Chapter 235 — Home, Properly

Chapter 235: Chapter 235 — Home, Properly

Pella spotted him before he’d taken three full steps inside.

"He’s back!" Her voice cut clean across the common room, loud enough that half the tables glanced up before losing interest again. "Rilla, he’s back!"

"I can see that." Rilla came around the counter at her usual unhurried pace, though her eyes were doing a quick, careful sweep of him all the same. "You’re thinner again."

"Probably."

"Longer this time, too. What’s that, ten weeks?"

"Something like that." He hadn’t actually counted precisely, somewhere past the two-month mark the days had simply stopped mattering as individual units and started mattering as a whole, continuous stretch. "Longer than I planned. Not longer than I could handle, though."

"That’s what you always say."

"It’s usually true."

Pella was already pulling a chair out for him, the same automatic gesture she always made, though she studied him with something sharper than her usual teasing this time. "You look different. Not hurt-different. Just — more, somehow."

"More what?"

"I don’t know. More you, maybe. Sit down, you’re making the doorway look crowded."

He sat, and Rilla set a plate down without being asked, the same quiet, practiced efficiency she always brought, and he ate while Pella hovered nearby, clearly bursting with questions she was visibly restraining herself from asking all at once.

"Where’s Yveth?" he asked, between bites.

"Back room. Doing the books." Pella’s grin widened. "She’s going to pretend she didn’t hear Rilla yell your name, and then she’s going to come out here looking very busy and very unbothered, and it’s going to be the worst acting you’ve ever seen."

"You say that every time."

"It’s true every time."

The back room door opened a moment later, and Yveth emerged with a ledger tucked under one arm, her expression composed into something carefully neutral that lasted exactly as long as it took her to actually see him.

Something in her face cracked, just slightly, before she caught it.

"You’re late," she said.

"I know."

"Over two months late." She crossed the room and settled into the chair across from him, the same easy, unasked claim she always made on his table, though her eyes lingered on him a beat longer than usual. "I got your letter. Eventually. Courier routes down there are apparently worse than I imagined."

"I figured it might not arrive at all."

"It arrived. Three weeks after you probably wrote it." She reached over and stole a piece of bread off his plate, the same old, familiar gesture, though her hand lingered against the table a moment longer than it needed to. "I missed your cooking. You said that in the letter. I missed it too, for what it’s worth. Nobody around here complains about my technique the way you do."

"I don’t complain. I offer observations."

"Complaints with better manners." Her mouth curved, warmth breaking fully through the composure now. "How bad, this time? Honestly."

"Not bad. Good, actually. Properly good." He found himself smiling, genuinely, turning the whole long stretch over in his head. "I found things. Learned things. Came back stronger than I left, and not from barely surviving something this time."

"That’s different from your usual report."

"I know. I’m as surprised as you are."

She studied him a long moment, something easing fully behind her sharp composure now, settling into plain, open relief. "Good. I like this version of the homecoming considerably better than the last one."

"Me too."

Pella dropped into the seat beside them without invitation, the same way she always did. "Tell us something. A real story. Not the guild-report version."

He told them, carefully, the same practiced omission he’d always managed — the pillar ruins, stripped of anything that hinted at what he suspected they might actually be. The heat vent, and the strange creature guarding it. A dozen small adventures, flattened just enough that the parts that mattered to him stayed his, and the parts worth sharing landed easily with people who had no reason to need more than that.

"A whole hidden city of stone pillars," Pella said, delighted. "Underwater. That’s the kind of thing bards actually sing about, you know."

"I didn’t sing about it. I just noted it down and moved on."

"You’re hopeless." She stole a piece of his bread too, apparently deciding it was fair game now that Yveth had started it. "What about the creature? The camouflaged one?"

"Gave me a good fight. Taught me something about patience."

"Everything teaches you something about patience," Rilla observed, from behind the counter. "You’re very consistent that way."

"It’s a useful lesson. I keep relearning it."

They talked a while longer, the common room’s evening rush gradually filling in around them, familiar voices and familiar noise settling comfortably over him the way it always did on nights like this. Pella eventually got pulled away by an impatient table near the door, muttering something about ungrateful customers, and Rilla drifted back to her own quiet work, leaving Arlen and Yveth at the table together.

"You’re staying a while, this time," Yveth said. It wasn’t quite a question.

"I think so. I’ve got some things to work through properly before I go back down there again. Training. Loose ends."

"Good." She reached over, and this time let her hand simply rest against his rather than stealing anything. "I’m not going to pretend I love you being gone that long. I’m not going to make it a condition either. But I like having you back properly, instead of dragging yourself through that door half-dead."

"I like being back properly too."

"Stay that way a while, then." She said it lightly, though something underneath it carried real weight. "Eat. Finish your plate. Tell me the rest of it properly later, once the rush dies down and I’m not half-listening while I count coppers in my head."

He finished his meal slowly, the Foxglove’s familiar warmth settling into him the way it always did, and found himself, watching the common room’s ordinary, unremarkable evening carry on around him, genuinely and simply content.

He thought, finishing the last of it, about everything still waiting for him in the days ahead — Neris, Corwin, the slow, deliberate work of closing the gap that still sat between him and Explorer realm on the Aura side. He thought about the pillar ruins, patient and unexplored, and the dark elf thread still sitting somewhere unresolved in Ilyana’s careful, measured letter.

None of it pressed at him tonight. Tonight was simply for being home.