Kaelen learned that secrets prefer feet. If you keep them sitting, they grow heavy and brood. If you walk them, they move more like weather, still troublesome, but at least they change. He left the square before anyone could recruit him to fetch onions or declare rope war and crossed Stonebridge with the purposeful vagueness of someone on an errand no one had written down. He carried nothing except his sleeves and the promise he'd be back by the hour when kitchens start to bully.
He took the west lane and then didn't, ducking down an alley that smelled like wet blanket and soap. He touched the gate post because he always touched the gate post and did not look through the arch because he was done looking at gates for the day. A gull laughed above him in the rude dialect of gulls.
The guardsman on duty made the same joke Daran always made, "Back before dark or we send the geese", and Kaelen nodded without words and kept moving, as if speed could confuse affection.
The Lark lay to the north, safer than the south reach where it grew impatient with stones and instructed boys about mortality. Kaelen followed the lower path that slipped beneath alder branches and became a ribbon of tamped earth stitched with roots. The river was full without boasting; spring had given it what it needed and it was trying to carry it sensibly. On the far bank a field did the honest work of being green. A heron stood in the shallows like a saint practicing indifference.
He passed the place where children collected skimming stones and pretended to be kings of islands, and the place where Mrs. Kettle's cat had once attempted to fish and discovered water is a liar. He went on to where the river bent and, for three breaths, forgot the town existed. A willow leaned over the bend as if it had conspiracies to whisper. Beneath it, a spit of gravel made a little landing the color of old teeth. No one came here unless they meant to be alone or were very bad at navigation. Kaelen had been very bad at navigation once and had memorized the route out of gratitude.
He tested the ground with his boot heel. It held. He sat. The willow allowed it without commentary. The hum in his palms, which had behaved like a polite guest while Stonebridge watched, lifted its head.
"All right," he said out loud because silence is a kind of cowardice when you're by yourself. "Be sensible."
The river did not object to being asked to witness an experiment. It had been river long enough to know which mistakes matter. A dragonfly wrote its bright sentence over the water and under the willow's reflected leaves. Far off, a cart hit two stones in a rhythm anyone from Stonebridge could name.
Kaelen held his hands out in front of him and examined them like tools he was still considering buying. They looked like boys' hands that had made the acquaintance of splinters and wanted to boast about it: nicks along the knuckles where Bren's bench had taught precision with impatience; a crescent near the base of the thumb where a practice sword had slipped and remembered it was just wood; the remnant of Maelin's sugar dust in a crease, invisible to all but memory. The hum sat within the skin like a secret pocket lined in something soft. He tried to think of it the way he thought of a rope, use the lay, don't fight the twist, and felt foolish, then felt less foolish when the hum adjusted as if it had been waiting for the correct metaphor.
He reached for the smallest thing available: a dry reed-tip fallen to the gravel. He did not move his hands. He let his eyes become a request. The hum asked back, 'how, the way', and he answered it without words, if answering is the term for thinking you know how a friend walks when you hear them on the stair.
The reed-tip quivered. That was all. No one would write a ballad. He laughed once into the space under the willow where laughter could be put down gently. "Fine," he told himself. "Fine, fine."
He tried water next because water is honest and petty and he liked both qualities. He picked a single floating fleck, a foam dot no bigger than a fingernail, and asked it to wait. It did not. He asked again with less eagerness. It hesitated, as if consulted by a committee, and then resumed going downstream as if it had convinced itself that obedience is a kind of wisdom. The hum did not sulk when it failed; it made a quiet admission of ignorance and tried to be helpful anyway, which made it unlike most people.
He lifted a pebble. The pebble continued being a pebble and he discovered he loved it for that, he liked that some things refused to volunteer. He sighed and then, because boys sigh differently the second time, he stood and skipped the pebble across the Lark.
It kissed the surface five times and stopped on six, which pleased him beyond reason. "I will never, ever be better than that again," he informed the heron, which refused to be impressed.
He tried something bolder: held his palm up and thought warmth at it. Not heat, warmth, the way Maelin's oven feels when the fire is coals and the bread has agreed to become more itself. Nothing. He tried again and felt that foolish stubbornness that is distinguished from courage only by timing. The hum gathered, attentive, and then found no handhold. He laughed at himself so that the river would not have to.
He closed his eyes to cut away the moving world and found the white instead. Not literally, he wasn't so unlucky, but memory did what memory does: it laid the image on the back of his eyelids so confidently his body believed it for a breath. The whiteness as flat as a decision, the push like law. 'Unauthorized,' the not-voice had said. The hum inside him had not said yes or no; it had set up a chair and refused to leave.
"Why was the quiet, so loud," he murmured, and the willow lifted one leaf as if choosing to pretend it understood.
He reset. Workmanlike. He looked at his fingers and flexed them slowly. The hum flexed with them, a half-second delay like a companion learning your gait. He thought not of water or reed or pebble, but of a circle. He had spent all morning measured by circles. He pictured the shape in his mind, not drawn, not perfect, just the idea that curves know how to return to themselves.
He cupped his left hand and covered it with his right, as if shielding a candle that did not yet exist. He didn't know why he did that until he felt the hum answer the posture. Some things learn posture before instruction. He drew breath like a man at a bench, not a boy at a miracle. He thought: small, safe, bright, here. Then he realized none of those words belonged to the thing he was asking for and nearly laughed himself off the gravel.
He nearly gave up then, and perhaps would have, on another day, or if Tamsin had been nearby to make jokes and ruin the mood for his safety, but the hum lifted its head in his hands and waited with an expectation that did not feel hungry. It felt steady. He felt steady back.
"Fine," he said to the river because the river was omniscient enough to deserve updates. "If you will not be a reed or a pebble, be a trick."
He moved his hands apart the smallest degree, as if inviting air to become a thing. The hum gathered between his palms, not like light, not like heat, not like any honest something. A thickness. Not air. Not smoke. The smell came first: coin-copper, wet ash, clove, and the faint sweetness of something that had intended to be bread and been told, gently, that it had other work to do today. The hairs on his wrists consulted one another and decided to stand.
He opened his hands another thumb's width. Between them, a point of not-dark pinched itself into existence. It did not light the willow or the world. It lit his attention. The point widened, not smoothly like oil, but in jerks, a jump-cut of a thing putting itself together in the wrong order and correcting. Orange found it, then withdrew, then found it again. Blue arrived late, tried to sit on top, and slid underneath. The thing did not burn. It edited. Fire, but with pieces missing, then reinserted in the wrong frame.
He made a noise in his throat that was unlovely and good. The hum in his hands spoke back to him, two notes only he heard, the same pair it had used since yesterday under the arch, altered now by a new harmony, not his, but near enough to trick a friend: the fire's own hum. They braided and did not agree. He held very still because touching anything would be like sneezing with a bowl of soup.
He moved his right hand a hair to the side. The wrong-fire moved with it and then with a stutter moved back to where his hand had been two heartbeats before, like memory catching up in pieces. He thought no, not yet, to no one, and the wrong-fire obliged by being exactly too obedient. He spread his fingers. In the space between, the thing he had made fluttered, as if it had been sketched in charcoal and the artist had smudged it with the heel of a hand and then redrawn the line three times.
"Now," he told himself, absurdly formal, and pushed.
He meant to push the way one nudges a boat from a bank, gentle, a wish turned into forward. The wrong-fire disagreed about definitions. It left his palm in a single ugly lurch, as if thrown by a man startled by his own throwing. It traveled two yards out from him, hovering, then hiccuped backward the space of a blink and replaced itself in the air where it had been a breath earlier, then remembered which direction the world prefers and jumped forward again. It stuttered toward the river like a bird with the wrong song caught in its throat.
It made no sound. No crackle, no roar, no polite hiss. Only the hum, doubled now: his own under-skin tone and the fire's alien cousin, neither loud, neither soft, both persisting. He felt the hum behind his eyes, a pressure where tears are manufactured in an emergency, and resisted the impulse to close them. He watched what he had made undo itself in public.
Halfway to the Lark, the wrong-fire stopped keeping up. It flickered out not like a candle losing a fight with weather but like a drawing erased from the corner inward. The color became outline; the outline broke into jitter; the jitter chose not to exist. For an instant there was the suggestion of a sphere, not even color now, just geometry refusing mercy, and then nothing. No smoke. No steam. The smell hung a breath longer, the copper clove ash smell of something unholy trying on holy's clothes, and then even that decided it had overstayed.
Kaelen did not move. He did not trust his knees. The river pretended not to have noticed while absolutely noticing. The willow leaves made their tiny sounds and the heron flicked an eye because herons are allowed to. A frog that had been thinking about singing decided to delay art.
He realized he had held his breath for the entire event and then some and carefully, as if letting the wrong thing into the world by accident could be repeated on an exhale, let it go. His hands trembled. Not much; enough to make him grateful there was no Bren or Daran in the scene. The hum in his palms did not dim. It tucked itself in as if cold. He rubbed his wrists together as if he could warm the ghost of a sound.
He sat back down because the gravel had opinions about boys who linger standing when they shouldn't. His heart pounded like a man at a door who has reconsidered and wants not to come in after all. He fought the urge to look behind him as if he could be caught by having made a small, wrong sun.
He wanted to be thrilled. He knew that. Some part of him, the one that might have enjoyed aping Garrin's flourishes if only his wrists had been less mortal, wanted to whoop and write his name with sparks in the air. But what he felt was something else. Not fear exactly. Not guilt. Something like sorrow, absurd and precise. Whatever that was had not been a torch. It had not even been a flame. It was a page of fire someone had torn from a book and tried to throw and the page had remembered it was supposed to remain inside a binding.
He put his hands back together, made the same shelter of his palms, and asked the hum to sit still. It did, grateful. He waited until his own pulse stopped trying to be more interesting than the river. Then he tried the smallest of tricks again, the reed-tip, and managed, this time, to lift it a finger-width and hold it there for the length of a swallow. He let it fall on purpose and told himself that being content with that was the only way to keep from wanting the wrong fire again too soon.
He stood. He failed to resist a second attempt. Boys, even sensible ones, are stacked like that: good intention, bad timing, hunger for proof. He cupped his hands and did not reach for fire. He asked for heat only and encountered refusal, polite this time. He asked for light and received a suggestion, a thinning of air that made the space between his palms feel like a held breath.
He laughed softly when nothing else appeared. "Good," he said to the space. "You're smarter than I am."
Clouds gathered behind Stonebridge, small as errands, not threatening rain, only offering shade later. A fish wrote a ripple and did not sign its name. The hum in his hands changed temperature without changing anything else; he could not have explained that to a carp and did not try. He could sense now how quickly it tired, not like a muscle, but like a thought that can only be held so long before it becomes someone else's. He gave it up before it had to stop.
He sat again because the willow and the gravel and the bend combined into a convincing chair for questions. He considered telling Tamsin. He imagined her face when he described the wrong-fire, how she would call it a trick of light and then immediately revise to 'pattern maligned,' and after an hour invent the phrase 'unholy fire' not because she thought it wicked but because she loved names that made people stand upright. He imagined Sister Anwen listening softer than anyone listens, asking him to show her, and the hum, shy or proud, refusing not because it could not but because it disliked temples. He imagined Daran not speaking for three entire breaths while his mind built a list with the words protect and teach and if-then. He imagined Bren grunting and handing him a bucket, 'Put it on this and then I'll call it a talent.'
He imagined telling no one and invented a future made of secret practice and public splinters. The future did not rupture under the weight of the idea. It simply sat beside him on the gravel and offered him a pear. He did not have a pear. He took the imagined one and smiled at his own absurdity.
'Unauthorized,' the white had said. His hands had said nothing. He wished they had language. He wished, fleetingly and unhandsomely, that some old word would come down from a priest and sort him. He wished, more honestly, for Bren's plain rule: measure yourself. He looked at his hands and measured. Not empty. Not safe. Not worse. Not saved. Something.
A dragonfly returned and wrote a more elaborate sentence over the water, full of flourishes and flights, and this time Kaelen could not resist asking it to pause. It didn't. He grinned at being denied by a thing that was, indisputably, alive.
"All right," he told the willow and the river and the heron and the new part of himself. "Enough for today."
He wiped his palms down his sleeves to get rid of a nonexistent residue. He stood and brushed dust from his trousers like someone who had done nothing but sit. He followed his own tracks back towards Stonebridge and practiced thinking of bread and spokes so that if anyone asked where his head had been, it would be near acceptable nouns.
At the gate he touched the post again, and this time the wood did not whisper. He took that as blessing. The guardsman on duty nodded him through without inventing a joke. Kaelen walked back into the square which had not been waiting for him and was generously indifferent to his late arrival. He felt the hum put itself away like a tool wiped and set on the correct hook. He let it.
When he reached the lane that led toward Bren's, he heard Tamsin before he saw her, which is the correct order for both disaster and happiness.
"There you are," she sang, as if she had rehearsed the phrase and preferred it to the honest alternative, which was likely, 'What did you do.' "I was about to set the rope-pull in the middle of the square without you and scandalize us into legend."
"I was at the river," he said, and was proud of exactly how much truth could fit into that sentence.
"Practicing pears," she said. "For eating."
"For eating," he agreed.
"You look like you've seen a story," she observed, and then she relented and added lightly, "Good. You can tell it to me when ideas have agreed to their punctuation. Right now I need your hands."
He gave her his sleeves and kept his hands for himself. They wove through the square toward Bren's together and the world kept working: the hawk with its fish, the watchmen pretending to be scenery, the lamplighter touching wicks with an absent thumb. No one noticed the boy who had almost invented a fire and then refused to name it properly, which was a mercy, and he accepted it.
He also accepted, reluctantly and without ceremony, that something noticed him.
Not the square, squares always notice, but affectionately, like grandmothers who pretend they weren't looking. Not the watch, watchmen notice everyone and then do the work of pretending they do not. This was a narrower noticing, a thread tugging the back of his neck and then letting go, like a draft you feel walking past a door you thought was shut.
He did not tell Tamsin. She walked beside him at that loping pace that meant she had a plan and was trying to persuade it to reveal itself. She spun the rope loop around her wrist, then around his, then around her own again, never tying, only threatening to.
"Bren will hate this," she said brightly, regarding the rope as if it were a dog she hoped to civilize by embarrassing it in public. "Bren will hate everything that is fun until he learns we do not stop being ourselves because the bench is offended."
Kaelen's smile arrived on time but spoke less than usual. They cut past the pie stall and the plank that wobbled no matter how many shims men of three gods had sworn would stop it. He stopped looking with his eyes. His skin looked instead. A window shutter on the left breathed, closing a fraction and opening again, not in wind but as if testing its hinge. A nail head on a post flashed sunlight and then, long heartbeat later, remembered it had already done that. He made himself catalog ordinary reasons: wind, sun, people, pigeons, the vast stupidity of coincidence. The catalogue helped and did not. The hum in his hands lifted once and then behaved, like a hound whose ears prick at a sound its master pretends not to hear.
They turned down the lane that took them toward Bren's. The lane smelled of leather being asked to forgive its past and sawdust that had decided to live in everyone's cuffs. Tamsin chattered about a cousin's goose that had become religious and refused to cross from one side of the yard to the other without being promised grain in the hereafter. Kaelen agreed in the right places and mentally put his back to the street, not because he expected attack but because he wanted the comfort of a wall. The sensation of being observed remained, not hovering directly behind him, someone good at following never stands precisely where the followed will feel them, but off, half a house-length, the distance of respectable curiosity. He could not tell from which side.
He could only tell it was.
They passed a glassmaker's stall shuttered for the afternoon; in the dusty pane, a sliver of them walked a half-step out of time with their bodies. Kaelen's reflection turned its head a shade too late, then caught up with the neck and looked straight ahead, mildly annoyed. He blinked hard and reminded his mind about the tricks of light. The sensation persisted. He did not like that his first thought was Nyx. That Nyx might be in a roofline shadow, grinning, teaching him the shape of caution, delighted with herself for doing nothing and accomplishing much. He did not like it because the feeling was not Nyx. Nyx's attention is spicy; you can taste mischief when she looks at you.
This was… flavorless. Real. Present. Like the air returning a sound to you that you had not made.
He stopped abruptly beside a stack of split oak and bent to pretend he had a splinter. Tamsin stopped with him, instantly producing a needle she had stolen from the day and refused to return.
"I can perform surgery," she said gravely. "I once removed a burr from a cat. The cat says I'm allowed to practice on boys so long as I never again practice on cats."
"No surgery," Kaelen said, scanning not with his eyes this time but by stepping his attention around him in tiles, one small square at a time.
The watch uses that trick, Daran had taught him without announcing it as a trick. 'Count window, post, barrel, step, ear, shadow; count again; note what moved and when.' A curtain twitched two doors down, yes; a rat considered a new life and then reconsidered; a copper pot on a hook rocked gently as if reminded of something and trying to nod. No figure where a figure should be if there were a figure.
And yet the noticing remained.
He straightened and allowed the splinter to be imaginary. "It's fine," he told Tamsin, which meant exactly as much as it always meant.
"Good," she said briskly. "Because we're here, and your soul must prepare itself for Bren's dislike of public rope."
Bren Alder regarded the rope loop as if it had insulted a beloved aunt. "No," he said, before either of them had said anything. "There will be no rope here unless it is attached to something that will be improved by rope."
"The boy," Tamsin said at once, thumping Kaelen on the shoulder with the dignity of a magistrate. "This boy will be improved by rope. He will become an exemplar. He will be a parable they read to the unknotted."
Kaelen obligingly held one end and planted his foot, grateful for the way rope as argument could distract him from the way air as attention could take the skin off thoughts. Bren grunted a noise that could be read as consent if you were fluent in Bren. He returned to the wheel and pretended to care only for spokes, but he watched, counting without moving his lips. Kaelen felt the count and wanted to be steady enough to be found by it.
They tugged. Tamsin set her heels against the yard's packed dirt and leaned back with the full cooperation of gravity. Kaelen leaned forward and found the angle that did not punish his spine. The rope bit his palm kindly. For a breath the hum inside his hands wanted to ask the rope to become something else, pattern, image, a line that could carry itself without hands, and he told it the single syllable that holds such fantasies obedient: 'No.' It obeyed. He pulled. The rope, faithful servant, told two stories at once: in Tamsin's hands it was a dare; in his it was an invitation; in both it was, importantly, rope.
"Again," Tamsin breathed, cheeks pinking with the virtue of work.
"Again." They did until both laughed and the rope relaxed like a thing that had been entertained and would now accept a nap.
Bren behaved as if none of this had occurred and then handed Kaelen a small plane he had not yet been allowed to touch. "You can try not cutting your fingers with this," he said. "If you succeed, perhaps I will let you try not cutting your confidence with the next one."
Kaelen accepted the plane with both hands because ceremony pleases tools. He put it to wood. The grain did its usual temperamental dance but a fraction less sulky, and Kaelen's arms agreed to be guided by the plane instead of asking to be in charge. As he worked, the sense of being observed dimmed at his back like a lamp whose oil has been deliberately turned down. He felt the edge of it move away, step by half step, not gone, only giving him room. He glanced once toward the doorway, an old habit, not suspicion, and saw only the street doing its afternoon chores of existing.
The hour grew older. The day took on that slant that tells children to go home and fetch the supper smell into their clothes.
Bren nodded at the wheel as if it had finally understood the meaning of gratitude and said, "Enough," in the tone he used when he didn't want enough to be mistaken for quit.
He wiped his hands, looked at Kaelen's as if confirming they were still attached, and added, casual as a sneeze, "Your father came by. He said the west gate wants me to look at a wagon whose opinion of its own axle is too high. I told him I would after bread. I expect to be irritated by its arrogance; I expect to be humbled by its necessity."
Kaelen nodded. The watcher sensation had retreated to the corner of his mind reserved for annoyances he could not improve. He set the plane where it slept. He felt, once, a prickle on the back of his neck and turned too quickly, catching only the end of a reflection slipping away in the burnished rim of a hoop leaning by the door: a second Kaelen, out of time by the edge of a blink.
He said nothing. It was a day to say nothing.
"Dinner?" Tamsin said as if she were offering him citizenship in a brand new city she had invented without permits. "I have two options. Option one: I bully my aunt into letting me cook and we all become victims of my culinary genius. Option two: I freeload off the Verenths and claim it's diplomacy between neighboring households."
"Option two," Kaelen said so fast even the rope looked scandalized. He cleared his throat to make it seem he had in fact been considering both options like a gentleman. "If you want. my mother will claim she did not make enough stew and then produce twice as much stew as there are people in Stonebridge."
"Perfect," Tamsin said. "I shall eat for the absent citizens so that the math is correct."
Bren made a noise that could have been approval or a stone settling into a wall the right way. "Go," he said. "Do not forget your hands on your way home. People who forget their hands drop plates and then invent philosophies about fate."
"We will remember our hands," Tamsin promised, already halfway to the door. She paused, looked back at the wheel with a narrow-eyed speculative affection that made it feel seen in a way that would have upset Bren if he'd been watching. "Do not learn bad habits while we are gone," she told it.
On the street again, the world had done that quiet softening it does before the lamps confess they're necessary. Kaelen felt a little lightness roll through him, the way river stones roll invisibly below the surface when water decides to argue with them gently. The lurking observation he had carried along the lane had thinned. He still felt watched, but now at a distance that registered as impersonal, a star, not an eye. He breathed without inventorying the air.
"You're twitching like a rabbit that read a philosophy," Tamsin observed cheerfully, swinging the rope so its tail flicked the cobbles and made a rhythm the cobbles were polite enough to play along with. "Everything all right in the museum of your mind?"
"Yes," he said, and felt how near the lie passed to truth. "Tired. Bren makes you do more with less. It's exhausting being taught to be honest."
"Everyone says that about me," she said smugly. "Also, about bread."
They cut by the fountain, which had adopted a mirror's mood, reflecting children back at themselves in pieces that were kinder than reality about ears. Sister Anwen wasn't present; a novice boy Tamsin excelled at terrifying in small ways was fetching water and attempting to do it with dignity. He nodded at them, slopped, blushed, recovered. Kaelen's hum soothed in his hands, curious without itching. The sensation of watching slid further off, either bored or pleased. He could not tell which, and told himself it was neither because wrong choices deserved equal opportunity to license fear.
They diverted one lane so Tamsin could fetch a basket from her aunt's house. The aunt, a tall woman with a voice that could organize weather, opened the door with the expression of someone who has count of everything that has happened on the street since noon and is disappointed none of it involved sensible footwear. She looked at Tamsin, at Kaelen, at the rope. She kept her thoughts to herself because she was very good at citizenship.
"Back before full dark," she said to her niece, which in Stonebridge is the same as saying 'I love you' and also 'Do not make me come get you.'
"Yes," Tamsin said, and kissed her cheek, then smuggled two rolls into the basket under the woman's gaze, which had probably permitted it.
They headed for Kaelen's with an ease that had taken a decade and a half to accomplish. The street leaned them homeward.
Kaelen re-counted the ordinary: shutters that remembered to be shut, children who remembered to complain, the lamplighter who remembered old songs under his breath when he thought people weren't paying attention. The feeling of the watcher thinned still more, until he could convince himself he had invented it to give the afternoon texture. A small courage grew in the space left behind. Courage always arrives when fear goes to find its coat.
He tripped once because his eyes had been in his hands, where the hum now lay like a cat, it had acknowledged him, it had flattened, it was pretending to sleep so he would alternate between forgetting and checking. He caught himself without ceremony. Tamsin didn't even remark on it, which is how true friends choose particular kindness.
Arrived home, he pushed the door and called down the hall, because the house liked to be told who was entering.
"Back," he said, adding, "and I've brought a criminal," because Tamsin had once stolen an onion by accident thinking it was a dwarf pear and the joke had become tradition.
Maelin's voice reached them from the kitchen, warm and busy. "Excellent," she called. "We have sentences to punish her with. Come in, guilt and accomplice. Wash."
Tamsin carried herself into the kitchen like royalty being kind to a room. "I submit to the law," she announced, putting her basket on a clean bit of table as if it had expectation of a welcome.
Maelin wiped her hands on her apron and then on both of their cheeks because flour has to mark what it claims. "You're staying," she told Tamsin, which is the way she accepts invitations that have not been made in time. "If your aunt has not already been told by the street that you are here, the street is unwell."
"She gave permission," Tamsin said. "She also accidentally gave me two rolls and an opinion about footwear."
"Good," Maelin said. She pulled a pot from the fire with a confidence that made heat behave. "Sit. Hands. Not near knives unless you intend to help in a way that makes me proud and not in a way that makes me create new words."
Kaelen washed as ordered, the hum in his hands behaving like a child pretending to drink and actually pouring water down a sleeve. He dried thoroughly to stop the prickle from feeling anything through cloth. He stepped beside the table, took up a knife, and began slicing carrot in the thickness that made Maelin's face approve. Tamsin seized an onion with athletic hostility and wept heroically, which can be considered a culinary contribution in Stonebridge.
Kaelen's father came in through the back door in that noon-and-evening blur he has that convinces people he is always arriving from somewhere just now and yet has been present all day. He noticed Tamsin first and made his face into a shape that told her she was both expected and suspicious.
"Guest," he said, as if he were announcing the presence of a dog that might be allowed to live indoors this once. He leaned over the pot, inhaled, and turned to Kaelen with grave ceremony. "You have made exactly the correct thickness," he intoned, and Kaelen snorted into the carrot and felt something gather in him that was not laughter but borrowed its clothes.
"Stay," Maelin repeated, not because she feared Tamsin would flee but because Maelin liked to cast her wishes in redundant layers. "We've more than we need, and I refuse to be left alone with the virtue of leftovers."
"I intend to be a menace to leftovers," Tamsin vowed. "I will take responsibility for their moral compass."
Kaelen caught his father's eye over the chopping board. Daran raised an eyebrow that asked, without language, You good? Kaelen put the answer into the angle of his shoulders and the shape of his mouth: Yes, now. It was almost true. It was true enough to cook by.
"After we eat," Daran said to the room in general, and to Kaelen in particular, "I want to show you the trick for dealing with a mule that believes in conspiracy. I met one today that thinks bridges are political."
"Bridges are political," Tamsin said. "They keep making people cross them who would prefer not to be crossed with."
Kaelen smiled, surprised by the small, clean twitch of joy at hearing the blessing in its new clothes. He set the knife down, wiped the board, and wanted abruptly to tell Tamsin everything: the willow, the hum, the wrong-fire, the watcher. He wanted to braid the afternoon into a rope and say, Here, pull with me. The wanting was so strong it leaned him. He did not move. He diced a last carrot and put it into the pot.
Tamsin bumped his shoulder with her own. "Thank you," she said too lightly, which is when Tamsin means it. "For inviting me."
"Always," he said, and meant it with the sort of ordinary ferocity that makes cities reassure themselves they are worth it.
Somewhere on the lane outside, the lamplighter tapped a wick even though it wasn't yet time, and a lantern obliged by catching early, as if eager to be helpful. Kaelen felt the tiniest answering shiver in his hands, not an alarm, not an event, a sympathy. He ignored it carefully, like a person pretending they do not hear their own name in a crowd. The sensation of being watched did not return; or if it did, it stayed where it belonged, at the far edge of the world where stars have opinions no one is required to consider.
"Bowls," Maelin said. "Spoons. And someone fetch Daran's note off the peg before I forget what I meant to buy twice."
Kaelen went to the peg. The old note lived under the glove's strap as always: South arch secure; told it it was handsome; it agreed. Proud of you. He didn't read it. He didn't have to. He touched it and then left it and brought bowls. Tamsin set them with an ostentation that turned placing crockery into theater. Daran waited with his patience that can be mistaken for sleep by people who have never tried to out-wait him.
"Sit," his mother commanded with the authority that makes chairs volunteer. "Tell me about your day and please do not make me regret asking."
He opened his mouth, throttled three stories into one, and chose the only safe truth. "We tied rope," he said solemnly. "Bren disapproved. A wagon has an opinion. And I made a very good spoke be less wrong."
The dinner continued normally, with laughter filling the kitchen, sometimes with Tamsin silently watching over Kaelen, quickly looking away when he turned, not always directly to her.
Kaelen, again, chose not to tell the real story to anyone but himself, and thought it was the right choice to continue to do so. At least, until he understood what he was, and wasn't capable of.