Rynn had an argument with Aldus in the autumn of my ninth year.
I heard it from across the house, which was not difficult because Rynn had inherited Mara's carrying voice and was not deploying it at minimum volume.
The argument was about timing. Rynn wanted to apply to Dustwalker in the spring. Aldus felt she should wait until she had consolidated her rank D more thoroughly before presenting herself to a guild. These were not incompatible positions, but they were attached to different people with different amounts of patience, and patience was not the trait Rynn had inherited most fully.
The argument lasted about twenty minutes. It resolved the way most Duren family arguments resolved, with Aldus making a point that was so accurate and so quietly delivered that it reframed the entire conversation, and Rynn going quiet for a long moment and then not agreeing exactly but not continuing to disagree.
The point, as I overheard it, was this: apply when you can walk in and show them something, not when you can walk in and ask them to give you a chance.
This was correct. I could have said the same thing but would not have said it the same way. Aldus had a gift for finding the version of the truth that landed without bruising.
Rynn trained harder after the argument.
Not in the punishing, reactive way of someone who is angry. In the focused, adjusted way of someone who has been given a target and is now recalibrating to hit it faster. She added morning sessions to her existing afternoon sessions. She started borrowing additional materials from the town library on her monthly trips. She asked me questions about Aether integration that I answered in the sideways way I had developed, suggesting directions without explaining how I knew them.
By midwinter she had noticeably improved.
I tracked this with the particular quality of attention I reserved for things I actually cared about, which had grown as a category over the years in ways that would probably have surprised the person I had been before.
In the old life, caring about outcomes was professional. Caring about people was an extension of caring about outcomes, which I had understood as a functional arrangement and had not examined too closely because examining it would have revealed a loneliness I was not prepared to address.
Watching Rynn train harder because she wanted to be ready to go out into the world, watching Aldus manage the balance between protecting her and letting her go, watching Mara process the prospect of her eldest leaving with the particular kind of love that accepts loss as a component of its own expression, was not professional.
It was something else.
I had been in this family for nine years. The word family, which I had applied to it from early on as the accurate technical descriptor, had acquired a weight over those years that the technical descriptor did not cover.
The Durens were my family. Not as the people I happened to be placed with. As the people I would have chosen.
This was, in the accounting of things that mattered, near the top of the list.
One evening in late winter, Rynn sat next to me after a training session and said, in the tone she used for things she had been thinking about for a while: 'I'm going to apply in spring.'
I looked at her.
'I know Dad said to wait,' she said. 'But I'm ready and waiting longer isn't going to make me more ready, it's just going to make me more anxious.'
This was also correct. Rynn had good self-knowledge when she applied it.
'What does Aldus say?' I asked.
'I haven't told him yet.' She paused. 'I wanted to tell you first.'
I thought about what this meant. Not the information. The fact that she had told me first.
'I think you're ready,' I said.
She nodded, slowly. Some of the tension went out of her shoulders.
'You'll be okay here without me?' she asked.
The question was light in delivery and not light in content.
'Yes,' I said. 'And you'll be okay there.'
She put her arm around my shoulder in the way she had been doing since I was three.
We sat in the cold evening air of the yard and I did not say anything about the fact that I intended, eventually, to follow her there. That was a conversation for another time.
For now there was just the yard and the cold and Rynn making a decision that was hers to make.
I was glad she had told me first.