The stair was fixed before breakfast.
I know, because I came down at dawn and found my wife kneeling on the third step with a very small hammer and an expression like a surgeon's. She had been at it for some time. There was a little pile of discarded pegs beside her, and a smear of sawdust on her nose.
"The first one was too loud," she said, without looking up. "The second sounded like a goat."
"It's good to see you've got a method."
"It is a principle of home." She tapped one more peg in and stood back. "Try it."
I put my foot on the third step.
Creak.
It was a small one, soft and warm and slightly apologetic. It was exactly the sound the cabin had made, and it went through me like a held note.
"It's right," I said.
"I know." Her tail twitched. "I measured."
Toby, who had materialized at the top of the stairs in one sock, stood absolutely still. Then he came down, stepped on the third stair on purpose, and listened to it.
"It's the same one," he whispered.
"Obviously."
"Can I tell Dumpling?"
"You may tell Dumpling."
He ran off. I looked at my wife. She had gone very busy with the hammer.
"It's a principle of home" means I'll make you feel safe, even if I have to build the noise myself.
Clara painted the front door that afternoon.
She had mixed the green herself, from a pot Pell had thrown into the wagon "just in case" and a little yellow I suspect Noctavia made on the sly. She stood in front of it with her brush for a full five minutes, not moving.
"It's only a door," I said.
"It is not only a door."
"Okay."
"It's the first one I've picked." She dipped the brush. "Ever."
She painted it slowly and carefully from the top. Toby did the bottom and got more of it on his nose than the wood. Noctavia held the pot and said "You've missed a corner" three times, and was told to be quiet three times, and obeyed twice.
When it was done, we stood in the lane and looked at it. A very green door, bright and ridiculous, the color of a ribbon, on a calm gray house.
"It's perfect," said Clara.
"It's very green," said Noctavia.
"It's perfect."
"It is adequately green."
Clara turned around, smiling so wide it looked like it hurt. "That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said about it," she said, and Toby shrieked with laughter, and Noctavia's ears went the color of a plum.
The registry was a small, dim room over the guildhall, with a desk and a great many ledgers. Brandt sat behind it with a pen, looking enormously pleased with himself.
"Household of the lease," he said. "Names."
"Elise Ashford," I said.
"Clara." Clara hesitated. "Clara."
"Last name?"
She looked at the floor. "I don't have one."
"Ashford," said Noctavia, abruptly.
We all turned.
"She is mine," said Noctavia, to the ceiling. "Both of them are. It is simplest. It is an administrative matter."
Clara made a very small sound. Brandt, without a word, wrote it down.
"Toby Ashford," he said. "Noctavia."
"Noctavia."
"Last name?"
There was a very long silence.
I watched my wife look at the pen. I watched her look at the page, and at the line where a name was supposed to go, three hundred years of titles and thrones behind her and not one of them written there.
"...Elise," she said. "What is yours?"
"Ashford."
"Is it an acceptable surname?"
"It's got a nice ring to it."
"It sounds like something that has a tree outside it."
"It does have one. There's a willow."
"...Whatever," said Noctavia.
Brandt wrote it down very carefully, in blue ink. Noctavia Ashford. I looked at it so long that my eyes began to sting.
"There," said Brandt, blotting it. "Now it's a household." He looked up. "Elise. A word."
He walked me to the window, where the light came in over the canals, and the voices from the lane below were small and far.
"It's a quiet town," he said. "I want you to know that. Nobody's reading what I write down. The Guild doesn't love the cathedral, and the cathedral doesn't love the Guild, and they've agreed to leave each other alone since before you were born."
"That's good."
"It is." He rubbed his jaw. "But a man came into this office two weeks ago. Dark coat. Polite. He asked to see the lease records for Water Lane. Wanted to know which houses had been empty longest."
I felt something small and cold settle at the base of my spine.
"What did you tell him?"
"That they were sealed." Brandt's mouth twisted. "Which they weren't. But I've been a sergeant a long time, and I know what a man looks like when he's counting, and I wasn't going to hand him my keys." He glanced at the stairs. "He wrote something in a little book. Left a coin for the trouble. I put it in the poor box."
"Did he say his name?"
"No. But he had a very kind voice."
A very kind voice.
"Elise." Brandt put a heavy hand on my shoulder. "I'm not telling you to run. I'm telling you I'm here. If anyone asks, they'll be told I was a drunk, and the registry's in a state."
"Odo."
"I carried my share. You carried the rest." He shrugged. "It's the least I can do."
I did not say anything. I did not trust my voice.
We planted the tomato that evening.
Noctavia knelt at the sunny bed by the wall in her brown apron, and dug with a spade, no magic, and lowered the roots into the new earth with both hands. She tied it to a stake with soft twine, loosely.
"It's all right," she said quietly. "It only needs support."
"And it must be allowed to lean."
"Yes."
We all stood around it in the last of the light, the four of us and one very attentive plant. Toby had set Dumpling on the lowest step with its mouth open, to supervise. The canal was gold and still. A mother duck came by, with six ducklings in a line, and paused at the foot of the garden to inspect us.
Dumpling clicked once, a lock turning.
"Dumpling," said Noctavia, in her war-council voice. "This is a duck."
Click?
"She has children. They are not to be eaten."
Dumpling studied the duck for a long, thoughtful moment. Then it closed its mouth, leaned back, and made the soft, settled click.
The duck, offended, swam away.
"That was very diplomatic," I said.
"It was procedure."
"It was lovely."
She did not say idiot. She sat back on her heels in the grass, with dirt on her hands and her hair coming down, and her feet bare, and looked at the house.
"It's a very good house," she said.
I looked at her. I thought of a porch, a crooked chimney, and a different kind of worry in her voice.
"It is," I said.
She nodded. Her tail was wrapped tight around her ankle. She opened her mouth, closed it, and looked very hard at a duckling.
"Noctavia?"
"It's nothing. A strategic observation." Her ears were scarlet. "It can wait."
I didn't push. I sat down in the grass beside her, close enough that our shoulders touched, and she leaned into me without a word. No don't touch me. No waiting. Her hand found mine in the grass.
That night, after the others were in bed, I sat on the porch with the dictionary on my knee and listened to the water. I thought about a man with a very kind voice, and a little book, and a coin in a poor box.
I thought: two weeks. I had written to Brandt only nine days earlier.
Either the Office had guessed where I would run, or it had been watching every door I might knock on.
Then Dumpling, on the step beside me, turned its round green head, very slowly, toward the lane. It watched the dark for a long time.
It didn't click.
After a while it turned back to the canal, and the ducks, and the stars. I decided, because it was late and my wife was waiting upstairs with a blanket and an excellent excuse about logistics, that it had only been looking at a duck.
I added two lines before I went in.
"It's a very good house" means I'm staying.
"A man with a kind voice" means we're going to be careful.