The kitchen had too many people in it. That was the first thing. It was not a large kitchen. It had been built for three, and had stretched, in the sixteen days since he came home, to hold six, and on the whole it had managed. It was not managing now. His mother was at the head of the table with her hands on her hips. His father was on the bench by the hearth with his long legs folded up under him, because there was nowhere else for them to go. Gregor was wedged into the corner by the bread oven with his bad hip and a face like thunder, which in Gregor meant he was delighted. Yseult was standing on a chair at the back for no reason Arthur could identify, and Elsie was beside the door with her arms folded, and Mira was half behind Elsie in the way she still stood in rooms with more than four people in them, although it was a smaller half than it had been sixteen days ago. And on the table, on every plate the Lyerm house owned and two it had evidently borrowed, there was honey bread. There was a great deal of it. There was more than the bakehouse could have produced in a morning without somebody getting up at three. And on the floor, holding two of his fingers, was his sister.
NAM: Ah-fuh.
ART: Yes. Hello.
NAM: Ah-fuh.
CAL: She's been practising. Since about four this morning. Your mother is very tired.
WRN: Your mother is extremely tired. Happy birthday, love.
GRE: Don't eat the one on the end. It's a disgrace. I'd not feed it to the pig. Eat that one first.
Arthur ate the one on the end. It was the best thing he had ever put in his mouth, and he said so, and Gregor told him he had no palate and that it was a shame to see in a boy his age, and went a deep, satisfied red to the ears.
The gifts came after the bread, because his mother said so, and nobody in that kitchen had ever successfully argued with his mother about the order of anything.
His mother's was a scarf. It was July, and it was the hottest July in years, and she had knitted it over the winter by the fire with Nami asleep against her, a long, close, careful thing in grey wool, and she told him he would want it at Solmere when the wind came off the water in November. He would, and he knew it, and he put it on anyway, there in the kitchen in the heat, and wore it for the rest of the meal while sweat ran down the back of his neck. His mother watched him do it and did not say anything, and her eyes were very bright.
Mira's came next. She came out from behind Elsie to give it to him, which he noticed, and put it into his hands without a word, which he also noticed. It was a chess set. It was small enough to fit in a coat pocket, the board folding in half on a brass hinge, and the pieces were carved in two colours of wood, very simply, as though by somebody who had taught themselves out of a book over a number of evenings and had got considerably better toward the end. He set it up on the table among the honey bread. One of the pieces was missing. It was a rook.
ART: There's a rook gone.
MRA: Yes. It's in my pocket. You can have it when you've beaten me.
ART: I've never beaten you.
MRA: No, I know.
Yseult's came wrapped in brown paper and tied with a great deal of brown string, far more than the parcel needed, as though she had felt the size of the gesture ought to be reflected somewhere and the string was the only place left. Inside was a glass sphere about the size of a plum, perfectly clear, with nothing in it at all. Arthur turned it over in his good hand. Nothing happened.
YSE: Shake it.
He shook it. Something woke up inside the glass. It was a thread of light, very thin and very bright and not quite white, and it moved in the sphere like a living thing, folding and unfolding, and threw small moving shadows on the ceiling of the kitchen. His father stopped chewing. Gregor said something under his breath that he would not have said in front of Wren on any other day.
YSE: Lightning. A very small amount. Held. It'll last, I think, a few years, if you don't drop it, which you will. You can read by it. You can find your way down a staircase in the dark with it. You can't set anything on fire with it, I made very sure of that, because I know you.
ART: Yseult. This is-
YSE: I know what it is. Say thank you.
ART: Thank you.
YSE: You're very welcome. It took four months and I burned off one of my eyebrows and nobody noticed, which I found deeply hurtful.
Elsie's was small. He had known it would be. She put it in his palm and closed his fingers over it before he could look, the way she had done with things since they were five. When he opened his hand it was a whistle, carved out of a single piece of pale wood, no longer than his little finger, with a hole bored through one end for a cord.
ELS: Rowan made me one, the first year I could carry my voice on the wind at all. You blow it, and the wind takes it, and it goes a long way. A lot further than you'd think.
ART: How far?
ELS: Far enough. If you ever need me and I can't hear you. Blow that.
She did not say anything else about it, and he did not ask, and he put the cord over his head and the whistle went down inside his shirt against his chest, and stayed there.
His father's gift was last. His father had been waiting with it propped against the end of the bench, under a sack, since before Arthur came downstairs. He brought it out now and laid it on the table across the bread, and the whole kitchen went quiet without quite knowing why.
It was a scabbard. It was dark leather, oiled until it was nearly black, with a long harness to carry it across the back and a buckle at the shoulder, and the stitching ran down both edges in small, even, patient stitches. Arthur knew those stitches. He had watched his father make them on harness and boots and the dog's collar his whole life.
CAL: Yours is falling apart. I've been looking at it since you came home. You've been carrying that sword in a thing I made you when you were thirteen, and you're sixteen, and you're a good deal bigger, and so's the sword, in the way swords get bigger, which is when somebody's been using them. You'll want something it can sit in properly. For a long time, if need be.
ART: Dad.
CAL: Try it. Go on.
He went and fetched the sword from the hook by the door, the old sword, the one he had almost left behind on the morning he left the city and had not, and slid it into the new scabbard. It went in the whole way, smooth and close, and stopped exactly where it ought to, and sat there as though it had been waiting. He put the harness on over the scarf. It fitted. Of course it fitted. His father had been measuring him with his eyes for sixteen days.
CAL: There. That'll hold it. Whatever you end up doing with it, that'll hold it.
There was one thing left, and it was not on the table, and nobody had said a word about it all morning. He had come down at half five and found the house empty of everybody under the age of thirty. His mother had said, very casually, that the girls had gone out early. Out where, he had asked. Out, she had said, and gone on stirring something. He had thought about it all morning and not worked it out. And then at a little before eleven Yseult had come in through the front door with her boots soaked to the ankle and grass in her hair, saying in a carrying voice that she had walked six hours for a man who could not be relied upon to notice a missing eyebrow and that she would like it entered in the record, and behind her Elsie and Mira, carrying between them more golden flowers than he had ever seen in one place outside the field itself. They had gone up to the spot. In the dark. Three hours up, three hours down. They had picked an armful each.
ELS: You said it was a blessing on somebody's future.
ART: I said a book said it.
ELS: Same thing. We thought you could use some.
YSE: You could use a great deal. That was the consensus.
They put the flowers down on the table among the bread and the scarf and the scabbard and the chess set with the missing rook, and they were so bright in the kitchen that they made everything else look a little grey. Arthur looked at them for a long time. Then he did the only thing he could think of to do with more blessings than any one person could possibly need. He started giving them away.
He gave the first one to his sister. He did not decide to. She was on the floor by his knee, still holding his fingers, and she was the nearest, and he was sixteen today and she was not yet one, and it seemed obvious to him, so obvious that he did not think about it at all, that the first blessing on anybody's future in this kitchen ought to be hers. He took a flower from the top of the pile and crouched down, and put the stem into her small fist, and closed her fingers round it.
ART: There. That's for you. That's a blessing on your future, that is. A book said so. You're meant to keep it.
Nami looked at the flower with enormous seriousness. Then she put it in her mouth.
WRN: No. No, no, no. Give that here.
His mother took it gently out of Nami's mouth and looked at it, a little crushed now, slightly damp, entirely golden. Then she did a thing Arthur did not think anything of at the time and would think a great deal about later. She did not put it down. She carried it across the kitchen to the shelf by the hearth where she kept the big book her own mother had written recipes in, and opened it to somewhere in the middle, and laid the flower flat between the pages, and closed it.
WRN: I'll keep it for her. She can have it when she's old enough not to eat it.
CAL: That'll be about thirty years, then.
WRN: Then she'll have it in thirty years.
He gave the rest away round the room. One to his mother, who put it behind her ear. One to his father, who did not know what to do with it and held it like a tool. One to Gregor, who said it was the worst flower he had ever seen and put it in his buttonhole, where it stayed for the rest of the week. One back to each of the three girls, which Yseult said was cheating and accepted anyway. And at the end of it there was one left over, on its own on the table, and he picked it up and did not know who to give it to, so he did not give it to anybody. He took it upstairs and put it in a cup of water on his windowsill, and it stood there in the afternoon light, and he forgot about it.
The letters came at six. They came the way everything in Hollowell came, which was past Mabel Ruck's gate. Mabel had been at her gate when the carrier came through from the Draymere road. She had seen the seals, both of them, and had formed a view, and had personally carried both letters the length of the village rather than let them wait until morning. She stood now on the Lyerm doorstep with one in each hand and announced them to the house.
MAB: ARTHUR LYERM. LETTER. CASTELGARD SEAL. AND ONE FOR THE QUIET GIRL. SAME ROAD.
Mira went very still. Arthur took his. It was heavy paper, the kind that cost money, folded small and sealed in dark red wax with a mark he had seen once, on the letters Corin read alone at the long table and never discussed. He broke it standing in the doorway. It was very short. He read it once. Then he read it again, more slowly, and the second time he got to the end of it he stopped, and did not move, and the kitchen behind him noticed that he had not moved.
Arthur, Happy birthday. I nearly lost our rivalry by default this week but I would like it on record that I did not. See you soon. Corin.
And under it, smaller, as though it had been added at the last moment by somebody who had then sent it quickly before he could take it out:
I was afraid. I am told this is normal. I am told you would know.
He folded it up again. He did it carefully, along the same creases.
YSE: Well? What does he say?
ART: Happy birthday.
YSE: That's not what your face says.
ART: He says happy birthday. And that he's all right.
YSE: Is he?
Arthur thought about a boy who had never once in a whole year said a warm word to anybody without first making sure it could be taken back, and who had written I was afraid in his own hand and sent it the length of the country to the one person in the world who had stood frozen in the air in front of an arena and could not move.
ART: Yes. I think he is now.
Mira had not opened hers. She was holding it in both hands, looking at the seal, which was the same dark red and a different mark. Then she said, very quietly, that she would be outside for a moment, and went out of the front door and sat down on the porch step, the one his father sat on at half five every morning, with her back to the house. She sat there a long time. Nobody went out to her. Yseult got up twice, and twice Elsie looked at her, once each time, and twice Yseult sat down again.
When Mira came back in, the light was going, and the letter was folded small in her hand, and her face was not doing anything anybody in the kitchen had seen it do before. She did not say what was in it. She sat down at the table and ate a piece of honey bread very slowly, and looked at nothing, and once, briefly, she smiled at it.
His parents went to bed at nine. They always had. His father picked Nami up off the floor, where she had fallen asleep against Arthur's boot with her fist still closed round nothing, and his mother kissed Arthur on the forehead the way she had not done in front of other people since he was seven, and said happy birthday again, and said not to stay up too late, which was something she had also not said since he was seven. Gregor went home down the dark lane, complaining about the flower in his buttonhole all the way to the bend. The house went quiet.
ELS: I'll go in five minutes.
YSE: You said that at eight.
ELS: I meant it at eight.
ART: Come up. All of you. It's too hot down here.
They went up. Arthur went last, and stepped on the third stair without thinking, and it creaked, and up above him on the landing Yseult said what was that in a voice of great suspicion, and Elsie told her it was the stair, it had always been the stair, it had been the stair for sixteen years. They went into his room, all four of them, which had been built for one, and shut the door.