Three summers later.
Kaius learned patience like a seed learns the tilt of sunlight — slow, quiet, inevitable.
Life measured itself in small things: Marta's broom on the dirt floor, the scrape of a spoon on wood, the bell that called the market. Those sounds stitched into a map he could read blindfolded.
His body fit a child of three summers. He could run, climb the keeper's steps, and stop at the road's edge when a coach thundered past. His mind did not fit the body. Inside him, arguments ran long and old; his mouth only managed crumbs of speech.
Marta moved around him with hands that fixed things — soups and seams and the small hurts that made a village. She patched his knees, tied his hair, scolded him for chasing the smith's dog. Her care was practical and steady; it kept him breathing in a world that had never owed him mercy.
The crescent on his palm was still there. In sunlight it warmed like a trapped ember; in shade it was a cool, secret weight. Marta began to wind a thin strip of cloth around his wrist some mornings, a small anchor against the oddness she could not name.
At the market a traveling crafter spread trinkets stamped with glyphs. Kaius reached for a carved bead and felt the crescent tug — soft as a moth's wing. His palm twitched and the bead rolled under his sandal. The crafter's eyes sharpened at the motion: interest, calculation. Marta moved before he could be questioned, scooping him away under an excuse about porridge and errands.
A lamb got wedged between broken slats after a storm. A neighbor's boy screamed like the sky had been split. Kaius felt that cry as if it were a chord struck inside his ribs and, without thinking, put his hand to the creature's flank. The air tightened for one breath; the lamb slid out as if the wood had forgotten how to catch. People praised luck and prayer. Marta's face and the neighbor's nod carried another word: they had seen something.
Those moments were not miracles so much as answers to tests he could not name. Potential noted. Danger flagged. Discretion required. Curiosity cost attention, and attention in a small place meant questions a child ought not answer.
Children played behind Marta's house — raspberries, rough games, shouted rules. Kaius knew how to be "it," where to hide, when to sprint. He played sometimes, but never with the abandon of his peers. Forgetting, he had learned, was a costly thing; the adult mind inside him banked every moment like a careful ledger.
When he could steal a minute, he sat in the orchard hollow with knees pulled close and let the old knowledge unfurl. Rune orders and forged-steel flaws recited themselves in his head without sound. He traced invisible patterns in the air with fingers too small for the shapes he imagined. The habit comforted him like a book you've read so often the spine knows your thumb.
He loved small things: the smell of rain, the smith's rhythmic hammer, the hollow quiet of market night when lanterns swung and the stars came too close. In those hours the ledger of his previous life felt like a book he could close for a while.
Stories about him began to circulate. Marta laughed them off: "He eats more questions than porridge." The grocer called the crescent fate, the priest softened it into a test of charity. People chose versions that suited their comfort. Kaius listened and kept the ones that left room — room for failure, for mercy, for the rough edges of living.
One noon the market bell tolled and a woman crossed the square with a basket of figs. She moved like someone who weighed value with one glance and did not waste hands on idle talk. Children clustered at her feet. A small shadow separated from them and walked straight toward Kaius.
The girl stopped at the green's edge and cocked her head like a sparrow. She was smaller than Kaius by a hair, hair tightly braided and tied with a strip of blue. She carried a stick like a sceptre and looked at him with eyes that wanted facts rather than stories.
"You're the marked one," she said, flat as bread.
There was no mocking in her voice. No awe. Just an observation. Relief washed a hollow open in him — the odd, sharp comfort of being named instead of explained away.
He could not reply with speech yet. The muscles for words were still catching up to the mind. So he turned his hand and let the crescent blink in the sun, as if offering what he could not yet say.
The girl's smile widened. "I'm Aurelia," she said, like a name that finished a sentence. She pointed to the church's shadow. "Do you want to see the church cat?" she added, as if the offer were the most ordinary thing in the world.
It was ordinary. It was also an invitation that cost nothing and everything. Kaius followed because Marta called that porridge would spoil, because curiosity pulled, because following another child felt safer than following anything older.
They went down a lane where the market's noise thinned. Aurelia walked with a quick, easy certainty. She jabbed the stick at a puddle when it looked like fun and laughed at the splash. Kaius found himself laughing too, a sound like a rusted lock easing. There was no heavy talk about marks between them; the world narrowed to a cat, a puddle, a shared joke.
Aurelia's questions were simple and sharp. Where did you sleep? What do you like to eat? What scares you? She did not pry; she catalogued. Kaius answered with gestures and a few clumsy words learned from the widow's patient teaching. Her eyes took him in without pity. It was the first time someone treated the strangeness in him like a thing that might be interesting rather than dangerous.
They found the cat beneath the church's lee — fat, sullen, and perfectly unconcerned with destiny. Aurelia pressed a fig into its whiskered mouth and the animal purred as if nothing in the world could shift it. Kaius watched the cat and felt how small moments could be armor: warmth, a living weight against cold.
When they came back, Marta stood at the door with a drying cloth and a face that carried the tidy worry of those who feed other people's children. She looked at Aurelia, then at Kaius, and said nothing. Her silence held more than caution; it held the calculation of a woman who knew the scale of kindness. Kaius felt it like a ledger sliding closed.
Aurelia waved as if this were only the beginning. "See you," she said, like a promise you could fold into a sleeve.
Kaius watched her go and felt, for the first time since waking, a small, stubborn warmth that had nothing to do with the crescent. It was the trivial, dangerous sweetness of wanting a person to return.
He went to bed that night with a strip of cloth around his wrist and the market's smells still on his skin. The crescent hummed like a small, patient thing, neither proclamation nor burden. He thought of the bead that had rolled at his foot, of the lamb that had slid free, and the girl who treated the mark like a fact.
I will not waste this life, he thought, not as a vow for the ages but like a coin pressed in a pocket. For now it could be that and nothing more. Outside, rain began again, steady as a hand turning a page.