Dalen came home 2 days before the ceremony, which surprised everyone including Dalen, who had apparently told their mother he'd be back the night before and then caught an earlier carriage without telling anyone why.
Kael watched him come through the door from the top of the stairs. Dalen was 21 now and had been living in the capital for 3 years working a minor administrative position in one of the guild halls. He looked the same but dressed better, which said something about where his priorities had landed.
"You're early," their mother said.
"Roads were clear," Dalen said, and hugged her, and that was apparently the whole explanation.
Kael came downstairs and Dalen clapped him on the shoulder and said he'd gotten tall, which wasn't really true but was the kind of thing you said to a younger sibling you hadn't seen in a while. Rhett came running in from the back of the house and crashed into Dalen's side and he caught her and swung her up, which she was probably getting a little old for at 10 but didn't seem to mind.
Dinner that night was the best meal they'd had in about 6 months. Kael noticed this and didn't say anything about it. His mother had clearly been saving for the occasion and he wasn't going to make that weird.
His father talked more than usual. Dalen talked about the capital. Rhett interrupted constantly with questions that had nothing to do with what anyone was saying, and nobody told her to stop. It was the most normal the house had felt in a long time and Kael sat in the middle of it and tried to just be there instead of cataloguing everything, which worked for about half the meal before he stopped trying.
After dinner his father asked him to come to the study.
Aldric's study had fewer books in it than it used to. Kael had noticed the gaps on the shelves over the past couple of years and had a pretty good idea where the books had gone. His father sat behind the desk and Kael sat across from it and for a moment it felt like one of their garden conversations, the kind where Aldric said something in the spaces between things and Kael was supposed to understand it.
"Tomorrow night," his father said, "I want you to sleep well."
"I'll try."
"I mean it. Not the ceremony. The night before." He looked at Kael. "The ceremony takes care of itself. The night before is the part people underestimate."
Kael had been preparing for the Awakening ceremony for 16 years, technically, and 6 years seriously, and he was pretty sure his father knew that on some level even if he didn't know why. "Okay," he said.
"How are you feeling about it?"
Kael thought about how to answer that honestly without answering it completely. "I don't know what's going to happen," he said. "So I'm trying not to build expectations."
His father looked at him for a long moment. "That's a very mature way to think about it."
"It's practical."
"Yes," Aldric said. "You've always been practical." He said it the way he said things when he meant something more than the word itself, and Kael waited to see if he'd keep going. He did. "I want you to know that whatever happens tomorrow, the family is going to be fine. I don't want you going into that ceremony carrying this house on your back."
Wow, he was optimistic. This was quite literally a life or death situation. Kael didn't say anything.
"I mean it," his father said.
"I know," Kael said, and he did know, he also knew that his father had sold 4 sets of shelves worth of books and was meeting with creditors on Wednesdays and had aged about 10 years in the past 6, and that the family being fine was true in the way things were true when someone needed them to be true.
He didn't say any of that. He said goodnight and went upstairs.
Rhett was in the corridor outside his room, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall like she'd been waiting there for a while.
"Were you just going to sit there all night?" Kael asked.
"Until you came out," she said. "Or came back. Whatever."
He sat down on the floor next to her because standing over her while she sat felt wrong. The corridor was dark except for the light coming from under his mother's door at the far end.
"You nervous?" Rhett asked.
"A little."
"Don't be."
"You always say that."
"Because you always are," she said, "and it never helps."
That was fair. Kael leaned his head back against the wall. He was 16 years old and tomorrow morning the Stone was going to read him and he still had no real idea what it was going to find. The Firmament had been doing stranger things around him the closer he got to 16, small responses to nothing, occasional skips in the energy, the feeling of something paying attention. He hadn't told anyone. He still didn't know if it was going to mean something good or something he didn't have a word for yet.
"What do you think it's going to say?" Rhett asked.
"I don't know."
"Guess."
"I really don't know, Rhett."
She was quiet for a second. "I think it's going to say something nobody's ever seen before," she said.
"That's not necessarily a good thing."
"I know," she said. "But it's going to be interesting."
Kael looked at her. She was 10 and she said things like that completely straight, no drama, just a conclusion she'd arrived at and was reporting. He'd been watching her do it for 6 years and it still caught him off guard sometimes.
"When's the last time something interesting happened to this family?" she asked.
"Define interesting."
"Good interesting."
He thought about it. "While you've been alive? Probably when you were born."
"I don't remember that."
"Nobody remembers being born, that's not how it works."
"You might," she said, and she wasn't wrong, technically, though he wasn't going to confirm it.
He didn't say anything and she didn't push it, which was one of the things about Rhett, she knew when to stop. She'd known since she was small. Most people didn't figure that out until they were much older.
They sat there for a while. The house was quiet. He could hear his father moving around in the study downstairs, the specific sound of someone sitting up late with something they couldn't put down.
"What happens if it goes badly?" Rhett asked.
She didn't say it like she was scared. She said it like she was asking about weather, something outside their control that was still useful to think about.
"I don't know," Kael said. "Something else. There's always something else."
"That's not a real answer."
"No," he said. "It's not."
She was quiet again and then she said, "You've always known things you shouldn't know."
Ah shit. Maybe Rhett also got reincarnated? He had never seen a 10 year old this perceptive but then again she had always been like that. Kael went still.
"I don't mean that in a bad way," she said. "I just mean I've noticed. Since I was little. You know how things work before anyone teaches you. You knew how to read before the tutors started, you just pretended you didn't." She looked at him. "I figured that out when I was 5."
"You never said anything."
"Neither did you," she said. "So I thought it was probably on purpose."
He looked at his sister. 10 years old and she'd been sitting on that for 5 years and had decided the right move was to wait and see. He didn't know whether to be impressed or concerned, and honestly it was both.
"It's complicated," he said finally.
"Okay," she said, and that was it, she wasn't going to push on it, she'd just wanted him to know she knew and now he knew and the conversation was done.
They sat in the corridor for another few minutes and then Rhett said she was going to bed and got up and went to her room, and Kael sat there alone for a bit after she left.
He thought about what she'd said. You've always known things you shouldn't know. He'd been careful for 12 years and a 10-year-old who paid attention had still figured out that something was off. Not what, just that. He wasn't sure if that was a problem or just a fact he needed to account for.
He went to his room and lay down and stared at the ceiling and tried to sleep, which didn't work for a long time.
The thing about tomorrow was that he'd been building toward it since he woke up in this body at age 4, and he still didn't know what the Stone was going to do with him. He'd run every version of it he could think of. High grade, low grade, no grade. He had plans for all of them, contingencies, fallbacks. He'd spent a lifetime in the other world learning that every system had outputs you didn't expect and the only thing you could do was be ready to adapt when they showed up.
He was ready. He was also scared, which was fine, the 2 things weren't mutually exclusive.
Somewhere around midnight he heard his father finally go to bed.
Then the house was completely quiet and Kael lay there in it and thought about the Stone and the ceremony and the 43 students he didn't know yet who would go before him, and somewhere in the middle of thinking about that he fell asleep.
He didn't dream.