The village healer's name was Sem, and she had been practicing in Maxentius for thirty years, which meant she had a more detailed observational record of the village than anyone else alive.
She kept notes. Not in any official format, simply in a series of worn books that she had been filling since her first year in Maxentius. Notes on seasonal ailments and their patterns, on soil changes and their effects on the local plants, on the Aether density readings she took monthly with a small personal instrument she had purchased twenty years ago at considerable expense.
In the spring of my ninth year, she came to visit Mara.
This was not unusual. Sem visited most households in the village on a rotating basis, partly for professional reasons and partly because she was constitutionally unwilling to lose track of how the people she was responsible for were doing. She and Mara had been friends for as long as I could remember, the kind of friendship that operates through regular proximity and honest conversation.
I was in the main room when she arrived, which was ordinary enough that no one thought to move me elsewhere.
They talked about the usual things for a while. The winter that had just ended. Rynn's rank D and her plans. Aldus's back, which had been bothering him. Then Sem said something that made me pay closer attention.
'The eastern readings have been climbing,' she said.
Mara made a questioning sound.
'Aether density, in the eastern quarter. Toward the Riftzone direction. It's been gradual, over the past few years, but it's measurable now. I've been cross-referencing against my old notes.'
'Is that dangerous?' Mara asked.
'Not as far as I can tell. It's not the kind of pattern I associate with seal degradation. More like...' Sem paused, searching for the right language. 'More like a tide. Something pulling the density in a particular direction consistently over time.'
I kept my attention on the thing in my hands, which was a piece of wood I had been smoothing for no reason other than having something to do with my hands during conversations I was not supposed to be monitoring.
'Something from the Riftzone?' Mara asked.
'The Riftzone seal is intact. I've checked the public monitoring reports. Whatever is causing the density shift is local. Or at least the source of the pull is local.'
A silence.
'Your plants have been doing well this season,' Sem said, shifting tone.
'Better than last year,' Mara agreed.
'Your neighbor Pella says her cats have started coming into this part of the village again. She was surprised. They had been avoiding it for years.'
I had been working on this. Compressing the ambient effect more carefully, allowing normal life to resume in my immediate environment. It had been a deliberate adjustment.
'Animals are strange,' Mara said comfortably.
'They are,' Sem said. 'How is Kael doing?'
A natural transition in conversation. A question about a child in a household she was visiting.
'Good,' Mara said. 'Very good. Strange, sometimes, but good.'
Sem laughed. 'Strange how?'
'He says things. That are too accurate. You know when children say something and you think, where did you learn that? He does that, but about everything.'
'Bright child.'
'Extremely,' Mara said, with the particular pride of a parent who has made peace with not entirely understanding their child.
I continued smoothing the wood.
Sem stayed for another half hour and then left. As she passed through the main room on the way out, she paused near me for a moment.
She had a small instrument on a cord around her neck, her personal Aether reader. I had been aware of it since she arrived.
She glanced down at it.
The instrument was not pointing at me. It was pointing in the direction that instruments pointed in when they were receiving a signal too complex to resolve into a clean reading.
Sem looked at me for a moment.
I looked back at her with the open expression of a nine-year-old child.
She said: 'Take care of yourself, Kael.'
'You too,' I said.
She left.
I sat with the wood in my hands and thought about how much Sem had understood from that instrument reading, and concluded that she had understood approximately everything and had decided, in the thirty seconds she spent looking at me, to file it under not my business and move on.
I appreciated that more than I could have explained.
Some people, I had learned, were simply wise enough to know where their expertise ended.