Six years is a long while to sit beside the same two people at the same long tables, through the same rotations, across the same thousand ordinary mornings, and Thomas found, in the final season before graduation, that he could no longer entirely remember what it had felt like not to know Wren and Iyo — could not summon, however he tried, the version of himself that had once stood at the base of Aldermere's hill as a stranger to both of them, comparing bean fields to a storybook's soaring pagoda.
He tried anyway, one warm evening near the season's end, the three of them sitting together on the low wall at the edge of the herb garden Ket still tended, unremarked, a stone's throw from where Thomas had once watched her call down a working vast enough to have humbled the whole Sect-house combined. It felt, that evening, like the kind of hour worth marking properly before the shape of their lives inevitably scattered them, and Thomas — old enough now, and honest enough with himself, to recognize when a memory deserved deliberate tending rather than being left to form on its own — found himself asking Wren, gently, the question he'd carried unspoken since their very first walk down Aldermere's hill together.
"You never finished telling me," he said. "That first day. What actually happened, in your district, when the frontier broke."
Wren was quiet long enough that Thomas half-regretted asking, until she began speaking, unhurried, in the same steady voice she'd used across six years to talk him through everything from grief to grammar to the correct proportion of water to grain in a kitchen rotation's porridge.
"My village didn't hold," she said. "Not the way yours did. We had no Denn settled quietly among us, mending fences a decade in advance. No retired Warden at all, as it happened — the district council had never petitioned the Sects for one, believing themselves too far inland to ever genuinely need it, which I've come to understand, since arriving here, was simply an honest miscalculation rather than any particular failure of anyone's care. The vanguard that reached us was smaller than the one that reached your own district, and considerably crueler for being smaller, I think — less discipline, less oversight from whatever commander Meshan had set over that stretch of the push, more of the raw appetite Threnn Vaskar's own dark ledger apparently bred in every officer who drew on it without restraint." She said this last part with the flat, careful precision Thomas recognized from Elder Marek's own hardest teachings, the voice of someone who had turned an unbearable fact over so many times it had finally, slowly, become bearable to hold in company.
"My parents didn't run," she went on. "I want you to understand that plainly, because I think, for a long while after, I believed — wrongly, I've come to see, though the wrongness took me years to properly feel rather than merely know — that their staying had somehow been a failure of judgment, a mistake I might have talked them out of if I'd been quicker, or older, or braver. They stayed because my little brother had taken a fever three days before, too weak to travel, and because the healer who might have moved him safely had already fled east with her own family two days earlier. They stayed because moving him would very likely have killed him faster than the vanguard eventually did, and because neither of them, in the end, could bring themselves to leave him to face it alone even for the sake of their own safety." She looked out over the herb garden, not at Thomas, not yet. "I was sent ahead with my aunt, who had no children of her own and one working leg to complicate the going. I didn't want to leave them. I screamed the whole first mile, I'm told, though I don't remember the screaming myself, only the walking, which felt, at the time, like the single worst thing I have ever done in either of my lives, though I've only the one to compare it to."
Thomas said nothing, letting the silence hold the shape she needed it to hold, the way he'd learned, across a decade of hard conversations with Sennet and Aldric and Elder Marek, silence sometimes served a grieving account better than any words offered too quickly into it.
"None of the three of them survived," Wren said, finally. "My brother, before the vanguard even reached the house, the fever simply outpacing whatever chance staying might have bought him. My parents, in the house itself, the following morning. I don't know the particulars, and I've never asked to be told them, and I don't intend to change that. My aunt raised me for two years after, on what little the district's own recovery could spare a limping widow with an orphaned niece, until a Sect-house envoy passed through on a relief circuit very like the one you and I walked together, our very first season here, and asked whether either of us had ever considered Aldermere. My aunt encouraged me to go. I think — I've come to believe, turning it over these six years — that she recognized, better than I could have recognized in myself at ten years old, that I needed somewhere to put the wanting to have saved them that I couldn't, any longer, put anywhere useful in that particular village, surrounded by every reminder of exactly what I hadn't been strong enough, or old enough, or fast enough to prevent."
"Did it help," Thomas asked, quietly. "Coming here."
"Yes," Wren said, without hesitation, and Thomas heard, in the plainness of the answer, six years of hard, honest work behind it. "Not because it undid anything, or because Elder Marek or Elder Bassa ever once told me some tidy thing that made the grief weigh less — you know by now that's not how any of this actually works, whatever the storybooks might have promised either of us before we arrived. It helped because I finally had something real to do with the wanting. Every household I've helped in a flood or a failed harvest across these six years has been, in some small honest part of me, the family I couldn't save, given one more chance through someone else's crisis to be saved properly this time. I don't think that's a shameful thing to admit, though I kept it to myself for longer than I probably needed to. Sennet — your Sennet, whose letters you've read me pieces of more times than either of us could count — would tell me, I suspect, that the motive doesn't need to start clean. Only that I keep doing the loving thing honestly enough, for long enough, that the doing itself does whatever scrubbing still needs doing."
Thomas felt something in his own chest ache, hearing his own old teaching handed back to him, transformed, in someone else's grief. "I'm sorry," he said, "that I never asked you plainly before now."
"I wasn't ready before now," Wren said. "I don't think either of us fails the other by letting a story wait until the telling's actually ready to be told."
Iyo, who had sat through the whole account in their own particular attentive stillness, added little that evening beyond a quiet hand briefly resting on Wren's shoulder — Vessic affection, Thomas had learned across six years, ran considerably more toward presence than words, a cultural difference he'd found himself genuinely grateful for on more than one hard evening when Wren's grief had needed simple company rather than any further conversation about it.
It was on a different evening, weeks later, that Iyo finally offered Thomas the fuller shape of their own reasons for coming to Aldermere — a story Thomas had never quite pressed for, sensing, across six years of Iyo's careful, unhurried disclosures, that the asking would arrive properly only when Iyo judged the moment right for it, same as Wren's own story just had.
"My people don't fight the way yours do, mostly," Iyo said, the two of them alone this time, walking the edge of the fields in the last of the evening light. "Not because we're incapable of it — I've held my own in Aldermere's sparring yards well enough, I think you'd agree — but because our own communities were built, long before any human traveler's tale ever reached us, around something closer to what your own Realm calls the Nearest Hand. We simply never had a name for it until I heard Elder Marek teach it plainly, this past season. A Vessic settlement doesn't crown a Duke, or gather a Convocation to recognize a Steward. We elect our elders by long observed patience — literally, the ones among us who've shown, across the longest stretches of time, the steadiest willingness to carry more than their own fair share of a hard winter without complaint. I came to Aldermere because my own settlement's elders believed — rightly, I think, six years on — that there was something in your Realm's teaching about costly, freely chosen love that our own older, quieter tradition of patient endurance had never quite articulated for itself, and that a young Vessic willing to cross into human lands and bring the articulating home again might be worth the years it would cost."
"Do you miss it," Thomas asked. "Your own people. Your own home."
"Every season," Iyo said, simply, without any particular weight of sorrow attached to the admission, the same unhurried honesty Thomas had come to recognize as entirely characteristic. "But I don't think missing something and regretting the choosing of it are the same feeling, however alike they can seem from the outside. My people live longer than yours, Thomas — I have, by my own reckoning, perhaps another hundred years ahead of me even after I return home for good, which means six years spent learning something worth carrying back is a smaller portion of my whole life than it is of yours, though I understand why it might not feel that way to you, watching your own years pass so much faster beside mine." Iyo glanced at him, something warm and faintly amused in the careful Vessic features Thomas had, across six years, learned to read almost as easily as a human face. "I think, when I finally do go home, I will miss you and Wren rather more than I've ever let myself properly imagine yet. I've been putting off imagining it, if I'm honest. Some griefs are better handled the way Wren handled her own — waited for, rather than rushed toward before either of us is ready to hold them properly."
It was a smaller moment, later that same season, that Thomas found himself turning over most carefully of everything that final year handed him — an ordinary evening, the three of them finishing the last of a shared chore in the Archive, reshelving a stack of returned manuals nobody else had gotten around to before the day's bell, when Wren, reaching past him for a high shelf, brushed his hand in a way that lingered, very slightly, longer than the reaching strictly required.
Neither of them said anything about it that evening, and Thomas found himself, walking back to the dormitory hall afterward, turning the small unremarkable moment over with considerably more care than its size seemed to warrant — aware, in a way he hadn't quite let himself be aware of before that evening, of something that had been growing quietly in him across the whole of that final year, alongside every other slower, steadier growth Aldermere's routine had cultivated in him.
He did not know, entirely, what to do with it. He was eighteen, in the plain honest years his body had actually lived; he was also, by the older, stranger accounting that never fully left him, a man well into his eighties, who had once buried a wife of his own in his old world and never expected, waiting patiently in Purgatory's long dark, to be handed anything resembling this particular kind of feeling ever again. He turned the strangeness of his own position over that whole evening, and found, in the end, that he did not want to rush toward naming it, or force it into some tidier shape than it honestly, currently held.
Some griefs are better waited for, Iyo had told him, of their own homesickness, rather than rushed toward before either of us is ready to hold them properly. Thomas suspected, turning the phrase over, that it held just as true for the gladder, more uncertain things a heart carried as it did for grief — that whatever this was, growing quietly between himself and Wren across six years of shared labor and shared silence and shared hard evenings on stone walls beside a groundskeeper's garden, deserved the same patient, unhurried tending every other true thing in this whole strange twice-given world of his had ever required.
He said nothing to her that night. He did not think, turning it over, that the not-saying was cowardice so much as the same discernment Bassa had once taught him about the Dellins — that some things, offered too quickly, before either heart involved had properly grown ready to receive them, risked costing more than the patient waiting ever would.
The three of them spoke, in that final season, more than once about what would come after — whether the Sect's own assignment process, guided by whatever need the wider Realm currently carried rather than by any disciple's personal preference, would keep them together or scatter them across three separate districts they might not see each other in for years. Elder Marek had been honest with the whole graduating class about this, weeks before: assignments followed the Nearest Hand principle same as everything else at Aldermere, sent wherever the accumulated need of the moment actually called for a fresh Household-threshold Warden, with friendship and preference weighed, when possible, but never guaranteed against a genuine gap somewhere else entirely.
"I hope we're sent together," Wren said, one evening, with the particular vulnerability Thomas had learned, across six years, she reserved only for the two of them. "I don't say that lightly, after everything I've been taught here about not clinging too tightly to any single outcome. But I hope it anyway."
"So do I," Thomas said. "And I think hoping it, even while accepting we might not get it, is allowed. Elder Bassa never once taught me that discernment meant refusing to want the good thing. Only that I had to hold the wanting loosely enough to still do right by whatever actually turns out to be needed instead."
He thought, saying it, of every lesson this whole long chapter of his life had handed him — Sennet's mixed motives, Bassa's fences, Marek's rest, Ket's hidden garden, the whole nested shape of the Nearest Hand stretching from a single household clear up to a Realm he'd likely never personally serve the whole of. He thought, too, turning the thought over with something that felt, for the first time in a long while, entirely unclouded by any older grief, that six years spent loving these two people — not in some dramatic act of stranger-directed heroism, but in the ordinary daily faithfulness of shared chores and shared silences and shared hard evenings turned patiently over on a low stone wall — had very likely been its own quiet, weighed, entirely real cultivation the whole time, no less true for how unremarkable it had felt, most days, simply to live inside it.
The love you practice on the people beside you, he thought, watching Wren and Iyo settle into the last comfortable silence of that particular evening, is not a lesser version of the love you're meant to eventually spend on strangers. It might, in fact, be the very groove that makes all the rest of it possible at all.