The introductions took eleven minutes and were, by Arthur's later estimate, about forty percent apology. Wren Lyerm apologised for her husband on the doorstep, in the hall, and once more in the front room for good measure. Calder apologised for himself twice, badly, in a manner that made it worse both times, and then attempted to shake Mira's hand while still holding the knife, discovered the knife, and left the room entirely to deal with it. Yseult said it's genuinely fine on four separate occasions and was not believed once. By the time all five of them were sitting down with tea in the front room the light had gone gold in the window and the eleven villagers in the road had reluctantly dispersed, and Arthur had begun to relax into the specific and total exhaustion of a person who has walked eighty miles and then survived his own family. The room was smaller. Not in a sad way. It was simply smaller than the version he had been carrying around for ten months, the ceiling lower and the fire nearer the chairs, and his mother had put a cloth on the table that he did not recognise and had moved the dresser.
WRN: Eight hundred students.
MRA: Eight hundred and forty, this year.
WRN: In one building.
MRA: Four buildings and the grounds. The residential halls are separate.
WRN: And you all eat together?
MRA: In two sittings. The refectory holds five hundred.
WRN: Five hundred people eating at once.
CAL: She's said it three times now, love.
WRN: I'm allowed to say it three times, Calder, I've never seen five hundred of anything.
Yseult had settled in beside the fire and had, within about six minutes, become the person Wren Lyerm was principally talking to, which Arthur had entirely failed to predict and which he watched with a kind of low background astonishment. She was not performing. That was the thing. Yseult Marchant, who had spent four days on a road constructing eleven categories of anxiety about this room, was sitting in it explaining what Alchemy was to a woman who had never left Astoria, and was doing it slowly and without any of the sharpness she used on everybody at the academy, and Wren was leaning forward with her cup in both hands not understanding most of it and enjoying all of it.
CAL: Say the bit about the essence again.
YSE: The essence is in everything already. That's the whole basis of it. You've got it, this chair's got it, the fire's got it. Alchemy is bending your own into a shape it wasn't meant to hold, which is why it costs more than a soul ability does and always produces something cruder.
CAL: Cruder.
YSE: Considerably. A soul ability is the thing your soul actually is. Alchemy is a soul doing an impression.
CAL: That's good. That's a good way of putting it.
YSE: It's Instructor Vance's, not mine.
CAL: I don't care whose it is, I'm going to be using it in this village for the next thirty years and nobody here will ever know.
That was when Arthur felt the eyes. He was not certain at first, because he was tired and because a person coming home after ten months feels a great many things in a familiar room, and the sensation was very specific and quite small: the exact prickle of being looked at directly by somebody at close range. He turned his head toward the doorway that led back into the kitchen. There was nobody there. He looked at the doorway for two full seconds, decided he was tired, and turned back to the conversation, which had moved on to whether Mira had been warm enough on the road and which Mira was answering with more patience than Arthur had known she possessed. Then he looked at the doorway again. There was a child in it. She was extremely small. She was standing, just about, with one hand flat against the doorframe for the entire purpose of remaining standing, and she was wearing something that had clearly been made out of something else, and she was looking directly at Arthur with the total, unembarrassed, unblinking attention that only very small children and Mabel Ruck are capable of. She was not older than a year. She had the specific top-heavy wobble of a person who had been walking for a fortnight and was still not sold on it. She was, unmistakably, in his house. Arthur looked at her for a long moment. She looked back. He turned round very slowly to face his father.
ART: Dad.
CAL: Mm.
ART: Can I ask you something.
CAL: Course.
ART: I want to ask it seriously and I want a serious answer.
CAL: Go on, then.
Arthur set his cup down.
ART: Was I the one standing in the way of your greatest desire?
There was a silence.
CAL: Hmm?
ART: For fifteen years. Was I the impediment.
CAL: The what?
ART: The obstacle, Dad. Was I the obstacle. Because I have been at an academy for ten months and I have come home to find that there is now a person in this house who was not in it when I left, and I am attempting to work out whether my absence was the necessary condition.
CAL: I've genuinely no idea what you're-
He followed Arthur's eyeline to the doorway.
CAL: Ah.
ART: Yes.
CAL: Right.
ART: Yes.
CAL: Wren.
WRN: I heard.
CAL: Wren, I told you. I told you at the time. I said, don't leave that out of a letter, and you said-
WRN: I said I wanted to see his face.
CAL: And I said, that's a cruel thing to want, and you said-
WRN: I said it wasn't cruel, it was thrifty, because the post west is fourpence and a face is free.
CAL: ELEVEN MONTHS, Wren.
Wren Lyerm put her cup down, got up, and went to the doorway, and crouched, and held out both hands, and the very small person came across the floor toward her at the speed and general trajectory of something being poured. She got picked up. She permitted it in the manner of a person allowing a formality, and then immediately turned round in her mother's arms to resume looking at Arthur, because Arthur was clearly the new thing in the room and everything else in it was extremely old news. Wren came back to the fire and sat down with her on her lap.
WRN: Arthur. This is your sister.
ART: I had begun to assemble that.
WRN: Her name's Nami.
ART: Nami.
WRN: She was born the second week of October. Three weeks after you went. I knew before you left and I did not tell you and I have thought about that decision approximately four hundred times since, and I still think it was the right one, because you'd have spent your first term at that academy worrying about a thing four days away that you could not have helped with.
ART: Mum-
WRN: I'm aware it was also a bit cruel. Your father has raised it.
CAL: Eleven months.
WRN: Calder, if you say eleven months one more time I shall put you outside.
Arthur sat with his tea going cold in front of him and looked at his sister. She was still looking at him. She had not stopped looking at him since the doorway. There was, in the way she was doing it, absolutely no recognition whatsoever, which was the part that got underneath his ribs and stayed there: this was a person who lived in his house, who had his mother's chin and something around the eyes that was unmistakably his father's, and who had never in her life seen him before and was working out what he was from first principles.
YSE: Arthur.
ART: Mm.
YSE: You've gone a colour.
ART: I've walked eighty miles and been shouted at.
YSE: You've gone a completely different colour to the doorstep one.
MRA: It's the same colour. It's a different cause.
YSE: Thank you, Mira.
MRA: I'm being precise. It seemed relevant.
Wren shifted Nami round on her lap.
WRN: Go on, then.
ART: What?
WRN: She's been staring at you for four minutes. Say something to her.
ART: I don't know what you say.
WRN: Your name would do.
Arthur leaned forward, which took some managing with the sling, and got himself down to roughly the correct height, and looked at his sister for the first time from an angle she could properly reach.
ART: Hello. I'm Arthur.
Nami considered this with enormous seriousness.
NAM: Ah.
ART: Arthur.
NAM: Ah-fuh.
CAL: She's got it.
ART: She has not got it.
NAM: Ah-fuh.
CAL: She's got it. That's you. That's your name, that is.
ART: Dad, that's two sounds.
CAL: It's two more than she had this morning.
Nami leaned out of her mother's arms and put one entirely wet hand flat on Arthur's face, which appeared to be the conclusion of some process she had been conducting since the doorway, and said it again with considerably more confidence.
NAM: Ah-fuh.
And Arthur Lyerm, fifteen years old, first year at the Solmere academy, holder of the endurance record, semi-finalist, three days' walk from a village where he had carried grain for a man who would not ask for help, sat on the floor of his mother's front room with his sister's palm on his cheek and discovered that he was going to cry about it and that there were four people watching and that he did not, on balance, care.