Stonebridge made a show of the festival. The river Lark presented its face as if it had slept the sleep of a saint. The bridge kept both hands on its hips and did not sag, even though lantern soot ringed the stones like eyeliner. The square had been swept by people who swore they hadn't, leaving confetti made of leaves and stray bits of ribbon to prove the party had been real. Somewhere a money toad decided it had done enough for culture and returned to being a toad.
Kaelen woke with the knowledge that he had agreed, willingly and with both eyes open, to go to Bren Alder's workshop and 'talk to wood in a dialect he could handle.' The prospect made his stomach feel like a pocket where something heavy had been placed and forgotten. He liked the heaviness. It meant the day had agreed to be real.
Maelin handed him a heel of bread spread with leftover frosting and a piece of apple 'for balance' and pointed at his boots before she pointed at the door. The boots were still damp at the seams from last night's river air. He rubbed them with oil until they sighed, then pulled on the new gloves because that still felt like the proper way to begin anything. Daran had gone before sunrise, leaving a note on the peg:
"South arch secure; told it it was handsome; it agreed. Proud of you."
The note tucked itself next to the other under the glove strap like a second heartbeat.
Stonebridge in work clothes had a different posture from Stonebridge in festival finery. The same people, but their backs leaned into the day. The same lane, but the voices dropped an octave into practical. Kaelen passed the thread seller and her wheel the size of a small cart, now covered against dew. He passed Mrs. Kettle's fence, the cat atop it resuming its post with the gravity of an appointment. Mr. Undern's door stood open; the smell of wet wood and pitch greeted him the way an old uncle does, with affection disguised as insult.
Bren Alder's workshop was a stout building with windows that flared their eyebrows at the street. Inside: order. Not the immaculate, brittle kind loved by people who haven't worked much; the resilient order of someone who knew where everything lived because it had a job and did it. Boards leaned against the far wall like musical notes waiting for a song. A long bench ran the length of the room; on it lay tools with honest previous stories: planes that had petted wood until it purred, chisels like boat keels, mallets with heads like very patient stones. An anvil kept counsel in a corner with a pile of iron bands. Light came in sideways and made dust look like it had been there since the beginning of the world.
"Verenth," Bren said, emerging from behind a wheel like the moon coming out from behind a cloud. He had shoulders like rafters and hands that looked as if they could twist a lie into a useful shape. "Take off your pride and hang it on that nail. It'll only snag."
"I left most of it at the rope fight," Kaelen said, obeying. He stood awkwardly with his hands at soldier rest, then realized the gloves made him feel official and adjusted them as if they were pieces of a uniform he'd inherited.
Bren grunted what might have been approval or gas. "You know how to sweep?"
"I have a relationship with brooms," Kaelen said. "We disagree about the nature of crumbs."
"Excellent," Bren said. "Sweep. Start by the door. Bring shavings this way. Don't chase them like cattle. Persuade. You don't want to know what happens when they feel persecuted."
Kaelen took up the shop broom. It had the long, scratched handle of a mast and the bristles of an old man's beard. He pushed gently, then a little more firmly, trying to move shavings without scattering them. The shavings, for their part, considered his offer, then slid like curt bows. It was not glorious work, but it made a sound he liked: the soft hush of doing something simple properly. Bren worked parallel to him, the plane singing along the grain: a long, even shrrr that entered Kaelen's ribs and settled there.
The room began to smell like the inside of a cupboard that had never known a lie. Resin and curl and dust and the warm animal scent wooden things acquire because hands have touched them for years. Kaelen breathed and the smell did something unnameable and good to his head.
"Rule one," Bren said without looking up. "Measure twice, cut once."
"I have heard that," Kaelen said, angling the broom so a rebellious flock of shavings fell into line.
"Excellent," Bren said. "You will now hear rule two, which is more important and less famous: measure yourself. If your brain is running hot, go outside and look at something that isn't trying to become a wheel. If your hands are stupid, give them a task they can't ruin. If your pride starts talking, feed it something and put it down for a nap."
Kaelen smiled. "My pride naps frequently."
"It is a growing boy," Bren said. He set the plane down, stepped back, and admired the board as if it had surprised him pleasantly. "You're here to learn wheels. That's what pays. But you can't understand a wheel until you understand straight lines and circles and why they get into fights. We'll start small." He lifted a half-formed wheel onto trestles. "Staves. Spokes. Rim. Iron tires later. I'm not letting you hit hot iron until you've failed at something cooler."
"I'm very good at failing coolly," Kaelen said.
"That will serve," Bren said. "Fetch me the marking gauge. No, that one. The one that looks like it wants to argue about philosophy."
Kaelen fetched it. The gauge did indeed possess the air of a scholar with strong opinions about angels. Bren took it, set a line true along the rim, and handed it back without ceremony. "Your turn. Set the pin to my line. Then make me three more. Coax. Don't force. Wood remembers insults."
He leaned over the wheel rim and discovered a new anatomy: the grain under his fingers like hair, the slight, living give of the wood, the discipline required to keep the gauge steady when his elbow wished to be dramatic. He set his first line slightly drunk and wanted to erase the universe. Instead he set his jaw, adjusted, and drew another. Better. By the third he had found the path between panic and swagger where hands do what they mean.
"Acceptable," Bren said after peering. "By noon you may become formidable. Or at least you will become someone who knows what he doesn't know. That is when apprenticeships get interesting."
The morning settled into the kind of work that feels both small and important. Bren let Kaelen mark, then carve, then sand until his shoulders hummed. When Kaelen overcut a notch and flinched.
Bren shrugged and said, "Wedges. And next time you'll stop a breath earlier because you will hear the wood tell you to."
He showed Kaelen how to sharpen a chisel on a stone without turning it into a spoon. He stopped him when he began to hurry and told him to take a drink and look out the window at the square and identify five things in motion that were not people.
Kaelen named three birds, a dog, and Mrs. Kettle's laundry. Bren nodded as if Kaelen had passed an exam.
Tamsin arrived as if she had been flung by delight. She carried a parcel and a question and somehow the parcel asked the question. "I brought lunch," she announced. "And is it possible to carve a message into a wheel that only appears when it turns very fast?"
"No," Bren said. "Yes. Not today."
Tamsin accepted those answers as the sort of chorus the world offered and set the parcel on a safe patch of table. "My mother had leftover roast. She encased it in bread as if it had committed crimes. There is also a jar of something that looks like mustard and behaves like mercy."
"Bless the Ellowe kitchen," Bren said, washing his hands in a basin so cold it could wake guilt. "Verenth, stop pretending you're not starving. Eat. If you do not, the shavings will unionize and demand a boy who appreciates sandwiches."
Kaelen's arms announced through the language of ache that he had been making things with them. He sat on an upturned bucket and bit into the sandwich. The roast was indeed encased by bread in a way that would stand up in court. It had a familiar spice that made him think of roofs where he and Tamsin had watched storms pretend to be officials. Tamsin sat on a plank and swung her feet. Bren leaned against the bench and looked like a wall built by a patient god.
"Do you like it?" Tamsin asked around a bite that required a strategy.
"Yes," Kaelen said. "I like work that tells the truth. I like wood. It doesn't try to impress you."
Tamsin grinned. "It will if I charm it."
Bren raised an eyebrow. "Charm my wheel and I will teach you rule three: if you charm my wheel, I will make you uncharm it by sanding it with your tongue."
Tamsin laughed so hard she swallowed mustard incorrectly and then decided to recover with dignity by turning her cough into a hymn. "I won't. I promise. Mostly because I do not wish to battle Verenth's masterful lines. Look at those." She pointed at the marks Kaelen had drawn. "They are very straight. They should be proud."
Kaelen basked for exactly the number of heartbeats allowed before modesty tapped him on the shoulder and asked for equal time. He took another bite and considered that lunch in a workshop made the world feel solid in a way festival sugar didn't.
"You'll do," Bren said, which in Bren was near to poetry. "Come after third bell again. We'll introduce you to spokes and their opinions."
Kaelen nodded. He helped tidy: sweeping shavings into a sack that would later charm the kitchen fire out of shyness, coiling ropes, putting tools back in the order of Bren's mind rather than the order of the table. Bren barked after him as he left, "Hands, oil 'em a touch. Wood steals skin if you let it."
The street took him back. On the way to the watchhouse to fetch Daran's midday message, because Maelin had casually mentioned, in the manner of a general suggesting the army might want to consider eating, that he should check whether Daran needed anything, Kaelen caught a change in the air like a chord. Not louder. More…sharp. People did the small shift a city does when new becomes present. Turned heads, altered footfalls, the first notes of a rumor that would soon ride ahead like a herald.
The adventurers arrived the way weather does when it knows people are watching. They came in at the south gate from the road along the river, four figures with travel at their edges and a private conversation at their center. Their horses were the kind that know they are in a story and decide to carry it well: clean limbed, bright-eyed, modest about it. Their cloaks matched only in the way all cloaks do when they have survived rain. They wore the look of people who had slept in places and eaten things and listened to each other breathe.
Stonebridge appreciated a good entrance as much as any town, but it gave nothing cheaply. The first reaction was always a narrowing of eyes and a counting of knives. The second was curiosity disguised as disdain. Only then did the children peel off to follow like gulls behind a boat. Kaelen felt himself become one of the children, in his heart at least. He drifted to the edge of the lane, pretending to be on his way to something crucial.
The warrior wore mail that had earned its reflections, the links a dull river that had seen teeth. He kept his helm hooked at his saddle and his head bare, as if trusting his skull would notice trouble early. His hair had gone to iron at the temples in a way that made him look like permanence had shaken his hand and approved. A cloak pinned with a brooch in the shape of a sunburst hung to his knees. He rode straight-backed, not stiff. The sort of posture that reminded Kaelen of Daran on inspection mornings.
The rogue, if that was her trade, had the lazy grace of a cat who doesn't need to pretend not to care. She wore leather too new to be hers, which meant she'd acquired it recently, probably along with a compelling story about how it wanted to be hers more than it wanted to be anyone else's. Her hair was cut short enough to keep secrets. She had three knives visible, which meant there were five more not so. She watched everything and nothing and smiled absently at a child who nearly tripped in front of her horse, a smile that checked if the child was okay and if anyone had noticed the smile.
The mage walked. Of course she walked. Her robe, simple, ink-stained, dragged just enough to annoy cobbles. She carried a staff of pale wood inscribed at the top with modest sigils, the sort that only glow when treated nicely. She had the look of someone who had put arguments into jars and labeled them meticulously. Her hair was braided back as if negotiations with it had been firm but friendly. When a hawker shouted something about miracle salves, she lifted an eyebrow so dark it cast shadow on the man's conscience.
The healer wore travel brown with a temple's simple silver circlet at the brow, the kind you forget you're wearing until children ask to try it on. He had the patient hands of a person who had set bones and closed wounds while being lied to about pain. He kept his pack in easy reach. He had the posture of a man who knew people broke like pottery and had decided to love them anyway.
Kaelen watched them come up the lane toward the watchhouse. He realized he had stopped breathing and remedied that before his body took matters into its own hands. He told himself stories about where they had come from. South, from the low vales past Greengate, perhaps, where the road goes wide and the storms do too. Maybe from the Old Road, where people still whisper it crosses under the world and comes up somewhere that does not exist on maps. He told himself stories about why they were here, and the stories were full of contracts and gold and a problem too stubborn for locals.
They stopped at the watchhouse. Daran came out into the sun, helm under his arm, his hair refusing to understand how helmets work even after all these years. He squinted once at the horses, nodded once at the people, and the nod meant welcome in the dialect of men who spend their lives looking at other men's hands.
"Stonebridge Watch," the warrior said. His voice carried without them having to drag it. "We're in need of two things: a permit for passage through the north woods, and someone honest to tell us who the bandits over the ridge belong to this month."
"If they belong to anyone," the rogue added, light as a leaf. "They sometimes belong to themselves. The worst kind."
Daran took in the group with the same expression he used to evaluate a knot or a bench. He approved or disapproved, but only after checking if any of the things could be improved with patience. "Permit's no trouble," he said. "Signed by my captain if you don't mind his signature looking like it lost a fight with a goose. As for the bandits, I'll tell you what people say and then what actually happens. You can use whichever helps."
The mage said nothing; she was watching the square the way a person listens to a room at a wake, measuring silence. The healer inclined his head when Daran spoke, which made Kaelen like him immediately.
Kaelen hovered with skill. Daran saw him, of course. Daran always saw him. He lifted two fingers in greeting and acknowledgement of sons who loiter for information. The slightest curve at the corner of Daran's mouth said, 'Come. Be useful.' Kaelen obeyed.
"Kaelen," Daran said mildly, "fetch Maelin's spare pen from the drawer. The good one the captain is not allowed to chew. And bring the permit book."
Kaelen went inside as if born to this bureaucracy, found the drawer, located the Very Good Pen that lived wrapped in cloth like an elderly aunt, and plucked the permit book from beneath three deranged leaflets about bridge maintenance. He returned to the door and delivered pen and book with the solemnity of a messenger from the sun.
"Thank you," Daran said, and to the strangers: "My son. Steady hands."
The rogue's gaze flicked to Kaelen's hands. She had the quick assessment of someone who hired help. The mage's eyes rested on Kaelen's face for one heartbeat longer than politeness requires. The warrior nodded as if tasting a name. The healer smiled like the opening of a door.
"What are you called?" the warrior asked.
"Kaelen Verenth," Kaelen said, trying not to infuse his name with too much ambition. "Sir."
"Sir is for the captain," Daran said dryly. "This is…" He looked at the warrior with an expression that assumed courtesy was a mutual burden.
"Rowan," the warrior supplied. "Rowan Hale."
The rogue made fingers like a flourish. "Nyx Varrow."
The mage, not looking away from the permit book as if it were a suspect, said, "Seraine Dorl."
"Sister Mirel," the healer said, as if confessing to being something slightly more. He smiled again.
Kaelen put their names in his pockets and buttoned the pockets. Tamsin had materialized like a stage direction and stood just behind him, barely not leaning into his shoulder. She mouthed Nyx with approval as if she had just discovered a new variety of raspberry.
Tamsin leaned toward Kaelen, a whisper stitched to the edge of her breath. "He's called Sister? But-"
Daran's mouth tucked at one corner. "In Stonebridge, Sister means healer. The word learned to follow the work. Scripture's got Brother for it too, if you dust the page, but folk speech got lazy. If you're mending people, you're 'Sister', beard or braid, it makes no odds to a wound."
"So it's less gendering and more job title," Tamsin, said under her breath.
Kaelen replied, "Like calling every broom a Mrs. because mothers do all the sweeping."
"Unfair to brooms and mothers both. But… yes."
Sister Mirel heard them, of course he did, and offered a small, kind nod. "Sister's the door people know to knock on," he said. "I answer to help."
"Passage through the north woods?" Daran asked, pen poised. "You want the shortest way or the one that only fools with a death wish take? We have both. We're generous."
"The bandits have been jumping caravans on the ridge road," Rowan said. "We were hired in Larksett to escort a shipment and then discover who's taking a cut and why the cut keeps being in blood as well as coin."
"The cut is blood because the ridge road breeds impatience," Daran said, filling the permit with a hand so orderly it could convince lines to straighten. "There's a tavern up there, if you'll forgive the word, a tavern made of rope and rumor. It pretends to be neutral ground. It isn't. It keeps everyone polite until someone decides politeness is an insult. You'll want to walk wide there."
Nyx grinned. "I love polite insults. They taste better than the other kind."
Seraine accepted the permit when Daran passed it, read it as if it might confess to fraud mid-sentence, and then tucked it inside her robe with a neatness that suggested pockets with bylaws. "We're leaving at first light," she said. "We'll need a farrier for a shoe and someone to sell us dried pears that don't lie about their freshness."
"You'll want Harl at the west green for the shoe," Daran said. "He hammered while still in the womb and has never improved. And Maelin at the square for pears." His eyes softened in the way that made Kaelen taller. "She will sell you pears that make other pears reconsider their lives."
"We'll visit," Mirel said. "You have a festival's smell still on the air."
"Indeed," Daran said. "And a hangover. Try not to step on it."
Nyx's gaze, bright and unembarrassed, flitted back to Kaelen. "Do you have work, Kaelen Verenth? Or are you some kind of free-range excellence?"
Kaelen, alarmed at being examined by a person who looked at knives the way bakers look at flour, managed, "I do. Wheelwright, when the bell cooperates."
"Good," Nyx said. "Honest trade. If you ever get bored of circles, find me and I'll teach you to walk in straight lines very fast while carrying a sack that isn't yours."
"He will not," Daran said, gentle like a hand on a boy's shoulder before a cliff.
"Yet," Nyx amended, smiling with mischief and no malice. "If you ever wish to borrow an adventure, Kaelen, I'm partial to lending."
Kaelen's mouth made an agreement with his heart to remain within his face. "Thank you," he said, and meant it, and also meant to never, ever do that. Probably.
They took their permit and a warning about the tavern made of rope and rumor, thanked Daran with the currency of professionals (a nod, a glance, the assumption of competence), and moved on. The square's eyes followed, then returned to the necessary business of being a town. Kaelen watched them until they were three figures and a mage. He wondered how he might become a person to whom roads lifted their heads and asked, Are you ready?
"Do not follow them," Daran said mildly without looking at Kaelen. "I can smell following."
"I'm going to Maelin," Kaelen said, who had been planning to do just that but now felt noble about it.
"Good," Daran said. "Tell her to put aside two parcels for Sister Mirel. He looks honest, and I trust priests who wear traveling dust. They don't have time to lie."
Kaelen delivered the message with the gravity of a boy carrying a loaf that must not fall. Maelin nodded, made two parcels appear as if the idea had thought itself into bread, and told Kaelen to carry one to Mrs. Kettle because the woman looked 'peaked from being pleased.' Kaelen obeyed. He returned to the workshop after third bell and found Bren in discussion with a spoke who had changed opinions while they ate. Work resumed. Kaelen held the spoke as Bren shaved it. Bren showed Kaelen where to look: not at the tool but at the shadow the tool made on the wood.
"That tells you where you are," Bren said. "Shadows are honest. People, less."
By late afternoon, Kaelen could feel his muscles rewriting syllables they hadn't used before. He let them. He learned how to sit on the bench with his back in line with his intention. He learned, to his surprise, that knocking a dowel home felt a little like a line in a song when the singer chooses exactly the right breath. He checked his work thrice without huffing aloud. He remembered to oil his gloves at Bren's bark.
When the bell said go home, Bren released him with a grunt and a nod. "Good hands," he said. "We'll get you into circles without losing you."
"Thank you," Kaelen said, which in this case meant more than it usually did. He left with shavings in his hair and satisfaction on his tongue.
The training yard tempted him the way a pond tempts a hot day. He found Tamsin already there with a bundle of practice swords and a philosophy about which ones were lucky. Garrin, the pebble juggler with the new Wind affinity and the hair that believed it was entitled to be admired, stood on one leg and stretched the other as if preparing to be an illustration in a handbook.
"You," Garrin said when he saw Kaelen, as if surprised the boy had failed to dissolve in sunlight. "Spar?"
Tamsin made a face that said: 'oh dear, but also yes.'
Kaelen shrugged in a way he hoped said: I am immune to humiliation because I had training in it as a child. "All right."
They took their places. Daran was not there; his shift had stretched long and would stretch longer because festivals breed enthusiasm and enthusiasm breeds misjudgment and misjudgment needs paperwork. The yard had two watchmen as referees, both built like pine trunks, neither inclined to cuddle.
Garrin fought with the confidence of a person recently told by reality that it would move aside if asked nicely. He attempted a flourish in the first breath purely to say that he could. Kaelen blocked it because he had seen that flourish before in a pamphlet and because Tamsin had practiced the counter with him behind the apothecary until a rat had asked them to stop.
They went back and forth for a while, wood knocking wood with the satisfying sound of arguments that do not end friendships. Kaelen was not bad. The truth of this statement lived quietly, like a cat in a sunbeam. Garrin did not like that truth. He pressed. Kaelen retreated at the right time twice, then at the wrong time once and caught a hard tap to the ribs that would be a purple coin tomorrow. He reset his breath, stepped in instead of away, and heard Tamsin's almost imperceptible mm that meant yes.
They broke, reset, and began again. People had gathered around the fence, as people will. Among them: two of the adventurers. Nyx leaned on the rail as if she had always belonged near adrenalin and splinters. Beside her, Seraine watched not Kaelen or Garrin, but the space between them.
Kaelen faltered when he saw them. He did not mean to. He had known they were in town. He had drawn portraits of them in his head while planing. He had not prepared to have them here, now, watching him attempt not to be embarrassing.
Garrin saw the falter like a hawk sees the note on a rabbit's door: 'Gone to market.' He pressed hard. Kaelen parried, too late. Garrin's blade smacked Kaelen's wrist with a kiss that would blossom into a bruise so impressive it would need to be introduced to the town council. Kaelen's practice sword flew from his hand and thunked into the fence near Nyx's arm. She didn't flinch. She caught the sword with two fingers and an expression like a teacher deciding whether to throw a chalk at a student.
"Ouch," Tamsin said on Kaelen's behalf, as Kaelen shook his hand in a dignified manner that looked like dancing. Laughter burbled at the edges of the yard and tried not to be cruel. Garrin took a step back and made a polite bow that had a stain of triumph on it.
"That will do," one of the watchmen said, stepping in with the authority of someone who had, once upon a time, seen a practice yard turn into a real one. "Good form. Enough wrists have been insulted for one afternoon."
Kaelen went to retrieve his sword from Nyx. She examined it as if evaluating a wine.
"Your grip went holidaying," she observed, handing it back hilt-first. "Everyone's does when eyes land that you didn't invite."
"I invited the eyes," Kaelen said, and then realized what he had said, and then decided to own it. "Or I knew they were around."
"Good," Nyx said. "Then the wrist will learn. If you want a trick, when you're about to swing, tell yourself you are not. It steadies the part that panics."
"I will try lying to myself," Kaelen said.
"Excellent," Nyx said. "That is most of heroism."
Seraine's gaze touched Kaelen's face again. "Your stance is less pretty than Garrin's," she said. "But it's more honest. I prefer honest."
Garrin, to his credit, didn't bristle. He looked at Seraine as if being considered by a mage was a new sensation and tried to decide whether to preen. He settled for flipping his hair and then pretending he hadn't.
"Again tomorrow," Garrin said to Kaelen, respectful now, little triumph washed into a new alloy. "At first bell. We'll do it before the yard fills with people who pretend they don't watch."
Kaelen's mouth said, "Yes," before his wisdom had time to restrain it. Tamsin's shoulder bumped his in congratulations and threat both.
"Don't let him pick your weapon," Nyx murmured in a voice that slid past Kaelen's ear like a smile. "Choose the one you didn't use today."
"It will be a stick," Kaelen said.
"The best of weapons," Nyx said cheerfully. "No one writes songs about them, which keeps them humble."
The adventurers wandered off the way clouds do: present until you look away, gone when you look back. Tamsin and Kaelen thumped each other lightly, then heavier, then remembered that was what had gotten them bruises in the first place and stopped. On the way home, they detoured past the square to listen to a fiddler who had found a tune he was determined to teach to people who did not want to learn. Then they surrendered to the kitchen's gravity.
Maelin had a pot on the stove that could make a street behave. She listened to Kaelen's report of the day with a face that tried very hard not to beam because the boy in front of her was fourteen and could be startled by maternal joy. She failed and beamed anyway.
"Apprenticed properly," she said softly after he described Bren's rules as if they were commandments. "Good. Your father will say you have chosen a life of splinters. He will be right and also outvoted because you will be too satisfied to notice."
Daran came in when the street had darkened and the lamps were trying to act modest. He brought with him the smell of outdoors and the paper taste of forms filled. He listened to the report of adventurers, nodding at the right places, and said something that made Kaelen love him more: "Rowan held his shoulders like someone who understands the weight of what he cannot hold. I like him."
"Sister Mirel bought pears," Maelin said. "He used temple copper and temple sincerity. They both fit my box exactly."
"Nyx threatened to train me as a thief," Kaelen said, putting alarm into the sentence like pepper.
Daran chewed, swallowed, and said mildly, "Then she has good taste. But if she tries to take you, I will remind her that knives need sharpening and children need steady hands more than adventures need extra lungs."
Supper included vegetables that had been frightened into tenderness and a loaf that Kaelen had helped shape before dawn with Maelin. They ate the crusts and let the center wait for those who wanted to argue with softness. After, Daran set his feet on a stool with the dignity of a king abdicating and asked Kaelen to fetch the little tin of oil. Kaelen oiled Daran's boots with solemnity, working in small circles, listening to his father talk about a mule that had decided it had been employed without consent and had to be coaxed with honeyed oats and a story about fairness.
"First bell?" Daran asked when Kaelen mentioned Garrin's challenge as casually as he could manage without leaving the house. "You want me there?"
Kaelen thought about that and surprised himself by saying, "Yes. But stand where I can't see you until I need to."
"I can do that," Daran said. "I have made a career of being seen only by those who should."
Later, when the house had settled into the comforts of evening, the scratch of Maelin's quill as she adjusted her list of expenses for the week, Daran's quiet muttering over a loose strap that had decided to interpret professionalism as optional, Kaelen slipped out with Tamsin to go stand near the inn because that is what young people do when the world presents strangers who know different roads. The Blue Heron stood near the river like a friendly liar. Music tried to escape its door and got caught in the doorway's hair.
They didn't go in. They were not turned away; children of Stonebridge were welcome at doors and not beyond them. They leaned against the wall within hearing range of the kind of conversation that carries without permission. Nyx's laughter, quicksilver with a low rasp. Rowan's voice, telling the tale of a village in the hills where they had once bartered a monster out of a barn using only bread and a lie about the god of cows. Seraine's precise tone instructing the innkeeper that if he wished to sell her that bottle he should first remove the mouse. Mirel's softer words, a prayer for someone in a room upstairs whose cough spoke of winters that had not been kind.
Tamsin exhaled a satisfied little sigh. "I want to be friends with all of them and also tell them what to do."
"They already know what to do," Kaelen said, and yet inside him a small bright coin spun and refused to land.
They were almost brave enough to leave when a waiter with a towel like a banner came out to dump slops into a bucket and caught them in his periphery. "Shoo," he said, but he said it in the tone a man uses to say stay as long as you like so long as you don't make me admit it. "Or come in and carry plates; those are the options."
Kaelen straightened, tempted, a chance to pass near big stories with his hands full of plates, but Tamsin tugged his sleeve. "First bell," she reminded. "You need your wrists tomorrow, not stewed in gravy."
They walked back through streets that had put on their night expressions: shorter sentences, deeper shadows, the lamplighter's steady presence. At the fountain, someone had left a ribbon tied in a hope-knot. Tamsin untied it and retied it lower where someone shorter could read the wish in it. They crossed the square. The lantern canopy, unlit, hung like a web that had done its work and now napped. The hawk on the fountain looked less like it would bite children if they climbed it and more like it wanted to be read a bedtime story about fish.
At home, Kaelen climbed the stairs slowly because his muscles had filed a complaint and had to be acknowledged. He washed splinters from his hands and found satisfaction in the sting of salt; it proved he'd done something that wasn't pretending. He lay on his bed and practiced the grip Nyx had suggested: tell yourself you are not going to swing when you are. His fingers found a less excited way to be. He practiced standing with honesty rather than prettiness. The room tried to join in by offering the bed as a weapon. He declined.
Sleep arrived like a cat, when Kaelen had stopped pretending to want it and sat still. He dreamed he was a spoke inserted into a wheel, and the wheel rolled and somehow he felt the road and was the road and also someone walking on the road, and it should have been confusing, but wasn't. He woke before first bell with his ribs complaining about Garrin and his heart rehearsing a steadier beat.
The yard at first bell was mist and breath and the kind of humility only morning enforces. The watchmen were earlier than their patience. A few other boys had come because public embarrassment tastes best fresh. Tamsin stood on the fence like a bird planning to make remarks. Daran leaned in the shadow of the gate and watched a sparrow with such attention the sparrow seemed to feel complimented.
Garrin arrived with his pebble-juggler's grin tempered into something more companionable. He nodded to Kaelen and did not try to show off with a flourish; he warmed his wrists and looked at Kaelen's face to see if the boy was ready instead of at his hands to see if he could break them.
Kaelen chose a different practice sword than yesterday. A shorter one, heavier in the hilt, the kind that forces your hand to do its job. He and Garrin saluted each other because that is what makes a fight not be a fight. The watchman grunted go in a manner that would have embarrassed any bell that attempted to ring in its presence.
They moved. Kaelen remembered to lie to himself at the last moment, and his swing began smaller and truer. Garrin parried and didn't look surprised, which made Kaelen like him more. The dance went on, careful and then less careful. Kaelen found a rhythm and, more important, found his breath. Tamsin's soft mm came at the right intervals, like punctuation. Daran's attention, felt from the corner, settled on Kaelen like the weight of a cloak only when he needed it, and otherwise let the boy be bare.
"They're evenly matched," someone said behind the fence, which might have been Nyx or might have been Kaelen's ego trying on her voice. He did not turn to check. He kept his eyes on Garrin's shoulder, where honest fighters telegraph the future. He stepped when the shoulder spoke and avoided when it lied. He took two hits he could not avoid and did not resent them. He gave one back that surprised them both.
The bout ended not with a victory but with mutual laughter when both lunged and somehow both tripped over the same invisible root and wound up on their backs staring at the small round heaven of the yard. The watchman declared a tie in the tone of a man who didn't mind not having to break up a contest people would argue about for days. Garrin rolled to his knees, offered a hand. Kaelen took it and let himself be hauled up, ribs complaining obligingly.
"Again," Garrin said, panting through a grin. "Not today. After your hands forgive you."
"After your hair forgives you for sweating," Kaelen said, and Garrin laughed properly, the rivalry sliding into the drawer labeled People I Can Stand.
Nyx was there on the fence when Kaelen finally dared look for her, sitting with feet on a rail, eyes bright as if she had been given a particularly good pastry.
"Better," she said simply. "Honest has teeth if you feed it."
"Thank you," Kaelen said, and tried to look as if he received advice from rogues each day with grace and not like he would write this down later and keep it under his pillow.
Seraine had come too; she held a slice of bread as if bread had apologized to her for being what it was. "Balance," she said to no one in particular. "He doesn't try to win every moment. He tries to not lose himself. That's rarer than it should be."
Mirel jogged past, late for something charitable, and clapped Kaelen once on the shoulder without pretending to know him well enough to do it twice. "Eat," he advised. "Then carry something for someone else. Pride burns sugar."
Kaelen took that to mean: 'go help Bren.' He went home to swallow porridge with Maelin and receive Daran's hand on the back of his neck with the weight of approval and a warning to oil his wrists, and then he returned to the wheelwright's with the morning growing up around him like a promise being kept.
The adventurers left at first light plus a kindness. They stopped at Maelin's stall for the pears Mirel had promised to buy and for a small loaf Nyx had not promised but needed anyway because rogues burn through their fuel pretending not to care. Rowan tipped two fingers to Daran over the heads of children and the gesture left something like respect in the air. Seraine bought a stick of charcoal from the thread-seller because someone else had taken the last decent quill and she intended to write the world into behaving anyway.
Kaelen watched them go and did not follow, which felt like maturation and failure at once. He returned to the shop and learned spokes and circles and why they complain at each other.
Bren said, "You see? That's it," exactly once, and that was a holiday inside Kaelen's chest. He measured himself when his pride began to hum and adjusted without being told. He held a spoke steady and felt the wheel become one thing when before it had been three.
The day continued, indifferent and generous. Stonebridge had chores and opinions. The bridge held. The Lark carried a barge as if it had always intended to be a barge's friend. Sister Anwen argued with a man about whether public benches should be narrower or people should simply learn to share, and won as she always did by declaring a holiday for both benches and people and then declaring the argument over. Mrs. Kettle's cat allowed exactly one child to pet it and then bit the second because fairness has limits. And Kaelen, who had expected, yesterday, that a day like today would pass without being seen by anyone but himself, found that it had been seen by many, each in their way, and approved in small registrations: a nod from Bren, a grunt from a watchman who liked the way he took a hit, a look from Daran that made the air in the room feel competent, a grin from Tamsin that said she would set the whole town on fire for him and then make an apology cookie in the shape of the town.
By the time twilight curled its hand around the square and the lamplighter set about whispering to glass, Kaelen's shoulders had a new opinion about his body, his wrists had learned to forgive, and his steady hands, which Sister Anwen had named yesterday so he could keep them, had held a spoke, a sword, a broom, a pen, and a loaf, and none of those things had needed to be rescued by a grown-up. This counted.