The manor had eleven rooms he could open and one he couldn't.
Tarev spent the morning finding this out methodically, starting from his bedroom and working outward the way you survey a site — not looking for anything specific, just building a picture. Every door. Every window. Every place where the structure was doing something it wasn't designed to do.
The results were not encouraging.
The kitchen ceiling had a soft spot above the east wall that would need addressing before the next heavy rain. The study had a window frame so warped it no longer met the sill, which explained why the room was ten degrees colder than everywhere else and probably explained the mold on the books inside. The sitting room was structurally sound and entirely depressing, full of furniture draped in cloth the color of old teeth.
He lifted one sheet, looked at the chair beneath, put the sheet back.
Some things were better left covered.
The upstairs rooms were worse. Two of the three guest bedrooms had water damage severe enough to make the floors uncertain — he tested each one with his weight near the door before committing to a full step. The third was fine, which he noted in the margin of the estate record he'd repurposed as scratch paper. He was building a list. Not a plan yet, just a list. You couldn't make a plan until you knew what you were working with.
He was at the end of the east corridor when he reached the last door.
Ordinary latch. Ordinary frame. He pressed the handle and pushed, the way he'd pushed every other door that morning.
It didn't move.
He tried again, more carefully this time — not forcing it, just feeling for where it was catching. The latch was moving. There was no lock he could see, no key slot, no bolt. The door simply declined to open, with the absolute indifference of something that had decided.
He stood there for a moment.
Then he added it to the list, noted investigate, and went downstairs for lunch.
Veth had made soup again.
It was thin and tasted primarily of salt, with suggestions of vegetable somewhere in the middle distance. He ate all of it because he was eight and his body had strong opinions about food regardless of quality.
"What's in the east corridor room?" he asked.
Veth's spoon paused over the pot. Just briefly, barely a hesitation, and then she resumed stirring. "Your mother's things."
He waited for more. None came.
"Why won't the door open?"
"It won't open for me either," she said, which was not an answer to the question he'd asked. She set a bowl down in front of him with the finality of someone closing a topic.
He ate his soup.
He had learned, in another life and this one both, that there were people who could be pushed into giving information and people who couldn't, and the difference had nothing to do with stubbornness. Veth wasn't protecting a secret. She was protecting something she wasn't sure he was ready for, which was a different thing entirely. Pushing wouldn't open that door any faster than it had opened the one upstairs.
"How long have you worked here?" he asked instead.
"Thirty-one years."
"Since before I was born."
"Since before your father was married." She sat down across from him with her own bowl, which she seemed to eat more out of duty than appetite. "Since the house was different."
"Different how?"
She considered him over her spoon. It was a long, deliberate look — the kind that was taking a measurement rather than just looking. "Louder," she said finally. "Your mother kept the windows open. Said the fog wasn't as bad as people made it sound."
It was the first time she'd mentioned his mother voluntarily.
He didn't react to it, because reacting would make her close back up. He just nodded as if this were ordinary information and spooned up the last of his soup.
"Was she right?" he asked. "About the fog?"
Veth was quiet for a moment. "About some things."
He found his father awake in the early afternoon, which was the closest thing to a surprise the day had offered.
Aldric Morthis was sitting at the kitchen table with no jug in sight, which was notable, eating bread and looking at the table's grain with the focused attention of a man trying very hard to be present. He was broader than Tarev had registered from the corner of the bedroom — not soft, under the general disarray of him. Someone who had used his body once and stopped bothering.
He looked up when Tarev came in.
"You were going through the rooms," he said.
"Yes."
Aldric nodded slowly. He didn't ask why. "What did you find?"
"The upstairs guest rooms need the floors checked before anyone uses them. The study window needs replacing or at least sealing. The kitchen has a soft spot in the ceiling above the east wall." He paused. "The beam in my room has a crack that wants attention within the next few years."
His father looked at him steadily. There was something working in his expression — not quite guilt, not quite grief, something flatter than either. "Your mother used to do that."
"Do what?"
"Walk through rooms and come back with a list."
Tarev said nothing.
"She would have fixed all of it by now." Aldric picked up his bread, looked at it, put it back down. "I was going to."
"I know," Tarev said, which was a small lie of the useful kind. "I can start on some of it."
His father looked at him for a long moment — long enough that Tarev had time to wonder if he'd said the wrong thing — and then simply nodded. Not permission, exactly. More like the removal of an objection.
"The toolshed is unlocked," Aldric said. "Second shelf from the bottom. Don't use the red-handled mallet. It's cracked."
He went back to looking at the table.
Tarev took the bread that Aldric clearly wasn't eating, got himself a third bowl of soup without asking, and sat down across from him. They ate together in a silence that was not quite comfortable and not quite uncomfortable. Outside, the fog continued its usual activity of being present and grey.
He spent the last hour of daylight in the toolshed.
It was in better shape than most of the manor, which told him something about what Aldric had found easier to care for when he was still caring for things. The tools were old but maintained — handles sanded, blades oiled. Someone had spent real time in here. The cracked mallet was on the second shelf as stated, its handle split cleanly near the head, clearly visible. He left it where it was.
He found a notebook at the back of the shelf. Blank, slightly water-warped, but intact. He took it.
Back in his room, by the grey light of the window, he transferred everything from the estate record scraps into the notebook properly. Twelve items, ordered by urgency, with a rough note on what each one would require. Time, materials, difficulty. He didn't know what everything would cost because he didn't know what anything cost in this village yet. That was a gap in the data. He wrote prices — Graysmouth as item thirteen and added a question mark.
He also wrote, on the last page where it wouldn't get in the way, a second list.
Questions.
1. The locked room — what mechanism, why only her things
2. What was the Hollow War
3. The map symbol — settlement in the deep marsh, pre-war, no current record
4. Why is the marsh quiet
He looked at the fourth item for a while.
It wasn't the kind of question that led anywhere immediately useful. It was the kind that sat at the edge of your thinking and waited. He had met marshes before, in plans and surveys if not in person, and they were ecosystems full of noise — frogs and insects and birds and the general wet commerce of things eating each other.
This marsh had fog and silence and a quality he couldn't name yet. The feeling of a room after someone has just left it.
He wrote underneath: three years — Veth said father got worse three years ago. Note.
Then he closed the notebook and put it under his mattress, because he was eight years old and that was still where you put things you wanted to keep private, regardless of what you remembered about being thirty-one.
The ceiling beam kept its crack without comment.
Outside, the fog came in with the dark.