The roof leaked in the same spot as usual.
Riel had patched it twice. The second time he'd been thorough about it, climbed up there with proper nails and took his time, came down feeling like he'd actually solved something. That was in the spring. By the following winter the plank had warped again and he'd put the metal bowl back on the floor and that was the end of his optimism about it. The bowl worked. He'd made his peace.
He sat on the floor watching it fill. The fire had burned down to almost nothing, just a faint orange glow at the center of the coals, not enough to push back the cold so much as remind it the house was occupied. Outside the sky was still dark, the particular dark of early morning before the sun cleared the hill, and the room had that deep stillness that came before the village started making noise.
The smell was the first thing strangers noticed. Bitter, medicinal, the herbs he brewed into tea twice a day, soaked so thoroughly into the walls over the years that the house carried it even on days they didn't make any. Riel had stopped noticing it a long time ago. He noticed that he'd stopped noticing it, sometimes, in the quiet hours. It was a small thing. It bothered him more than it should have.
In the corner, Cilia stirred.
She slept on her side with one arm dangling off the bedroll in a way that looked like something a person fell into rather than chose. Her hair was a compromise between their father's brown and their mother's auburn that had never settled on either, and her eyes when she opened them were their mother's blue. She sold flowers at the road crossing in the afternoons for whatever people would pay, which was usually not much, and she kept track of what they made and what they owed and what they needed with a precision that Riel found quietly humbling. Of the four people who lived in this house, she was the most functional by a margin that said unflattering things about the other three.
She opened one eye and aimed it at him.
"You're already up," she said, still groggy.
"Good morning to you too."
She squinted. "Did you sleep?"
"I slept enough."
"Define "enough" for me."
"Enough to wake up earlier than you," Riel yawned.
She sat up slowly, hair going in several directions, and looked at him with the expression she'd developed sometime around age eight that communicated she found him deeply exhausting and had accepted this as a permanent feature of her life. She pulled her hair back with a cord and nodded toward the table. "There's bread under the cloth. The lady from down the road brought it yesterday."
"Which lady?"
"The one whose shutter you fixed last week."
"It was nothing really."
"She doesn't know that. She thinks you're very dedicated." Cilia's mocked in an unimpressed tone. "She made good bread for you."
He found it under the cloth. It was good bread, still soft in the middle. He ate half standing at the table and wrapped the rest in the cloth for later, and he didn't say anything about it because there wasn't anything to say. People in this village had been handing him things for years, bread and apples and wrapped parcels of dried meat, always with some explanation that made it about something other than what it actually was. He'd stopped pointing out the gap between the explanation and the reality. It didn't change the reality and it made both parties a bit uncomfortable.
A cough announced itself from the other room.
It started low and built quickly, the wet dragging kind, the kind that didn't want to stop once it had momentum. It went on and on and then it stopped, and the breathing that came after it was fast and shallow and had a thickness underneath it that hadn't been there a year ago. A sound that had been getting worse by such small degrees that you could almost convince yourself each morning it was the same as the morning before.
Almost.
Neither of them spoke. Cilia had gone still, both hands flat on her lap, her face doing the deliberate thing it did when she was deciding not to let her expression show what it was doing.
"I'll check on her before I go," Riel said.
"Okay."
He pushed through the curtain.
The other room was colder, despite attempts to gain the opposite effect. The window never shut completely and the morning came through the gap without apology. His mother lay on the narrow cot with one hand pressed loosely over her mouth and the rag on the stool beside her showing a dark stain. When she heard him come in she shifted and arranged herself into the look of someone who had just been resting, which was a thing she did every morning and which neither of them ever acknowledged as the performance it was.
There Faria lay. She had a face that the village still found occasion to mention when it thought Riel wasn't listening despite her current state. The sickness had been taking things from her for 5 years now. Weight, color and the ease she used to move with, and what it had put there instead were shadows under her eyes that didn't leave and a stillness that came from managing constant pain rather than being free of it. She was still his mother. She was also, in a way that he had never figured out, less than she had been.
He picked up the cup from the stool and held it out.
"Drink."
She took it. Her hands trembled slightly around the clay. He watched this happen and kept his face at nothing.
"You're up early," she said. Her voice was rough from the cough.
"You're coughing blood again."
"It's nothing."
"It wasn't this bad a year ago."
"It's just the winter cold that makes it look worse than it is," She tried for a smile.
He kept the cup in front of her until she'd finished it. Then he took it back and set it on the stool and drew her blanket higher on her shoulders. It slipped too easily. She'd lost more weight. His jaw tightened and he made sure she didn't see it.
"You should rest more," she said.
"Stop talking," he replied.
She laughed, soft and tired, and then coughed again, and he didn't move.
"Did you sleep enough?" she asked.
Riel sighed, "You're asking me too?"
"Riel."
When she said his name like that he knew what was coming and he steeled himself for it anyway, because knowing something was coming and being ready for it turned out to be different things.
He looked at her. Properly. The way he rationed himself to do, not often, because it cost him every time. There was something in her face that had been building for a while, some weight that had stopped trying to stay hidden. It wasn't only exhaustion. It was something that lived near guilt but wasn't quite that either. Something that understood exactly what it had cost him to be her son in this house, and couldn't find a way to say that, and was sorry about it in a way that words were too small for.
His feelings about his mother were not simple. They never had been. He loved her in the deep automatic way you loved someone who was woven into every earliest thing you remembered, and he was also angry at her in the slow steady way you were angry at something you couldn't fix and couldn't leave alone. She was kind and she was soft and she had a gift for seeing into the center of things. Those were the qualities that made him love and cherish her. They were also the same qualities that made him slowly begin to hate her.
"You don't have to carry everything," she said quietly.
He held her gaze for a moment. Then he looked away.
"Someone has to, so I'm just carrying what I can," he said.
She didn't answer. Maybe because there wasn't anything to say to it, or maybe because answering it would have required her to say something about why the someone had ended up being him, and neither of them was ready for that conversation.
He fixed her blanket one more time and stood.
"Riel?" Cilia's voice came through the curtain. "Don't forget the coat."
He stopped. "It's not even that cold but alright."
"It's cold if I say it's cold."
"You're being bossy today,"
"I heard that," she grumbled.
"I know, that's why I said it."
He looked back at his mother. She had an expression on her face that was soft and private and not quite a smile. The shape of something she hadn't figured out how to say yet. She didn't say it. She closed her eyes instead.
He took the coat.
Outside, Cael was beginning the slow process of waking up.
The village sat in a low basin at the western edge of Draveth Province and was, by most official measurements, a [Lowest-Priority] area. About four hundred people. A supply cart that came twice a month. Roads that were passable in good weather and a problem in bad. The kind of place that existed on maps as a small mark. If it existed at all then it was noted without comment and moved past. Riel had lived here his entire fourteen years and had arrived at a clear-eyed understanding of exactly what the place was. Despite its Priority Rank the people of the village and the village itself always tried its best to be a place someone could survive until the next day.
The sky was the flat gray of the beginning of winter morning that hadn't committed to anything yet. The path from their house was packed mud, frozen overnight and thawed at the surface, soft over hard, and it grabbed at his boots with every step. Chimney smoke was starting up from a few houses to the south. Someone's dog watched him pass from a doorstep without much interest.
He crossed the square, where the old vendor at the produce stall was lifting his shutters and spotted Riel with the timing of someone who had been watching for him.
"Oi."
An apple came at him. He caught it without breaking stride.
"Gonna rot anyway," the man said, not looking at him.
"I find it hard to believe you find a rotten apple everyday old man."
"Still true every time."
Riel turned the apple over in his hand. There was a soft spot on one side. The rest was fine. He pocketed it and kept walking.
Having to do freelance work just to put bread on the table Riel eventually picked up a few skills in his young age. Whether it be wood working, carpentry or farming he did whatever he could and made it work. Most times it did and a few times it didn't. While his skillet may be expansive it's still mediocre in comparison to anyone truly working the field.
He had three jobs today. He went to them in order.
The first was a fence on the south road. Two posts had rotted through at the base, which was the real problem, not just the collapse but the ground that had allowed it. He dug them out in half-frozen earth with a borrowed spade, the kind of work that made his shoulders burn after the first twenty minutes, and while he worked the farmer who owned the fence stood nearby and talked. About the soil. About the wood. About the season and the general decline of things and several opinions about cart traffic on the south road that Riel had not asked for. He didn't ask for them and he didn't stop them, because it cost nothing to be the person an old man talked at for an hour, and he'd learned early that the things people gave you afterward were usually proportional to how much you'd let them feel heard.
The fence took the better part of the morning. When it was standing again the farmer paid him and held out a cloth parcel that smelled like bread and hard cheese.
"My wife made extra," he said.
"Tell her I said thanks."
The man was quiet for a moment. "How's your mother?"
Riel tucked the parcel into his pouch. "Same."
"Shame," the farmer said, and the word carried the specific weight of someone who meant more than it and had decided that this was as much as he was going to say.
Riel moved on.
The second job was a cart axle split near the left wheel.
The owner was a passing low rank merchant of some sorts. He offered Riel compensation for fixing the wheel then and there, however it being late in the evening was too dangerous a risk. Being on the edge of the village with the chance of Defiled beasts or even bandits around is just signing your life away. As such the merchant had no choice but to stay in the village and have Riel fix it the next day, since having an actual expert do it would cost more than the nights stay and Riels compensation all together.
The merchant had strong opinions about how long it was taking Riel to arrive, which he expressed through body language rather than words, and then watched the repair with folded arms and the energy of someone who had minimal hope. When the wheel held after a hard test kick his expression went through several adjustments before landing on something that was technically neutral.
"That will be about four silver," Riel said while wiping sweat from his forehead.
"I'm keeping two silver for the wait," the owner said with a smug grin.
"I was only ten minutes late."
"Time is money boy, you'll learn that when you're as experienced as I am. So it's two silvers," he persisted.
"Fine, fine. That's reasonable."
"Good, you're gonna make it in big places kid."
The merchant handed Riel two silvers with a sly smirk on his face. He soon grabbed his cart and towed away, obviously satisfied after he got his time's worth. Unbeknownst to him however he lost both. In Riel's hand was a decent sized pouch filled with cuts of aged dried meat and different herbal spices.
"I'm surprised he didn't notice this. I guess it's true that greed blinds people," Riel said while holding up the pouch. "Looks like meat is on the menu tonight, Cilia will be happy."
He tied the pouch to his side and continued on with his day.
The third took him out to the eastern tree line. A hunter with a full trap line needed an extra pair of hands to carry the catch back and keep track of their movements. Two rabbits and a fox. Usually Riel wouldn't go this far out the village due to the threat of Defiled Beasts. However, the man offered 10 silver so he really found it hard to refuse. They moved through the scrub without talking, which suited Riel fine. The forest was quiet in the way that forests got in winter, not peaceful exactly, just emptied of the things that made noise in warmer months. At the end of it the hunter held out a strip of cured fur without explanation.
"For your sister," he said.
"She'll like it," Riel said, and put it away.
He started back toward the village in the late afternoon with his pockets full and his hands cold and a result for the day that was better than it could have been. Enough for the week's herbs and something past that. He'd stop at Deacon Nald's on the way home. The man would apologize for the cost with genuine sincerity and charge it anyway, because that was the situation Nald operated inside of, a church that ranked its villages by priority, kept its best healers at its highest-priority posts, and sent people like Nald to places like Cael with limited resources and told them to do what they could. Nald did what he could. He was kind and he was careful and his ceiling was lower than what Riel's mother needed. That wasn't Nald's fault. The system was a different question, one Riel had turned over many times without arriving anywhere useful.
He came back through the southern path and cut toward the fork where the village trail split from the forest road.
That was where he found the man.
He was standing at the fork with a folded map and the expression of someone who had extended considerable trust to that map and was now reassessing the relationship. Well-dressed, even under the road dust — the kind of clothes that were plain by design but expensive by quality, made to last rather than to impress. Late twenties. Brown hair roughed up from travel. He had the stillness of someone trained to project composure, and underneath that, as clearly as anything, the posture of a man who had no idea where he was.
Riel stopped a few paces away.
"You look lost,"he said. "I recommend you go to the village before dark unless you don't value your life all that much.
The man looked up. His expression pulled itself together quickly. "I'm not lost."
"You're standing at a fork in the road reading a map like it owes you money."
A pause. "I may have taken a wrong turn somewhere past the last town."
"Which town?"
"Verath."
Riel looked at him. Verath was almost two hours east on horseback, in good conditions. "How do you get from Verath to here without knowing where you are?"
"I had a guide," the man said, with the tone of someone conducting a private review of a decision they'd already made and finding the results unflattering. "I let him go to Verath. I didn't want to draw attention coming into the area. I was told the roads out here were straightforward."
"Well they're not."
"I'm aware of that now."
Riel tilted his head back the way he'd come. "Cael Village is that direction. There's a stone marker at the north end, the road past it takes you back to the provincial route."
"Thank you," the man said.
He said it the way a person said it when the transaction was over. Riel nodded and turned to go.
Then he heard the man stop breathing.
Not literally. But there was a change, a shift in the quality of the silence behind him, the kind that happened when someone's attention snapped onto something with full force and everything else fell away. Riel turned back around.
The man was looking at his chest. Not obviously nor with intent to stare— it was controlled, a second or less, but it was there. His eyes came back up and found Riel's and something in them had changed. The composure was still in place. Behind it, something else had lit up.
Riel looked down.
He'd been working since early morning and his collar had pulled open over the course of the day. The mark sat just below his clavicle, exposed — a shape pressed into his skin in a faint gold almost like a tattoo. It was something between a cloud and a sigil.
He pulled the collar closed.
"Quit staring, it's creepy," Riel withdrew.
"I'm sorry," The man apologized, "But could you please tell me the origin of that mark."
Riel looked at the man strangely. He was definitely weird. He's wearing expensive clothes and carries himself like someone who has a wealthy background yet he's in this area that's far away from any City. He's definitely trouble, is what Riel thought but yet he felt compelled to answer the strange man's question.
"It's a Birthmark," he said.
The man had gone very still. "As in, you've had it since birth?"
"That's generally how birthmarks work, yes."
Something had changed in the air. Riel felt it before he could name it — the specific quality of quiet that appeared when something shifted and the world hadn't caught up yet, the held-breath feeling of a moment that had turned into something other than what it started as.
"Strange looking, I know," Riel said.
He wasn't entirely sure why he was still talking and that turned out not to be enough reason to stop. "Sometimes at night I think it glows. Probably just the light."
The man's expression didn't move.
"My sister once thought it was one of those blessings that grants people special abilities," Riel added. "Maybe I'm secretly favored by Gaia and just nobody sent the letter."
He meant it as a joke. He was already half-smiling.
Then the man bowed.
Not an inclination nor just respectful nod. A full bow, the kind that went deep and meant something, the kind that wasn't an offer but a rendering.
Riel stopped moving entirely.
When the man spoke his voice had shed every conversational layer. What was underneath was formal and unhurried and weighed something.
"Please forgive my incompetence," he said, head lowered. "I greet His Royal Grace. The Twelfth Heir to the Throne of Gaia."
The road was quiet.
The wind had gone still.
Then, after a long moment that didn't seem to belong to any normal measure of time, a single word came out of Riel.
"What?"