The stew tasted like pepper and autumn, the kind of meal that convinced a body it had always lived here. Malik sat between Lira and Anwen on the boarding house steps while the town folded itself into night. Lanterns woke one by one, and somewhere a fiddler practiced arguing with a melody.
He was beginning to believe he might survive this world after all.
Lira licked her spoon thoughtfully. "You know," she said, "you've been very helpful today. In most towns that would earn you a proper reward."
"Like extra bread?" Malik guessed.
Anwen snorted. "He really is from far away."
The two girls exchanged a look that had more meaning in it than a library. Malik felt like a man standing outside a window while the joke was told indoors.
Lira leaned back on her elbows, studying the stars as if they were a menu. "Where you come from, is closeness treated like a crime?"
"Closeness?" Malik repeated.
"Bodies, affection, pleasure," Anwen said bluntly. "Here it's just part of living. We thank people with it. Celebrate with it. Sometimes pay debts with it when coin is thin."
The words landed in him like dropped dishes.
"You're joking," he said.
Lira shook her head gently. "Why would we be ashamed of something that makes more life and more joy? The goddess herself encourages it. Didn't you hear her message?"
Malik remembered the glowing letters on the hillside and nearly choked on his stew.
"I thought that was metaphorical," he muttered.
Anwen laughed, a warm, fearless sound. "Metaphors don't usually mention procreation so directly."
The night suddenly felt closer to his skin. He noticed details he had somehow ignored—the easy way couples touched in the market, the laughter drifting from open windows, the absence of secrecy he had mistaken for politeness.
"So all this time," he said slowly, "people have just been… free?"
"Free enough," Lira answered. "Kindness matters. Consent matters. But hiding desire? That's considered the strange habit."
Malik's mind tried to stand on unfamiliar ground and kept slipping. Back home he had learned a different alphabet of rules—shame folded neatly into jokes, silence taught as a form of safety. Here the language was upside down.
Anwen shifted closer, her shoulder brushing his. "You look frightened, not tempted."
"I'm trying to figure out what kind of man I'm supposed to be," he admitted. "The one I was raised to become doesn't exist here."
Lira's fingers found his hand, not demanding, simply present. "Then become a new one. Slowly."
Their nearness was persuasive in ways that had nothing to do with force and everything to do with warmth. Malik felt the pull of it, the honest invitation, and also the old walls inside him humming with alarms.
"I don't want to hurt anyone," he said. "Or pretend I understand what I don't."
Anwen nodded, respect softening her fierce face. "That's a good beginning."
The conversation drifted into safer harbors—stories of festivals where the river was braided with lanterns, of a mountain that answered questions only on windy days. Yet the earlier revelation lingered between them like a third guest.
When the stew was gone and the moon had climbed to the roofline, Lira stood and stretched. "No one here will rush you, Malik. Even a world that celebrates the body knows the heart sets the pace."
Anwen bumped his knee with hers. "But don't take a century deciding."
He laughed, grateful for the release of it. The girls headed inside, leaving him with the crickets and his spinning thoughts.
Malik looked at the town that now contained his future—whatever shape that might take. Freedom, he realized, was heavier than rules because you had to carry it yourself. He would need time to learn the balance between the man he had been and the man this open sky invited him to become.
Above him the stars kept their counsel, bright witnesses to a life just beginning to choose its own name.