Chapter 135: What the Household Kept

The pancakes came out slightly burnt, and nobody said a word about it.

Bram had taken over the good pan two weeks ago and treated it like a personal territory, which meant Ryuji now cooked breakfast only when he woke before the sun. This morning he had. The house was quiet, the fog was thin, and the old cast iron pan still hissed the same way it had on the first day, when a woman with silver hair sat at this table and waited for poison.

He set a plate in front of Selene. More honey than the batter needed.

"You are aware," she said, "that we employ a cook now."

"Bram has strong opinions about my batter."

"Bram is correct about your batter."

"Still eating it, though."

She was. She ate every bite, exactly like she had on the first morning, and Ryuji watched her do it with a feeling he didn’t have a good word for. It sat somewhere between pride and disbelief.

[System Log: Day 141]

[VOLUME THREE HAS CONCLUDED ITS PRIMARY CONFLICTS]

[THE FALSE PEACE HAS WITHDRAWN. THE ENTITY HAS CHOSEN A SMALLER SHAPE. THE FIFTH GUARDIAN IS SEARCHING. THE ARCHITECTS HAVE BEEN ACCOUNTED FOR]

[I HAVE CATALOGUED FOUR THOUSAND YEARS OF SENTIENT BEHAVIOR]

[I DID NOT EXPECT THE MOST DIFFICULT ENTRY TO BE "NOTHING IS ON FIRE"]

[...]

[I AM ENJOYING IT. I WILL NOT ADMIT THIS AGAIN]

Marro came in with the tea tray and set down four cups instead of two. That told Ryuji who was about to walk through the door before anyone spoke.

Alexei arrived first, ducking under the frame he’d repaired himself last month. He’d insisted on it, saying a future king should not be the reason a house lost its doorway. Renka followed with her ears relaxed, then Seris, home from Millhollow for the week, then Kaelith, back from the north with a small wooden box she kept touching like she was checking it was real.

"I brought seeds," Kaelith said. "Wren’s village. Star lilies. I thought the garden might want company."

Selene looked at the box for a moment too long. Then she took it in both hands and said nothing, and Ryuji understood that nothing was the correct answer.

They ate together, all of them, at a table that had once held two chairs and now held eleven mismatched ones Marro refused to replace. Bram argued with Renka about salt. Ostra came in from the garden with dirt on her sleeves and sat without being asked. Seris told a story about Talia accidentally restoring a chicken, which was apparently not a thing that should have been possible, and Kaelith spent five full minutes trying to work out whether she should be proud or alarmed.

Ryuji leaned back and let it wash over him. Three volumes ago he’d bled in this kitchen at two in the morning and lied about it over breakfast. Now the loudest thing in the room was a dispute about chicken.

That’s what it was for, he thought. All of it.

Selene caught him looking. She raised one eyebrow.

"You have the expression," she said quietly.

"Which one."

"The one where you are pretending to be calm and are actually about to say something sentimental."

"I wasn’t."

"You were."

"Maybe a little."

She reached under the table and squeezed his knee once, hard, and went back to arguing with Alexei about whether a heir could reasonably be forced to attend tax meetings.

The rest of the day drifted. Ryuji walked the outer wall with Renka, who reported, with visible amusement, that her network had nothing to report. Vashae sent a letter from Aldenmarch saying the diplomatic school had eleven applicants and she was already tired of all of them. Ashcroft wrote separately to say he was tired of Vashae. Ryuji read both aloud at dinner, and the table lost about ten minutes to laughter.

That night Selene was quiet in a way he recognized.

She sat on the edge of the bed with her hair loose, turning the small box of seeds over in her hands without opening it. Ryuji sat beside her and waited, because he had learned that waiting worked better than asking.

"You talk in your sleep," she said finally.

"I know. You’ve told me."

"Not the words I understand. The others." She kept her eyes on the box. "You have been doing it more often since the celebration. A language I have never heard. And one name, said over and over, in the same tired voice."

Ryuji felt something cold move through his chest. "What name."

"Tetsu."

He let out a breath that was half a laugh and half something else. "Selene..."

"I am not accusing you," she said, before he could go on. Her jaw was tight anyway. "I am telling you it has been sitting in my chest for nine days, and I am tired of pretending it has not. I know your old life is closed. I know everyone in it is beyond reach. But I know what it sounds like when a man says the name of someone he lost, and it does not sound like nothing."

This was the part of marriage nobody warned you about, Ryuji thought. Not the assassins. Not the gods. The nine days of silence that turned into one evening’s honesty.

"Tetsu was my second," he said. "Ten years. He was twenty when he started working for me and he still didn’t know how to fold a shirt properly. He cried at my father’s funeral because I couldn’t." He stopped, swallowed. "He was probably the closest thing I had to a brother. I don’t know what happened to him after I got pulled here. I don’t know if he’s alive."

Selene’s shoulders came down slowly.

"That is not what I imagined," she said.

"What did you imagine."

"A woman," she admitted, with dignity that cost her visible effort. "A wife, perhaps. A life you had abandoned."

"There was never anyone. Only him. Only the job." He took her hand out of the box’s lid. "You’re the first person I ever let close enough to notice what I say in my sleep."

She was quiet for a moment. Then, drily, "I am relieved. I am also embarrassed by how relieved I am."

"You’re allowed to be jealous of a dead friend’s memory."

"I was not jealous of a friend. I was jealous of the possibility of a woman. That is a completely different and far more dignified feeling."

Ryuji laughed properly for the first time in days. She leaned into his shoulder, still slightly annoyed at herself, and he kissed her hair and said nothing wise, because for once nothing wise was needed.

"Next time you notice something," he said, "say it on day one."

"I will attempt to."

"You’ll say it on day nine again."

"Very likely."

They lay down. The fog pressed gently against the shutters, the house creaked in the familiar way, and for the first time in a long time Ryuji fell asleep without counting the gaps between sounds.

He didn’t dream about Tetsu that night.

The rider reached the gate at dawn.

It wasn’t the frantic gallop of the old days. It was a fast, tired ride from someone who’d been given a message they didn’t fully believe, and Ryuji met him at the wall with his sleeve still half rolled and a sense of dread that arrived a little late, like it had been stuck in traffic.

"Lord Volkris." The messenger wore Theron’s colors and stood like he’d been trained not to fidget. "Lord Berrin sends word. Urgently, but not as an emergency. He said to make that clear."

"Say it then."

"The old summoning circle beneath Aldenmarch’s cathedral lit up two nights ago. No one activated it. The priests say it hasn’t responded to anything since the day you arrived." The man wet his lips. "Something came through. Someone. He is alive, unharmed, and terrified, and he refuses to give the priests his name."

Selene had come up beside Ryuji without a sound. He felt her hand settle against his back.

"Why is Berrin sending word to me," Ryuji said.

The messenger reached into his coat and pulled out a strip of paper, folded small, damp at the edges like it had been gripped too hard. Ryuji unfolded it.

The handwriting was unmistakable. The characters weren’t Avarthos script at all. They were the strokes he’d learned as a boy and hadn’t seen in over a year, quick and crooked and slightly too large, written by a man who never once learned to slow down.

Three words. One name.

Boss. Please. It’s Tetsu.

Behind him, in the kitchen, someone dropped a pan.