"You're pushing," Bren said without accusation. "Let the edge work. Your job is not to get in its way."
Kaelen exhaled. The chisel did what chisels do when boys stop telling them what to be. A curl of wood ribboned up and fell to the floor as if content with gravity. He could have stayed in that small happiness all morning. He tried to.
Tamsin arrived without knocking, because people who arrive with their entire personality as luggage can't waste energy on doors. She wore a braid that had not been negotiated so much as captured. "News," she announced, hopping up to sit on a sawhorse that definitely did not approve of being furniture. "North gate closed for a spell. Something about a caravan running late and rumors sprouting thicker than weeds. Your father is at the west gate today, Verenth."
Kaelen glanced up. He did not ask how she had come by that information. Tamsin knew things by leaning against them until they admitted their names. "All right," he said. "We'll bring him food at midday, then."
"We will?" Tamsin said, delighted. "Because I'm free, obviously, and not at all obligated to help my aunt count goose eggs, which laid a philosophical question on the house this morning: when does an egg stop being an egg and start being a bird with opinions."
Bren, without looking at her, said, "At the exact moment the bird corrects your knife hand."
"I hate it when craftsmen are poets," Tamsin muttered, but she grinned.
By third bell Kaelen had lost track of everything except the way wood argues with itself and occasionally agrees. Bren took his gauge and marked three quick lines as if jotting down a melody. "Enough," Bren said, and it sounded like a concession from a man who didn't like conceding to clocks. "Go feed someone who thinks paper schedules contain reality. Bring back your hands."
Kaelen washed at the basin until the water admitted defeat, dried his fingers on the rag that had once been a shirt and now aspired to be nothing, and shook splinters from his hair. He gathered the parcel Maelin had sent with Tamsin earlier, bread folded around roast and mustard with a whisper of sweetness, and tucked a little note under the twine because his mother's love required paper to climb.
"I'm coming," Tamsin declared, which meant she already walked beside him.
Stonebridge traded the morning for the hour when apprentices run errands and mothers begin to notice the state of their kitchens. The square kept its necessary racket at a respectable volume. Kaelen and Tamsin cut along the lane behind the apothecary where sunlight fell between buildings like gold flour through a sieve. The west gate stood down a sloping street that thought it was important because it had a long view of fields. The gate itself was older than people who said 'older than the hills,' made of oak banded with iron that had been replaced twice in Kaelen's lifetime and would be replaced again by someone else's hands.
His father liked the west gate. He said you could smell weather better there, what it intended for the afternoon and what you would have to say to it in return. Today the smell was clover and cart grease and a rumor of rain that had been postponed.
Kaelen slowed as they approached. Something in the air had been folded incorrectly. He didn't know how else to name it. The shadow of the gate fell at the wrong angle by a breath. Not wrong: stubborn. The guards on duty, a pair of familiar shapes in leather and patience, stood where they should, except that their conversation did not carry, as if someone had rolled wool between them and the street. The city's noise arrived late and then hurried to catch up.
"Do you feel that?" Kaelen asked.
Tamsin tilted her head. She could hear patterns other people only saw. "The air is holding its breath," she said. "It'll pass. Stonebridge is practiced at this. We don't keep our lungs full forever."
He meant to believe her. He did not.
"Go," she said suddenly, her voice light, but her eyes sharp. "I'll buy pears before the stall sells out and a poet has to write about hunger."
"I can-"
"Go," she repeated, and because she was Tamsin and because he was himself, he did.
He picked his way down the last of the slope, the parcel warm under his arm, the note's corner tickling his wrist. The closer he came, the more the wrongness gathered on him like dust. It wasn't danger. It wasn't even fear. It was a miscount, a small subtraction no one had approved. One of the gulls that haunted the gate arches hung on a draft a beat too long, then flapped twice, as if remembering it had applied for a job.
Daran was not at the post. A younger guardsman with the expression of someone learning to keep a face stood with a spear he hadn't yet made peace with. Kaelen scanned the angle where he liked to stand when he was not standing where he ought to stand: the corner by the postern door. Empty. Perhaps he had been called to the south arch. Perhaps he was reading a list. Perhaps. Kaelen turned once, slow, to find him, and the world fell still the way a thrown card lies flat on a table.
Stillness is not absence. It is a type of presence. Everything held its place as if told to. The guardsman's mouth was half open on a breath. The gull above the arch had forgotten to choose a direction. A drop of water hung from a cart's axle where a puddle had been stepped in and had not yet broken free. Sound stopped. Not fell quiet. Stopped, as if someone had spilled flour over it.
Kaelen knew this. He had seen this once; not long, not public. A blur at the edge of the lantern canopy on festival night, a smear where laughter slid. He'd told himself it was tired eyes. He had told no one, because who tells the river it missed a word.
He was, abruptly, and completely, alone. Not simply in the sense of there being no one near. Alone as in the little room behind the eyes where a person keeps their one self widened and found only one in it.
"Father?" Kaelen said anyway, because there are words you test even when you know no one is listening. The sound did not happen. His throat moved. The world did not accept the coin.
He stepped forward, parcel under his arm. For a heartbeat, three, seven, the air remained unwilling to move. Then it moved, all at once and not at all: the gate's shadow slid a finger's width, then put it back. The light on the guard's cheek changed its mind and returned to its first angle. The gull had a thought that lasted too long and didn't finish it.
Kaelen held still. He had learned stillness at Bren's bench and at Daran's side and at Maelin's oven. He did not move as if he were trying to trick the moment into forgetting him. He felt, this was foolish; he heard Sister Anwen gently call it foolish even as he thought it, he felt as if stepping wrong might tear something.
The whiteness entered without fanfare. It wasn't bright; nothing in that blank had to outshine anything else. It appeared the way an eraser appears: slowly erasing only becomes obvious when it has already begun. Beyond the gate's lintel, the road to the fields unspooled into a chalk nothing. The cart track, the grass, the walker's line where feet choose the shorter route, all submerged under a white that wasn't light and wasn't paint. A clean, indifferent absence, as if parchment had been unrolled over the day.
Kaelen's skin recognized it before his mind let itself. Every hair lifted, not in fear but in attention. The parcel under his arm felt foolish. He placed it on the step, then picked it up again, because his body objected to setting anything down in front of that white as if the blank would decide it belonged to it.
"Is this a joke?" he asked the silence, and this time his voice felt noise in his mouth and not in the air.
No answer. No anvil-fall of 'unauthorized' the way the old folk-tales told the gods spoke: iron in the throat of the sky. Only a not nothing.
He took a step toward the gate. The stillness did not crack. He took another, counting without knowing why. He did not feel reckless. He felt cautious in a new key.
Within the gate's frame, the whiteness breathed, not a movement, not a wind, but a suggestion. He stretched a hand toward it, palm open as if greeting a skittish horse. Heat entered his fingers. It was not warmth. It was a correction. He did not yelp. It didn't hurt, but it notified. He lifted his hand higher and put it into the white.
It didn't vanish. It didn't become a stump. He did not expect either of these, and was nevertheless grateful. His hand existed in the whiteness and the whiteness behaved as if his hand were an acceptable guest.
He stepped.
One, two, three. The cobbles under his feet continued inside the gate for a meter, two, then softened to an idea of cobbles, chalk suggestions, then were simply the white and not floor. He kept his eyes open because he had once closed them during a training bout and woken up on his back with Garrin examining his eyebrows for damage.
Four, five. Back on the lane, the gull held fixed in a position of permanent indecision, the guardsman's breath remained politely unspent, the drop of water clung to its axle like a child late to bed.
Kaelen took a sixth step. The whiteness allowed it. He took a seventh. Something in him argued that seven had never been a kind number. He took an eighth, and the world said no.
It didn't throw him. Not at first. The air thickened in front of him, gently, irresistibly, like a river that had been pretending to be a path. He leaned forward and felt current. It pressed. It was not angry. It was not even impersonal. It was a law. He leaned because fourteen-year-old boys are built to lean at the world until it laughs and lets them through.
The current gathered itself and, without malice, pushed. Kaelen staggered backward two steps, three, his heels looking for anything that made sense and finding only the gate's worn threshold. He held the parcel like a soldier holds a standard and then let it go in order to catch himself and then tried to catch the parcel and missed both. He stumbled into a sunlight that had been stuck and now remembered how shadows work. The parcel landed with the dignified thud good food makes when it refuses to be tragic.
"Unauthorized," said a voice that was not a voice.
It did not come from in front of him. It came from everywhere that was the white and every edge where the white touched the world. It hummed in the gate's lintel. It rustled the gull's feathers without moving them. It spoke in the cornice moldings of the houses that had seen everything and disliked being surprised. It was without breath. It made a shape of the word that his ear recognized but that never passed through air. 'Unauthorized.'
Kaelen flinched, not from the word but from recognition. He knew it. He had heard it once before from the corner of a night he had convinced himself was a trick of sleepy eyes: a smear in the lantern canopy where a piece of sky had hiccuped, a syllable he had pretended was a boy making a joke into his shoulder. It was this. He could not recall hearing it. He remembered having heard it.
He tried to speak back. Nothing.
He tried to step forward again. The river refused with the same quiet insistence as before and moved him back with the authority of water. He had the absurd thought that if he had been practicing with Garrin for another year, his balance would laugh at this and stay. He retreated instead of becoming a story.
The whiteness did not advance. It held the road with the patience of pages waiting to be written on. The gate's shadow, real shadow, not its earlier twitch, crossed his boot and settled.
And then: a second change, smaller than both the stillness and the push. The air around Kaelen's hands thickened, as if it had purchased new clothes without telling him. The skin of his palms prickled. Not like heat. Not like cold. A texture. The way a pattern in a cloth can be felt with your looks. He lifted them into the light within the gate and saw nothing there but his hands and their ordinary nicks. The prickling became a hum that wasn't a sound and wasn't a feeling, and he didn't have a word for it and would have asked Sister Anwen for one if he had not promised himself, in that moment with no witnesses available, to tell no one.
Something moved under the floor of himself. The way a cellar door lifts when you tug the ring and discover that your arms remember different strengths. Not big. Not bright. Not fireworks. He could smell it, ridiculous to say so and true: a copper sweetness like coins kept in a warm pocket, the ember of clove, wet stone struck against wet stone. The hum ran down his forearms to his elbows and then up again, as if testing boundaries politely.
Kaelen curled his fingers. The hum responded, not by obeying, not by resisting. It acknowledged. He thought of a spoke sliding, made himself stop thinking about that before he made a blasphemy of work. He held his breath without knowing he had and then let it go because the hum in him asked for exhalation like a favor.
The whiteness closed nothing. The word said nothing else. The world around him, frozen, then refusing, stayed as it was for as long as it took him to understand that he had taken a step into something no one would help him name. Then, casually, rudely, like a friend who remembers an appointment, the gate's scene returned.
Sound came back all at once and wrong. The gull screamed because gulls do. The guardsman finished his breath with a small cough and then pretended he had meant to cough. A cart rattled; a wheel declared itself discontent, then forgot. Voices in the street behind him rose to the right pitch, half surprise, half complaint. A woman across the lane told a boy to stop tormenting the dog with a ribbon. A dog agreed loudly. Stonebridge resumed itself with the injured dignity of a city that has tripped in public and would prefer you not mention it.
Kaelen stared into the road beyond the gate where fields ought to be. The whiteness was gone, or had never been, or had left its weight in his blood as a deposit now owed.
"Kaelen?" said a familiar voice, and he turned too quickly, guilty of nothing and everything. Daran strode toward him from the watchhouse door with a list half-folded in his hand and a crease of irritation between his eyes that smoothed the moment he saw his son. "You all right? You look like you've seen a tax."
Kaelen forced his swallow to be humorous. "Worse," he said, automatically, without planning to say it. "I think I saw a philosophy."
Daran looked him over in the way of men who once learned to count wounds at a glance and then promised not to make a scene. His gaze paused at Kaelen's hands. Kaelen curled them into his sleeves too late to make it look natural. "You brought me my dinner," Daran said, rescuing them both. "Good. The gate has been busy inventing excuses to stand upright."
Kaelen bent to retrieve the parcel. His fingers tingled against the twine as if it had been singing when he touched it and now had to pretend twine cannot sing. He handed the package up. Daran took it, then frowned down at Kaelen's hands. "You cut yourself?"
"No," Kaelen said, too quickly. "Bren's bench. Splinters. I'm fine."
"Mm," Daran said, and made it both a syllable and a file note. He glanced toward the arch, then past it to the field road he had walked too many times to be surprised by. He squinted. He smiled at a farmer he did not know and made it look like they had history. He returned his eyes to Kaelen and the look was slow, which meant Daran had decided not to be an officer for a minute. "You sure?"
Kaelen should have lied better. He should have said yes and made his eyes more ordinary. He shouldn't have let them show the thing that had moved under the floor of him. Instead he half shrugged because to shrug is a good compromise between yes and no, and Daran accepted it because Daran loved him enough to not ask in public for the rest of the answer.
"Tell your mother I live," Daran said, breaking the twine with his thumbs. "Tell Bren I'll bring him the wheel paperwork this evening." He paused, then placed a finger against the inside of Kaelen's wrist as if checking a pulse. "You're cold."
"I'm fine," Kaelen said, which was an admission that the word fine covers many nations.
"Mm," Daran said again, then used his official voice for a passerby who asked if the gate would be closing at twilight, used his father hand to squeeze Kaelen's shoulder once, and used his sense to not watch him walk away.
Kaelen found Tamsin on the slope eating pears from a paper cone as if pears were a solution that could be consumed fast enough to solve anything. "You were gone forever," she said. "I nearly took up carpentry to fill the time."
"Do not," Kaelen said faintly. "Bren will take it personally when you are better than he is by dawn."
Tamsin peered at him. "You went white," she observed. "Either from hunger or from thoughts. What happened?"
Kaelen opened his mouth. His hands answered before his tongue did, which was new and entirely unwelcome. They flared, not light, not heat, attention. The air around his fingers hiccuped, not visible, not entirely ignorable. Tamsin's eyebrows rose the slightest degree. Kaelen shoved his hands into his sleeves as if hiding from a goose. "I... nothing."
"Liar," Tamsin said, cheerfully, as if the word were affectionate. "Fine. Keep your secrets like a goblin keeps buttons. But if you fall over I will tell Mrs. Kettle you tried to steal her cat and let her do justice."
They walked. Kaelen wanted, badly, to find a place without people where he could examine the hum without being noticed by a single blade of grass. Stonebridge never let you be alone without effort. It was one of its virtues and its crimes. He gripped his elbows. The hum in him obliged by quieting. It didn't leave. He knew it had no intention.
Signs began immediately and made fools of secrets. The first was so small he almost passed it by. A candle in an upstairs window down the lane, a house charm to keep mice from thinking they owned the place, flickered when he looked at it and then steadied in the shape of a straight line, not a flame's shape, just for one heartbeat, then resumed normal behavior like a child who realizes a parent is watching. He looked away so hard his neck objected.
Outside the apothecary, a string of drying herbs turned their faces to him as if he were a small sun. He stepped faster. The lamplighter, whose job did not include afternoons, stood at a corner fiddling with a wick out of habit. As Kaelen passed, the wick caught without a whisper. The lamplighter startled, then told himself a story about how well-tended his tools were, and Kaelen loved him for that kindness.
He was half a block from Bren's shop when a length of leftover rope hanging from a peg untwisted itself the slightest, as if acknowledging a friend. He stopped, stared at nothing, moved on.
Bren glanced up when Kaelen returned. "Well?"
"Fed," Kaelen said. "Gate awake. Father alive."
"Good," Bren said. He put a hand on the wheel and the wheel, treacherously, spun a fraction before his touch. Bren's eyes narrowed briefly. He looked at Kaelen's hands as if they were apprentices who had wandered in without papers. "Wash," he said.
Kaelen washed. The water in the basin cooled under his fingers faster than water cools. He held still until his skin decided to feel like skin. He dried his hands and kept them to himself.
"Back to spokes," Bren said, because Bren's universe had spokes at its center. "If the gate intends to dramatize, it can do it without us."
Kaelen set his hands to wood. The hum did not intrude; it hovered. He could feel it as a possibility he had not invited to supper who had nevertheless found his window and waved hello. He understood how Sister Anwen smelled rain before it declared itself. He did not understand what to do with understanding.
When he worked, the shop seemed to join him a fraction faster. The chisel took less persuasion. The marking gauge found its line on the first try. The mallet tapped and the wood said All right instead of Why. Bren noticed. You could see in the way his eyes rested on the piece one heartbeat longer, then left and came back a breath sooner. He did not comment. He did not approve. He did not disapprove. He added three things to the list he kept in his head and crossed off something that had to do with Kaelen, but he did not know which thing it was yet.
He did not disapprove. He added three things to the list he kept in his head and crossed off something that had to do with Kaelen, but he did not know which thing it was yet.
"Fetch me a skin of pitch from Undern," Bren said at last, as if he had just then remembered the errand and not chosen it because errand is a word that means walk until your lungs soften. "Tell him I want the dark, not the pale—none of his flirtations with cheap resin. If he argues, tell him it's for the wheel that thinks it's a sermon. He'll know."
Kaelen slipped the rag into its nail-home, scrubbed his palms one more time until the prickle quieted from a shout to a suggestion, and nodded. "Dark pitch. For the sermon."
"And take the long way," Bren added without looking up, which meant he had looked up a great deal and was being polite about it now. "Streets teach you things about hands."
Outside, Stonebridge had settled into its broad-shouldered stride. The last of morning's errands rubbed elbows with the first of afternoon's obligations. Laundry on lines squared itself to the sun as if answering a roll call. A boy ran past with a butcher's parcel and the solemnity of a man who knows he is carrying someone's supper happiness. The river in the distance set its glitter to 'confident.'
Kaelen walked with the conscious inattention of a person thinking about his hands while trying not to think about his hands. The hum did not throb. It idled. Every few steps it bumped the inside of his skin as if testing the fence. He breathed the way Bren's plane breathed: in, out, even. He passed the apothecary; the bundles of dried marigold swiveled two petals toward him, then remembered their dignity. He passed the thread stall; spools clicked imperceptibly on their pegs as if making room for him in the drawer. He kept his eyes forward, as if motion could keep coincidence from turning its head.
Undern's cooperage breathed cool when he ducked in. Staves leaned like listeners. The man himself looked up from binding a cask and made his beard bristle at the interruption, then recognized Kaelen and allowed the beard to be stroked by affection.
"Dark pitch?" Undern said. "You tell Bren I've a mind to raise the price of his sermons. They keep stealing customers off my bench."
Kaelen smiled. "He said you'd argue. He said to say it's for the wheel that thinks it's a sermon. I don't know which part is the insult."
"All of it," Undern said, pleased. He produced the skin, tested the plug with a twist of battered fingers, and handed it over with a nod. "Tell him if it runs too thin he can come complain where I can hear him."
As Kaelen paid, a hoop rolled from the corner where hoops keep themselves and trundled three arcs toward the door with no wind behind it. A child outside squealed, delighted, as the hoop bumped the threshold as if it had meant to present itself as entertainment. Undern grunted. "They do that all day when I ain't looking," he said without suspicion, and Kaelen loved him for having that kind of mind.
He took the long way back, because Bren had told him to and because the long way gave him time to hear how the square breathed when it forgot to put on its company manners. It was a good day for eating outside; benches strained under the weight of people pretending they do not like to sit. The fountain ought to have had a sign that said, Do not be charmed by me, and had never needed one. The hawk stared at its fish with the same eternal question: 'what did I want, again?'
At the far side of the square, a knife-grinder pedaled. Sparks sprayed from the whetstone in bright little admissions of imperfection. As Kaelen drew level, the sparks seemed to momentarily gather and hang, unwilling to die at the usual speed. Then they remembered gravity and fell. The grinder swore at his foot and accused it of rhythm. Kaelen made himself do the very brave thing of ignoring coincidence in public.
"You there," said a voice from somewhere around the vicinity of his elbow. "Hold a moment."
He obeyed before he categorized the command because the voice was Maelin's friend from three lanes over who had once caught his sleeve when he had been about to step into a cart-rut and had announced, "It's too late in the month to be picking fights with holes." Her name, like many useful women's names, had changed depending on who was addressing her. Today she was Aunt Nella to two children and Mistress Nel to her own sense of gravitas. "Tell your mother," she said, "the pears yesterday were a bad influence. I ate two before supper as if I were the sort of person who didn't know how the day works."
"I'll convey the reprimand," Kaelen promised solemnly.
She peered at his hands, and his guts became a fan snapping shut. "You look... older," she said finally, as if that were a flaw Maelin might chide him for. "Good. Someone should. Your father won't."
He laughed and escaped. It was easier to be seen when seeing was this kind of ordinary.
By the time he reached Bren's, the pitch skin had nested comfortably into his arm like a baby that had decided it could bear to be carried by this particular boy. He passed it over. Bren thumbed the plug, sniffed with the contempt of a man allergic to being disappointed and relieved that today would not require it, and set the skin in a shaded crock.
"If Undern sends me pale I send him back his own reflection," he said to no one in particular. "Ready to spoil the spokes with too much enthusiasm?"
"Yes," Kaelen said, and meant it in the opposite way.
He settled. The shop received him. He made himself slow.
The hum, which had been behaving like a guest pretending not to see the good cups, relocated itself to a quiet chair in the back of his ribs. He felt it there when he breathed deeply. He felt it curl when he pushed too fast, and felt it level when he corrected. It did not ask to touch the tools. He did not offer them. He did not speak to it because, he realized in a small, embarrassed flash, he did not know what language it took. It was not Sister Anwen's tidy prayer words or Bren's plane-syllables or Daran's names for knots. It was like the white had said: 'this way of talking is older and also not for mouths.'
By mid-afternoon the wheel had accepted the next ring of sense. Bren appointed the moment by not remarking on it and then by remarking on something completely different, as one does when a child has finally learned to tie their laces and the ritual must include pretending it is no big thing.
"You'll sweep the lane in front," he said, "or Mrs. Kettle will accuse me of breeding shavings."
Kaelen obeyed. He liked the broom, despite all the broom had done to him earlier in life. The afternoon tilted toward the time of day when even the sun considers a nap. People's voices softened as if the air had reminded throats not to be rude. He swept in long strokes, letting the head of the broom carry its own argument along the stones, flicking shavings into neat drifts that would be tinder later and kindness now. A few strands of straw tugged away and went their own eccentric paths; he decided to let small rebellions have their victories.
Mrs. Kettle came by exactly when Mrs. Kettle would come by, which is to say the moment a boy had begun to think he could predict when she would. She eyed the swept patch in front of Bren's with the gaze reserved for the inspection of soldiers and pies, nodded once, the nod of a general who pretends relief is not her favorite flavor, and then ruined the effect by saying, 'Good boy,' in a tone that could shame an army and soothe a dog. Her cat followed her with an expression of long-suffering and a small burr in its fur. It paused at Kaelen's ankle and made a decision to bless him with a head-butt. As it leaned, the burr unhooked from its flank and dropped onto the swept stones. Kaelen, without thinking, flicked the broom toward it and felt the hum in his hands answer in the broom handle like a plucked string. The burr jumped to the bristles and clung. He froze, then pretended nothing at all had happened, which is a very Stonebridge thing to do.
The cat blinked at him. Cats frequently know when boys are lying and do not care, provided the lie benefits cats.
"Don't let the broom think it's clever," Mrs. Kettle warned as if she had seen nothing and everything. "Once a broom gets ideas it tries to tell the door who's in charge."
"I will keep it humble," Kaelen said.
He finished the sweep, stowed the broom in its corner and patted its head like a conspirator, and told Bren he'd make a turn around the square before returning. Bren waved him off with the distracted regal approval of kings who want their subjects to receive sun before returning to mines.
The square's afternoon face was his favorite version of it. Morning had pretensions. Evening had wine. Afternoon had humility and practice. The pie-seller had taken to fanning his own face with a tin. Children had discovered, again, that the fountain's low rim was exactly high enough to sit on and exactly low enough to leap off. Two elders argued over a game cloth where stones stood in small armies, neither side willing to admit the other had any right to enjoy victory. A woman sang something tuneless and happy while mending a net that had never been near the river, her husband kept it the way other men keep swords, to say I am ready if the fish ever invade.
Kaelen drifted along the stalls, hands buried in his sleeves so no stray rope or glow or flicker could accuse him. He thought of telling Tamsin, and in the thinking found the nick of temptation. Tamsin would hear him to the end without laughing; she would also feed the story back to him with improvements until it grew feathers. He thought of telling Sister Anwen and saw the quiet listening that would follow, the careful notes in the little book only gods should read. He thought of telling his father and saw the particular silence that means a man is building a barricade in his mind that matches the outline of his child. He did not tell. He did not tell.
He bought a wedge of cheese cut by a woman whose knife looked like a letter opener and paid with a coin that had known three generations of thumbs. He accepted a slice of pear from the stall on sufferance because Maelin's pears had created a monopoly on candor and everyone else had been forced to join in. He let a fiddler's tune catch the hem of his mind and hold it only as long as the tune deserved.
He took the bench near the west side, the one whose leg had been mended three times by three men who did not believe in the same god but believed in the same angle. It sat with the fountain on his right and the stalls on his left and the shade creeping toward his knees in slow, tidy finger widths. The bench acknowledged him by not creaking; he made a note to love it for that.
He sat like a boy who is allowed to sit now that his work has been seen to. He let his shoulders forget they envy other shoulders.
He watched.
A mother crouched to tie a child's shoe and used her body as a roof against the sun. A man carried a sack of flour as if it were an elderly relative who deserved respect. The lamplighter, off duty hours ago, stopped to press a wick with his thumb as if checking a pulse. A girl practiced a coin trick badly and delighted her uncle despite the trick. Two watchmen pretended to be invisible so the square would behave. A dog lying in sun turned over to cook evenly and caught three pats from three different children who did not think themselves kind for doing it.
All of it passed under Kaelen's eyes like a wheel taking road, unremarkable and miraculous. All of it, somehow, seemed nearer than it had in the morning, as if the world had leaned in to confirm its features. He became aware of his hands in his sleeves in the way one becomes aware of one's tongue when someone says, 'Think about your tongue.' The hum returned to the front hall of him, polite, the way a guest stands with hat in hand waiting for someone to ask if they are staying for supper.
He looked down, making sure no one could see his gaze fall, and allowed himself to feel it fully. He did not tug. He did not pray. He conducted an inventory. It sat in his palms and along the fingers, as if his skin were a bell and someone had rung it softly many times. When he breathed in, it gathered; when he breathed out, it spread, settling to the edges, to the nails, to the fine nicks that Bren's bench gave as lessons. It did not feel holy. It did not feel wicked. It felt like discovering a pocket in a coat he had worn for years and wondering what it had held the entire time without him knowing.
He made a small test with as little drama as a boy can make on a public bench.
A speck of leaf, browner than the rest, torn from a stall's wreath, drifted down in front of him and caught the air. It would have fallen, gone where leaf dust goes. He let his eyes follow it. Without moving his hands, without changing the anxious crouch of his shoulders, he asked the hum, not with words, more like how one asks a dog with a glance whether it will come. The leaf hesitated in the busy current between fountain and stall. It hung half a second too long. He had enough sense to look away, and when he looked back it had fallen like any other leaf. He was not sure if he had done anything. He was sure the hum had answered that it could, given the right question.
He swallowed. The square continued. No one had cried out. The hawk continued to think about fish. Children continued to invent a new game with a name that changed each time they changed their minds about it. Sister Anwen laughed once, short, at a thing an old man had said quietly, and Kaelen absorbed the laugh like bread takes butter and did not feel anointed by it, only nourished.
A thought came for him, uninvited and absolutely committed: 'if the white had refused him, why had it marked him? Why had the gate pushed and also placed this instrument in his hands?'
The hum stayed and did not insist. He set his hands on the bench slat, palms down, fingers long. The wood was warm. For a dangerous breath he wanted to ask the wood if it knew him now by a new name. He did not ask. He thought of Bren's warning: 'if you charm my wheel, I will make you uncharm it with your tongue.' He grinned to himself and the grin helped.
Dust motes in the height of the square did the little dance dust always thinks it invented. He watched them go around one another without collision and thought of the white again, the way it had spread without light, without shadow.
'Why was the quiet, so loud?'
The phrase arrived whole, as if someone else inside him had been working on it while he labored at spokes and knots, and now had brought it up to the mouth to see if it fit there.
'Why was the quiet, so loud?'
Because it wasn't quiet. Because absence is not silence; it is a different instrument. Because when a city as noisy as Stonebridge stops all at once, your bones remember every sound they were supposed to make and scream them inside you. Because when a door says 'unauthorized', it doesn't shout; it removes the floor. Because the humming his hands did now was that same silence turned inward, made small, made his.