12th of Darkfall, 412 AH
The formal dining room had read as information the first time I'd sat in it.
Tonight it was just the place the day ended, and I came into it too far down in my own head to do anything else, the arm aching faintly where I'd burned it the night before.
I'd gone easy today. I skipped targeted holds and did only the slow flood drills, keeping the forearm out of them. It galled me a little to trade a day of real work for one that kept the burn from worsening, but oh well. Stupidity last night, paid for in reps today.
The table had been laid full, or as full as it ever got: bread still steaming in the basket, soup, some sort of meat. Three seats filled already, which for this house was a crowd. Rosabel sat in the chair, propped on both elbows, blinking slow at nothing and losing the fight to keep her head up.
I sat down.
"There he is," Father said, and a bowl arrived in front of me. "You've gone thin this week, you know. Aldric says you skipped eating at noon." His palm came up and pressed flat to my forehead. "Eat, sweetling. You can read your books later."
"I had bread," I said. I had skipped the bread, but he didn't need to know.
"Mm," he said, and tucked a slice of meat onto my plate anyway. "There's honey if you want too."
The soup was good, barley threaded with dark green from the herb whose stem I'd split open to see whether it ran mana channels alongside the water-veins. It hadn't, at least it wasn't observable with the naked eye. I ate, and my interior went where it had been going all day.
Mother came in last.
She crossed behind Father's chair to reach her own. On the way, her hand went flat between his shoulder blades and stayed there longer than crossing a room required. She bent and whispered something into his ear, too quiet for the rest of us to catch, in front of all three of us.
Ugh
Father's face reddened a little. It always looked strange to me, the man being the one to blush because a woman had made a move on him where people could see. He busied his hands with the bread basket, somewhere to put the embarrassment. He looked entirely content to be doted on and would have died before admitting it.
I went at my soup. Some things should not be looked at, and your own parents flirting was one of them.
"Sit up, Rosabel," Mother said, settling into her chair. She tucked a strand of hair off Rosabel's face. "You'll be in the soup."
Across from me, Sera ate.
She ate fast and contained, the plate worked in an order. The training maniac needed her calories, I guessed. She'd given me the look when I came in and nothing past it, then kept her eyes mostly to her own plate. I'd started classifying it: suspicion that I was pretending, suspicion that I was about to do something awful, or a live calculation of whether stabbing me with the nearest utensil would be worth the trouble. There was no direct evidence for any of them, which left the classification open.
"You're quiet, sweetpea," Father said, to Sera now, the whole apparatus swinging her way. "Did the morning go hard? The senior guards had you running forms in the cold."
Sera's knife stopped. "It was fine," she said. Two words for a question that asked for more, and the knife went back down to the meat. She gave me the look.
I ate my soup.
"Aldric tells me Pemberton's run out of curriculum for you again," Mother said warmly.
"He says you're asking him things he has to go and look up. He's sent for texts from the city on your account." She looked at me down the table and held the look a moment past comfortable. "We should think about what comes after a tutor who's out of things to teach."
A real laboratory. Proper benches, real glass, a lens that actually magnifies. Tools, and the room to use them. The work I'd been doing in the corner of a bedroom, done for real this time, shaped like a career instead of a hidden habit.
But that wasn't what she meant. To her the same talent was an asset that had outgrown its first shelf, and she was deciding how best to use it. Let her, then. I'd only make sure I was the one who decided what got counted.
So I made myself seem small.
"Pemberton's thorough." I rolled my eyes and said it like it was a chore. "I just ask a lot of questions. Most of them are dead ends." I let my eyes go back to the bowl, the picture of a boy more interested in barley than in himself. Make the capability boring, refuse the attention she was giving it.
"He's ten." Father said it lightly, reaching to refill the water Rosabel wasn't drinking. "There's no hurry on any of it. Let him read books and play with moss for a while." He smiled and changed the subject. There's my exit. "You should see what he's got in the jars on his desk. Half the garden, I think. Aldric's stopped trying to clean that."
Mother's gaze went to him. For half a second, sternness showed behind it. Then she let it go and picked up her spoon again.
"No rush," she agreed, and the thought was set aside, for now.
Rosabel had lost her long war with the spoon. She was slumped against the table, eyes shut. Her neck dipped, caught, then dipped again. A shine of drool clung to the corner of her mouth.
I finished the soup.
Tomorrow my arm would be whole. I couldn't wait to continue working.