[ Marten ]
The table in the corner of the yard had six chairs, one wobble, and a reputation.
Dren had stolen the chairs over two weeks. Garrett had built the table from supply crate wood and nails and what Dren called "character" and Garrett called "a structural problem I'll fix when I have time, which is never." The wobble was in the front left leg and had become, over five months of evenings, so familiar that we compensated for it unconsciously — everyone leaned slightly right, as if the table's imperfection had become part of our collective posture.
The reputation was simpler. The misfits' table. Dren's name. The rowdy bastard prince and his collection of broken toys — that was someone else's name, less kind, accurate enough that we'd stolen it and worn it like a badge.
Tonight: Dren, Garrett, Sera, Kael, Torvald, me. Full table. The sky doing the red thing. The desert cooling from lethal to merely unpleasant.
Dren had a bottle. Source: unclear. Contents: debatable. He poured without asking, because Dren's hospitality operated on an opt-out basis and nobody had ever successfully opted out.
"Question," he said. He always started with a question. "If you could be anywhere right now—"
"Bed," Torvald said.
"You always say bed."
"Because bed is always the answer. Bed is the answer to every question. 'Where should we go?' Bed. 'What's the meaning of life?' Bed. 'How do we solve the border crisis?' BED."
"The border crisis cannot be solved with bed, Torvald."
"Have you TRIED?"
Sera materialised. Torvald yelped. "EVERY — SINGLE — HOW—"
"I walked," Sera said, sitting.
Garrett's answer surprised us. "My grandfather's workshop. He was a carpenter. I used to sit in the sawdust and watch him make things." Pause. "He had good hands."
The table went quiet. Garrett volunteering memory was sacred ground. You didn't step on it with jokes. Even Dren knew this — he held his cup still, which was the Dren equivalent of a moment of silence.
"The coast," Dren said, answering himself. "A tavern. A woman who called me 'almost handsome in the right light.' She married a fisherman. I will never recover."
The bottle reached Kael. He held it. Looked at the sky — or the space where the sky met the desert, or the distance that measured everything he'd left behind and everything he'd found.
"A stable in Eden," he said.
The bottle reached me.
I thought about it. Eight months ago, the answer would have been Eden. The stables. My father's forge. The south gate where a prince and a stable boy had watched fire-eaters and where something had cracked open inside me that hadn't closed since.
But that was the old answer. Before the door. Before the desert. Before pending.
"Here," I said. "This table."
"HERE?" Dren looked personally offended on behalf of every other location in the empire. "Sand and lamp oil wine and mystery stew and you choose HERE?"
"Yeah."
"Why?"
I looked at the table. At Dren, who filled silence the way water filled cracks. At Garrett, who carried a dead general's memory and a carpenter's hands. At Sera, who said nothing and meant everything. At Kael, who had been a wall and was becoming a window. At Torvald, who wanted to be in bed and was here instead because here was where his people were.
"Because you're all here," I said.
Dren opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it. A rare event — Dren speechless. Like witnessing a natural phenomenon. The table noted it.
"The twelve-year-old," Dren said finally, "is going to make me cry. In a desert. Where the tears will evaporate before they reach my chin. That's the saddest possible version of crying. That's DESERT crying."
The table broke. Laughter. Real and loud and warm, rising into the dark sky where the stars were coming out — thick, bright, more stars than Eden ever showed, because Eden had too much of its own light to see anyone else's.
Garrett told a story about General Morran. About how the General sat with his soldiers after every battle. Not officers. Soldiers. Listened all night sometimes.
"He said the empire wasn't the throne. It was the men at the tables."
He drank. The table was silent.
Dren hugged him. Garrett threatened his arm. Dren hugged anyway. And Garrett's hand — scarred, old, a carpenter's grandson's hand — patted Dren's back. Once. Twice.
The table exploded. And I sat in my stolen chair under stars that proved the sky was bigger than anything I'd been taught and thought: This. This is what Edrin showed me was possible. Not THIS table. Not THESE people. The idea that people could sit together and be real with each other and that the sitting and the being were worth more than any title or bloodline or five hundred years of history.
Why not?
I was twelve. I was a farrier's son. I was pending.
And the table held.