Felix woke because someone was trying to put a sock on his hand.
“That isn’t where it goes,” he said.
Pell Reed looked up. He had his mother’s dark eyebrows and an expression suggesting that adults regularly obstructed useful work.
“It’s warm. She said keep your arm warm.”
“A compelling argument.”
The boy eased the sock over the bandage, leaving Felix’s fingers exposed. It was an excellent sock, thick and recently dried. Felix decided to reserve judgment on the arrangement until somebody attempted a shoe.
Through his bedroom doorway, he could see Tamsin laying tools on the kitchen table. A small pile of them. He remembered the open roll beside the bridge and looked away.
His chest hurt when he breathed deeply. His right hand felt too large for its skin.
He tried to sense the circuit below his ribs. A familiar warmth answered. When he moved it toward his arm, pain snapped from wrist to shoulder.
“Don’t do that,” Pell said.
“How did you know?”
“Your face.”
Felix let the warmth settle. The AetherDeck lay beside his pillow. He touched its glass with his left hand.
Ambient intake stable. Reserve below one measure.
Meridian injury. Release unsafe.
Nothing about accepting a reward or purchasing an improved arm. He put it down.
Pell offered a cup. “Willow bark. The academy healer left it.”
It tasted as though somebody had persuaded a tree to resent him personally.
“Did she leave anything pleasant?”
“Instructions. No deliberate output for several days. Walk if it doesn’t make you dizzy. Don’t listen to yourself about being fine.”
“That last one sounds unofficial.”
“That was Mother.”
Pell returned to the kitchen carrying the empty cup in both hands. His trousers had dried stiff at the cuffs. Somebody had sewn a patch over the knee in blue thread that didn’t match.
The healer had left a note: stairs with company, and turn back at dizziness. He folded it into his pocket, planning to ask what she meant by stairs tomorrow.
Felix sat up slowly.
The room remained steady. He considered standing, then gave sitting another moment to prove itself.
Outside the window, rain ticked off the crooked pine. The wind had dropped. He could hear ordinary noises again: a drawer closing, Barnaby complaining about a hinge, a spoon scraping the bottom of a pot.
He had been afraid of the silence after a disaster. He hadn’t expected it to contain supper.
Lyra appeared in the doorway.
“You’re awake.”
“The sock alerted me.”
She glanced at his arm. “I approved that.”
“A conspiracy.”
She held out his slippers. He put them on without assistance and followed her into the kitchen, taking the wall seriously on the way.
Tamsin looked him over and pulled a chair out with her foot.
“Sit before you invent a reason not to.”
He sat.
The table held a pot of lentils, half a loaf, and Barnaby. The owl stood with one wing extended while Tamsin worked a thin screwdriver into his shoulder.
“That is an adjustment port,” he said. “Not a place to test your strength.”
“Then stop locking the joint.”
“It clicks when I leave it loose.”
“It will click louder if it breaks.”
She turned the screw. Barnaby flexed his wing, folded it, and unfolded it again.
“Acceptable,” he said.
Tamsin held out her hand.
“What?”
“The screw you hid.”
After a pause, he lifted his foot.
Pell laughed into his bread. Felix felt something in his own chest loosen, carefully, around the pain.
Tamsin put the screwdriver down.
“We need somewhere tonight.”
There it was. Not a plea. A practical fact she disliked having to say.
“The workshop?” Felix asked.
“Back wall’s gone soft. Water got under the floor. The watch house will hold people, but not our stock as well.”
Beside Pell’s chair sat a canvas bag and a wooden box with a broken latch. The boy had his foot hooked around the bag’s strap.
“How much did you lose?”
“Enough. I’ll count tomorrow.”
Felix nodded toward the spare room.
Lyra spoke before he could.
“Mine for now. They can have it.”
“And you?” Tamsin asked.
“The workshop loft’s dry. I checked.”
“The ladder wobbles,” Barnaby said.
“Then we’ll fix it before I go up.”
Felix considered offering his room. Tamsin read the thought directly off his face.
“You’re staying near a flat bed. We aren’t building tonight around your manners.”
“A harsh but efficient policy.”
She looked toward the ruined kettle on the stove, then back at the surviving tools.
“We need terms.”
“It’s a room.”
“It’ll be work tomorrow. Better to know which is which.”
Lyra drew a clean sheet from the drawer. Felix recognized the back of an unsuccessful charter petition. She turned it over without comment.
They settled on three nights, then a review. Shelter and meals came without charge while the Reeds couldn’t safely return home. Tamsin would supervise the bridge assessment for an agreed fee, payable from their first repair income. Her materials remained hers until bought. Pell was not an assistant unless he chose a small task and she approved it.
“I could do accounts,” he said.
“You could finish eating,” Tamsin replied.
Felix added that nobody was expected to rise before breakfast merely because Barnaby considered sunrise a personal invitation.
“I object to the implication,” Barnaby said.
Lyra wrote the sentence down.
Tamsin read the sheet twice and signed it. Felix used his left hand. His name sloped down the page as though trying to leave before the discussion resumed.
“About the tools,” Felix said.
Tamsin looked up from the page.
“And the bracket. I shouldn’t have used it without checking. You told me.”
“Yes.”
He waited for something kinder, recognized the impulse, and let it go.
“I’ll replace what I broke. Not from whatever you earn repairing the rest.”
She considered him, then added a separate line beneath the fees.
“That’ll do.”
Pell opened his wooden box while the ink dried. Inside were a chisel, a tin whistle, two stockings, and a carefully wrapped bundle of paper.
“Saved your accounts,” he told his mother.
Tamsin reached for the bundle, stopped, and put her hand on the back of his neck instead.
“You saved yourself first?”
“Yes.”
“Keep doing it in that order.”
He nodded against her hand.
They ate while the lentils were still warm.
Pell wanted to know whether the three wardens had truly landed sitting down. Lyra described Rusk’s expression with a precision Felix found uncharitable and deeply satisfying. Barnaby corrected the order in which the swords had fallen.
Nobody asked him to demonstrate.
After supper, Pell carried bowls to the wash tub. Tamsin went with him, partly to help and partly to inspect the cottage’s plumbing before trusting it with her son.
Lyra stayed at the table. Her satchel lay against her ankle.
“You should know one thing,” she said.
Felix waited.
“The papers aren’t just household correspondence. They’re original clan tribute shipment records. I worked on them because I wanted my uncle to trust me with estate business.”
Her fingers tightened around the satchel strap.
“Some invoices list copper by weight. Some list attendants. The totals match exactly, down to the last fraction, on dates when the shipments were supposedly different.”
“People entered as cargo?”
“Maybe. Or charges hidden in the wrong account. I can’t prove what happened after the gates.”
“Why bring them here?”
“I didn’t choose here until I saw the bridge. The other paths had guards.”
He looked toward the window. A rope swung in the dark beyond it, no cradle at the bottom.
“Good bridge to choose. Terrible day to choose it.”
She didn’t smile.
“You could have let Valen take me somewhere else.”
“I still might, if he finds somewhere safer and you agree.”
That answer seemed to surprise her more than a promise would have.
“I don’t want to spend my life hiding in your spare room.”
“Excellent. It’s become quite popular.”
This time she smiled, briefly.
Outside, a watch bell rang once. Lyra counted under her breath, waiting for a second stroke that didn’t come.
“All clear?” Felix asked.
“For the weather.”
“One system prepared to express itself briefly.”
She unfastened the satchel and checked the oilcloth around her papers, but didn’t take them out.
“I still need the training we discussed.”
He glanced at his bandaged arm.
“My qualifications have suffered a setback.”
“I noticed. That doesn’t cancel the agreement. It means we’ll have to be more particular about what you teach.”
He liked that she hadn’t mistaken being rescued for an education. He liked it less that she was right about him needing to be particular.
“Testing things safely,” he suggested.
She looked toward the torn basket outside the window.
“We’ll begin with theory.”
A knock came at the back door.
Everyone looked at it.
“If that’s another resident,” Felix said, “we’re charging by the roof beam.”
Barnaby flew to the latch, his repaired wing moving smoothly. He opened the door on a young man in plain academy robes, carrying a sword and a long cloth case.
“Jian Tao,” the visitor said. “Arch-Inquisitor Valen sent me to assess the remaining anchor strain.”
“He does know it’s evening?” Felix asked.
“Yes. It remains damaged in the evening.”
Felix disliked the answer because he couldn’t improve it.
Jian wiped his boots and waited to be invited in. He looked at the sock, the kettle, and the sheet of signed terms. His gaze stopped at none of them long enough to become rude.
Tamsin came back from the wash tub.
“Can you hold a quarter measure steady?”
“For how long?”
“Twenty breaths without changing its shape.”
“Yes.”
“Then I like you already.”
Jian set his case on the table. Inside were insulated probes, three small weights, and a copper needle protected by a wooden cap.
He asked permission before touching Felix’s left wrist. The needle warmed between two fingers. A thread of light appeared above it, straight as a drawn hair.
Felix watched it hold.
His own qi always wavered a little when somebody looked.
“Your intake can stay,” Jian said. “It isn’t feeding the injury. Your release cannot.”
“I’ve received that advice from several departments.”
“Then perhaps you should follow it.”
Tamsin made a satisfied noise.
Jian lifted the needle away. “I can keep the exposed return cool while we examine it tomorrow. That doesn’t replace the broken regulation. Has anyone checked the old service chamber?”
Barnaby turned his head.
“That chamber is closed.”
“For safety?”
“For disuse.”
“Different condition,” Tamsin said.
The owl was quiet for a moment. Then he asked Lyra to open the shallow cupboard beneath the window.
They found a rolled maintenance sketch behind three cracked plates. Barnaby flattened it with a spoon at each corner. His amber eyes moved over faded lines.
“Workshop hatch,” he said. “Steps below the north wall. Third junction leads to the lower regulation frame.”
Tamsin tapped a small brass symbol.
“There. Return regulator. Old design, but if the seat’s sound, I can adapt it.”
“Can we buy one instead?” Felix asked.
She named a price.
He looked at the map again.
Jian followed the tunnel line with one finger. “How old is this?”
Barnaby stared at the faded date and did not answer immediately.
“Old enough,” he said at last, “that we should not assume the doors remain where they were.”
Lyra fetched a second sheet and began copying the route. This time she marked an alternative at every junction. Tamsin listed tools. Pell leaned over her shoulder until she gave him the useful task of finding dry lamp wicks.
Felix started to suggest that he could stay above and provide power.
His arm throbbed inside the sock.
He stopped himself.
“I can read the deck,” he said. “And carry a lamp with my left hand.”
“If the healer permits the stairs,” Tamsin said.
“If she permits the stairs.”
Jian nodded. It wasn’t approval of Felix generally. Only of one sensible condition.
For tonight, Felix decided, that would do.