For someone who'd lived thousands of lifetimes, no matter how imperfectly remembered, it was galling and difficult to pretend he remembered this one. This Parry didn't know anyone here, remembered no family jokes, wasn't sure where they kept the flower press, which foods made him queasy or what contracts he was working to shape in the week before his illness. Mistakes were inevitable, they piled up, prompting worry from his father and the servant Domo.

The day before, Domo had brought out practice swords for some after-lunch instruction. It went poorly.

"I didn't teach you that," his informal instructor managed, breathing hard, confounded by the boy using an alien fighting style.

Parry tried to shrug it off. "It felt natural, a low stance means better balance, and I thought while I'm down here, I could sweep lower too, hit your knees and ankles. Obvious stuff."

He mistook other things as well, staring without comprehension as his father sent him out for fernweed. "Fernweed? Fernweed. Oh, this. Right." Pharryl marched the boy out to the herb garden, pointing. Parry nodded, "Right, fernweed," he agreed, gazing down at what he had called "bald thistle" the last few dozen lives. "I guess it does look like a fern, if you ignore the blossom."

Emotional mistakes were even worse. That night, his father drank alone in the parlor, lights low, almost to the point of inducing Parry's night-blindness. "Dad seems off, is he upset at my mistakes?" he asked Domo, who looked shocked.

"It's August 5." Domo waited for a reaction, his eyes narrowing when he didn't elicit one. His next words were spoken too slowly and too clearly: "The anniversary of the night your mother died."

Parry fought back the instinct to quip about "two weeks missing" due to his illness or a joke about losing track of the date. Too many details had been slipping, it was getting hard to brush them under the rug. The plan Parry had been forming could have used a couple more days, but he was going to have to rush it.

At lunch the next day, Parry set it in motion.

"Father, what's a Divine Heart?"

Pharryl froze, bread halfway up from his plate. Domo looked over his shoulder from the cupboard, not moving.

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Parry did all he could to look casual, eating faster, as if question was about the weather. He purposefully didn't glance up, letting his boots scuff at the floor under the table, trying to look like someone pretending he didn't know what he'd asked.

His father's voice took a moment to return. "Something we don't shape without good reason. Nothing we talk about lightly. And just where the hell did you hear about it?"

The air felt tense. The hi-lo by the door made a two-note whine. Parry let the moment draw out, then made it look like his resolve shattered.

"I'm sorry, I...I know it's been strange since...!" He put down his cup, implored up at the room. "When I was sick, I had a vision."

Domo scraped a chair, sitting at the table, eyes on the boy. In a more strict home, that would be a serious breach of decorum, but it was hard to think of the older man as a servant. Domo was family.

"I dreamed about the Lady Ittia, Goddess of Waters, except I don't think it was a dream," Parry blurted, letting it all spill out as if he'd been holding back for days. "I can't remember all of it, but I know She...charged me? I mean, told me to shape a Divine Heart with my own hands, then walk alone to Her temple in Seven Towers and lay it on Her altar. She wasn't really angry, I think? She seemed sad, or determined, something about 'expiating the old sin' and it fell to me, and..."

He let himself suck in a long breath, looking everywhere but into his father's eyes, appearing cornered and frightened. "I'm sorry? I don't know what I did, but--whenever I'm not trying to do exactly what She said, it's like my head clouds over and I can't think, and--"

"Enough, son. Enough." Parry saw his father and Domo exchanging a long look. "This is the way of gods. Their elders falter, fail and become corrupt, but they make the young pay the price. You've not incurred Her wrath, rest easy."

Parry let out a long, relieved breath. That much at least was honest. His plan's greatest weakness was how his father might react. Nothing in the house led him to believe the family were all that devout, but his ploy could have gone wrong in dozens of ways.

He'd been watching his father these four days. Something had led Pharryl, a highly skilled shaper, to live and work far out in the west doing small jobs for locals, restricting himself to chasing whatever local markets might bring in, raising a shaper son entirely by himself, quietly, along with a servant who just happened to know his way around a sword.

Surely Pharryl had to have been a man of ambition in the past, how else could he master a magic, even the low-risk, relatively safe magic of shaping? Where was that ambition now, or why was he smothering it? What had he done or failed to prevent?

Parry didn't know and it didn't matter. All he needed was a measure of guilt lodged in his father's soul, something to leverage him. He gambled that Pharryl was decent enough to acknowledge the gods might come calling for the dues on that old sin. That he wouldn't fight divine justice.

Pharryl drew in a long, shuddering breath, then let it out. To his son, he said, "Go to the shop and finish grinding that pumice. Keep your hands busy. Domo and I are going to talk. Everything is going to be fine. We have a lot of work to do."