Ashgrave’s harvest fair came once a year, in the week the last of the barley went in, and it was the one occasion on which the entire dukedom — nobles, soldiers, farmers, and every child old enough to be trusted near a bonfire — occupied the same square at the same time with no particular hierarchy enforced about who stood where.
Corwin considered it the single most useful diplomatic event on his calendar and told anyone who’d listen that a duke who couldn’t stomach an afternoon among his own people had no business ruling them.
Isolde considered it the one day a year she was permitted to eat food a servant hadn’t tasted first for poison, and enjoyed it accordingly.
For Kaelen, it was the loudest single afternoon of his life so far, and not in the way a bell is loud.
It was loud the way a hundred bells are loud, all struck slightly out of time with each other — a whole village’s worth of excitement and worry and old grudges and new courtships, layered thick enough that for the first quarter hour he simply stood very still near the fair’s edge, letting Wren’s particular weather — bright, impatient, thoroughly unbothered — anchor him the way Yvaine had taught, until the rest of it stopped feeling like drowning and started feeling like noise he could stand inside.
“You’re doing the still thing,” Wren said, elbowing him without much sympathy.
“Stop doing the still thing.
There are games.”
The games were how he met Finn.
Finn Oswick was the blacksmith’s son, a stocky, freckled boy exactly Kaelen’s age who had entered the footrace with the single-minded fury of someone who had lost it the previous two years running and did not intend to make it three, and who cannoned directly into Kaelen at the final turn because neither of them had been watching anything but the finish line.
They went down together in a heap, lost the race to a girl twice their size, and lay in the trampled grass for a moment doing the specific accounting children do after a collision — checking for real injury before deciding whether to be angry.
“You’re the Duke’s boy,” Finn said, working it out, once it became clear nothing was actually broken.
“You knocked me into a fence post,” Kaelen said, which seemed the more relevant fact.
“Yeah.
Sorry.
Da says I run like the fence post insulted my mother.” He stuck out a hand, calloused already at ten years old from time spent at his father’s forge.
“Finn.”
“Kaelen.”
“I know who you are.
Everyone does.” Finn said it without any particular weight to it, which was, Kaelen realized with something close to relief, exactly what he’d never gotten from Aldric or the Guild’s letter or even, at times, his own well-meaning household — the plain, unfussed fact of being known as the Duke’s boy who fell over in the race, and nothing more complicated than that.
“You want to try the ring toss?
I’m better at that than running, if I’m honest.”
He was not, in fact, better at the ring toss.
Kaelen won four times running, mostly because he’d learned, from a year of Bram correcting his footing, exactly how much of his own weight to commit to a throw before overcommitting it, and Finn lost with the same cheerful, unbothered fury he’d brought to the race, which Kaelen was fairly sure was simply how Finn approached losing at anything. This chapter was taken from NovelPing without permission.
They spent the rest of the afternoon together, in the loose, undeclared way boys that age become friends — not through any conversation about it, just by staying near each other through three more games, a shared meat pie split unevenly in Kaelen’s favor because Finn insisted, and a long argument about whether the blacksmith’s new dog could beat Bracken in a fight, which neither of them had any way of settling and which they enjoyed disagreeing about regardless.
Kaelen noticed, somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, that he had gone almost the entire time without needing to find Wren’s weather to steady himself.
Finn’s mood was simple and near the surface and entirely without performance — happy when he won, loudly annoyed when he lost, hungry an hour before he admitted it — and there was something restful in a person who felt exactly as uncomplicated as he behaved, after a lifetime of reading the careful gap between what people showed and what sat underneath.
“You’re strange, you know,” Finn said, later, around a mouthful of honeyed nuts, in the same tone Seren Duskmere had used on the same subject months before, though he had no way of knowing that.
“Quiet strange.
Not bad strange.
Just — you look at people like you’re reading something.”
“I am,” Kaelen said, and left it there, and Finn — being ten, and hungry, and satisfied with the answer purely because it had been given honestly — shrugged and went back to his nuts without needing more.
The bonfire went up at dusk, and the whole square turned, for an hour, into one enormous shared warmth that Kaelen let himself simply stand inside without trying to sort into pieces — his father’s arm around his mother, Wren arguing spiritedly with Finn about the dog question as if she’d been part of the friendship from the start, the low, contented hum of an entire dukedom briefly agreeing to be glad of the same thing at the same time.
He thought, watching the sparks go up into a sky that had once, in some life he couldn’t remember, belonged entirely to him, that this was closer to what Vaelith had wanted all along, though he had no name to call the thought by.
Not one enormous feeling arriving from everywhere at once.
Just this — a few people, known specifically, close enough to touch.