Morning arrived with its usual lack of sentimentality, but today, the kitchen table felt like a negotiation room.
I sat at the head, my tea cooling as I watched the centerpiece of our morning: the wooden spoon. It sat by Arin's bowl, looking remarkably smug for a piece of kitchenware. Arin hadn't touched it yet. He was staring at it with a mixture of reverence and suspicion, as if it might decide to report back to the Principal if he used it too aggressively.
"Eat, Arin," Avaris said, her voice a calm tether in the room. "The porridge won't quantify itself."
Arin picked up the spoon with the delicacy of a man handling a live explosive. "I'm practicing my grip," he whispered. "Low friction. High stability."
"It's a spoon, not a poleaxe," Lysa muttered, not looking up from her book. She was already dressed, her hair tied back so tightly it made my own scalp ache in sympathy. She looked ready for a march; Arin looked ready for a miracle.
"Father," Arin said, looking at me. "If I am boring today, truly and deeply boring, do I get to keep it for the weekend?"
"Boredom is a virtue that pays in installments," I told him, trying to sound like a man who wasn't worried about the 'Practical Wing' waiting for them. "Keep your head down, your questions simple, and your spoon in your bag."
Breakfast passed in a blur of clinking ceramics and Lysa's silent, efficient chewing. When the clock struck the hour, the house shifted. It was the moment I hated most—the transition from 'Our Family' to 'Citizens of the Empire.'
Avaris stood by the door, her hands occupied with Arin's collar and Lysa's cloak. She didn't hug them; she checked them. She adjusted a strap here, smoothed a wrinkle there, her fingers moving with that uncanny, military precision that I still couldn't quite place.
"Walk together," she told them. It wasn't a request. "Stay in the flow of the crowd. If an instructor asks you to 'demonstrate' anything, you are tired. You are clumsy. Do you understand?"
"I am a master of clumsy," Arin saluted, nearly hitting himself with his own bag.
"I'm a ghost," Lysa said flatly.
The gate clicked shut behind them. I watched through the window until their small shadows merged with the other students on the lane. Only then did the house exhale.
I turned back to the kitchen. The table was a mess of crumbs and half-empty bowls. Avaris was already moving, stacking plates with a rhythmic, hollow sound.
"The house is too big when they leave," I said, moving to help her.
"The house is finally honest when they leave," she replied.
I stopped, a damp cloth in my hand. "Honest?"
She stopped too, holding a stack of bowls. She didn't look at me. She looked at the door. "We don't have to pretend to be 'Normal Parents' for a few hours, Ilyas. We can just be... this."
"This?" I stepped closer. "And what exactly is 'this' today, Avaris? Because you've been looking at the herb garden like you're planning an ambush, and I've rewritten the history of the Northern Provinces three times in my head just to keep from shaking."
She finally looked at me, and for a second, the mask of the village wife slipped. It didn't fall—she was too careful for that—but it cracked. I saw the exhaustion in the set of her jaw, the way she guarded the scars on her wrists even when it was just us.
"Let's go outside," she said softly. "The walls are listening too hard today."
I followed her into the garden, my mind already cataloging the silence.
The garden was our sanctuary, but even here, I found myself calculating the height of the walls. I sat on my "experimental" bench, the wood still smelling of sap and my own failures as a carpenter.
Avaris was among the rows of kale and herbs. She didn't crouch like a gardener; she knelt with a straight back, her movements so precise they reminded me of a clock's internal gears. I watched her, my hands resting on my knees, feeling the strange, thrumming tension of a man who realized he was deeply in love with someone he might not actually know.
"Ilyas," she said, her back still to me. "You're staring at my hands again."
"I was actually admiring the geometry of the kale," I lied. It was a scholar's lie—defensive and easily dismantled.
She turned around, sitting back on her heels. She wiped a smudge of dirt from her forehead with the back of her wrist, a gesture so domestic it almost made me forget the way she had looked at the Principal's letter.
"Come here," she said.
I didn't hesitate. I slid off the bench—which groaned in relief at my departure—and knelt in the dirt beside her. The sun was warm on my neck, and for a moment, the smell of damp earth was the only thing that mattered.
"You look tired," she whispered. She reached out, her fingers tracing the edge of my jaw. Her skin was rough, calloused in ways that didn't match the life of a village weaver, but her touch was lighter than a breath.
"I have spent the last forty-eight hours building fortresses out of ink and paper," I admitted. I leaned into her palm, closing my eyes. "In my head, the Empire has already invaded twice, and I've had to bribe the commanding general with a rare collection of agricultural treaties."
Avaris let out a soft, melodic laugh. It was the sound that had first snared me in that library years ago—bright, genuine, and entirely too rare.
"You and your treaties," she murmured. She leaned forward, resting her forehead against mine. I could smell the jasmine tea she'd had at breakfast and the sharp, clean scent of the outdoors. "You think you can solve the world with a well-placed footnote."
"It's a more civilized weapon than a wooden spoon," I whispered.
I reached out, my hands finding her waist. She was solid, steady—the center of my gravity. In this position, the scars on her wrists were inches from my face. I didn't look at them. I looked at her eyes. They were a deep, stormy grey, and for the first time, they didn't look like they were searching for threats.
I leaned in and kissed her. It wasn't the quick, distracted kiss of a man heading to the Academy. It was slow, lingering, and full of the questions I was too afraid to ask. She responded with a sudden, fierce intensity, her fingers curling into my scholar's robes.
For a few heartbeats, the "Verne Paradox" vanished. I wasn't a worried scholar, and she wasn't a guarded mystery. We were just a husband and wife in a garden, holding onto each other while the world turned outside our walls.
"Stay," she breathed against my lips as we pulled apart. "Just for an hour. No books. No diagrams. Just... stay."
"The Academy could burn to the ground," I said, my voice thick. "And I wouldn't leave this spot."
She smiled, a soft, vulnerable expression that I realized she only ever showed me. We stayed there, sitting in the dirt among the vegetables, her hand in mine. I watched a beetle navigate a leaf, and for the first time in years, I didn't try to predict its path.
The peace was fragile—a glass bubble in a hailstone storm—but it was ours.
"Ilyas?"
"Yes, Avaris?"
"If you ever finish that bench," she said, her eyes dancing with mischief, "I might actually let you sit on it without a lecture."
"Then I shall endeavor to make it a masterpiece," I promised.
We sat there until the sun began its descent, two people stubbornly pretending that the gate was locked and the road was empty. But as the shadows grew long, I felt the shift in her. The subtle tightening of her grip. The way her head tilted toward the lane.
The hour was over. The world was coming back.
"They'll be home soon," she said, the mask sliding back into place so smoothly I almost didn't see it.
"Yes," I said, standing up and brushing the soil from my robes. "And they'll be hungry."
She stood up too, her eyes already scanning the perimeter. The cozy scene hadn't ended; it had simply been archived, placed on a high shelf behind the armor we both wore.
As we walked back toward the kitchen door, I looked at the "Crossed Circle" I had scratched into the dirt earlier with a stick. I kicked some soil over it, burying it deep.
Today, the peace had won.