Chapter 8:

By the second week, Hayato could find the meadow with his eyes shut.

Not because he knew the path — Quinn's memory had always known the path — but because his own feet had started to agree with hers about where to put themselves. Left at the split oak. Follow the sound of the stream until it got quiet, not loud. Cut through where the grass grew thin from being walked on by four people most mornings.

He still failed the water every single time.

"Again," Orin said.

Hayato crouched at the puddle — a different puddle, same general hollow in the dirt, since Ashenvale seemed to only ever produce puddles in exactly two places — and reached inward the way he'd been reaching inward for two weeks now. Looked for the well.

Found the room. Empty. Waiting for furniture that never showed up.

"Nothing," he said.

"Mm." Orin didn't sound surprised anymore. He hadn't sounded surprised in about a week. He crouched down beside him anyway, out of what Hayato had started to suspect was pure stubbornness rather than any real expectation the outcome would change. "Nothing's a very consistent answer for you."

"Sorry."

"Don't apologize for it. It's data." He straightened up, knees popping audibly, and raised his voice toward the others. "Sable, again. Ren, try the log this time instead of the water. Different medium, different resistance — see if the shape of it changes anything."

                             • • •

The lesson had a rhythm to it now, the kind that only comes from repetition — Sable's clean quiet lift, Ren's furrowed concentration, Liora's spiral holding a beat longer each time before it wobbled. Hayato had started to be able to predict the order things would go wrong in.

He was right, mostly. Ren's log twitched an inch off the ground and dropped. Liora's spiral held for a genuinely impressive stretch before collapsing sideways into something that looked, briefly, like a bird shape, which she insisted afterward had been on purpose.

"It was a bird," she said. "I was going for a bird."

"You were going for a spiral," Ren said. "You said spiral. Five minutes ago. Out loud."

"The bird was an evolution of the spiral."

"That's not a thing."

"Everything's an evolution of something, Ren, that's how evolution works—"

"That's not how any of that works—"

Sable, off to the side, lifted her thread of water in one motion, held it a full three seconds, and set it back down without a ripple. Nobody but Hayato seemed to notice.

[She's better than all of them and she never says so,] he thought. [Not once.]

He keep it away with the other things he'd started keeping about Sable without quite meaning to.

                             • • •

They broke for the day around noon, the sun high enough that Orin declared, without much ceremony, that the earth's resonance got "lazy in the heat" and there wasn't much point pushing further. He said this most days around the same hour. Hayato had started to suspect it had less to do with resonance and more to do with Orin wanting his lunch.

They were gathering up — Liora wringing out her sleeve from a splash that had gotten her more than the puddle had — when a man came up the mill road at a pace that meant he had somewhere to be.

Hayato recognized him after a second. The baker's brother-in-law, or something close to it — Quinn's memory supplied a name, Foss, and the general impression of a man who traveled between villages selling flour and came back with more news than flour most trips.

"Master Orin," Foss said, slowing but not really stopping, already half turned to keep walking. "Thought you'd want to hear — the Aldric boy got marked. Over in Thistlewood."

Liora's head came up so fast Hayato heard her neck.

"Marked," Orin repeated, mild.

"Two days ago. Whole village turned out for it, I heard. Empire man came through same day, if you can believe the timing." Foss was already moving again, flour bag shifting on his shoulder. "Vanguard type, they're saying. Boy's what, twelve? Younger than my own." He raised a hand in a general goodbye. "Anyway. Thought you'd want to know."

He kept walking. The road took him around the bend and out of sight, unhurried about the whole thing in a way that made it clear he'd already told this news to four other people that morning and would tell it to four more before dinner.

Nobody said anything for a second.

                             • • •

"Twelve," Liora said finally, to nobody.

"You heard him," Ren said.

"I know I heard him. I'm processing it out loud. That's allowed." She was looking down the empty road like it might still have something else to give her. "Younger than us. Barely."

Orin, gathering his coat off the flat stone with no particular urgency, glanced at her. "Marks don't run on a schedule, Liora. I've told you this."

"I know that."

"You ask me every week if there's a schedule."

"I ask *hypothetically*."

"You ask the same hypothetical." He shrugged the coat on, patted one of its many pockets like he was checking for something, found it, and looked satisfied. "Twelve is young. Not unheard of. Vanguard types do sometimes come early — more instinct than formula, in my experience, so the body doesn't need to catch up to the theory the way the rest of you do." He said this the way he said most things, like a man reading off a fact he'd long since stopped finding remarkable.

[Two days ago,] Hayato thought, watching Liora's face do something complicated. [A whole village. An empire man showed up the same day. That's fast.]

He didn't say any of that. Quinn's memory didn't have strong feelings about the Aldric boy one way or another — a name from a neighboring village, nothing more — but Liora's face had feelings enough for both of them.

                             • • •

"Do you think he wanted it?" Sable asked.

She hadn't said much the whole exchange, which wasn't unusual, but the question landed with a particular weight anyway — the kind that made Ren stop fiddling with the hem of his sleeve and Liora actually look at her instead of at the empty road.

"What kind of question is that," Liora said. "Of course he wanted it. Everyone wants it."

"I didn't ask if everyone wants it. I asked if *he* did."

Liora opened her mouth. Closed it.

Orin, watching this with the particular stillness he got when he was letting his students work something out without helping, said nothing at all.

"I don't know him," Liora said finally, quieter. "I don't know if he wanted it."

"Neither do I," Sable said. "That's why I asked."

She said it plainly, not pointed. That was just how Sable talked. But Hayato caught something in it anyway, a small echo of the same conversation they'd had on the road home two weeks ago. *Having a purpose that clear. You wouldn't get to choose it.* Sable hadn't let that thought go. She'd just been carrying it quietly since, waiting for a reason to bring it back out.

[She does that,] Hayato thought. [Puts something down and picks it back up later, exactly where she left it.]

                             • • •

They walked back toward the village together, the four of them, Orin peeling off early at the fork toward his own cottage with a wave and a reminder that they'd meet again same time, weather allowing.

Liora was quieter than usual the whole way. Not upset, exactly — Hayato couldn't quite name what it was, watching her from the side. Something turning over behind her eyes that she wasn't putting into words for once, which for Liora was its own kind of unusual.

"Twelve," she said again, out of nowhere, somewhere past the mill pond.

"You keep saying that," Ren said, but gently this time, without the usual edge.

"I know." She kicked a stone off the path, watched it skitter into the grass. "I just thought I had more time to be ready for it. That's all."

Nobody had an answer for that. Sable glanced at her, said nothing, but shifted half a step closer as they walked, the kind of small adjustment that wasn't really about distance.

Hayato watched the three of them and thought about a boy he'd never met, twelve years old, standing in a village he'd never seen, getting handed a whole future in one moment — whether he'd asked for it or not.

[Some people get told what they're for,] he thought. [And some people spend a whole life not finding out.]

He didn't say that either. He just kept walking, Quinn's boots finding the path without needing to be told where it went.