The village was a twenty-minute walk from the manor along a path that had once been maintained and now maintained itself out of habit.
Tarev followed Veth through the fog, which was thinner here than at the house — or not thinner exactly, but different. More willing to move. It parted around them and closed behind, the way fog does when it is just weather and nothing else. He catalogued the path out of reflex: packed earth over soft ground, holding well enough in the dry season but probably treacherous after heavy rain. Two sections where the ground had subsided slightly on the left side, pushing the natural walking line toward the ditch. A wooden footbridge over a shallow drainage channel that bounced more than it should when you stepped on it.
He didn't say any of this out loud.
He had learned already, in the handful of days since waking up as himself, that saying the things he noticed tended to produce a particular expression in people. Veth had given it to him twice already. It wasn't offense exactly — more a careful reassessment, like someone revising an estimate they thought they'd already finalized.
He was eight. He was trying to seem like a normal eight-year-old.
He was not entirely succeeding.
"Don't touch anything in Maren's house without asking," Veth said, without looking back.
"Who's Maren?"
"The hedgewitch. She'll be at market."
"Is she difficult?"
Veth made a sound that was not quite a word. "She's honest. Which in this village amounts to the same thing."
Graysmouth arrived before he was ready for it.
Not that it was large — it wasn't. Maybe sixty buildings if you counted generously, clustered around a market square that was more mud than cobblestone, with a well at the center that had a bucket on a chain and an expression, somehow, of long-suffering patience. The buildings were built in the practical style of people who cared primarily about keeping water out, with low roofs and small windows and walls that leaned on each other for moral support.
They were doing their job. Just not elegantly.
He walked through the square behind Veth and tried not to visibly assess everything, which was difficult because everything wanted assessing. The fence line on the east side had monster damage — claw marks, by the width and depth, something that had hit it hard enough to split two planks. Repaired poorly, the new wood unpainted and already beginning to swell with moisture. The covered storage at the far end of the square had a roof that was shedding its thatch unevenly, which meant the framework underneath was probably sagging on one side.
The path through the square's center collected standing water in two places that were clearly habitual, by the way the ground had been worn down around them. People had spent years walking around these puddles rather than solving them.
He thought about that.
One morning's work with a spade, maybe two.
A boy tripped over his foot.
It was entirely Tarev's fault. He had stopped walking without announcing it, staring at the drainage problem, and the boy behind him had been moving at the particular speed of someone who was not watching where he was going because he was watching something else entirely — a dog near the well, as it turned out, which had found something in the mud worth investigating with great seriousness.
They both staggered. Nobody fell. The boy caught himself on Tarev's shoulder and rebounded, and they looked at each other from a distance of about one foot.
He was a year older than Tarev, roughly, with dark hair that had dried at several different angles and a bruise on his chin that was fading from purple to yellow and had clearly been there long enough that he'd stopped noticing it. His boots were wet. His expression cycled through surprise, mild embarrassment, and aggressive recovery in about half a second.
"Watch it," he said.
"Sorry," Tarev said. "I stopped."
"Yeah, I noticed." The boy looked down at where Tarev had been looking. At the puddle. At the worn path around it. His expression shifted into something more curious than annoyed. "What are you looking at?"
"The reason your shoes are wet."
The boy looked at his shoes. Looked at the puddle. Looked back at Tarev. "I walked around the puddle."
"You walked around it the same way everyone else does. The ground's worn down on both sides. When it rains, the whole section floods because there's nowhere for the water to go except across the main path."
A pause.
"So the whole path is wet," the boy said slowly, as if testing whether this was a reasonable thing to be annoyed about. "Not just the puddle."
"The puddle's just the visible part."
Another pause, slightly longer.
"That's—" The boy stopped. Frowned. "Huh."
His name was Tomas Breth. Tarev learned this thirty seconds later when Tomas's mother called it from across the square in the tone of someone who had been looking for him for longer than she'd wanted to. Tomas made the face of someone who had not been anywhere suspicious and was inexplicably being treated as if he had, said one second in a way that communicated it would absolutely not be one second, and looked back at Tarev.
"You're the Morthis kid," he said. Not unkind. Just placing him.
"Yes."
"You just moved in."
"I've been here a few weeks."
"I know. My dad said the manor finally had someone in it again." Tomas tilted his head. "Why do you talk like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like you're explaining something to someone who didn't ask."
Tarev considered this. "Habit," he said.
Tomas's mother called again, with more syllables this time. Tomas took two steps backward, still facing Tarev, the way people do when they're leaving but haven't decided to yet. "The puddle thing," he said. "How would you fix it?"
"Diversion channel. Maybe half a day's work. Run it along the east edge to the ditch."
Tomas looked at the ditch. Looked at the puddle. Did the geometry in his head. "Huh," he said again, which seemed to be what he said when something made sense that he hadn't expected to make sense.
Then he turned and jogged toward his mother, and Tarev watched him go and returned to looking at the drainage problem.
The market was small by any standard and by the Graymarsh's standards was practically bustling. A dozen stalls, most of them selling necessities rather than luxuries: dried goods, rough cloth, two butchers working from the same table in adjacent but apparently not cooperative proximity, a woman with seed packets and the focused energy of someone who had fought winter before and expected to fight it again.
Veth moved through it with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this for thirty years and had long since stopped finding it interesting. Tarev followed and looked at everything.
He was looking for patterns more than things. How the villagers carried themselves — where they held tension, where they relaxed. Who spoke to whom. Where they didn't speak and why. It was the same way you read a site before you started work on it: not the surface features but the habits and pressures underneath.
What he found was exhaustion.
Not desperation — nothing that acute. But the particular flatness of people who had been managing a difficult situation for long enough that managing it had become the whole of what they expected from life. They repaired what broke. They stored for winter. They watched the fence line for damage. They sent for help when someone died and were not particularly surprised when the help was slow.
He watched a man he didn't know stop at the butcher's table, look at the prices, and make a decision in his face before making it with his mouth. Got less than he'd meant to get. Turned away without the expression of someone who'd compromised. Just the flat face of someone who had done that calculation many times before.
"Who is the headman?" Tarev asked Veth quietly.
"Osric Fell. The large one near the well."
He found Osric: a broad man in his fifties, the kind of big that came from work rather than comfort, with a beard that was losing its argument with the grey. He was talking to two other men in the way people in authority talk — not actually listening, building his response while the other person was still speaking.
He caught Tarev looking at him. Held the look for a moment. Then turned back to his conversation.
Not hostile. Not welcoming either. Measuring.
Maren was exactly where Veth had said she would be: at the edge of the market, at a stall that was less a stall and more a table covered in things that defied quick categorization. Small bundles of dried plants. Stoppered bottles of various colours. Three items under cloth that he decided not to speculate about.
She was shorter than he expected. Not elderly — somewhere in the distance between fifty and seventy where it became hard to tell, her grey hair pulled back with the absent efficiency of someone who had stopped caring about hair long ago. She had the hands of someone who worked with small, precise things, and she was watching Tarev approach with an expression that was doing something he couldn't immediately parse.
Not surprise. She had been told he was coming, probably, or had noticed him walking through the square. Not wariness either, though there was something careful in it.
Recognition, maybe. Faint and turned inward.
"The Morthis heir," she said, in the tone of someone stating a fact they find mildly inconvenient.
"Tarev," he said.
"I know what your name is." She looked at him steadily. "You've been walking through the market staring at everything as if you're writing a report."
"I was looking at the drainage problem."
"I noticed." She picked up a bottle from her table, looked at it, put it back with a slight rotation — some private organization system. "Your family has been useless to this village for three generations. I hope you're not about to tell me you're different."
Tarev thought about the repair list in his notebook. The eleven items, ordered by urgency. The drainage channel that would take half a day with a spade and nobody helping.
"I'm eight," he said. "I'm not going to tell you anything yet."
Maren looked at him for a moment. Something shifted very slightly at the corner of her mouth — not quite a smile, but the suppression of one.
"Veth," she said, without looking away from Tarev. "He's better than the last one."
"Mm," said Veth, in the tone of someone preserving their options.
"Come by the house sometime," Maren said to Tarev, picking up the cloth-covered item nearest to her and relocating it to the far end of the table. "I have things worth teaching if you have sense enough to learn them. I haven't decided if you do."
"How will you decide?"
"Ask fewer questions. See if the drainage channel exists by next week." She picked up another bottle and turned her attention to it with the absolute finality of a dismissed audience.
Tarev looked at the path between the well and the east fence, mapped the run of the diversion channel in his head one more time, and went to find Veth.
On the walk back, the fog came in earlier than it had gone out.
He thought about what he'd seen. The repaired fence boards. The sagging storage roof. The standing water in its habitual places, worn into the square's pattern of movement like a scar. The man at the butcher's table making the calculation in his face.
Nobody powerful cared about the Graymarsh. That was evident in every cracked wall and insufficient repair.
But the people here had been solving their problems with stubbornness for longer than he'd been alive, in either life. That counted for something. Stubbornness was a resource. It was not always well directed.
He thought about the diversion channel.
Half a day with a spade.
Probably less, if he picked the right weather and the right section of ground.
He added it to the list when he got back to his room, in the slot between window frame — study and footbridge — check fixings, and fell asleep thinking about gradient and drainage and the particular way a marsh is quiet when it has decided, for its own reasons, to wait.