Chapter Six — Two Shadows

He woke up looking at the sky.

Then he looked down, and there was a Guesclin at the foot of his bed.

She sat against the bedpost in her nightdress with her shoes on. Wrong feet. The ponytail was already tied, crooked, which meant somebody in the Guesclin household had been up before dawn and lost an argument.

She was wiping her hands.

White handkerchief, much too big for her. One finger at a time, very thoroughly, like a surgeon.

"You're awake," Marika said.

"Mm."

"I knew you were awake. You did the thing with your eyes." She stuffed the handkerchief up her sleeve. "You were asleep for so long. I waited forever."

"How long?"

She thought about it seriously.

"Forever and a half."

The sky was barely blue. The bird hadn't even come out yet.

"...Who let you in?"

"Nobody. I let me in. The door was shut, but I'm very strong now. Did you know I'm very strong now?"

"You said."

"I'm very strong," she said again, in case it had worn off.

He looked at the sleeve.

"What did you do?"

"Nothing."

"Your hands."

"They're clean," said Marika, and held them up, which was not the same as answering.

Fourth morning this week. Somewhere around the turn of the season the Guesclins had stopped going home between visits, and now there was simply a small girl in the house the way there was weather.

He dressed. She counted his buttons out loud and got to fourteen on eleven, and was satisfied.

"Your shoes are on the wrong feet."

She looked down at them for a long time.

"No they're not."

"They are."

"They're on my feet."

He didn't have an answer for that.

He opened the door, and she was behind him before it finished swinging, one fist bunched in the back of his shirt. Not his hand. His shirt. Like a leash, except he could never work out which of them was the dog.

Loretta was in the corridor with the linens. She didn't even ask anymore.

"Good morning, my lord. Good morning, Miss Marika. Does your mother know where you are?"

"Yes."

"Does she really."

"...She knows I'm in a house."

Somewhere downstairs, very faintly, Marta was shouting about the honey.

Marika looked at the ceiling.

Two years old.

They'd been two for about three weeks. Both of them. Same day, same morning, near enough the same hour — and Marika had never once let that stop her arguing about who got there first.

The talking had come on her all at once, in the winter, like a pipe bursting. One week it was "Avu" and "no" and "again." The next it was whole sentences with no brakes on them, most of them wrong in ways that were hard to argue with.

She called him Avon now. One morning she walked into the nursery and said "Good morning, Avon," in a voice like somebody's aunt, and never used the old name on purpose again.

Only when she forgot. When she fell over, or got caught. Then it came straight out of her in the old voice.

Avu.

He'd noticed that he waited for it.

The handkerchief had arrived around the same time as the sentences. Loretta said it was Miss Guesclin's. Miss Guesclin said it certainly was not. It lived up Marika's left sleeve and came out a dozen times a day, and every time it came out, something somewhere in the house had just happened.

He'd never once seen her do anything. Only the wiping afterward, very calm, like a general after a battle.

The training had never stopped. It had just gotten an audience.

Every morning, before the house was up, he did what he'd done since the crib. The wardrobe first — one corner off the boards, up slow, down slower. Then the floor. Push-ups, the real kind now, nose to the boards and back. Then the length of the room on the balls of his feet, silent, until the sky went grey.

It stayed a secret for about a week.

Then one morning she was at the foot of the bed early. She watched the wardrobe come up off the floor, and didn't scream, and didn't run for Loretta.

She got down on the floor next to him.

"Do the other thing."

"What other thing?"

"The up-and-down thing." She was already climbing onto his back. "I'm the heavy."

She'd done this once before, when neither of them could talk. He didn't think she remembered.

He did forty with her on. She counted to fourteen several times, which was her favorite number, and fell off laughing twice.

Afterward he sat her on the edge of the bed.

"Marika. You can't tell anybody."

"Why?"

"Because."

She thought about it. Then she held out her little finger, very solemn, like a sword.

"Pinky promise."

He looked at the finger. She waited.

He hooked his own around it.

"Pinky promise," she said again, and shook it once, hard, like a contract.

She told her mother at breakfast.

He heard it from two rooms away.

"Mama. Avon lifted the wardrobe."

"Did he, sweetheart."

"With his hands. And then he did the up-and-down thing forty times and I was on him."

"Forty."

"Lots of fourteens."

"That's very good counting."

"Mama, it's true."

"I'm sure it is." A page turned. "Eat your egg."

A pause.

"...It was a secret."

"Then you'd better not tell anyone else."

She told her mother the next morning, too. And the one after. The wardrobe. The push-ups. How fast he ran in the dark. Every morning she broke the pinky promise over breakfast, and every morning Miss Guesclin said, "Did he, sweetheart," and turned the page.

He stopped worrying about it after the first week.

It was the safest secret in the house. Told every day, out loud, to the one person who'd never believe it.

The fence was his now too.

Nobody had said so. He went out the day after his birthday, and the day after that, and a hundred days after that, and at some point the guards stopped looking round when he turned up at the bottom rail.

At some point after that, Corin started waving.

"Morning, little lord! And the little lady" — a bow so low his sword touched the dirt — "whose father, I'd like everyone to remember, could have my head."

"Hello, Corin," said Marika graciously.

She found the whole thing boring inside four minutes, every time, and said so.

"This is so boring."

"Then go inside."

"No."

And stayed.

He watched the swords. He watched the feet more.

The guards drilled forms before they sparred — six steps, a turn, a cut, six steps back — and by the end of the first month he could have done them with his eyes shut.

So one morning he pulled a stick out of the kindling pile and did.

He did it badly, a little, in the right places. Heel late on the turn. Cut low. The kind of wrong a boy gets from copying with his eyes.

Faro saw first and nearly took a blade to the ear.

"Hey — look! Look at the little lord!"

"He's got the turn."

"He's got it wrong."

"He's two, Faro. You've got it wrong and you're twenty-six."

The whole ring went off.

Corin leaned his forearms on the top rail. "Weight on your back foot, little lord. Like you're sitting in a chair that isn't there."

He adjusted. Not all the way.

"There you go! Born to it. You hear me? One lesson and he's better than Faro!"

"He's not—"

"One lesson, Faro."

So the stick and the forms became part of it, out in the daylight, with twelve grown men shouting advice and nobody taking any of it seriously.

Good cover. But the forms weren't what he'd come for.

He'd come for the breath.

His father came out most mornings. Not to fight, usually. To walk the ring and say three words to one man and two to another. But even standing with his arms folded, he breathed the same way.

In through the nose. Long. Slow as a man by a fire.

And the yard leaned in. The light came up off the ground and the fence and the men and bent toward him like grass under a steady wind, then sat still inside him. Water in a well.

Avon decided on the second day he was going to learn it.

It took him a week to find out he couldn't.

The first problem was size.

His father's breath went in for a count of twelve. Avon tried twelve that night in bed, got to seven, and coughed so hard Loretta came in with a candle.

"My lord? Are you sick?"

"No."

"You sound like a goose."

"...Swallowed wrong."

"Swallowed what? You're in bed."

The second problem was him.

He'd spent a year teaching himself to reach — to put his mind out into the room and call the light in — and now he couldn't stop. He'd breathe in, and reach, and the light would come straight into the frame inside him. The old thing. Not this.

His father never reached. The breath went in and the yard followed it, the way water follows a boat.

So Avon lay in the dark and tried to breathe without reaching.

Like trying to walk without moving his legs.

"What are you doing?"

Marika was hanging upside down off the bottom rail by her elbows.

"Breathing."

"You're breathing weird. You go hhhhhhhhhhh" — a kettle — "and then you stop, and then you go hhhhhhhhhhh again. And your face goes all—" She crushed her face into a fist.

"It doesn't."

"It does. You look like Beso when he's doing his business."

Two of the guards had to walk away.

The third problem was that when it finally did something, it did the wrong thing.

That was summer. He'd given up on being his father and tried being the guards instead — rough breaths through the teeth, the light gulped in and spent down the arms. Wasteful. But it moved.

So he breathed rough on the cut.

The light came. Into his right side.

Only his right side. Down the arm, into the stick, where it sat in the wood for half a breath like a lamp somebody forgot to put out. The left side got nothing. Like standing with one foot in a hot bath.

He dropped the stick.

"Butterfingers!" yelled Faro.

Again. Right side. Again, and this time a shiver went off him like a dog shaking water, and the light around the rail jumped away.

Wrong side. Wrong way.

But it had never done anything before.

It went like that for months.

Right arm only. Or jumping off him like a sneeze. Once, for four days, only his feet, and he walked around the house feeling like he'd stepped in something warm.

Wrong nine times in ten. Then eight. Then, around the first frost, seven.

He'd been built, once, by people who measured progress by the day. Here he was, measuring it by the season.

He minded less than he should have.

"I can do it too."

Marika stood at the rail with her feet much too far apart and her hands out like she was about to catch a very large ball.

"Do what?"

"Your thing." Her cheeks went round as apples. She held it until her face went pink, then let it go in one wet rush. "Hhhhaaaaahh. See?"

"That's not—"

"Hhhhhhhhhh—haaaaahhhh."

"You're going to fall over."

"I'm not—hhhhhhhh—"

On the sixth one she sat down very suddenly in the dirt.

"...The ground moved."

"You got dizzy."

"The ground moved, Avon."

It was nothing. A two-year-old huffing until her head spun.

Except the light around her had moved with it. The light that had always hung thicker around her than anywhere else. On the last breath it stirred, like a curtain when a door opens somewhere in the house.

Then it settled.

"Again," she said, and got up, and wiped her palms on the handkerchief.

"Don't."

"Why?"

He couldn't think of a reason he could say out loud.

"You'll fall over."

"Then you'll catch me. You must," said Marika, as though that fixed it.

The other thing came back in the spring.

He hadn't gone looking for it. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, wanting bread and not wanting to be asked about it, and he did something he hadn't done since before.

He went quiet. Not his mouth. All of him.

Back there, it had been the first thing they taught. How to stand in a room so eyes went past you. Not hiding. Just being less, until somebody looked straight at where you were and saw the wall.

Marta turned from the oven with a tray, looked right at him, and walked round him.

"Nina. Where's the young lord got to?"

"Haven't seen him since breakfast."

"Well, he'll be wanting his heel." Marta cut it and set it on the table, a foot from his hand.

He took it. She didn't see that either.

He tested it after that, carefully.

It worked better than it had back there. Much better. Back there, a trained eye could still catch you if you moved wrong. Here, a guard on the wall walk looked straight down at him in the open yard and yawned. Corin walked into him once, said "Sorry" to the air, and kept going.

It didn't work on everyone.

His mother looked up from her letters, straight at him through all of it, and said, "There you are."

Loretta found him from the far end of a corridor without looking up from her basket. His father saw him every time, and never seemed to notice there'd been anything to see through.

And Marika didn't even slow down.

"Avon, why are you standing in the middle of the kitchen?"

Marta dropped the tray.

Four people. He turned it over for a long time and couldn't find what those four had that the rest of the house didn't.

He didn't like not knowing.

He had no objection to it being those four.

He tested her once.

He didn't mean to at first. It was just a day. Around midmorning he realized what he was doing, and kept going, to see.

A body that never gets tired has to be put somewhere. So: the fence at dawn. The forms. Then the garden wall, the long way round. With nobody able to see him, he didn't have to trot. He ran.

Marika didn't go the long way round.

She watched him set off, thought about it, and went straight across the lawn, through the flower beds, through the hedge — not round it, through it — and was sitting on the far corner of the wall when he got there.

"You're slow," she said.

There were leaves in her hair. She wiped her hands.

He went round again. She cut across again. The hedge had a hole in it now.

Then the kitchen.

"Where he goes," said Marta, "she goes."

"Like a duckling," said Nina.

"Like a burr. A duckling at least gets bored."

He was shelling peas at the end of the table, slowly and badly on purpose, because the last time he'd done it well Marta had given him a long look. Marika was eating them as fast as he shelled them.

"And somebody," said Marta, "had her fingers in my honey this morning. Before the sun was up."

"Wasn't me," said Marika.

"I didn't say it was you."

"Good, because it wasn't," and wiped her hands.

Rufo came in with a bucket and looked at the pair of them.

"Like a dung beetle," he said.

The kitchen went quiet.

"Rufo."

"What? My uncle kept a farm. You'd see 'em in spring, one rolling his ball of — you know. And another right up behind him all day. Couldn't knock it off with a stick."

"You cannot," said Marta, "call a Guesclin a dung beetle."

"I said like one."

"What's a dung beetle?" said Marika.

Everybody looked at everybody else.

"It's a bug," said Avon. "It's very strong."

Marika lit up like a window.

"I'm a dung beetle," she told the kitchen. "I'm very strong, and I follow Avon." She planted herself in front of Rufo. "Am I a good dung beetle?"

Rufo looked at Marta. Marta looked at the ceiling.

"...Best one I ever saw, miss."

"Yes," said Marika, and didn't stop saying it for a week.

Then the stables, where he climbed the loft ladder and she stood at the bottom and told the horse everything happening up there, most of it invented.

Then the fence again. Then the yard with Beso, who ran until his tongue hung out and then lay down in the shade and refused to be a dog anymore.

Marika did not lie down.

Loretta came for her at nap hour and carried her off down the corridor stiff as a rolled carpet.

Nine minutes later she was back, hair flat on one side, handkerchief out.

"Did you sleep?"

"Yes," she said, wiping something off her fingers that looked like it had come off a window latch.

He did the sums on the bathroom floor while Loretta ran the water.

She'd been up before him. She'd done the wall six times, the kitchen, the stables, the fence twice. She'd escaped a nap by some method he was going to have to look into.

He knew what a small body had in it. He'd seen it run out, in other children. In himself.

She should have run out at noon.

She hadn't done a single thing he'd done. Through the hedge instead of round. The horse instead of the ladder. She had her own way of being everywhere he was, and it was sideways from his every time.

But she'd been everywhere.

And he had the frame. She had nothing but herself.

"It's your turn, my lord," Loretta was saying. "Just yours. Miss Marika has her own bath, in her own rooms—"

"I'll wait outside," said Marika, from the corridor.

"You will not."

"On the floor. I'm very quiet."

"You have never been quiet one day of your life." Loretta got down on her knees, which meant she was serious. "Sweetheart. The young lord needs a little time by himself sometimes. Everybody does."

Marika thought about that very hard. Then she looked past Loretta at him.

"Do you?"

A straight question. Nobody in this house asked him those. They asked things they'd already decided the answer to.

She was actually waiting.

"...Sometimes."

Her face went through four things very fast.

"Oh," she said.

Then she sat down against the corridor wall across from the door, knees up, shoes on the wrong feet.

"I'll wait here. That's not outside the door. That's the wall."

Loretta opened her mouth, looked at the girl, and shut it.

"...Ten minutes, my lord."

When he came out, the dung beetle was asleep against the wall, sitting up, handkerchief in one fist.

He'd only ever measured himself against people trying to keep up with him. Every one of them had stopped.

She wasn't trying. She just came along.

...Huh.

It was Corin who told his father.

Late autumn. His father was walking the ring, and Corin fell in beside him, and they stopped at the far post, forty paces off, backs to the fence.

Forty paces was nothing to him anymore.

"Sir. Can I say something?"

"You're going to anyway."

"The little lord, sir." Corin tipped his head toward the fence without looking. "He's copying you."

"...What?"

"Your breathing. Been at it all year. Every time you come out he stops what he's doing and breathes like you. Gets it wrong, mind. Goes red in the face. But every single day." Corin rubbed the back of his neck. "We've got a bet on. Faro says he'll quit by midwinter."

His father said nothing.

Avon watched the back of his neck go red.

It started at the collar and climbed, all the way to the tops of his ears, until they were the color of a split plum.

"...I see," his father said.

"Sir?"

"Get back to work, Corin."

Corin went, grinning so hard it went round the back of his head.

His father stared at a spot in the dirt six feet in front of him, like he'd dropped something there.

Then he went inside. Early.

The next morning, his father took his coat off.

He never did. That morning he folded it over the rail fifteen feet from Avon and rolled his sleeves to the elbow.

"Corin. Faro." He pointed at the lean one, the one who'd got behind him on the birthday. "You too. All three."

"...All three, sir? It's Tuesday."

"All three."

They came together.

And his father — who had spent a year catching swords like a man catching apples — moved.

He turned under Corin's cut, low, one hand trailing the ground. He came up inside Faro's reach and put him down with a shoulder. He stepped back from the lean one's swing, one long unnecessary step, and let the steel go past his nose so close Loretta screamed from the kitchen door.

Then the hands.

Two first. Cartwheel-sized. One caught Corin's blade. One caught the lean one round the middle and set him down in the dirt like a cat.

Then four.

Avon went very still.

Smaller. Half the size, easier to see through. But four, and his father standing in the middle not moving at all.

One took Faro's sword and threw it straight up. One caught it coming down. One flicked Corin's ear like a schoolmaster, and Corin yelped. The fourth did nothing whatsoever but hang over his father's shoulder with its fingers spread, like it was waving.

Then they were gone.

"Sir," breathed Faro, from the dirt. "You've never—"

"Again."

He didn't look at the fence once.

His ears were red the whole time.

It went on every morning after that.

Coat on the rail. Two hands, then four. Guards flying across the yard like washing in a gale. One morning he went clean over Corin's head — both feet off the ground, turning in the air — and Loretta put down a full basket of eggs.

"He's performing," she hissed from the kitchen door. "The lord of the house! Showing off like a boy!"

"Been at it a week," said Marta. "Nobody's told him."

"Somebody should."

"You tell him."

Loretta did not tell him.

The guards were delighted. They'd never had so much fun losing.

And every morning his father stood a little closer to the fence, and before he started, he folded his arms and breathed — long, slow, in through the nose — where anybody small at the bottom rail could hear it.

That was the part Avon watched.

Everything else had gotten bigger all week. Louder. Flashier.

The breath hadn't changed at all.

On the eighth morning his father took all four of them at once.

Corin and Faro high, the lean one and a fourth man low, and his father in the middle with his coat on the rail and his hands empty.

Avon had both fists on the bottom rail and wasn't breathing.

Corin went first. Overhead, everything behind it. His father didn't lift a hand to it. One of the big shapes did — came up out of nothing and closed on the blade, and Corin hung off his own sword like a man hanging off a branch.

Faro came in under that. His father turned sideways, let the cut go past his belt, and tapped Faro on the back of the head as he went by. Just a tap. Faro went face-first into the dirt anyway, out of pure surprise.

The low two came together, from both sides.

Four shapes this time. Two took the swords. One took the fourth man by the collar and sat him down. The last one caught the lean one's ankle, lifted him clean off the ground, and held him there upside down while his father looked at him and breathed.

In through the nose. Long. Slow.

The yard leaned in.

"Yield?"

"Yield, sir!"

Somewhere beside him, very quietly, somebody was watching.

Not the yard. Him.

Marika had her chin on the rail and her cheek squashed against the wood, and she wasn't looking at the fight at all. She hadn't been for a while. He'd felt it start around the time Corin went up.

He didn't turn his head.

"Your eyes went big," she said.

"They didn't."

"When the hand came out. They went big." She made hers enormous to show him. "And then when Faro fell over, your mouth did a thing."

"What thing?"

"This." She tried it. It came out lopsided. One corner of her mouth went up a little and stayed there, and she held it very carefully, like something that might spill. "Like that. Just on one side."

He didn't know his mouth did that.

"And when your papa breathes, you stop breathing," she went on. "Every time. You go all still. Like when Beso sees a bird."

In the ring, his father set the lean one down right way up and brushed the dirt off his shoulder, twice, without thinking about it.

Avon watched that too.

"There," said Marika. "Your face went soft."

"It didn't."

"It did. It goes soft when he does that. When he does the brushing."

Nobody had ever watched his face before. Not like this. People looked at him all day — Loretta, Marta, the guards — and saw a quiet boy, and moved on. Back there, faces were something you kept flat because somebody was always reading them, and whatever they read, they used.

She wasn't going to use it. She was just keeping track, the way she counted his buttons.

He let her.

He kept his eyes on the yard. She kept her eyes on him. Every so often she reported something — "Big eyes," "Mouth thing," "You stopped breathing again" — in a small, satisfied voice, like someone ticking off birds.

It should have bothered him. He waited for it to.

It didn't.

"Your papa's strong," Marika explained.

Grey end of the afternoon. She was on her back in the grass, explaining to the sky.

"Because he doesn't breathe."

"He breathes."

"He doesn't breathe loud. He does lots of big stuff now. The hands and the jumping. But he doesn't breathe big. Corin goes HUH, HUH, HUH like a horse. Faro goes hsss, hsss like a snake. Your papa doesn't go anything. So he's the strongest."

"That's not why."

"It is why. If you breathe loud, your strong leaks out."

He turned his head and looked at her.

She was picking at a grass stem. She'd already moved on.

"Who's the second strongest?"

"...I don't know."

"I am. Because I'm a dung beetle. And you're third."

"Why am I third?"

"Because you breathe so loud." The kettle again. "Your strong's leaking out everywhere."

He looked back at the yard.

Corin was at the trough, still heaving from the morning. Every time he blew a breath out, the light around him went a little thinner. Avon had seen that on his birthday — in, bright; out, thin — and never once thought about what it meant for him.

He'd been at it for a year like a lift. Set yourself. Shove the breath in. Hold it. Force it out. All of it loud, even when nobody could hear it.

His father never forced anything. He could throw grown men across a yard with four hands at once and still breathe like he'd forgotten he was doing it. Nothing going out. Everything staying in.

He lay down in the grass beside her.

"Marika."

"Mm?"

"Say that again."

"Say what again?"

"The loud thing."

She rolled her head over and looked at him with enormous suspicion.

"...Why?"

"I liked it."

Something happened to her face.

People told her she was clever all the time. Nobody had ever asked her to say something again. That was her word.

"If you breathe loud," she said slowly, like handing him something that might break, "your strong leaks out."

"Okay."

"That's the whole thing."

"Okay."

"Avu — Avon — you're being weird."

He was already listening to himself breathe.

Alina Guesclin watched them from the terrace over a cup that had gone cold an hour ago.

Two years.

She'd asked for two years, lying in that bed with the sky still ringing. She hadn't expected to get all of them.

She had. So far. No priests on the step. No pleasant man from the palace. There were letters — there were always letters — but letters could be answered slowly, and slowness was a thing her family had used to win wars.

Two years of the girl being nothing but a child. Spent, as it turned out, attached to the back of a Strade boy's shirt.

"She's still out there?" Janet came out with a shawl.

"Where else."

"I sent Loretta out an hour ago."

"Loretta came back without her. With honey on her apron, which I'm choosing not to ask about."

Janet sat.

"Did you see him this morning?" She didn't mean the boy.

"The whole house saw him."

"He went over Corin. He's never done that. Not in all the years I've known him." Something in her voice was trying hard not to be laughter. "Somebody told him, didn't they."

"Corin."

"Corin."

"His ears have been red for eight days, Janet."

Janet put her face in her hands.

Alina had watched the boy's breathing from this terrace a hundred times. The first time, she'd thought he was ill. The second, she'd seen who he was watching.

She'd grown up among men who breathed like that. Her father. Renoir. Her son, the last time he came home, very serious about it. You only noticed it if you'd been raised around it.

And here was this boy, doing it wrong every day for a year, with that face that never gave anything away.

There were other things. Her daughter at breakfast every morning, swearing the boy lifted wardrobes. And the stable door last week, which she'd looked straight at, twice, and not seen him standing in until Marika shouted "Avon, come on" — and there he was, as if he'd been there all along.

She'd put that down to the light, and to not sleeping. She didn't care for either explanation.

Children were small. Children stood still in doorways. That was all.

He wasn't a cold child. She'd thought so once, for a day and a half.

He was a boy who adored his father and didn't know how to say it. And a father saying it back the only way he knew — coat off, in front of twelve men, going over Corin's head.

She'd seen it in every barracks she'd ever set foot in. It had made her eyes sting from this terrace more than once, and she'd have cut out her tongue before telling Janet.

"He's a good boy," she said instead.

"He is," said Janet, into her hands.

Down on the grass, the boy lay on his back and breathed. Slower than she'd seen him do it before.

Quieter, too.

"Should we get them in?"

Her daughter pulled out that handkerchief and wiped her hands, for no reason at all, in the middle of the grass.

"In a minute," said Alina.

Marika was at the foot of his bed before the sky went blue.

"Where are we going?"

"Outside."

"It's dark outside."

"You can stay here."

She had his shirt before he reached the door.

The yard was empty. Frost on the rail, frost on the beaten dirt. The air was thick with light, the way it always was at dawn, drifting between the posts like something that hadn't woken up yet either.

Marika lasted about as long as it took to sit down against the corner post. Then her head went down on her knees and she was gone.

He didn't take the stance. Didn't pick up the stick. Didn't count.

If you breathe loud, your strong leaks out.

He stood there like a man in his own yard, and breathed in, and tried very hard not to try.

The first breath, he reached without meaning to. The old thing. He let it go.

The second, he counted. He let that go too.

The third, he didn't do anything.

In through the nose. Not long — he couldn't do long yet. Just slow. Like somebody by a fire, falling asleep.

And the yard leaned in.

A finger's width, maybe. The light between the posts tipped toward him like the surface of a cup set down on a table that isn't quite level. Then it came. Not pulled. It came because the breath had left room behind it.

Down into him. Both sides. Both arms, both legs, everywhere at once. Still. Deep.

And crooked.

It had come from the left, mostly. Much more from the left than the right, as if the ground sloped that way.

The left was the corner post.

He didn't look over. He could hear her breathing, small and slow, the way a sleeping child breathes.

He noticed that.

And the moment he noticed, he was reaching again, and the lean went out of the yard like a candle, and he was just a boy at a frosty fence with his mind stuck out into the dark like a hand.

A year for a finger's width. Crooked. Gone the second he looked at it.

He waited to be disappointed.

It didn't come.

What came instead was the same thing that came on his birthday, watching his father stop a sword with a hand that wasn't there. It sat in his chest, warm, and wanted the next one already.

A long way to go. He'd told himself that a year ago like it was news.

It still was.

"...Avu?"

She was blinking at him from the post, frost on her sleeves, ponytail flattened on one side.

"Avu, is it morning? Did you go without me—"

"I'm here."

"Oh." She rubbed her face with both hands. Then she remembered who she was. "Avon. Did you do the thing?"

"...A little."

She sat up very straight.

"Did you do it quiet?"

"Yeah."

"I told you." She scrambled up, half-asleep and completely triumphant. "I told you and you didn't listen and then you listened."

"You told me."

"I'm very clever. Also very strong. Also cold."

"Let's go in, then."

He started back across the yard toward the kitchen, where Marta was lighting the ovens and was any minute now going to find out about the honey again.

Behind him, the handkerchief came out. One finger at a time. Folded, and back up the sleeve.

Then a small hand took hold of his shirt.

He let it.

She was still going — how cold she was, how clever, how she was going to tell her mother and Loretta and Rufo and Beso and the horse.

Loud, of course. All her strong leaking out everywhere, all over the yard.

She'd have plenty left by noon. She always did.

He walked slower, so she could keep up.