The temple bells did not so much ring as clear their throats. Two notes, clean and cool, ran down the lanes and slipped beneath doors. It was not a festival summons or a funeral call. It was the tone Stonebridge used for errands of the heart: 'come, not because we will fix you, but because we might sit near your trying.'
Maelin turned the spoon in the pot as if there were answers under the potatoes. "Sister Anwen sent a note," she said, not looking up. "Canon Edrin is in from the river parishes. He's agreed to try a ritual of unlocking. This afternoon. If we want."
Kaelen's hand tightened on the back of the chair he was pretending to move. He could feel the wood notice his grip. "If we want," he repeated, and hated how hopeful and resigned could fit in the same sentence without anyone calling a constable.
Daran, at the window, set down his mug very gently, as if it were a nervous animal that might bolt if startled. "Edrin's not a fool," he said. "He knows the difference between a child and a problem. If he says he'll try, he means try." He turned, met Kaelen's eyes, and did not flinch from what they asked. "We can say no."
Maelin set the spoon down, wiped her hands on the apron that had accepted a life of stains. "Or we can show up and let a man pour water over your head and speak old words at your bones and see if anything trembles." She paused. "We have tried three times before. People will say, why try again."
"People say a great many unhelpful things," Daran said.
Kaelen pretended to examine the seam on his new gloves, a foolish pretense; he knew every stitch. "Sister Anwen thinks this man is… different?"
Maelin softened, just enough to let him see the soft. "She said he listens before he speaks. That's a rare order, in priests and in bakers."
Daran's mouth tucked at one corner. "In guards as well. In fathers."
Kaelen wanted to say no because it sounded like armor. He wanted to say yes because hope is a stupid, loyal dog. He wasn't sure which desire counted as courage. He was sure of one thing: he did not want to overhear the ritual from the lane and imagine it better or worse than it was. If it was going to be done, he wanted to be in the room where words made the air heavy. "I'll go," he said, and felt the dog in him wag its tail and the armor in him adjust the straps so they wouldn't chafe.
Maelin nodded once, brisk, as if he had asked for a list of apples. "Eat," she said. "You don't bargain with old words on an empty stomach."
The temple, in afternoon light, looked like a ship that had decided to anchor on land for a century or two. Its stones were river-kind, rounded corners, an old honesty. Sister Anwen met them at the door with a look Maelin returned: woman to woman, mother to mother. She put her palm briefly to Daran's arm in the way he allowed, as if checking that duty had not built itself too high on his shoulders, then to Kaelen's shoulder, a lighter weight. "With me," she said, and led them to a side chapel where light bent through blue glass and made a watery geography on the floor.
Canon Edrin stood by the altar, sleeves rolled to the forearms in a way that made Kaelen like him more than he expected to like anyone about to rearrange his insides. He was neither tall nor broad; age had thinned him into the shape of a wick. His hair had given up its arguments with time. His eyes were the color of the river at six in the morning when fishermen are already arguing about bait. He wore the temple's grey, same as Anwen, but his had been mended so many times the thread had become part of the cloth's memory.
"Verenths," Edrin said, and did not bother to find titles. "Thank you for coming. I would say it will be all right, but I don't know what you mean by 'all right,' and that seems important."
Kaelen liked him then. He wanted to say, By all right I mean I walk out unchanged and also everything is different. He said, "Thank you for trying."
Edrin smiled as if Kaelen had passed a test. "We call it a ritual of unlocking," he said, "but that's just what the scroll calls it. What it is, is very old people saying a word that once moved easily in throats and now only sometimes remembers to get up." He gestured to the low basin set on a stand: a simple bowl of hammered tin, old enough to have a name. "There's water. There's a braid. There's a word I'm not supposed to write down, so I keep it in my mouth like a seed. The rest is listening."
Anwen moved around the small space like a person making a bed while telling a story. She placed a small dish of salt on the ledge, a folded square of cloth on the rail, a bell with no clapper beside the basin. Maelin stood with her hands folded hard against themselves. Daran kept his hands at rest because if he let them free they would try to add usefulness, and there is nothing more dangerous to a ceremony than a Watchman attempting to fix it.
"Kaelen," Edrin said, and the boy's name in the old man's mouth had a weight that made Kaelen stand taller. "I don't promise. I don't explain to you what will happen to your life if this fails or succeeds. You already know both possibilities. I will ask you three questions before we begin. You can tell me if you'd rather I didn't."
"I'd rather you did," Kaelen said, and heard how much younger he sounded, and tried not to be cruel to himself about it.
"Do you pray?" Edrin asked, mild as soup.
Kaelen startled at the unexpected direction. He thought of Sister Anwen's little blessing at noon, of Daran's way of touching the doorframe each morning as if asking the house to behave, of Maelin humming to yeast because it has a god inside it if you believe correctly. "Sometimes," he said. "Mostly when I am afraid of being selfish."
"Then you're praying correctly," Edrin said, amused. "Second. Does it matter to you whether you are like other boys?"
"Yes," Kaelen said before he could ask himself what sort of answer would make him more beloved by gods or parents. "And no. I want to be myself in front of other people who are themselves."
Anwen made a small approving noise, one she usually reserved for children who remembered to return library slates.
"Third," Edrin said, "if no doors open to you today, what will you do tomorrow."
"I'll go to work," Kaelen said. "With Bren. And not step in the piles my feelings leave on the floor."
Daran's laugh was one sound and then a cough, proud and self-deprecating at once.
"That's all," Edrin said. "I can work with that."
He washed his hands in the basin without ceremony, as if preparing to cut bread. He took a length of soft blue cord from the pocket of his robe, the kind of braid Anwen sometimes wound around children's wrists at harvest to remind them to hold on to one another. He nodded to Kaelen, who came forward because his body had learned to obey when his name is called.
"Feet here," Edrin said, tapping a mark in the floor with a toe. "Not because the gods care—because I do, and I'm old and get to have prejudices about where feet go." Kaelen obeyed and did not smile, and did not not smile.
Anwen lit a candle and set it where the light would find a cheekbone and make it look like a hill new to sunshine. She stepped back, hands open, palms up. Daran and Maelin stood close enough to be reached and far enough to let him stand alone.
Edrin placed the braid in Kaelen's left hand. "Hold this," he said. "Not like it's precious. Like it's yours." He cupped water and let it run over Kaelen's right hand and wrist, twice. It was cool; it felt like truth. He put two fingers on Kaelen's brow, where children feel kissed by fever, and closed his eyes and said the seed word. It wasn't a foreign word. It sounded like it had been spoken in this room when the stones were young. Kaelen felt it go into him as far as it could without being rude.
"Again," Edrin murmured, to the word or to himself, and said it once more. He tapped the bell with no clapper. It made a sound anyway: the sound a bowl makes when it remembers to be a bell. The light, in the way light does, made pretensions of being a sign, but it was only light. Or only light at first.
Kaelen closed his eyes because that's what people in stories do when water and old words touch their heads. He did not feel anything that made itself into a song. He felt the roughness of the braid. He heard Anwen breathing, counting. He heard the small secret sound Daran's wrists make when he tenses and then stops himself from tensing more. He smelled salt, candle, the iron in the water which had been fetched from the Lark an hour ago and already missed the river's conversation.
"Again," he said, and Kaelen thought the word had a different flavor this time: less command, more plea. The braid in Kaelen's palm ticked. Not moved. Not tightened. Not anything he could hand to a skeptical child and say, Here, see. A suggestion, like when someone at the market mentions your name and you think you heard it, but then it is just a different 'K-' sound. It might have been his blood. It might have been hope.
Edrin's fingertips were steady on Kaelen's brow. "Open," he murmured, not to Kaelen, to the room, to the old thing older than rivers that sometimes gets up and stretches and remembers to be a door. He lifted his hands an inch and set them back down as if adjusting a book on a shelf. He spoke again, quiet, then quiet again, then quiet until the word almost couldn't find air to swim in.
Nothing happened.
That is to say, nothing that would have satisfied a crowd. Nothing that would have made a child clap and say, 'Do it again.' Kaelen felt warmth at the edges of himself and then realized it was embarrassment. He felt the way the floor meets the foot of someone who has done this posture before. He felt tears rise, not the elegant, jewel-like tears of poetry, hot, stupid ones, and he managed to breathe in and keep them from falling because he did not want to salt the ritual with himself.
Edrin's hands remained at his brow long past the point where a man trying to pretend at magic would have dropped them with a flourish. He did not sigh when he did lower them. He took the braid from Kaelen's palm with the care one uses to take tools from another's hands. He set it on the altar, like a runner returning to its place at a table. He washed his fingers again. He looked at Kaelen and let disappointment show in his own eyes, but only the disappointment of a craftsman whose materials had refused a shape today, not the disappointment of a priest who felt his gods had been insulted by a boy.
"I am sorry," Edrin said. He did not say it as apology for the gods. He said it as apology for his old hands, his not-good-enough word, his own breath. "The door is there. I cannot make it open. Some doors need a key. Some doors are painted on."
Kaelen bit his lip so hard the skin would remember tomorrow. "So I am… what?"
"You are Kaelen," Edrin said lightly, like tossing a ball gently so a child can catch it. He caught it again before Kaelen could drop it. He looked to Daran and Maelin. "You already know this part," he said to them. "But I should say it in front of him so he hears it with witnesses."
"Say it," Daran said, voice even, hands at rest by force of will.
"Magic is a poor excuse for dividing children," Edrin said. "It is a tool, a trade, a talent. In this city we have trades that need hands and eyes and patience. Some of us also have a trick for telling water what to do. That is all. If the gods denied you, boy, they denied you fireworks. They did not deny you the city."
Kaelen's mouth moved before his sense of audience could sand it down. "You said 'denied.'"
Edrin blinked. "Did I." He considered his tongue with the curiosity of a man caught by his own grammar. "I did. I'm old. My words learned to travel in teams. I meant-" He breathed and did not reach for a different noun. "I meant exactly this: No old word I know can open what you keep shut. And I do not know why it is shut. And that ignorance is mine, not yours."
Maelin's hand covered her mouth for three heartbeats and then she made it fall to her side because she had never taught her son to see her cry in front of him and she would not begin now.
Anwen, who had stood like a hewn thing throughout, moved. She took the cloth from the rail and dabbed Kaelen's forehead where Edrin's fingers had set a little circle of damp. She did it with the ceremony of a queen crowning a child with a daisy chain. "Steady hands," she said under her breath, only to him. "We keep what we keep. We get what we get. We make from both."
Kaelen did cry then, just one. He let it go down into the corner of his mouth and taste of salt, his, not the dish. "I'm sorry," he muttered to no one in particular.
"For what," Maelin said, too quick, and then gentled, "Darling, if you apologize in this room I will ask Sister Anwen to evict us."
Anwen nodded gravely. "I will. The rent for sorrow here is steep."
Daran put his hand on Kaelen's shoulder with the same weight and placement he had learned when Kaelen was small and had fallen from a chair that had never agreed to be a horse. "Look at me," he said softly. Kaelen did. "You didn't fail. A man threw a word at a door. The door was busy. That's all."
Kaelen wanted to laugh, and because he wanted to and the gods did not care to forbid it, he did, once, like a cough that had decided to be useful. He swiped the heel of his hand quickly under his eye. "I don't like that it matters," he said. "I don't like that I care. People are hungry in this city. Things burn. I want to be bigger than this."
"You are allowed to be exactly your size," Anwen said. "If you try to be bigger, you'll knock pots off shelves."
Edrin reached for the braid, coiled it, and returned it to his pocket. "May I give you a blessing anyway," he asked, polite as a guest.
"Yes," Kaelen said.
Edrin lifted his hand, stopped, lowered it, and chuckled at himself for almost doing it wrong. He put his hand, instead, over Kaelen's hands. He did not touch, he hovered, as if warming dough with his palms. "Bless these," he said, plain. "Make them tools and not weapons unless they must be. Make them strong and patient. Let them be slow to hit and quick to hold. Fiaht."
"Fiaht," Maelin said, as if to seal the dough.
"Fiaht," Daran said, as if to file the paperwork.
Kaelen swallowed his second crying. "Thank you," he told Edrin, and meant it.
They walked out, their footfalls doing that polite thing footfalls do in temples, hiding their own noise out of respect for other people's thoughts. Outside, the day tried to decide whether to continue or end early to avoid embarrassment. The river smell came up the lane as if it had an apology to deliver for the iron in the basin.
On the steps a boy sat who had pretended to wait for no one and had waited anyway. Garrin, hair tamed by shame into something earnest, could not quite meet Kaelen's eyes, and then did. He stood up fast and then recalled he was human. "I-" he started, and ran into the problem of not having practiced this sentence. "I wanted to say… if anyone laughed, I didn't."
"I did," Kaelen said dryly. "Thus you owe me nothing."
Garrin winced. "I used the wind," he blurted. "Yesterday. I shouldn't have. It felt… there. My feet were-, It was like stepping on an extra stair that wasn't there and thinking that was the world's fault. I'm sorry."
Kaelen studied him. He could have said, 'It was allowed.' He could have said, 'It didn't matter.' He could have said, 'I don't care.' All of those would have made both of them smaller. He said, "I know. Learn to be better than the easy thing. I have to. So do you." It surprised him that he could sound older than the boy speaking to him. It surprised him that it didn't feel like pretending.
Garrin nodded, relief cracking his face into a real smile. "I asked Sister Anwen if I could sit smells-of-incense and wait," he said. "She said if I got in the way she'd enlist me to carry water until I forgot what I had been loitering for. I carried three buckets to prove I was useful."
"I hope the water forgave you," Kaelen said, and the two boys stood on the temple steps in the awkward fellowship of people who have just realized they are part of each other's story whether or not they filled out the form.
Tamsin appeared from nowhere with the sort of delicacy a cat brings to the conclusion that it has misjudged a jump. She looked at Kaelen, then at the temple door, then back at Kaelen. She didn't hug him. She did walk close enough that if he had leaned, he wouldn't have fallen.
"Well," she said briskly, because brisk is mercy. "Now you must do something glorious with your hands so that when people list Verenth's failures they have to do it while pointing at a thing that could hold up a bridge."
"I will build a bench so straight that soup will resign from the city," Kaelen said.
"Canon Edrin would approve," Tamsin said. "He looked like a man who has suffered soup."
They walked. Daran and Maelin followed at the pace of parents who have had to learn the art of not stepping too near their child's feelings. The lane accepted them without commentary, which was the nicest thing it could do. Mrs. Kettle nodded to Kaelen like she had suspected him of something and had been satisfied to discover it was only humanity. The fishmonger pretended prices were more insulting than usual to keep his day consistent. The lamplighter tested a wick in broad daylight because an old man can do what he wants.
They might have reached the house and stayed there, nursing the ache like a household pet, but Bren Alder intercepted sorrow the way a cart intercepts a boy who isn't watching: gently, inevitably. He strode out of his shop holding a half-formed wheel like the moon interrupted him. He looked at Kaelen's face once, he knew faces the way he knew grain, and set the wheel aside.
"Verenth," he said. "Can you hold a spoke and not bleed on it."
"Yes," Kaelen said.
"Good," Bren said, "because I cannot convince this one to remember who it is. I threaten it, it laughs. I cajole, it sulks. We will try steady hands and see if it behaves out of respect."
Kaelen glanced at Maelin, who nodded as if sending him to school. Daran squeezed his shoulder once, the unspectacular blessing. Tamsin flopped into the shop with her best impression of a person who merely happened to be present whenever wheels needed to be placed in the correct moral alignment with the universe.
Bren set the spoke in Kaelen's hands. "Not too tight," he said. "Not too loose." He tapped the mortise. "If it fights you, you are likely trying to improve it too dramatically."
Kaelen breathed. He had been taught to breathe by many teachers, his mother over bread, his father on the training ground, Sister Anwen in the temple, but wood had its own lesson. He spread his fingers. He thought of the water on his brow: cool, then nothing. He thought of Edrin's words: fireworks and city. He thought of his own: I will go to work. He held the spoke until his pulse forgot to be the loudest sound in the room.
"All right," Bren said, softer than Kaelen had ever heard him. "Introduce them."
Kaelen did. He eased the spoke into the mortise and did not grab when it hesitated. He twisted his wrist a quarter turn in the direction Bren had shown him yesterday, a tiny adjustment, like kindness that comes one phrase later than it should and still counts. The spoke slid. It seated with a low, satisfied sound. Kaelen did not grin. He did not not grin.
Bren grunted. "Better. Again." He handed another. "You do not need to be exciting to be right, Verenth."
Tamsin perched on a bench and swung her heels against the leg rhythmically, as if keeping time for a song only she knew. "You can be exciting later," she said. "At the moment, I will release balloons in your honor internally, where they will not bother anyone."
They worked. Work is a kind of spell that does not ask permission. Bren spoke little, which was kindness; he let the shavings and the grain make the noise. After three spokes, Kaelen's breath had settled into that better rhythm, the one he'd almost caught during the bout before wind had jogged his ankle. He liked this rhythm better. It did not belong to anyone else. He made a mistake on the fourth, corrected it without self-laceration, and moved on. He caught Tamsin catching him, not with pity, but with admiration, which is harder to accept and easier to live with.
Bren called a halt when the afternoon light had crept to the place on the bench where he never allowed tools to rest. "Enough," he said. "If you conquer satisfaction too completely, it stops cooperating."
Kaelen blinked, shoulders complaining in that productive way. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me," Bren said. "Thank your hands."
"I did," Kaelen said.
He stepped out into the late day and let the air find him. The sky had been the same color when he'd entered the temple. It had not become more dramatic to accommodate his feelings. He suspected, a little bitterly and a little relieved, that it never would. He set his palm on the doorframe of the shop as he left. The wood was warm from hands and sun. He thought of Edrin's blessing, 'let them be tools', and felt a small, clean gratitude that didn't try to be more than it was.
"Hungry," Tamsin announced, as if the word were a law and she merely the messenger. "If we do not eat, we will chew our grief and then spit it out on the floor and Maelin will make us mop it."
"She will," Kaelen agreed. "And then she'll feed us anyway."
They went home. Maelin had indeed put the pot back on the fire with the same practical affection she gave to well-behaved dough. She looked at Kaelen, not to inspect, just to see, and saw, and set bowls down as if to say, Here is my part. Daran came later than usual, apologizing to his boots with an old man's mutter. He took one look and made his face into a thing between pride and warning, as if to say, A person is not to be touched and a person is to be held, and I will decide between those with care.
Over supper, no one mentioned the word denied. No one avoided it like it carried plague either. Maelin told a story about a girl at market who had tried to pay for cinnamon with an apologetic onion and had succeeded because sorry and onions together are too powerful a combination to refuse. Daran told the tale of a traveler whose donkey refused to cross the bridge because it suspected trolls and who had to be reassured by Mrs. Kettle's cat agreeing to test the arch first. Tamsin recited a poem she had written about rope, which ought never to be done in polite company, and they let her because she was fourteen and a person's business is to be slightly improper at fourteen. After, Daran took Kaelen out to the stoop and sat with him in the familiarity of planks that had their own complaints. The lane did its evening shift, less boastful, more tired, better honest.
Daran rubbed his thumb over the ridge of a knot and said, "When I took my oath at Lathmere, a man next to me couldn't get his words out. Mouth dried up. The captain waited. He didn't prompt. He didn't roll his eyes. He let the silence be. The man finished. And later the captain told me: You cannot rush a word into the world. It's not a horse. If it doesn't want to come, you leave the door open and keep the lantern lit."
"I am a word," Kaelen said, small, and not mocking himself for being small.
"You are a house," Daran said. "With many words. And a table. And a bench that will never force anyone to eat soup sideways."
Kaelen laughed; he did not know why soup had become the city's shorthand for injustice, but he was grateful it had: better soup than blood for a metaphor. He leaned until his shoulder touched Daran's, and Daran leaned back, and the lean was permission, not requirement.
"Tomorrow," Daran said, "you will have to endure people who love you telling you you're special in a way that makes you want to crawl into a shirt and hide. People mean well in Stonebridge. They don't always measure their spoons."
"I will endure," Kaelen said, and then, because he had to get used to saying it if he was going to do it: "I'll go to Bren. I'll hold spokes. I'll spar. I'll take the blow and return the correct one."
"And you will eat," Daran said. "You cannot wage a campaign against despair on an empty stomach."
"Mom would say you can't wage anything on an empty stomach," Kaelen said.
"She is correct," his father said truthfully.