He allowed the smile to take up the whole of his face and felt no need to apologize for it.
Tamsin shoved her plate forward. "I will perjure myself right now if it speeds the process."
Maelin laughed, bright and warm, and served Tamsin a slice proportionate to the girl's audacity. Plates found hands, and forks found cake, and for a time there was only the sound of people who lived in the same house remembering how to be happy in it.
When conversation returned, it came back like a friend who knew the way. Daran ate with justice, praised the cake with elaborate legal metaphors until Tamsin told him he was under arrest for excessive punnery, accepted his sentence, and demanded a second slice as part of his punishment. He asked Maelin about the morning and was told of the goose that had not exploded but caused excitement. He asked Kaelen about errands, and Kaelen pretended he had not considered fleeing to the forest to befriend trees. Daran told a story about night watch, the brawl at third dawn, and the artisan who had tried to hex another man's boots by making them honk with every step, only to accidentally hex his own. He had been pursued by honking until he begged forgiveness, broke the charm, and paid every tenant of the lane a silver piece for their pain. Kaelen laughed until the laugh had to close its eyes.
"Name day gifts," Maelin said, and retrieved the wrapped present she had confiscated. She set it before Daran and took delight in the way he tried to open it carefully and ended up with paper in confetti anyway. Inside was a new belt, the leather braided, the buckle engraved with the crest of the Stonebridge Watch, a hawk with a fish in its talons. Daran ran his thumb over the crest and the stitching and then over the crossed threads on the inside that Maelin had left on purpose because she liked to see the proof of what she had made.
"Perfect," he said. "This will hold a belly in check and a city's honor with it."
"You have no belly," Maelin said, which was mostly true. "You have stubbornness."
"That is heavier," Daran said. He leaned to kiss her, then turned to Kaelen with a look that shifted from humor to something more intent. "I have a gift for you, too. For helping your mother create that which will be sung about in taverns."
He reached under the bench and pulled out a wrapped bundle of his own. Kaelen blinked.
"It is your name day," he protested.
"It is," Daran said. "It is also the day you made the kind of cake I cannot legally buy. Humor an old watchman."
Kaelen took the bundle. He unfolded paper to find a pair of gloves, not fancy, not soldier's gauntlets, but soft leather work gloves that fit when he tried them on as if Daran had secretly measured him in his sleep.
"For the cart," Daran said. "For the market. For when you help me mend the fence and the world. They are not magic, but they are useful. And perhaps that is magic you will need."
Kaelen swallowed, and something in his chest made room for air again. He flexed his fingers and felt the gloves' newness and the way they already belonged. He tried to say thank you, and the words came out as something more like a vow.
"I will use them well," he said.
"I know," Daran said, and the quiet pride in his voice was the best sound in the room.
They ate until the cake had a dent where joy lived. Afterwards, Daran set his plate aside with a deep sigh that might have worried a physician and leaned back to rest his hand on his stomach.
"If there is a villain in Stonebridge today," he said, eyes closed, "I will fail to catch him for at least an hour. I am too heavy to run."
"Villains do not run on name days anyway," Maelin said. "They write threatening notes, then go home to nap." She began gathering plates, and Tamsin jumped up to help, then almost dropped everything, then gathered again with more humility.
"I will take a slice to my aunt," Tamsin said, lifting a plate already wrapped and charmed by Maelin without anyone seeing her do it. "She will bless your name with the intensity of a goose." She paused in the doorway, then looked at Kaelen, a question on her face, a question he had seen there ten times this spring alone. "Training yard later?"
"Later," Kaelen said. He loved the training yard, loved the shape of the wooden swords in his hands, loved the rhythm that made sense to bodies when words and magic did not. He also loved not getting knocked down by older boys who could shout small fires into being just to distract him. "I need to take old Mr. Undern's cart back to him."
"I will help you," Daran said automatically. "After name day nap."
"You will not," Maelin said. "You will lie on this bench and will not move unless the house is on fire, in which case we will move the house." She kissed his forehead. "Sleep. We will handle the world."
Tamsin departed with a wave that was one part salute and three parts promise to return. Maelin washed dishes. Kaelen stacked them and tried to get the hard butter to yield to his will so it would not seize when they needed it later for the evening stew. Daran Verenth breathed the deep comfortable breaths of a man who had seen the inside of a hundred dawns and found this one better than most.
Stonebridge went on around them, confident, bustling. Children dashed across the lane, chasing a rag ball that refused to behave even for the boy who could whisper to wood. A pair of scholars argued outside the apothecary about whether mint was truly distinct from peppermint or whether the distinction existed only in the minds of mint sellers. A fishwife sang as she scaled her catch, and the cat on Mrs. Kettle's pig fence judged everyone.
After dishes, Kaelen swept the flour from the floor with the dedicated flour broom that lived by the oven. The broom bristles had a stubborn bend from years of tackling spills. He finished, set the broom aside, and washed his hands in the basin with mint soap that made his fingers smell like an apology to a garden.
"Go," Maelin said, seeing the way he was half turned toward the door. "Take the cart back. Tell Mr. Undern that if he keeps lending it to us we will eventually build him a statue. Out of used barrels."
Kaelen pulled on the new gloves because he could and because they felt like something decided. He kissed his mother's cheek because he always did. He paused by the bench to look at his father a moment, to memorize the soft open mouth of his nap and the way his hair never cooperated with a helmet. He moved a cloak so it would not slide to the floor. He did not put it in a better place because his father liked to wake and find things where he remembered them.
He stepped into the lane. Air bright and loud met him like a friend.
Mr. Undern's cart was small enough to be pulled by a patient boy and large enough to carry a keg if one did not mind the keg muttering about dignity. The old cooper's shop sat three doors down, and the man himself was half inside a barrel with a hammer in his mouth when Kaelen arrived. Kaelen waited. Mr. Undern withdrew, sighed, pulled the hammer from his mouth, and squinted at Kaelen as if arriving at the idea of his face through a fog.
"Ah," Mr. Undern said. "You, child. The one who returned my cart in better shape than your father would."
"My father returns everything in better shape than he found it," Kaelen said automatically. "He once fixed the door at the watchhouse by glaring at it."
"Do not tell him he is terrifying," Mr. Undern said. "He thinks he is respectable. Did the cart behave?"
"It did," Kaelen said. "It rolled. It held things. It did not question its role in the world."
"Better than my apprentice," Mr. Undern said, looking toward the back where a boy named Thom stood with sawdust in his hair and guilt in his posture. "Put it there. No, not there, put it where I pointed. Not there either. Oh, give it here. I will put it where I wanted it to go."
Kaelen left the cart, accepted Mr. Undern's thanks, and turned to find Tamsin leaning against the wall, face composed in an expression that meant she had done something she was about to turn into a story.
"I thought you went to your aunt," Kaelen said.
"I did," Tamsin said. "She wept. Then the goose glared at me until I left. Now I am here to rescue you from a life of barrel delivery."
"I am not in danger from barrels," Kaelen said. "They only attack when provoked."
"Come on," Tamsin said. "We will do one errand for my mother and one for yours, and then you cannot avoid the training yard any longer."
He could, but he would not. They moved through the market, which even at this hour was a competition for which smell could be the loudest. Spice women shouted competing descriptions of cinnamon's virtue. Butchers extolled the patience of their lambs. The baker whose daughter had broken Kaelen's heart the previous winter, without knowing she had done so, sent them off with heel ends and the particular smile adults gave children when they were feeling gentle.
Tamsin's mother wanted thread. This required stopping at a stall run by a woman who could tell if your copper had been held in a pocket with an onion. She squinted at their money, sniffed, decided they were not onion people, and measured thread from a spool the size of a carriage wheel. Maelin's errand was to collect back the cooling pan the cobbler had borrowed because his oven had died of age. The cobbler, a man who lived in permanent intimacy with leather, greeted Kaelen by name, called him son-of-Daran as if it were a title, and told a joke about shoes that would have been funnier if it had not been older than the bridge.
At the corner near the watchhouse, Kaelen slowed. Daran stood with three other guards, helm under one arm now, speaking to Hobb the tooth man, who gestured extravagantly at his mouth and then laughed at something Daran said. Daran listened, the kind of listening that allowed the other person to be the most important object in the room. Kaelen knew the way this happened. He had watched it all his life. People began to stand straighter when his father faced them. They told the truth more often. Or the lie they told was kinder.
Daran looked up as if he had felt his son in the air. He smiled. He raised two fingers in a small salute, the guard's way of sending someone onward. Kaelen raised two fingers back and felt, as he always did, both settled and restless, as if one part of him belonged only where Daran was and another part felt pulled by something that did not yet have a shape to point at.
He turned away. Tamsin bumped his shoulder. He bumped hers back. They walked.
Stonebridge was not the center of the Kingdom of Avarinth, but it behaved as if it were. River barges low with grain moved beneath the bridge in a parade. A minstrel one alley over practiced a complicated run of notes and made them all wrong in the same satisfying way. A baker shouted that he had made too many buns again and began giving them to children, which meant children began materializing from behind things. In the schools, tutors taught the little ones to brush the air with their fingers to keep wick-flame alive without scorching. On a green square, an older boy juggled pebbles in the air without touching them, and a younger boy tried to mimic him with his hands and failed and then pretended he had meant to toss them on the ground after all.
Kaelen watched the juggling boy. The pebbles made neat arcs, rose, paused, fell, without the tug of a string or the hint of a hand, and the boy hardly seemed to concentrate at all. The younger boy scowled and picked up one pebble and threw it hard against a wall so at least it would do what he wanted. The pebble did not care.
"Do not," Tamsin said, seeing where Kaelen's eyes had gone.
"I was admiring," Kaelen said. "Totally and completely admiring with no other emotions attached."
"You looked like you wanted to eat the pebbles out of jealousy," Tamsin said. "Come on. If you stare at magic long enough, it will decide you are a stalker."
They cut through the square and out into a narrow lane where laundry hung above their heads like flags. A woman shouted down for them to mind their hats, for she was about to throw water, and Tamsin shouted back that they had no hats and she had no right to ruin invisible hats, and the woman laughed so hard she forgot to be annoyed.
They made it home as the sun took a step toward afternoon. The kitchen greeted them with a smell that had somehow gotten warmer. Maelin had tidied and produced, through methods known only to mothers and bakers, an entire stew and a loaf of bread that looked as though it had become a pillow and then changed its mind, then also produced the miracle of tea without having left the house. Daran had returned to the watch, because the city did not pause during naps, even when they were deserved. He had left a small note for Kaelen in his careful hand.
Came a call about a stubborn mule on the bridge. Will make the mule feel better about life. Back before supper. Proud of you, lad.
Kaelen folded the note, slipped it under the strap of his new gloves where the leather would hug it, and felt the kind of complicated warmth a furnace might feel if it learned to be tender.
The afternoon passed in small chores because the kingdom was built from them. Kaelen swept the stoop, then helped Maelin patch a rent in a sheet by holding it taut while she stitched. He went out to the alley behind the house where the sun touched brick and watched a line of ants discover a drop of honey, find it unfathomable, and then decide to take it apart and carry it to their invisible castle one grain at a time.
When Daran came back, he had dust on his boots and a story about the mule.
"It was not stubborn," he said, easing his feet out of his boots as if introducing them to the floor. "It was scared. A cart wheel shattered on the bridge, scared the animal half to death. We untangled the harness, fed it apples, and let it stand until it remembered being a mule. The owner cried into his hat. Hobb tried to comfort him, but Hobb's tooth whistled with every word and made the man cry harder because it sounded like he was being mourned at a funeral."
He sat, accepted the bowl of stew with gratitude, and took his first spoon with the serious attention of a judge. "This is very good. That makes two miracles today."
"Do not call them miracles," Maelin said, "or the priest will knock in here and ask to take credit."
They ate, laughed, and sighed in the ways the Verenths had their entire lives. The light shifted across the narrow room, from the window to the corner where the broom lived to the shelf where the three precious mugs stood lined up like soldiers. The town called, then dwindled to a murmur, then rose again with the noise of feet going home. Kaelen washed dishes while Maelin wiped the table. Daran stood at the window and looked out as if he had a second watch to keep in his bones.
"Training yard for an hour?" Daran said then, after the dishes had been conquered and the light had gone to honey. "I can spare it. I will stand in the corner and scowl as a deterrent to bullies."
"I am not bullied," Kaelen said automatically, and then softened. "All right. For an hour."
The yard was a patch of packed dirt behind the old watchhouse where the city trusted children with wooden swords and took care to intervene before blood learned its lesson too well. The posts were scarred and proud. The wooden swords were scuffed and honest. Tamsin was already there by the time Kaelen and Daran arrived, because Tamsin was always already somewhere, and she had acquired two other children who were arguing about form in a way that caused splinters to be born.
"Verenth," she said, tossing him a practice sword that he caught on reflex. "We are solving a debate. Is it acceptable to feint and then trip your opponent, or is that poor form?"
Daran coughed into his hand with a sound that concealed a laugh. "Within reason and without breaking bones, it is acceptable to win," he said. "Unless you wish to impress them, in which case you will get yourself knocked on your rear because you tried something elegant when something obvious would have done." He stepped aside, leaned on the fence, and folded his arms in a way that suggested fences had never been so well leaned upon in their lives.
Kaelen sparred. He liked the feel of his feet finding ground. He liked the rhythm that did not ask him to speak a language he did not know. He liked the way a parry made sense in his arm. He liked breathing hard for reasons his body liked. He took a hit too hard to the thigh from a boy who liked his own strength more than he liked other people and accepted the bruise because the bruise meant his body had been where his body should be. He tripped the boy when an opening appeared. He did not feel guilty. Daran's cough laughed again.
Tamsin tried a showy spin and whacked herself in the ankle with her own blade. She declared that the blade had insulted her and refused to participate in such behavior. Kaelen, grinning and sweating, set his sword on his shoulder between bouts and looked at his father by the fence and felt something like peace touch down for a breath.
They walked home under a sky painted with the first creep of evening. A lamplighter moved along the lane, coaxing glow into the lanterns with his tap and whisper. The smell of supper had shifted from other homes to the smell of dishes being washed. A dog barked at the notion of cats and was ignored by the cats themselves.
Maelin had set out a small second spread because she refused to let the day end without one more memory. They ate pears again, this time raw and sweet and impatient. They ate bread and cheese, the bread stolen from the loaf that had tried to be a pillow. Daran told a story about a watchman who had once lost his spear and then lied about it by saying he had given it to a beggar to use as a walking stick, and how the captain had believed him and praised his generosity, and how the watchman had then had to find a beggar and give him a spear.
After the second supper, after the lights had gone a little blue at the edges, after the lane had done its best to be quiet, after the lamplighter had tapped the last lantern and decided to forgive the one that sputtered, Daran stood and stretched in a way that made his bones consider complaining and then decide against it because Daran had no patience for complaints that were not properly filed.
"Bed," he said. "Before I fall over and bruise the bench in retaliation for past benches."
"Go," Maelin said. "I will clear."
Kaelen cleared anyway. He stacked plates and took them to the basin and moved with the habit of a boy whose hands had learned to make his house easier to live in. When it was done, when the kitchen had come back to itself, when the last candle had been pinched and the darkness left behind felt friendly, he went to the little window and looked out.
Stonebridge lay easy. The river whispered its long story against the bridge piers. A drunk sang a sad song that belonged only to him and the street accepted it without argument. The cat on Mrs. Kettle's fence turned once, got comfortable, and decided to keep the moon for itself.
Kaelen breathed, let the day settle inside him like flour settling in a bin. Tomorrow would be lessons and errands and everything that built a life, and next week would be something else again, and in a month there would be a festival, and in a year he would be older whether he liked it or not. He pressed a palm to the new gloves where the note hid under the strap and then let his hand fall.
He turned from the window. He climbed the complaining stair, each step a sound his body knew by heart. He passed his parents' door by on silent feet because parents deserved silent feet, found his own room, and slid under the blanket that had been darned so many times it had grown a pattern.
He closed his eyes and saw the cake again. He smiled. The cake had been good. He had done that.
He slept, and the house slept with him, each timber and plate and whisper of curtain aware, without knowing it, of the things it held together.