Aldus noticed patterns.
This was, I had come to understand, one of his fundamental characteristics. He did not draw attention to it. He did not announce his observations or seek acknowledgment for them. He simply watched, quietly and without apparent effort, and assembled what he saw into a picture that was usually more accurate than anyone else's.
He had been watching me since I was born.
I became fully aware of this on an evening in late spring, when I was about eighteen months old. The rest of the family had gone to sleep early. Aldus sat in the main room near the lamp, which he did sometimes when he wanted to think, and I was in the corner on my mat, supposedly asleep.
I was not asleep.
He looked over at me after a long silence and said, quietly, as if continuing a conversation that had already been going on inside his head for some time: 'The chickens don't come back.'
I did not respond. I was a toddler. Toddlers do not respond to observations about chickens.
He continued anyway. 'The scanner broke. The plant by the window went funny in one day. The Merren dog wouldn't come past the gate last autumn, and it usually charges anything smaller than a cart.' He paused. 'And you never cry. Babies cry. You've cried twice in eighteen months, both times when you were in actual pain, not fussing.'
I maintained the breathing pattern of someone asleep.
'I don't know what that mark on your ear is,' he said. 'Mara says it's a birthmark and I haven't told her I disagree. I might be wrong. I'm wrong about things regularly.' Another pause. 'But I don't think I'm wrong about you being different, Kael. Something about you is different from what most things are.'
The lamp made a small sound. Outside, something moved in the yard and then was quiet.
'I want you to know,' Aldus said, in the same calm voice he used for everything, 'that I'm not concerned about it. Different isn't bad. Different is usually just different, and people make it bad by deciding they're afraid of it before they've had a chance to understand it.' He looked at his hands for a moment. 'Your mother is going to love you so completely that she won't notice anything unusual until you're old enough to explain it yourself. Your sister is going to be impressed by anything you do and annoyed that you did it first.' He looked back at me. 'And whatever you are, you're still ours. That's not a small thing.'
He stood up. He crossed to where I was lying and adjusted the blanket, which did not need adjusting, in the way that parents adjust blankets when they actually just want an excuse to check on their child.
Then he went to bed.
I lay in the dark for a long time afterward.
I had not anticipated this. I had profiled Aldus carefully and had arrived at an accurate understanding of his character, his patience, his intelligence. But I had not anticipated this specific version of him, this willingness to look at something he could not explain and simply decide that it did not change what mattered.
In my previous life, the people who had known something unusual about me, my work habits, my level of focus, my way of operating, had responded by trying to use it. By calculating what advantage my particular characteristics represented for them. By filing me in the category of useful rather than the category of known.
Aldus had filed me in the category of family and found that it covered everything else.
I did not know what to do with that.
I thought about it for a long time, and I still did not entirely know what to do with it, but I felt something loosen very slightly in a part of me that had been in one position for a long time.
Above the house, on a clear night with no particular cloud cover, the stars above the Maxentius area dimmed briefly. Not all of them. A small section, roughly the span of an outstretched hand, going slightly less bright for about four seconds and then returning to normal.
There was no one awake to see it.
In a Conclave monitoring station two regions away, an instrument registered a minor anomalous reading and then returned to baseline. The technician on duty made a note of it, marked it non-urgent, and went back to his report.
In the house, I looked at the ceiling and thought about what it meant to be someone's, and decided that understanding it fully could wait.
For now it was enough that it was true.