The day didn't decide to be cruel. It simply refused to be different. The square hawked the same pears, the bridge held up the same quarrels, Bren's shop smelled the same good honest way, as if the planks had been told a secret and were keeping it without strain. Kaelen's steadiness held. It held right up until it didn't.
Bren put a spoke in his hands that morning and said, "Introduce them," in the voice Kaelen had started to like too much, simple, unquestioning.
Kaelen introduced spoke to rim and they cooperated. That should have helped. Instead the little heat from Edrin's basin, the quiet of the old man's apology, kept licking the edge of Kaelen's thoughts like a flame that would not go out or warm. He wanted the spoke to fight him so he could fight anything back. It didn't. It slid. The good sound it made small, clean, was somehow intolerable.
"You're working too tidy," Bren said at last, suspicious. "Nobody is that obedient on a morning."
"I can be," Kaelen said, and the words came out sharp and self-betraying; he heard Bren's eyebrow creak in surprise. He set the spoke down with exaggerated care. "Sorry," he added, because Maelin had put that law in his bones.
Bren scratched the stubble on his jaw. "You're allowed a sulk if you sweep it up after. Take a turn around the square. Come back when your hands stop pretending not to shake."
Kaelen nearly said he wasn't shaking. He was. Not in his fingers. In the place behind his ribs where words live. He left because Bren's eyes were a mirror this morning and he couldn't stand to see himself reflected in a shape that didn't match the one he thought he'd earned.
The lane did what the lane always did: carried people along without asking permission, without caring whether a boy's interior weather had gone wrong. Tamsin tried to shoulder-bump him out of his cloudbank; he failed to be bumpable. She settled for walking backward in front of him and making a face that meant you are being a donkey and I will bribe you with apples later. He couldn't even enjoy her face. He told her he had to get bread. He did not buy any.
After midday, he went home because he couldn't think of anywhere else to put himself that wouldn't require being nice to someone who deserved it. Maelin had the kettle on the hob and the good cups on the table in that way that says a mother has decided to treat a mood with heat and honey. Daran, off his shift early, sat at the window, not reading the watch ledger on his knee, exactly, but letting it sit there so he had something to put his hand on.
"There you are," Maelin said lightly. "We were about to send Hobb's tooth to fetch you. It whistles like a messengers' horn."
Kaelen wished he could be the kind of boy who laughed and ate a biscuit and let a day be a day. He wanted to. He set his jaw instead like a misplaced hinge. "I'm fine," he said.
"I did not inquire," Maelin said, which was her way of inquiring without alarming the gods.
Daran tilted his head. "How many spokes today."
"Enough," Kaelen said.
"Enough is never the number of spokes," Daran said mildly. "Either too many or not enough."
Kaelen put his hands on the back of the chair and left them there because if he sat he'd become a person at a table in a kitchen and kitchens were for people who felt like they belonged to themselves. "Can we not," he said.
Maelin's eyes flicked to Daran and back, a whisper between them Kaelen had grown up watching, how much to touch, how much to leave. "We can," she said. "We can not."
The kettle chose that moment to whistle with the righteousness of a citizen who has noticed a civic infraction. Maelin moved to lift it and set it aside with practiced fingers. Steam curled up, smelling of mint and nettle. The smell made Kaelen think of the basin in the side chapel, of water and the seed-word and the not-quite-sound the bell had made when it remembered how to be a bell. The memory made him raw in the way getting clean sometimes does. He was suddenly furious at mint. He could not have told anyone why.
Daran, who could smell an argument the way a hound smells weather, tried to reroute it. "Sister Anwen sent a note," he said. "Canon Edrin left a braid for the altar guild. Says he's sorry he keeps stealing theirs. Says he'll send a new one in spring."
Kaelen heard the apology as an accusation from the wrong mouth. "I know he's sorry," he snapped. "Everyone is sorry. I'm sorry. The braid is sorry. The bell is sorry. The whole temple is sorry. The city can file a petition to the river to be sorry. What am I supposed to do with that, tie it to a spoke?!"
Silence took the room, not offended, considering. Maelin glanced at the cups and decided they were not brave enough to be filled yet. Daran took his hand off the ledger. He didn't reach for Kaelen, which was, in that instant, the kindest thing he could have not done.
"You're supposed to do exactly what you did this morning," Daran said after the silence had given him permission. "Go to work. Be decent. Take the blow the world gives without pretending it didn't hurt. Give back the correct one."
"It didn't hurt you," Kaelen said, and the cruelty burst out so quickly he didn't recognize it as his; he wanted to claw it back out of the air and step on it. Daran took it without flinching, he had trained for worse, and Maelin flinched for him.
Maelin set the kettle down with a clatter an inch louder than necessary. "It hurts me," she said, and the steadiness in her voice was the steadiness of a shelf you trust even after you've seen it sag once. "Do not measure sorrow like grain, child. We don't need to know who has more."
"It hurts me," Kaelen shot back, and now he sounded exactly fourteen years old and unlike the person who had calmly held a spoke while Bren nodded to himself with private satisfaction. "It hurts me so much I can hear it when I try to sleep. I hear that word, 'denied', in the back of my head like a bell that won't stop ringing, and I can't-"
He stopped.
His father's mouth had not moved at the word 'denied', but something behind his eyes had. Maelin folded her hands together and put them against her lips as if to keep from letting anything helpful escape.
Daran said, very quietly, "Who said it last."
Kaelen's breath hitched. "I did," he admitted, half defiant, half pleading. "To myself. I keep saying it to myself. So it won't sneak up on me and say it first."
Daran nodded once, as if he had been offered a piece of intelligence he wished to keep, and then, gently, he tried to steer again. "Words are not spears, Kaelen. If you hold the point end toward your own ribs long enough, you'll start to believe being stabbed is what a chest is for."
"Don't," Kaelen said. It came out raw. "Don't make it wise. Don't make it a lesson. I don't want-"
He was choking on it now, the terrible thing that had been pushing against his teeth since Edrin had put that soft hand above his and blessed what he had.
"I don't want to be brave about it. I don't want to be the boy who goes to work and is decent and eats stew and says Fiaht and carries water and ties knots and is good. I want to be-"
He groped for the shape of it and found a word so ugly he almost laughed. "I want to be dazzling."
His mother made a soft sound, half sympathy, half recognition of herself, at fourteen, asking the world to look and never look away.
Daran stood. He did it carefully, as if to avoid jostling the air, as if the room were a bowl and he a man who had knocked enough bowls over to know better. "Then be dazzling," he said. "There are a dozen kinds."
"I know the kind I mean," Kaelen said. "The kind that the cloth glows for. The kind that steps into a ring and the air rearranges. The kind that doesn't have to make peace with the bench. The kind that doesn't get told, learn to be better than the easy thing, because the easy thing is finally easy. I want to be-"
He couldn't finish. The word shining sat ash in his mouth.
Maelin crossed to him then because there is a point beyond which a mother must move or become a statue of herself. She put her hands on his shoulders and he shook them off, against his own wishes, and the hurt that crossed her face would have made him kneel and beg if he had had any breath left that wasn't smoke. "I have to go," he said. "I have to walk or I will set the table on fire by looking at it."
"Take your cloak," Maelin said, because some laws still hold, even when a boy breaks three others.
"I don't need-" he began, then saw the look, and grabbed the cloak off the peg as if to throw it, then let it settle across his shoulders like something he had earned. He made for the door.
"Kaelen," Daran said, without the weight of the father in it, without the watchman, only the man.
"What," Kaelen snapped, and hated himself for it.
"Come back," Daran said.
Kaelen nodded once, curt enough to count as both promise and insult, and slipped into the lane.
He didn't mean to go to the woods. He meant to walk until the stone under his feet gave up and admitted it could not take him any farther without becoming something else. The path that led up past the north fields seduced his boots with familiarity. He'd been there dozens of times with Tamsin, clambering over the tumbled wall that was more rumor than barrier, inventing names for the three birches that held hands at the edge of the first copse. The field gave way to the scrappy trees that pretended to be a forest until they remembered their humility and made a glade instead. He kept going.
He walked fast enough that his breath made a quiet complaint and his eyes watered from wind and not from anything softer. He told himself he would stop when he reached the old stump shaped like a chair. He passed it, because the stump looked too much like a place someone kind would sit and listen and he did not want to be listened to by a stump. He told himself he would stop at the creek that forgot to be important every summer. He passed it too, because the trickle sounded like the basin in Edrin's chapel and he couldn't stand thinking of that touch of water on his brow, as gentle as pity.
He hadn't cried, not properly, for years. Boys in Stonebridge learn to leak exactly enough to be human and then to mop their leaks politely. Now the tears came wrong, hot and messy and stupid, and he wiped them with the heel of his hand and made them angrier. He thought of Garrin waiting on the temple steps with his awkward apology and wanted to be a person who deserved that kind of courtesy. He thought of Tamsin hovering in the doorway like a bird prepared to pick up pieces one by one and carry them to a nest. He thought of his mother's hands on his shoulders, the way he had thrown them off like a person who thinks gentleness is a trap. He thought of his father saying come back and felt something in his chest twist, not cruelly; a rope being spliced.
He must have gone farther than sense allows because the path stopped pretending to be a path and started being a suggestion. The air changed from the busy breath of town-suburb trees to the listening quiet that older growth keeps for itself. The light went to green and then to the grey-green of late afternoon, which is to say everything adjacent to sorrow, without being sorrow itself.
He stopped because stopping seemed like a good first step toward not doing anything worse. He stood among hazel and ash and waited for his breath to accept its job. A bird scolded him for existing. He nearly told it to file a complaint.
Then the world did that thing where it sets down a cup and misses the table.
It wasn't dramatic. Not at first. The scolding bird paused mid-syllable, as if remembering a different argument in a different tree. The wind forgot the last part of a thought and held there, a fraction of a fraction. Kaelen felt his tears stop on his face like soldiers halting on a bridge at a command he hadn't heard. He turned carefully, the way you turn when you are trying to prove you did not hear the word behind you. The leaves were not moving. The trickle he had walked past could be heard no longer. Sound went thin, as if the forest had been turned down so as not to wake a child.
He said, 'Hello,' in case someone else had come and was playing at stillness. His voice sounded like a coin dropped into a well that had decided to be floor rather than water.
He took one step. The step happened. His boot sank into the moss, flattened it, then let it spring up, except it did not spring up. It remained the exact impression of his boot, held as if a hand kept it down. His cloak lifted at his thigh with his motion and remained lifted, an indecorous flag. His breath made a small curtain in the air in front of his mouth and stayed there, hanging like a veil. The scolding bird remained a beak, open, no sound. The betrayal was complete and kindly, the forest had not changed into a monster; it had changed into a painting, and paintings do not want to hurt you. They also do not want to let you walk out of them.
Kaelen took another step because if the world turns to glass under your feet you can either set yourself down and scream or you can move before everything decides it is entirely glass and you are an inclusion. He moved. He felt the weight of his body, the shift of his shoulders under the cloak, the thud of his heart because hearts continue. He saw nothing else change.
"Unauthorized," said a voice. Not a voice. A word dropped from above as if someone had turned a wheel and the word had fallen off.
Kaelen's spine went hot and then cold, the way iron does at a forge and then in the trough. "What," he said, because what else does a person say when someone tells him he is not allowed to exist in the place where he has put himself.
"Unauthorized," said the word again, placid, indifferent, as if reading a recipe to no one.
He turned. The trees held still, their edges, he blinked and that was wrong, even the act of blinking felt recorded. The edges of the trees looked… fuzzy wasn't the word; uncommitted. As if the leaves in the foreground and the background had refused to agree on an outline. Past them, this should not have been possible; past them, at the limits of his sight, the forest simply stopped. Not with a line, exactly, but with a falling-off, the way ink bleeds out of a shape until it becomes pale at the edge and then is nothing. The world thinned, like old fabric, and then was not there. Where it was not there was a whiteness that was not fog, not sky, not anything he had a word for from Stonebridge. The white had no place to go because it was already everywhere beyond the edge. It made his eyes water, not from brightness but because they had found a thing they could not hold on to.
He walked toward it the way you walk toward a rumor before you decide whether to repeat it. One step, two, three. The moss under his feet kept the shape of those steps as faithfully as a memory you wish would blur. At the fourteenth step (he knew because counting seemed like the only courtesy he could offer to a day that had forgotten how to move), he reached a place where the air became thin in a way that had nothing to do with breath and everything to do with permission.
"Unauthorized," the word said again, from nowhere and everywhere, and now the sound added a second syllable he could not hear with his ears. It tickled the nerves in his teeth.
He reached his hand out. The fading edge was not a line he could touch; his fingers passed without resistance through the place where color went pale, where bark forgot its texture. But beyond that—beyond that, the white was not emptiness. It refused him the way a closed eye refuses someone trying to see the thought behind it. His fingers tingled. He could not have said whether it was heat or cold. It had the taste of metal. He withdrew his hand and found he had left a long smear through the pale, like drawing in dried soap on a window. The smear remained. It should have been wrong to leave a mark on the edge of the world with a finger. It was wrong. It also felt—he did not have a good word for this, yet, right, in the way scratches on a bench tell you who has used it.
"Unauthorized," said the word, patient now, almost bored. The syllables doubled, the sound phasing, as if two throats in different rooms were saying the same word in the same instant without agreeing on when the instant was.
Kaelen would later decide that the most frightening part of those two minutes was not the white or the stillness or the cord-like word dropping into his life. It was a smaller thing. A bee, mid-flight, had been trapped in front of him, its legs curled as if holding the air. The bee hung, the transparent blur of its wings not blurred at all. When he reached across to the white and drew that long smear, the bee moved. Just the legs. They stretched a fraction, obedient to some other law, and then snapped back, as if scolded. Rubberband. He would think of that later, lying awake, imagining the bee shouting at the air for daring to tell a bee how to be.
He took a breath, it hung in front of his mouth, harmless as a curtain, and then another.
He tried a word. "Authorized," he said, and felt ridiculous, but the ridiculousness was relief compared to what his body wanted to do, which was kneel and call for the gods in a voice strong enough to re-thread the eyes of the world.
The white did nothing. The fading edges did nothing. The forest remained loving and indifferent.
"Unauthorized," said the not-voice, as if he had spoken in a language it had not been taught to understand by a patient uncle.
The practical part of him, the one Maelin had fed and Daran had trained, the one Bren had hired, spoke in his ear: 'go back.' When a board creaks, step off the board. When a rope frays, take your weight off it. When a boy has walked to the place where the forest is over and the nothing begins, turn around.
He turned around. He took three steps down the path that was not a path. The third step did something like pop. Sound returned in a flurry. The bee completed its stroke, outraged. The leaves laughed at one another. The breath in front of his mouth leapt backward into his throat and made him cough. His cloak fell from his thigh and slapped his leg as if to scold him for making it hold that posture for so long. The moss, all at once, sprang up. The impression of his boot disappeared as quickly as if it had been only a thought of standing, not standing itself.
Kaelen's knees did that human thing and forgot to be knees. He went down with a lack of drama that hurt more than any fall he could remember. The scolding bird finished its syllable with such vengeance he had to laugh, two strangled barks he couldn't stop. He put his palm against the ground, felt the dirt stain his skin, and blessed that stain and wanted to vomit for blessing it and then did both, one after the other, a prayer and a heave.
It had been two minutes. Perhaps three. The length of a kettle trying to decide whether to boil. The length of a child's apology. A life. He sat there and listened to the forest pretending nothing had happened and tried to decide whether to dishonor it by calling it a liar.
He stood at last because being on the ground felt like asking the earth to tuck him in, and he needed to prove to himself that the earth wasn't in the mood to tuck anything. His legs worked. His head swam. He looked back toward the fading edge. It wasn't there. Not the way it had been. The trees simply stood. The white, if there had been white, was a rumor with no immediate witness.
He took out his pocketknife. He had owned it since his father deemed him old enough to bleed on purpose. He knelt by a pale birch on the path and pressed the blade into the bark, very gently, the way you sign your name slowly the first time you are allowed to write it in a ledger. He scratched a mark: a single straight line, then a small cross-hatch at the top. Nothing fancy. If the world decided to unzip again, he wanted to know if a mark he made in it would go with it.
'Unauthorized,' the echo said inside his bones, as if remembering itself, and then it was gone again, like a fish rolling and vanishing into the grey river water.
Kaelen took a step backward. Then another. He did not run. It would have been easy to run and trip and twist his ankle and then have to explain to Daran a sprain with a lie and add shame to the pile. He walked the way a person walks out of a room where a conversation has just said something unforgivable and someone has to go buy bread or there will be no supper to eat between the people refusing to speak to each other.
When he came out of the copse, the world had the courtesy to look exactly the way it had when he went in. The field lay as if asleep. The low wall remembered where its stones went when they were younger. The sky did the decent thing and let a cloud pass for cover. He breathed. He tried to shake his cloak down as if to get forest out of it, as if any of what had just happened could be carried in cloth.
He reached Stonebridge and the city took him back the way a mother does when a child stomps out and stomps in and neither of you is ready to discuss why. Maelin was at the stove again. Daran had moved the ledger and was polishing his boots in that way that calmed him more than prayer. Tamsin sat at the table with her chin in her hands and a loaf in front of her as if she had been holding it hostage in case he didn't come back and would now eat it as reparations.
"You were gone a bit," Maelin said, and the bit contained all the minutes a mother can count without a bell.
"I walked," Kaelen said. He took off his cloak as if it had misbehaved and hung it on its peg with a precision he did not feel. He washed his hands at the basin, scrubbing hard at dirt that came away easily. He looked at his fingers as if they could tell him what they had touched. They could not. He could barely tell them.
Daran's eyes followed the lines of Kaelen's face as if reading a map newly printed on a country he thought he knew. "You go to the woods," he said, not a question.
"Yes," Kaelen said.
"Got lost?" Daran asked. He kept his voice in the narrow channel of casual. It was a courtesy Kaylen missed and then recognized and wanted to be worthy of.
"A little," Kaelen said. The lie sat next to the truth like two men on a bench who refuse to speak to one another.
"Did the woods help," Maelin asked, because she had always believed in the medicinal properties of trees.
"They made me tired," Kaelen said.
"Then they're working," Maelin said, and set a bowl in front of him with a tenderness that did not ask him to be different than he was.
He sat. He ate. He did not tell them about the bee or the moss or the word that had dropped through the air like a stone through still water. He did not tell them about the white because saying white would have made both of them go to the door at once and he could not bear to think of Daran stepping where the world ended. He did not tell Tamsin because Tamsin would have believed him too fast and run to see, and he knew, suddenly and with a kind of fierce clarity, that whatever this was, it had said his name in the only way it knows, 'unauthorized', and he could not risk it saying hers.
He kept it, then. He kept it like you keep a hot coal, not because you want to but because you do not know where to set it down that will not burn the house. He slept badly that night and woke three times convinced that he had heard the word again, the syllables falling like grain into a mill, a rhythm he could not unhear. Each time he sat up and put his hands flat on the coverlet and told himself the most boring story he knew, benches and boots and bread, until the interesting one went away.
However, just before his final attempt at sleeping to avoid being exhausted for work the following day, he grabbed a piece of fine paper from a small journal, empty as always, and wrote something.
"Why was the quiet, so loud?"