Early mornings knew what was expected of it on festival days. It arrived with a fanfare of gulls at the river, with the smell of oil on axles and cinnamon on air, with the racket of wooden stalls being coaxed into being by men who swore at the wood and women who swore at the men. It spilled light down Stonebridge's lanes as if tipping a whole yellow jug over the cobbles. The bridge itself woke as if it had decided, privately, to be a stage. Banners stitched by hands that had once stitched children's shirts unfurled and tried their best to look as regal as court pennants. The Lark flowed beneath, busy and smug.
Kaelen Verenth woke to laughter in the lane and the sound of someone learning to play a drum without sufficiently learning not to. He lay there a heartbeat, listening to the city become louder, and felt the day reach for him. He obeyed. He pulled on a clean tunic that might, if one squinted, be called festive, and went downstairs to find Maelin regarding a basket of pears with a look that suggested it had gotten ideas above its station.
"Good," she said when she saw him. "You look as though you intend to have a fine day, which is an excellent start. Carry this to the stall."
'This' turned out to be a box that contained not only a new pear cake, Kaelen saw it and had to hide a grin because the frosting gleamed with the peculiar satisfaction of tasks done twice and done right, but also small parcels wrapped tidy in paper, labeled in Maelin's neat hand. Honey biscuits with nut shards. Little loaves that smelled like rosemary had told a joke to garlic and both had laughed. The box had handles. The handles had created calluses in other years. Kaelen lifted, braced his knees like a person who had been told to do so every time he forgot, and felt the weight pleasantly declare itself.
"Do not drop it," Maelin said.
"I will throw myself beneath it if it falls so that the cake may survive," Kaelen said solemnly.
"You will not," Maelin said. "You will set it down gently and apologize to the gods of pastry. Take the lane, avoid the boys with wooden swords, they are more dangerous than real ones, and if the fishmonger attempts to charge you for breathing near his eels, tell him I have eyes in the back of my head."
"You do," Kaelen said, because he had little doubt.
Daran had already gone to the Watchhouse, festival duty. He had left a note: Inspecting the south arch of the bridge for cracks, attempting to intimidate cracks. Eat three things you cannot pronounce. Proud of you. The note made a new room open in Kaelen's chest, a small one with a window.
He stepped into the lane. Festival morning was a living thing. Vendors pushed barrows that complained like old men, and old men walked as if they were barrows. Children with ribbons in their hair pretended to be banners until the ribbons tangled and an aunt had to intervene. The woman at the thread stall had braided her hair with actual thread and thus was being trailed by a small girl whose fist was full of color. A potter's wheel spun out bowls that decided, tragically, to be ashtrays at the last moment.
Kaelen saw Tamsin before she saw him only because he had learned what to look for. She moved like a phrase that did not care about punctuation. Today she wore a sash she'd stolen from reality: strips of ribbon braided with copper wire that caught the light and demanded rent. She was eating something flat and fried and furiously dusted in powdered sugar, and wherever she stepped it left her footprints in sweetness.
"You," she said when she spotted him, pointing with the food in a way that made powdered sugar decide to colonize his tunic. "Perfect. You're strong."
"I like where this is going," Kaelen said, adjusting the box and trying not to inhale the sugar. "But my mother says to avoid any plan which begins with that sentence."
"We're assembling the lantern canopy over the square," Tamsin said. "We need a person who is taller than most poles and also can be trusted not to tie knots that come undone the moment people congratulate themselves."
"You want me for my knots," Kaelen said. "I see."
"I want you because I am not climbing a ladder while wearing this," Tamsin said, indicating the sash as if it were a dignitary. "Also because I like you. Is that so surprising?"
"Yes," Kaelen said. "Completely astonishing. I will need to sit down."
"Later," Tamsin said briskly. "What's in the box?"
"Most of the reasons people will come to speak to my mother," Kaelen said, and Tamsin's eyes lit as if he had opened the lid so that cakes could sing inside.
They crossed to the square. In festival time it forgot that it had ever been anything else; it was made to be a square that held a day for people. Stall roofs went up like sailcloth. A man with a face like a cliff hammered a peg and then apologized to the peg for any offense. The lantern canopy was a web of ropes strung between buildings, from which glass lanterns would hang like strange fruit. When lit, they would glow with magic coaxed into them by apprentices happy to do something that made people look up and say oh in a friendly tone.
Old Mrs. Kettle held one end of a rope and Tamsin's tiny cousin held the other and both looked equally likely to become airborne. Kaelen handed the box to Maelin's neighbor, who had been deputized to do nothing but keep things from falling, and took hold of the rope.
"You're a good boy," Mrs. Kettle observed, granting a benediction in the way old women in lanes could.
"I am deeply invested in not being a bad one," Kaelen said.
"I knew your father when he had hair you could get lost in," Mrs. Kettle said. "It tried to run off with a brush more than once."
Kaelen laughed and tried to imagine Daran with hair that did anything he had not told it to. The attempt failed. He knotted, pulled, and hitched until the rope felt like a promise. Stepping back, he squinted up. Lanterns were a festival of their own—glass in blues and greens, some with bits of copper leaf that had survived children's helpfulness, a few with seedpods trapped inside so that when they lit at evening the seeds would cast little shadows like thoughts.
Tamsin tilted her head, judging his knot, then made a approving hum in her throat that she usually reserved for things she had done herself. "Acceptable."
"I live only to meet the high standards of the Ribbon Sash Republic," Kaelen said. "Now please eat something sticky near someone else."
She kissed her fingertips and patted his cheek so a constellation of sugar dust remained. "You're sweet now. Keep up."
The square cooperated, the lantern canopy surrendered to the idea of itself, and Maelin accepted her box back long enough to turn it into a stall. The stall was simple: a cloth, a sign that said Maelin bakes for those with good hearts and coins, and a wooden cash box that had known trustworthy hands. She placed her goods with a care that would have made gemstones reconsider their life choices. The first customer was indeed Mrs. Kettle, who purchased a honey biscuit and informed the entire neighborhood loudly that if it was not the best thing she had ever put into her mouth she would deign to inform people anyway, but it was, so she did not.
Festival games found Kaelen the way rain found people who did not believe in umbrellas. A boy with hair so fair it might have been wary of sunlight ran up, declared that teams were being formed for River-Run, and that if Kaelen did not consent to being on their side then their side would lose, and how would he live with that. River-Run was a sprint from the square to the third pier and back while balancing a wooden ladle filled with water, judged by how much a person retained and how many apples they could charm into hopping into the ladle on the way.
"I do not charm apples," Kaelen reminded the boy. "Apples and I have a professional relationship."
"You can run," the boy said, "and you can glare at apples until they reconsider their life choices. It worked on the lantern rope."
"Fine," Kaelen said, because a person's morning could only move forward or turn into a pile of goats, and he preferred the forward option. He allowed himself to be fitted with a ribbon that marked him as team south-of-lanterns. Tamsin appeared, bowed as if he were a knight going to battle, and then trotted off to join team north-of-banners.
They lined at the edge of the square. A woman with a bell the size of a fist held it aloft and proclaimed that anyone who actually spilled on purpose in order to lighten their ladle would find themselves dunked headfirst in the Lark by their ears because the ears are the handles of the soul. There were mutters about ears. The woman rang her bell.
Kaelen ran. His feet remembered drills in the training yard and the time he and Tamsin had once sprinted the entire length of the west wall simply because it had seemed impossible and then had turned out to be merely difficult. The ladle sloshed, flirted with the idea of imitating a waterfall, and then recalled the conversation it had held with gravity and decided to behave. He cradled it with his free hand the way he would help a child who had been asked to carry something too large for them.
At the pier, others murmured a quick charm and apples rolled obligingly into their ladles. Tamsin's apples practically leapt like dogs called by name. Kaelen stopped, set his ladle down, and attempted the ancient and mystical art of Staring At Something Until It Helped.
"Come along," he told the apples quietly, as if coaxing an infant stubbornly determined to be a beetle. "Be helpful. Think of the story you'll tell."
An apple did roll. Slowly. More a scoot than a roll. It tipped into his ladle as if it were doing him a great favor and wanted witnesses.
"I appreciate your generosity," Kaelen told it and then ran back, the apple bumping like a heartbeat.
He finished mid-pack. He did not spill an insulting amount. He made his team glad he existed without making them wish to build statues. Tamsin finished third, nearly swallowed her laugh when she saw his apple, and declared it an allegory for patience. The woman with the bell awarded the north-of-banners team a ribbon the color of new leaves. The south-of-lanterns were told they were amazing and also should run faster.
"Apple whisperer," Tamsin said. "Teach me your ways."
"I glared until it got bored," Kaelen said. "A powerful technique."
They moved as the morning smoothed into midmorning and the square filled with the particular density of people who have agreed to be happy in one place at the same time. A troupe of jugglers set up by the fountain, tossed torches in the air, and made those torches behave with thank-you kisses of spellwork. Musicians tried not to glare at the jugglers stealing their audience. Children with painted faces of foxes and hawks darted beneath elbows. A man with a puppet theater made his puppets argue so convincingly that two old men began arguing along with them and had to be bribed with toffee to allow the puppets to finish their scene.
Kaelen was content to drift and be tugged by Tamsin until they reached the paint circle where older children and brave younger ones made rune paintings that would be held up for judgment and praise by Sister Anwen at noon. Sister Anwen was a temple scholar and the sort of woman who could look at you and make you somehow both mind your manners and feel seen by a sun.
"Do it," Tamsin said, poking Kaelen with a brush so that a dot appeared on his arm and would be there until midwinter. "Paint the rune for wind and have it kiss people in the back of the neck. They will love you for it and claim they hate it."
"I will paint the rune for patience," Kaelen said. "Or possibly for bread. I can never tell the difference."
He found a plank and a brush and faced the stern perfection of ink that had been coaxed into color. Around him, children painted with confidence or reckless affection. A boy drew the rune for luck and then tried to get it to adjust his hair, failed, and pretended that had never been the plan. A girl painted a series of small interlocking marks that meant safe passage, the kind of spell you prayed onto boots.
Kaelen dipped his brush. He composed an elegant line in his head that would become a rune that would invite breeze. He set the brush to the board. The ink enacted the ancient tradition of failing to become a spell and settling for being an excellent line. He made another line. And another. The lines became, if he was honest, something like a bird.
He decided to lean into that. If magic did not intend to attend his party, then he would feed the guests who had come. He painted a field and a fence that knew it was not good at being a fence but tried anyway. He painted a boy on the fence and a pear tree, and only at the last minute did he add a small rune in the corner that meant luck for the person who looked at this when they needed it. He did not say it aloud. Saying it aloud made the word slide off his tongue and fall on the floor.
Tamsin peered, and her mockery gentled into something else. "It's good," she said. "It makes me want to sit on that fence and waste an hour. I never want to waste an hour. Clearly it's cursed."
"I will sell it to Mrs. Kettle as a device to make her nap," Kaelen said. "She will pay me in scoldings."
At noon the bell in the temple tower told everyone where the top of the day was and people took that knowledge and arranged themselves accordingly. Sister Anwen mounted a stool in the square. She wore plain grey and had made it look like the most dignified thing anyone could do. Her hair was braided in a crown, a signal that she was performing duties on behalf of the temple and not merely being Anwen, who laughed too loudly when she let herself.
"Neighbors," she said, and the square kept its sound and also listened. "The Loom is kind to us. We have bread for our tables, walls that keep us, a river that sings even when we are cross with it. We have work that matters and work we only pretend does. We have each other. The gods do not need our thanks. We need to give it."
A murmur went through the square: not pious so much as agreeable. Sister Anwen raised her hands, blessed the city with words that felt like clean sheets, and then the real point of noon arrived: the blessing of the children, the Loom's Touch. Adolescents lined, some fidgeting, some trying to become marble statues to impress fate. It was not a formal binding, Stonebridge was not a court where magic was the only key to a future, but it was a tradition. Children placed their palms against a cloth hung over a wooden frame and if the cloth glowed with a certain color, Sister Anwen announced an affinity: wind, water, heat, growth, sharpness, softening, the thousand little specialties by which a person might find the spellwork that loved them best.
Tamsin tugged Kaelen's sleeve. "Come," she said. "If it refuses you, we will refuse to care."
"I know," Kaelen said. He did. He had always known that Tamsin would stand with him in the mud, and he would stand with her on the roof, and both would be very angry and then hungry and then laugh. He stepped into the line because he could not spend a life not stepping into lines just to avoid disappointment. Also because Sister Anwen had a way of looking at people that made it feel like you had already done something brave and only had to live up to it.
He watched others go first. Garrin, the older boy who juggled pebbles while pretending he was bored by adulation, pressed his hand to the cloth. It flashed airy blue.
Sister Anwen smiled and said, in her voice that made pronouncements sound like patience: "Wind's wit. Don't use it to blow hats off. Use it to carry news."
Garrin grinned in exactly the way that suggested hats were going to have a challenging year.
A girl from the east lane touched the cloth; it glowed a green that had dirt under its nails.
"Growth," Anwen said. "Plants will like you even when people don't. Be kind to both."
Tamsin stepped up, almost bouncing. She pressed her palm and the cloth did something like a swarm of bees decide to hum. It shone in flickering lights like festival lanterns.
Anwen's smile deepened. "Pattern. The threads of things. Be careful not to pull them too hard."
"I will pull them exactly as hard as they deserve," Tamsin said, unrepentant, and the crowd laughed because love of Tamsin had a way of becoming public.
Kaelen's turn.
He knew how to hold his face. He knew how to not make a moment heavier than it would be anyway. He placed his hand on cloth that thousands had touched, cloth that had absorbed more hope than most things in Stonebridge, and sent his hope into it as if mailing a letter you suspected the carrier would put in their pocket and forget until spring.
The cloth was warm against his palm. It was rough, a good rough, the kind that reminded skin it was connected to a person. It did not glow. It did not hum. It did not even attempt to be diplomatic, which he rather appreciated. It lay there, elderly and content and untroubled by ambitions on his behalf.
Sister Anwen did not look surprised. She did not look pitying. She tilted her head and smiled with a curve like the corner of a book you meant to come back to.
"Steady hands," she said, audible to the square. "Some of us are meant to yoke the world with steadiness. Thank you for volunteering."
There were snorts from boys. There was a mutter Kaelen pretended he did not hear. There were two girls who sighed as if cheated that something dramatic had not occurred. There was Tamsin's fingers sliding into his because she had always used hands like reminders.
He took his palm away, flexed fingers that had found so many knobs and handles, and bowed to Anwen because one bowed to a person who had not made a hard thing worse.
After, he stood off to the side while others glowed with the business of being caught by magic. His stomach did not fall. He had prepared it in advance. He could feel the laugh in it even as it felt dull.
"You are very good at not looking like you are sad," Tamsin said, tilting her head up at him and squinting as if sadness made smoke you could see.
"I am extremely well-practiced," Kaelen said. "I will market it."
"I will stab anyone who says anything," Tamsin said.
"You will not," Kaelen said. "But you will compose a withering rhyme and teach it to children."
"I already did," Tamsin said. "It is about Garrin's hair."
Garrin, astonishingly, did not be horrible. He looked toward Kaelen once and then looked away without smirking. Kaelen allowed him that small mercy in his mind and did not decide what to do with it yet.
Sister Anwen finished the blessings, thanked the city for the breath it took together, and stepped down. People scattered into eating and playing with the relief that comes after a pinch in the arm. Kaelen felt the pinch fading. It left a small ache and a burning desire to eat something astonishing. Maelin's stall obliged; she pressed a parcel into his hands that held a honey biscuit and a little tart with a filling that tried to be all the fruits at once and almost succeeded. He ate standing and his mouth thanked every person who had taught him to find food with reverence.
"Next," Tamsin said, licking sugar off the side of her hand in a way that made a child copy her and a mother tut. "Illusion toss or the rope fight?"
"Rope," Kaelen said, because rope fights did not require a person to be visible to anything but rope. Teams took up a charmed rope that had all the ordinary stubbornness of rope and an added streak. It would try to slither like a living creature if you pulled badly. It would look for your ankles if you got smug. It responded to rhythm, to people pulling at the same time.
They joined a team half-filled by Mrs. Hobb's nieces, who looked like flowers and pulled like bridges. Daran, just off the bridge, arrived in time to stand behind Kaelen and, without quite saying so, anchor him by existing. Daran's presence made ill-behaved things reconsider. The opposing team looked like a family portrait of oxen. The rope seemed nervous.
The call sounded. Kaelen dug heels, felt his bones take up positions, and pulled when the girl at the front said now. He listened with all of him for the little shifts, the timing, the moment when the other team's breath went wrong. He found it. He heard the now inside the now, the tug that said if you pull on this thread the whole shirt will come apart.
He shouted, "Now," and everyone listened, and the rope realized it had been ambushed. The other team did not so much fall as come to an understanding with gravity all at once. Daran, steady behind, laughed once, low and pleased.
"Captain," said one of the Watchmen who had wandered by. "Recruit him."
"Already did," Daran said gravely. "Rope Division."
They won two more rounds and lost one because laughter undid their rhythm and they could not put it back quickly enough. They forgave themselves. One of the Hobb nieces decided that Kaelen's new title should be Knot Commander and then forgot the title thirty breaths later because the jugglers had caught fire in a good way.
Afternoon slid down the sky like a well-behaved cat. Kaelen, having accomplished both triumph and Nothing Terrible, took a break by the fountain. He sat on the warm stone edge, dunked his hands, and let water decide to be cold on his skin. The fountain had a carved hawk, wings out, a fish in its talons. Someone had once painted the fish silver and the hawk green because that child's brain had insisted on that scheme, and no one had yet dared scrub it away because the paint had become a kind of pet.
Tamsin flopped beside him and announced that if she did not drink something soon she would become a raisin and then roll away and be planted in a field and people would be very confused when she grew. He passed her his cup. She drank like a meadow and handed it back with thanks that sounded like a made-up word.
"Do you want to try the candle sprint?" she asked. "It's hilarious."
"Because people put fire near their faces and then run? What could possibly go wrong," Kaelen said.
He tried the candle sprint. He held his candle like a friend he feared might faint. He sheltered the flame with his hand like a storyteller baffles wind. He did not speak a charm because when he did, candles felt judged and sputtered out of sheer stubbornness. He ran. The candle decided to be brave for him. He finished with a flame that looked like a sigh. He did not come first. He came enough, and someone he did not know clapped him on the shoulder and said, "Well done, go on then," which was the kind of praise that found its way into pockets and stayed.
Late afternoon meant music. A fiddler with a face that suggested kindness had been his second profession brought a song out of his instrument that made two old women begin to dance with the exact seriousness some people applied to taxes. A boy with a pipe played three notes true and a fourth with comic determination until the fifth surprisingly fell into place. Tamsin crossed paths with a gaggle of girls from the north lane who whispered, then looked at Kaelen, then whispered again, in a manner that suggested conspiracy but was probably about ribbons.
Sister Anwen found Kaelen in the ebb of people and leaned against the fountain as if it had invited her.
"Thank you," she said.
"For what?" Kaelen asked, unsure which of his several minor services warranted priestly attention. He had also not forgotten his noon, which he intended to treat with the same kind of firm ignoring one applies to stings.
"For pretending as if the noon blessing is a test," she said, dry as a good biscuit. "We need someone in the city this year who does not treat it that way. I nominate you."
"I accept the nomination," Kaelen said, attempting humor and finding that it was happy to be found.
Anwen's gaze went sideways to where Daran spoke with Tamsin's aunt and Hobb and two merchants who could not agree on what price constituted justice for apples picked at the wrong hour. "Your father is a good man," she said.
"I have noticed," Kaelen said.
"Be careful," Anwen said, not unkindly. "Good men can carry too much. Sometimes they do it so quietly their backs break where no one can see. Part of goodness is occasionally handing the load to someone else."
"I will tell him so," Kaelen said. "He will say he is capable and then carry the load anyway and then at night he will complain to my mother as if the load insulted him personally."
"Then I will tell your mother so," Anwen said and pushed off the fountain with a small grunt that reminded Kaelen people had knees even in grey gowns. She went to tell three boys to stop attempting to climb the hawk because the hawk did not care for it.
Kaelen thought of loads. He thought of his own, which felt lighter after a day of moving and pulling and not waiting for a word to say yes in a way that would echo. He felt the peculiar comfortable ache right behind his sternum that said he had used the day enough to deserve sleep later.
Daran waved him over and introduced him to a man Kaelen had seen but not properly met.
"Bren Alder," Daran said. "He's the one who made that cart wheel that did not betray its owner."
Bren Alder had grease under all ten nails, permanently, and a smile like a bridge: strong, plainly useful, more beautiful the longer it stood. "You pulled well in the rope," he said. "We need lads in the Yard who know when to shout."
"I can shout," Kaelen said. "Very precisely."
"You want work when the summer comes?" Bren asked. "Real work. Splinters and swearing and the satisfaction of making a thing square. Your hands will complain for a week then decide to love you for it. Your mother will say you are ruining your gloves. You will be."
Kaelen almost said yes so quickly the word would trip, then caught himself and looked to Daran, whose face, as ever, held pride and caution balanced like two eggs in a basket. Daran inclined his head very slightly, which in Daran meant this is a good man and a sound plan and I will stop you only if you try to do it without eating.
"Yes," Kaelen said, and the word found a place to stand. "I will."
"Good," Bren said. "Come by after third bell tomorrow. We'll teach you to talk to wood in a dialect you can handle."
Tamsin appeared at his elbow as if she had been stored there and forgotten. "You have acquired employment," she observed, approving. "At last, you will contribute something to society besides your sugar-dusting talents."
"I can pull ropes," Kaelen said mildly. "And light candles with guilt. And paint a fence in such a way that people desire repose."
"You are indispensable," Tamsin said. "Now, illusion toss. And then we have to stand awkwardly during the grand speech at dusk while the Queen's representative says words that sound like wine diluted with more wine."
The illusion toss required someone to make a small image in the air and throw it into a ring without it dissolving into glitter. Kaelen did not attempt an image; he respected illusions for what they were: the cousins of lies that made art. He cheered, and his cheer mattered to two young ones who nearly made it into the ring and only needed someone to convey that nearly was, today, charming.
Evening crept in and made the lantern canopy earn its keep. Lanterns kindled one by one, in an order that suggested invisible hands and in truth were apprentice hands told to pretend to be invisible. The glass glowed, blue and green and a few stubborn pinks, and cast small ponds of color onto faces which had earned that color by staying until this moment. The square collected people the way a good story does; even those who might have said they had had enough found themselves back in the thick of it.
On the dais, which was to say a cart borrowed from Mr. Undern and scoured so it would not smell of barrels, the Queen's representative stood and reminded Stonebridge that it was beloved. He used elevated language and the town allowed him to. He praised the bridge's engineering for three sentences longer than necessary. He made a joke about ducks that did not land but fluttered away gently. He bowed toward the temple and the watch and the families and the people who had made the lanterns glow. He did not trip, which had been the collective fear. The crowd gave him an indulgent cheer, the kind given to people who will be leaving soon and thus can be given kindness in bulk.
Witch-lights followed, translucents that floated up like soap bubbles and then decided not to pop. The apprentices coaxed them, for once allowed to show off. Tamsin made a shape that wanted to be a hawk and then decided to be a fish and then, reluctantly, was both. People applauded as if that was exactly what they had hoped for.
Daran stood behind Kaelen, the bulk of him a reassurance and a shadow both. Maelin slipped her hand into Daran's and made it her business to keep it, festival or no. Kaelen stood with Tamsin on his left and the fountain's hawk behind him, and for a moment he felt the world at a manageable distance, the news from Lathmere far away, the talk of a tax on grain as distant as geese, the church's arguments between two Sister scholars a murmuring river he did not need to cross. He had a very specific piece of cobble under his foot and the glow of a lantern caught in Tamsin's ridiculous sash, and the note still tucked into his glove strap, and a promise that someone would teach him to talk to wood in a dialect he could handle.
He listened to the music. He watched the lights. He allowed himself the thought that while he could not put sparks into the air with a twitch and a word, he could help make a day like this run. The thought felt good and did not ask for proof. He kept it.
When the official parts were done, the square relaxed into the best part: people simply being. Couples danced badly and enjoyed it. Children traded ribbons. Someone released a money toad by accident and half the lane went chasing it with tiny nets as if it owed them rent. Sister Anwen sat on the fountain and allowed someone to put a flower behind her ear and pretended it wasn't there.
Kaelen found himself by the river with Tamsin because the river had been hauling things for Stonebridge since before Stonebridge existed and sometimes you wanted to stand with something that had all the patience. The Lark reflected the lanterns with the sort of accuracy a court artist would charge for. The bridge's shadow fell like a sleeping giant. Boats made quiet adjectives of themselves beneath.
"On a scale of one to turning into raisins, how are you?" Tamsin asked.
"Three," Kaelen said. "No raisins. Possibly an apricot."
"Acceptable," Tamsin said. She leaned on the rail and then stopped leaning because one should develop habits that allow one to survive if rails are capricious. "I don't know what it feels like, to put your hand on the cloth and hear nothing. I only know it's not the same as being told you are small. You are many things, and small is not one."
"I am very small next to your aunt's goose," Kaelen said.
"That goose is in an advanced class," Tamsin said. "You did well. You survived noon and ate sugar responsibly and won glory for rope-pullers and secured a future in the honorable profession of hitting things with hammers under instruction. Good day, Verenth."
"Good day, Ellowe," he said. "You turned bees into light."
"I turned desire into an insect," Tamsin said. "Sister Anwen will give me a lecture tomorrow about not encouraging metaphysical insect metaphors in public."
They stood in the companionable quiet that people pretend to ruin because quiet is a tender animal and most of us are clumsy. The river said things no one was required to understand. Somewhere up on the bridge a watchman coughed and then did it again and then decided he was fine. Far off, someone was late to a kissing appointment and ran. Closer, on the bank, a little boy told a little girl that he could make the river goose-step and then tripped over his own feet so convincingly that the girl forgave him his arrival.
Daran eventually found them, because Daran could always find the people he loved in a crowd. He stood with them a moment and said nothing, which was a gift. Then he said, "The lantern over the south arch is out. I'm going to go persuade it."
"You are going to tie a proper knot," Kaelen said.
"That is a form of persuasion," Daran said, and left them to the river, the bridge, the lights.
When Kaelen and Tamsin returned to the square, it had begun its slow, compliant descent from celebration to mess. The lanterns would glow a while longer. The puppeteer had packed his puppets and told them to not decide to reenact a coup in his bag. Maelin's stall was a collection of crumbs that spoke of victory. She had already traded her last tart for a handful of cloves and three favors later. She kissed Kaelen's cheek and told him to carry the cash box with the concentration of a person carrying a sleeping child.
They walked home together the three of them, their feet memorizing stones they'd known since bare summer soles. At the door, Daran reached past Kaelen to open it not because Kaelen couldn't but because ritual had a place in a life. Inside, the house breathed out the faint warmth of bread and the ghost of frosting. Maelin set the box on the shelf. Daran hung his helm on the peg and then moved it exactly an inch to the left for reasons he could not have explained under oath.
Kaelen went to the little window and looked out one last time because that is what boys deciding to be men do without telling anyone: they take stock of the street that raised them and ask if it will still be there tomorrow. It always had been. It would be.
He climbed the stair with legs that had earned it today. He lay down and did not so much sleep as greet a friend. Before his thoughts dripped away entirely, he let one more silly idea pass through: that the whole day had been a set of gears that meshed, teeth to tooth, and that he had been one of them, perhaps small, but necessary to the turning.
He smiled in the dark, because he had found work and made a cake and held a rope and that was, for one day, what a life was made of.
Outside, the last lantern burned, guttered, and then decided, mustering courage, to shine again for a few heartbeats more. Then it gave up gently, as if yawning, and the square accepted its rest. The river carried away the day's straws and whispers. The bridge stood. Stonebridge slept. The Lark kept speaking its old language. And the Kingdom of Avarinth did what kingdoms do when no one is looking: it sat very still and pretended it had always been this fine and this easy.