Spring came to Maxentius with its usual indifference to human timelines.
I was three and a half, which felt internally like a significant number while externally presenting as unremarkable. The village went about its business. The Duren family went about theirs. I went about mine, which at this age consisted primarily of observation, continued experimentation with what I was capable of, and the ongoing project of performing developmental normalcy without losing myself in the performance.
The performance was getting easier.
Not because I was getting better at pretending. Because I was needing to pretend less.
A farmer from two villages away came through Maxentius on a Tuesday with a delivery he was making to Pell, the village headman, and he stopped at the well to water his horse and ended up talking to Aldus for about forty minutes, the way conversations in small settlements tend to expand naturally when two people have no particular schedule pressing them.
I was nearby, sitting against the fence in the position I had taken to using when I wanted to listen without being in the center of things.
The farmer was talking about his brother, who lived further inland. The brother had been assessed at rank B two years ago and had taken a contract with one of the larger guilds, which was a source of both family pride and family worry. Guild contracts were well-paying and dangerous in roughly equal proportion.
Aldus listened, asked a question or two, said something about the balance between secure and alive that I recognized as his particular form of philosophical observation dressed up as practical comment.
The farmer laughed. He said something about how his wife said the same thing.
Then he looked over at me with the mild curiosity that adults aim at children who are being quiet in a context where children are usually not quiet.
'Yours?' he asked Aldus.
'My son,' Aldus said.
Two words. No hesitation. No qualifier. Not the child we are raising, not the youngest of the family, just: my son. With the ease of someone stating something that had been true long enough to stop being worth elaborating on.
Something settled in me.
I had been expecting, I realized, to have some internal response to that. Some reflexive qualification, some remaining piece of distance that would register the designation as technically accurate but emotionally complex. The echo of Nathan noting that the claim was valid but should not be taken too literally.
Nothing. Just the mild warmth of hearing a true thing said simply.
The farmer made an approving comment about my being well-behaved and returned to his conversation with Aldus. The conversation moved on. The horse finished drinking. The farmer eventually collected his reins and went on his way.
I sat against the fence and looked at the ordinary sky above Maxentius.
My son.
That was what I was. In the straightforward, uncomplicated way that Aldus meant it, which was the way it had always been meant in this house, which was the only way it needed to be meant.
That evening I came inside and found Aldus at the table, working on something with a piece of paper and the look of focused effort he got when math was involved. He was not naturally inclined to numbers, a fact he had made peace with by marrying someone who was.
I climbed up onto the bench next to him.
He looked over.
I looked at the paper. 'You're carrying the ten wrong,' I said.
He looked at the paper. He looked at me. He looked at the paper again.
'...You're right,' he said, with the expression of a man who had already fully accepted that his youngest child was going to be like this and had decided it was his particular comedy from the universe.
He fixed the calculation.
I leaned against his arm slightly, the way Rynn did when she was tired, and looked at the corrected numbers.
He did not comment on the leaning.
We sat like that for a while, in the ordinary light of an ordinary evening in Maxentius, while Mara's cooking came in from the kitchen and the day settled into itself and whatever I had been in a different life continued, quietly and without drama, to become what I was now.
Kael Duren.
Son of Aldus and Mara. Brother of Rynn. Resident of Maxentius, village of no particular note, on the edge of a kingdom that did not pay attention to edges.
It was enough. More than enough.
It was, actually, exactly right.