The walk back from Porin took longer than it should have.
Clyde moved through the city's quieter arteries rather than its main avenues — the narrow back lanes of the older districts, where the fog settled low against the cobblestone and the lanterns burned at wider intervals, leaving stretches of blue-tinged shadow between their pools of amber. His coat was buttoned against the cold. His forearms ached beneath the fabric where the wounds from the centipede's pressure rebound had been cleaned and dressed in the Academy's infirmary before Aldric had dismissed them for the night — shallow splits in the skin, treated efficiently, already beginning the slow work of closing. The ache was a steady, present companion. He had decided to find it useful rather than troubling. It reminded him that the events of the previous hours had been real, which was something he occasionally needed reminding of when the mind's instinct for normalization began its work too quickly.
His Astral Card beat its steady, layered rhythm behind his sternum.
Beneath that rhythm — quiet, reflexive, as present as it had been since the moment his Hollow Eyes had seen it in the darkness of the baptism — the twitch.
He walked with it and did not try to resolve it.
The streets of his district received him with their characteristic evening stillness — the lantern clock having edged the city toward its engineered rest, the residential lanes emptied of their daytime population, doors sealed against the cold and the dark, windows lit from within by the warm amber of domestic lamplight that pressed against the glass and made the interiors look like contained versions of the lanterns burning in the streets outside. The cobalt bleed above contributed its customary cold quality to the upper atmosphere, the two light sources maintaining their familiar, unresolved coexistence.
He turned the corner onto his street.
Luchian was waiting beneath the lantern at the end of the road.
He stood with his arms crossed and one foot tapping lightly against the cobblestone — not with impatience exactly, but with the particular restless energy of someone who has been stationary for longer than their nature prefers and has been managing it with moderate success. He was still in his brown suit and cap from the morning, the cap sitting slightly askew in the way it did at the end of long days when he had stopped adjusting it. When he saw Clyde emerge from the fog his posture shifted immediately — the crossed arms loosening, the foot stilling, the quality of his attention changing from the broad, ambient attention of someone waiting for something to the focused, warm attention of someone who has found what they were waiting for.
"There you are," he said, and the warmth in it was entirely uncomplicated. "How were the teachings?"
Clyde adjusted his coat as he approached — a small, automatic gesture that gave his hands something to do while he assembled the answer he had been constructing since he left the Academy. "Good. Better than expected, actually." He paused for the correct duration. "I got a raise. Twenty shillings."
Luchian's eyebrows rose by a fraction. "Twenty shillings."
"The Academy recognizes sustained performance apparently."
Luchian looked at him for a moment with those grey eyes — the crescent in each iris catching the lantern light at the correct angle, visible for a second before the angle shifted and they receded again. The look was the one Clyde had spent years learning to read and had never fully decoded — warm on its surface, carrying something beneath the warmth that had no name he had been able to settle on.
Then Luchian smiled. The small, genuine concession of it — the one that meant something rather than performing something.
"Twenty shillings," he said again, as though testing the weight of it. "That calls for something decent for dinner."
"It calls for something better than that," Clyde said. "Come with me."
He had found the house three days earlier.
It sat at the quieter end of a residential lane in one of the city's modest middle districts — the kind of street that had never been fashionable enough to attract the silver tower developments of the newer quarters but had been maintained with sufficient civic pride to avoid the accumulated neglect of the oldest ones. The cobblestone was even. The lanterns burned without flickering. The buildings along the lane were two-story in their majority — modest Victorian terraces of pale stone with narrow front steps and window frames painted in dark colors, their proportions reflecting the particular architectural pragmatism of a city that had learned to prioritize function and had occasionally, in its better moments, found room for modest beauty alongside it.
The house was single-floored, which distinguished it from its neighbors and had likely reduced its price to something that twenty shillings a month, combined with careful calculation and the modest savings accumulated over two years of teaching, could be made to accommodate. It sat slightly back from the lane behind a low iron fence, its front face presenting two windows flanking a dark green door with a brass handle worn smooth from decades of previous use. The stonework was pale and clean. The window frames had been painted recently — dark brown, still carrying a faint smell of the paint in the morning cold.
Clyde placed the key in Luchian's hand without preamble.
Luchian looked at it. Then at the house. Then at Clyde.
"Someone you know lives here?"
"We do."
The silence that followed lasted approximately four seconds and contained, in Clyde's assessment, the entire history of every drafty wall and creaking floorboard and inadequate stove of every place they had lived before this one.
Then Luchian laughed — genuine, unguarded, the laugh of someone caught entirely off guard by something good — and pushed the green door open.
The interior announced itself immediately as a place that someone had thought about.
The entrance opened directly into the living room — a single, proportionate space with a low ceiling that gave it an intimate quality, its walls papered in a muted pattern of dark green and cream that had faded gracefully over the years into something warmer and less deliberate than it had originally been, which was an improvement. A fireplace occupied the far wall, its mantelpiece of dark wood carrying the accumulated character of previous occupants in the form of small indentations and one burn mark near the left edge that someone had attempted to sand away and had mostly succeeded. Two chairs sat before it — mismatched in their upholstery but compatible in their proportions, the kind of furniture that had arrived at coexistence through use rather than design.
A doorway to the left led to the kitchen.
It was small and practical and entirely sufficient — a cast iron stove against the far wall, its surface clean and cold but carrying the residual warmth of previous fires in the metal itself, a deep ceramic sink beneath the single window, wooden shelving along two walls carrying the previous tenant's abandoned inventory of serviceable crockery. The window above the sink looked out onto the back garden, and even in the dim cobalt-and-lantern light filtering through the glass, the garden was visible as a small, walled rectangle of dark soil bordered by the low stone walls that divided it from its neighbors on either side. The soil had been recently turned — not by Luchian, not yet, but by whoever had last occupied this house, leaving it in the particular readied state of ground that has been attended to and is waiting for the next season's intention.
Luchian stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the garden for a long moment.
"The soil looks good," he said.
"I thought you'd say that."
"I could put in vegetables by next month if the temperature holds." He was already calculating — Clyde could see it in the quality of his attention, the way his gaze moved across the garden's dimensions with the particular focus of someone converting a space into a plan. "Leeks. Possibly some root vegetables along the south wall where it'll get the most reflected light from the cobalt."
"Sell them alongside the paintings?"
Luchian glanced at him with a small smile. "The paintings sell to people who can afford to buy things they don't need. Vegetables sell to everyone."
"Practical."
"One of us has to be."
Clyde said nothing to that, which was its own kind of response.