He told Rook in human form, a week after the fourth moon, standing in the farmhouse kitchen while Nadia was out and everyone else was at some business of their own and the kitchen had that late afternoon quality of a room that is waiting to be used.
"I know this is —" He stopped. Started again. "I'm sixteen and I've been alive for about four months in any way that feels real, and I know that's —"
"Mare," Rook said.
"I like you," he said. "I think you're — I trust you, which is a thing I don't do lightly and have never been able to do easily, and you are — I don't have a good, non-embarrassing word for what you are, but —"
"Mare."
"What?"
"I know." Rook was looking at him with the composed expression that on anyone else would have read as detachment and that Mare had long since learned to read as the opposite — as the specific stillness of someone who feels a great deal and manages it internally. "I know. I've known." A pause. "I've been waiting for you to be ready."
"Very patient of you."
"You were building a self. I wasn't going to interrupt that." He looked at his hands briefly, then back up. "Are you ready?"
"I think so."
"Then yes," Rook said. "Same."
This was how it began. Not with drama, not with the declarative language of large feelings, but with a yes and a same in a kitchen that smelled of dried bark and woodsmoke, which was, Mare would reflect later, exactly right. Not everything that is large needs to arrive loudly.