Elsie arrived at seven without knocking, which Yseult observed and did not comment on at the time and asked about three days later, and by then the answer was obvious enough that she was embarrassed to have wondered. She came in through the back, put a covered dish on the table that her own mother had sent over on the strength of forty minutes' notice, told Wren she looked well, told Calder he looked older, took Nami off Arthur's lap without asking and without Nami objecting, and sat down in what was evidently her chair.
YSE: You've done that before.
ELS: About nine hundred times.
WRN: She had her tea here twice a week for six years.
ELS: Three times a week.
WRN: Three times a week in the bad winter.
ELS: Every winter was the bad winter, Wren.
Supper was longer than Arthur remembered suppers being and considerably better, and he understood by about the second course that his mother had spent a quarter of an hour that afternoon completely reconstructing a meal designed for three people, and that she was going to say nothing about this, and that mentioning it would be worse than not mentioning it. There was a chicken that had not been intended for tonight. Yseult said so, once, in the form of a compliment, and Wren Lyerm deflected it so smoothly and so instantly that Yseult sat back and looked at her with open professional respect. Calder waited until the plates were mostly done, which Arthur had known he would, and then leaned back and did the thing he had been visibly building toward since the front room.
CAL: Mira.
MRA: Yes.
CAL: Can I ask about your mother's people.
Arthur closed his eyes.
MRA: You may.
CAL: I'll do it badly.
MRA: I'd assumed.
CAL: Right. Good. Eskandar coastal, Arthur said. Which would make it the avian lines, and I've only ever met two, and both of them were down the southern reach where the lines are different. Now what I never worked out, and I asked at the time and got told to mind myself, is whether the coastal lines and the reach lines are the same people with a distance between them or two lots that got called the same thing by somebody who wasn't paying attention.
There was a pause.
MRA: That is a considerably better question than the ones I usually get.
CAL: Is it?
MRA: The ones I usually get are whether it hurts and whether I can fly.
CAL: I'd assumed you couldn't fly.
MRA: Why?
CAL: You walked here.
Mira looked at him for a second and then laughed, which Arthur had heard perhaps four times in a year, and answered the question, at length, and Calder Lyerm sat with his arms folded and did not understand a substantial portion of it and did not once interrupt, and asked two more when she had finished, and both of them were sensible.
WRN: He'll be telling that back to the whole village by Thursday.
MRA: Will he get it right?
WRN: He'll get about a third of it right and he'll be extremely confident about all of it.
CAL: That's a slander.
WRN: It's an observation, Calder, you did it with the fish.
It was Wren who brought the other thing into the room, and she did it kindly and without any idea what she was doing, which was somehow the worst possible way for it to arrive.
WRN: Do your families mind? Only, eight weeks is a good while, and if I'd had a daughter off at an academy I'd want her back where I could see her.
Nobody said anything. It went on for slightly too long. Arthur watched his mother register that it had gone on too long, and watched her begin to work out that she had put a foot somewhere, and watched Yseult decide to answer before Wren could get to the apologising.
YSE: We can't get home, Mrs Lyerm.
WRN: I'm sorry?
YSE: Drennick's on the eastern continent. So's Eskandar. The academy posted a notice on the tenth saying civilian passage across the Sea of Serenity is suspended by order of the provincial authority until further notice, and there are three hundred and eleven students at Solmere who cannot go home this summer, and Mira and I are two of them.
Calder Lyerm put his cup down. He did it quietly. That was the part Arthur noticed and did not forget, because his father was a loud man in almost every respect and had spent the entire day being loud, and he put his cup down on the table without any sound at all and sat forward.
CAL: Say that again.
YSE: Which part?
CAL: All of it. Slowly.
She said it again. Calder listened to the whole of it without moving.
CAL: The whole sea.
YSE: All civilian traffic. The three northern Lassiter routes went first, back in the spring. Nobody said why. This is the rest of it.
CAL: Not the harbours. The sea.
YSE: Yes.
WRN: Calder.
CAL: I've crossed that water eleven times.
He said it to the table rather than to anyone.
CAL: Eleven times, between the age of nineteen and the age of thirty-one, and I want to be clear about what that means, because there's nobody in this village who'll understand it and I'd rather one of you did. That crossing is not a crossing. It's the road. Everything east of Astoria that isn't grown in Astoria comes over that water. Metal out of Drennick. Half the grain. Every single thing Lassiter has ever done as a republic, it does because that water is open, and it has been open for four hundred years through two famines and the border wars, and I have been on ships that crossed it in weather that killed people, and it stayed open.
MRA: It's closed now.
CAL: I know. That's what I'm telling you. In four hundred years the only thing that has ever closed the Serenity is the Serenity, and now something has closed it from outside, and the notice you read on that gate said until further notice, which is a sentence men write when they do not have a date and do not want to say so.
The room had gone entirely quiet. Nami, who had been methodically dismantling a piece of bread on Elsie's lap for some minutes, chose that moment to drop it, and the sound it made was disproportionate.
WRN: Calder, that's enough. They've walked four days.
CAL: Aye.
WRN: They've walked four days and one of them has just told us she can't get home and you've made it into a lecture about shipping.
CAL: Aye. Sorry.
MRA: Don't be.
She said it flatly and everyone looked at her.
MRA: I have spent eleven days being handled very carefully by people who are frightened of upsetting me, including, and I say this with real affection, everybody at this table under the age of twenty. Your husband is the first person who has told me what it actually means. I would rather know.
Calder looked at her for a moment.
CAL: There'll be more of it.
MRA: I assumed.
CAL: Not this summer. Probably not this year. But that water opens or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, there's things that follow on, and they'll follow on whether anybody at this table talks about them or not.
WRN: Calder...
CAL: I've finished.
They got onto Arthur's arm afterward, which Arthur had been steering the conversation away from since the doorstep with what he considered considerable skill.
WRN: And the shoulder.
ART: It's nothing. It's six weeks.
WRN: Six weeks is not nothing, Arthur.
ART: It came out. They put it back. That's the whole of it.
WRN: How did it come out?
ART: Training.
ELS: Training.
ART: Elsie.
ELS: I'm repeating the word. I find it interesting.
ART: It's not interesting.
ELS: It's mildly interesting. I'd say it's mildly interesting that a boy who reached the semi-final of the Trial of Power in front of four hundred people and then turned a drying loft one-handed for four hours has described the whole of his year as training.
There was a silence of a very particular kind.
WRN: The what?
ART: Elsie.
WRN: The what, Arthur?
CAL: The Trial of Power.
WRN: What's the Trial of Power?
CAL: It's a tournament.
WRN: What sort of tournament?
CAL: The sort that has a semi-final.
WRN: Calder.
CAL: I'm being unhelpful because I'm working out how angry to be and I'd like a moment.
Arthur, sixteen days from his sixteenth birthday and four hours into being home, put his face in his one working hand.
ART: I was going to tell you.
WRN: When?
ART: Gradually.
ELS: Over eight weeks.
ART: In stages, yes.
YSE: This is the best evening I've ever had.
The back room had been aired that afternoon and made up in what was clearly a great hurry, and it had two narrow beds in it and a window that looked out over the plot and the fence and the dark, and Yseult lay in one of them at half past ten listening to a house that had entirely stopped making noise.
YSE: Mira.
MRA: Mm.
YSE: They've gone to bed.
MRA: It's half past ten.
YSE: They've gone to bed and nothing happened.
MRA: What were you expecting?
YSE: I don't know. That's the difficulty. I have been braced since Solmere and I have got all the way to lying down and nothing has happened, and I find I've got all this bracing left over and nowhere to put it.
Mira was quiet for a while.
MRA: The man gave me bread.
YSE: I know. You've said.
MRA: I'm going to keep saying it. I have been running it through repeatedly and I cannot find the angle on it, and I would like you to understand that this is not a small thing for me. I have spent four days constructing an approach to this village and every part of the approach has turned out to be equipment for a problem that isn't here.
YSE: Same.
MRA: It's extremely disorienting.
YSE: Yes.
MRA: I don't like it.
YSE: No.
MRA: I'd like it to keep happening, though.