A month passed, and I learned three things about five-year-olds.
First, they ask why the way other people breathe.
Second, they can fall asleep anywhere, including inside the laundry basket, which is where I found Toby on the fourth day.
Third, once a small boy decides you are his, he will follow you from room to room, narrating your life out loud. "Elise is cutting the carrot. Elise is cutting it small. Elise is making a face."
"I'm not making a face."
"You are. It's your carrot face."
I had no defense. I carried him on my shoulders to the garden, taught him his letters with a stick in the dirt, and let him sit on the counter while I stirred soup. By the end of the second week, he had stopped asking if he could stay.
He just was there, the way the chimney was there.
Which left my wife and Clara.
I would like to say they became friends in a month.
They did not. They conducted what I can only call a cold war, and I watched it the way you watch two cats on opposite ends of a fence.
It began with the table.
Noctavia sat at one end. Clara sat at the other. Toby and I sat in the middle, like a border. They both held their spoons exactly the same way, both sat perfectly straight, and both said "Pass the salt" without once looking at each other.
"Noctavia," I said, on the third evening, "Clara would like the salt."
"I heard her."
"Clara, Noctavia is passing it."
"I saw," said Clara.
The salt traveled down the table, handed from my wife to me to Toby, who gave it to his sister with great ceremony. Neither of them said thank you. Both of them, I noticed, looked slightly pleased.
The second front was chores.
Clara was awake before dawn every morning. By the time I came downstairs, the fire was lit, the floor was swept, and every dish from the night before stood in a perfect tower. She never sat down until everything was done, and she never asked for anything.
"You're a guest," I told her, more than once.
"I'm not a guest," said Clara. "Guests leave."
I let that one go. I don't think she meant for me to hear how it sounded.
Noctavia took it personally. On the ninth morning she found the kitchen already spotless and glared at it as if it had insulted her.
"I do the dishes."
"You burn them," said Clara, without turning around.
I choked on my tea.
"...I am learning," said Noctavia.
The next morning there were two sets of dishes in the drying rack. One was neat. The other was slightly crooked and had clearly been washed by someone trying very hard.
Neither of them said a word about it.
The third front was the garden.
Noctavia still guarded the tomato every morning, and I had stopped commenting on it. But one dawn, I came outside and found Clara standing at the edge of the patch, holding a watering can. Noctavia stood on the other side. Neither had moved. The little plant, now knee-high and leaning proudly against its stake, stood between them.
"It needs water," said Clara.
"I water it."
"It's dry."
"It's thinking."
"Plants don't think."
"Mine does."
Clara looked at her. Noctavia looked back. For a long moment I thought one of them might actually start a fight over a tomato, which, given our history, would have been very on-brand.
Then Clara quietly held out the can.
"You do it," she said. "Slowly."
Noctavia took it as if she'd been handed a crown.
She watered the plant in a thin, careful stream. Clara watched with her arms crossed. Once, she reached out and gently moved the stake a quarter inch to the left.
"Better," Noctavia admitted, after a long time.
"Obviously," said Clara.
I turned and walked back inside very fast, so neither of them could see my face.
The thing is, I noticed something else that month, and I kept it to myself.
Clara did not sleep.
Or rather, she slept like someone ready to stop. The first night I came to check on Toby, I found her propped against the wall, fully dressed, with her boots on. Under the bed, partly hidden, was a small canvas pack, tied shut and already full.
She woke at the creak of the floorboard. She sat up so fast that I stepped back.
"It's just me," I said quietly.
"I know." She wouldn't meet my eyes. "It's habit."
"I won't ask."
"Good."
I didn't. But every night after that, I noticed the window latch was always checked, the curtains were always pulled tight, and Toby was never, ever allowed past the garden fence without her.
I locked the front door every night, too. I hadn't seen the man in the dark coat again, and I told myself that was a good sign.
"Why can't I go to the road?" he asked me once, in a very small voice.
"Because Clara says so."
"But why?"
I opened my mouth.
"Toby," said Clara, from the door. "Come eat."
She said it gently. But her hand, on the doorframe, was white.
That same evening, I found something folded on Clara's chair.
It was a coat.
It was gray, plain, and warm, made of thick wool and lined with soft cloth. It was about the right size for a tall, thin girl who had outgrown every sleeve she owned. Along the inside collar, in tiny stitches, ran a line of shimmering gold thread.
Clara stood in the kitchen doorway and stared at it.
"What is this?" she said.
Noctavia was at the stove with her back to the room. She was stirring the soup with enormous concentration.
"A coat."
"I can see that."
"It was lying around."
"It has my name in the collar."
"It does not."
It did. In very small gold letters. I'd seen them.
"I didn't ask for this," said Clara, and her voice shook.
"I know," said Noctavia, to the pot. "I didn't make it for you."
There was a long, long silence.
Clara looked at the coat. Then at the stiff little back of my wife's head. Then at me, with a question in her face that I did not answer.
I didn't have to. She was clever. She was very clever.
She put the coat on, slowly, and the sleeves were exactly the right length.
"...Thank you," she said, to no one.
"Don't mention it," said Noctavia. "I mean that. Never mention it."
After dinner, Clara carried a sleepy Toby upstairs, the new coat still buttoned to her chin, and the cabin went quiet in a way it hadn't in a month.
I started on the dishes. Noctavia, to my surprise, stayed. She stood beside me at the basin with her sleeves pushed up, washing the same cup for a very long time.
"That cup is clean," I said.
"I'm making sure."
"For three minutes?"
"...Be quiet and dry."
I dried. The lamp glowed low, and the fire ticked in the stove. Upstairs a floorboard creaked, then nothing. It was the first time all month that we'd been alone in a room with nobody to be brave in front of.
"Elise," she said, to the cup.
"Yes?"
"It's been a while."
"Since what?"
Her tail curled around her own ankle. The tips of her ears were going pink.
"Since it was only us," she muttered. "Down here. At night. With nobody..." She waved the cup vaguely at the ceiling. "...listening for the latch."
I put the towel down.
"I'm not complaining," she added quickly. "It's only an observation. A strategic observation. I'm merely noting that—"
"Noctavia."
"What?"
"You miss me."
"I do not—" She stopped, because I was smiling, and she can't lie properly when I'm smiling. "...I see you every day. I'm only saying it's been a while since I've seen you."
"That makes no sense."
"I know it makes no sense!"
I laughed, softly, because of the children. "Well," I said, "there are kids now."
"I'm aware there are kids. I made one of them a coat."
"I know. It was lovely."
"It was nothing." She set the cup down at last and glared up at me, with the particular scowl she uses when she is embarrassed and wants me to do something about it. "You've carried that boy around since sunrise. He's on your shoulders, he's on your hip, he's in the laundry. You haven't sat down once."
"Are you jealous of a five-year-old?"
"Don't be ridiculous. He's five. I'm hundreds of years old."
"So that's a yes."
"It's a scheduling concern."
I dried my hands, very slowly. Then I stepped close, and she didn't step back. She is small enough that I had to lean down, and when I rested my forehead against hers, she went perfectly still, and shut her eyes, and said, in the faintest voice:
"Don't touch me."
I waited. One second. Two.
Her hands came up and gripped the front of my shirt.
Please stay like this a minute.
"You're being soppy," she whispered.
"You started it."
"I made an observation."
"It was a very good observation."
"...Idiot."
I tucked a loose strand of black-violet hair behind her ear. It was warm. She scowled at me with her eyes closed.
"Say something sharp," I whispered. "Just once."
"What?"
"Anything. Humor me."
One gold-and-red eye opened.
"You," she said coldly, "are the most pathetic Hero in the history of the world."
It went straight down my spine, right to the old scar. I may have made a noise.
"Elise."
"Sorry."
"You're enjoying that."
"I'm enjoying it so much."
She hid her face against my shoulder and laughed, a real, helpless laugh, muffled in my shirt. I held her. We stood there in the lamplight with the dishes half done and the fire popping, and for five whole minutes, nobody in the world needed us.
They were the best five minutes of the month.
"Not a word of this to Clara," she mumbled into my collar.
"Never."
"Or the boy."
"Never."
"Or the tomato."
"The tomato already knows."
She pulled away first, as she always does, smoothing her hair and straightening her back as if nothing had happened. "I'm checking the latch," she announced. "For no reason."
"Of course." We both knew the reason.
She went. I carried the last cup to the shelf, and a minute later I heard her voice on the stairs, and another one answering.
I stopped in the kitchen doorway, in the dark. I wasn't going to interrupt.
Noctavia sat on the third step, with her knees pulled up and her tail around her ankles. Clara had come back down and sat two steps above her, wearing the new coat, with her chin on her fist.
They weren't talking. They were just sitting, side by side, the way two soldiers sit on a watch they both pretend they aren't keeping.
"The east latch sticks," Noctavia said at last, in a low voice.
"I know," said Clara. "I checked it."
"Of course you did."
"It's loose in the frame."
"I fixed it."
"...I saw."
Silence.
"Is there something I should know?" asked Noctavia, very quietly.
I held my breath.
Clara was quiet for a long time.
"Not yet," she said.
"Hm."
"...Is that all right?"
Noctavia looked up at her. For a moment, she looked as though she were about to say something proud and terrible. Then her whole face softened, just a little, the way it does when she thinks nobody is watching.
"I'll keep watch," she said. "Until you're ready."
"You don't have to."
"I didn't say I had to."
Clara's mouth twitched. It was almost a smile, and it vanished at once.
I went upstairs without a word.
In bed, I opened the dictionary by lamplight.
"It's been a while." means I miss you.
"The latch sticks." means I'm staying awake with you.
"Not yet." means Please wait for me.
And a fourth line, smaller, because it was true:
My wife says all three.
Then I looked at the window.
Somewhere on the kitchen table, under a jar of pickles, were two letters. Thirty days was what the Council had given me, and we were well past twice that now.
In all my years in the cathedral, the Church had never given me a deadline it didn't mean to keep. Either they had forgotten us, or they had stopped asking. And if they had stopped asking, they would send someone to bring me home. My wife would burn the cathedral to the ground, the Legion would move, and two children asleep upstairs would wake in the middle of the war they had run away from.
Nobody had come for us.
I didn't know whether that was good news.
I turned down the lamp anyway, and for the first time in a month, I fell asleep listening to two sets of quiet footsteps on the stairs.