The months that followed settled into a rhythm Arthur would later remember as some of the happiest of his life, though he would not understand that until much later, the particular delayed recognition that always arrived once a good thing had become a thing you'd lost.
At the time, it simply felt like Tuesdays.
Elsie was, true to her word, an excellent guide to the unspoken architecture of village school, the seating arrangements and the unofficial rules of the schoolyard and the precise timing required to claim the good spot under the old oak tree during lunch before anyone else thought to. She seemed to know everything worth knowing about the social terrain of their small world, dispensed it freely and without condescension, and Arthur absorbed it the way children absorbed things that mattered to them, completely and without effort.
ELS: You have to throw the ball higher than that or Tomas catches it every time.
ART: I am throwing it high.
ELS: You're throwing it medium, at best.
They played the games children played, the chasing and the counting and the elaborate invented rules that shifted meaning depending on who was winning, and Arthur found himself, more often than not, laughing in a way that had nothing complicated underneath it, the particular uncomplicated joy of a child simply being a child among other children.
The other kids had begun showing small signs of their abilities by then, the way most village children did by five or six, little sparks and flickers, nothing dramatic, mostly the kind of thing that announced itself in small accidents and unexpected outcomes rather than grand displays. Tomas could make small stones skip further than physics should allow when he threw them.
A girl named Pria occasionally made her own shadow move independently for a second or two before it settled back into obedience.
Felix, who Arthur had noticed mostly from a distance so far, a loud confident boy a year ahead of them who held court at the center of most schoolyard activities, had apparently sparked actual visible lightning from his fingertips during a thunderstorm the previous month, an event that had been talked about with the particular awe children reserved for genuinely impressive displays. Arthur had shown nothing.
He had noticed this, in the quiet observant way children noticed things without yet building elaborate meaning around them, but it had not yet become something heavy. It simply was, the way some children were taller and some were shorter, the way some could whistle and some couldn't, one fact among many small facts that made up the texture of being five years old in a village full of other five and six and seven year olds.
ELS: When do you think yours will come?
They were sitting under the old oak during lunch, sharing the bread Wren had packed that morning, the particular easy intimacy of two children who had decided, somewhere in the past months without ever formally discussing it, that they were friends now.
ART: I don't know. Mama says it'll come when it comes.
ELS: That's what my mama said too, before mine came. Took longer than my brother's did. He had his by the time he could walk, practically. Mine didn't show up till I was four.
ART: Were you scared it wouldn't come at all?
Elsie considered this with the particular seriousness she brought to questions she found genuinely interesting.
ELS: A little. But everyone's does eventually. That's just how it works.
ART: That's what I figure too.
He said it with the easy confidence of someone who had no reason yet to doubt it, the particular uncomplicated certainty children carried before the world gave them cause to question it, and Elsie nodded, accepting this the way she accepted most things he told her, without suspicion.
ELS: My brother's going to teach me how to make the wind carry sound further. Like, all the way across the village. He says I'm not ready yet but I think he's just being annoying about it.
ART: That sounds amazing.
ELS: It would be. Imagine being able to whisper something and have it heard a mile away.
ART: What would you whisper?
She considered this with mock seriousness, the particular performance children sometimes put on when they wanted to draw out a moment of shared imagination.
ELS: Something important. Like, everyone needs to come to the well right now, there's free bread.
ART: Is there free bread?
ELS: No, but they'd come anyway, and that's the funny part.
Arthur laughed, the particular full unguarded laugh of a child who had not yet learned to hold anything back, and Elsie laughed with him, and the autumn afternoon continued around them, ordinary and warm and entirely unremarkable in the way that the best days of childhood always were, precisely because nothing remarkable needed to happen for them to matter.
The bell rang eventually, the way it always did, summoning them back toward lessons, and they gathered their things and walked back across the schoolyard together, two small figures among many, indistinguishable from any other pair of friends in any other village, on any other ordinary autumn day.
Arthur did not know, walking back into the schoolhouse beside her, that the ease of this particular season would not last forever.
He simply knew that today had been good, and that tomorrow, by every reasonable expectation a five year old could hold, would probably be good too. For now, that was enough.