Evening, Thirteenth of One, Harvest, 236 CR

After the excitement of demonstrating our work, not to mention the absolute release of it being done, Kelly and I both crashed for more than a day. Not deigning to get out of bed for much more than eating and having a few quiet moments of reassuring people we were okay, we took the extraordinary measure of not even working the next morning.

Sleeping just seemed like a far higher priority, and there was nothing that demanded our attention. Sure, there were various details to be sorted out, but they weren’t actually dependent on us; James was representing us, and for once Kelly didn’t mind. There’d be a small but reputationally meaningful amount of money coming our way along with a seven-year discount on anything we bought through Crown channels, which was everything we were buying from beyond Kibosh’s walls. More importantly, the recognition would open doors for collaboration in the future.

Plus, Inventor Nadash had a way better ring to it than the useless fancy title that I’d missed out on in my previous life.

By evening on the thirteenth, we were getting stir-crazy. Not that the shophouse wasn’t nice, but I’d been spending a fair bit of time outside every day, and I found myself eager to be out of the house. Getting that done was made easier by the fact that dinner was at Levali’s, barely a short walk down the ring road, and we didn’t even have to lean on each other to get there.

A silence very much did not ripple outwards from the doors as we entered. No conversations came to an abrupt halt, and people didn’t turn to stare. But there was an energy to the air that conveyed that people did not turn to stare, rather than people simply not staring—conversations hiccuped briefly, and more than a few people gave a sign of acknowledgement. The adults did it as a tilt of the head or a two-fingered double-touch to the other wrist or knuckle, but the first children to notice us took off towards us like they were spring-loaded.

“Inventor Avara, Inventor Nadash!” Kartom’s voice cut across their rising, excited voices. “Congratulations on your Discovery. I suspect it will not be the last time you make light work of a certainty of mine. Join me? I would hear the full tale of it.”

As nice as it was to hear Kartom of all people say that, since on my second day in Kibosh it had been him who had told me that my magical capabilities were a big fat nothing… “I was uniquely motivated,” I said in a carrying voice, downplaying it for all I was worth. “That led to my pursuing an avenue of research nobody before me had bothered with. Anybody could have done it.”

The children started to swarm around me and Kelly as we made our way towards his table, talking over themselves as they tried to compose their questions. They seemed to be competing to make the silliest of questions sound serious and the most serious of questions sound absurd, which would have been a surprise to me if I hadn’t spent a fair bit of time around children.

I stopped in the middle of an aisle of sorts—the refectory’s layout was open and spacious, but there was still a structure to it—and shook my head at them. I held a chair carefully and tried to squat down, but gave up on it as a bad idea when my legs started to give out despite the support. They noticed in a way I hadn’t expected, backing off a bit.

“Sorry, kiddos.” I smiled at them, shaking my head. “I need to get to my seat and eat, and it’ll be a race between finishing that and falling asleep. Maybe another day?”

Yalad’s “Yes, Miss Sophie!” was the loudest and firmest of the responses, with Dana’s not far behind him. The teen lovebirds immediately turned around to corral the other children, keeping them far enough out of my way that I wasn’t worried about tripping over them if I stumbled.

I did, inevitably, stumble on my way to Kartom’s table. Twice, in fact—once with my leg failing under me when I took too long a step, and once when I tripped over my own two feet for no discernible reason. It said a lot about my baseline levels of clumsiness that I’d caught myself both times. My hand was never more than a bare reach from a chair or table, so it was just a matter of nodding in apology and thanks to the people I was disrupting and then moving on.

Kartom was scowling as we approached, doing a very good job of not scowling at me and instead directing his dyspeptic expression at the world in general. “It is an impropriety,” he muttered darkly, “when a political necessity results in the propagation of an untruth. I advocated for your accession to the title of Scholar by acclamation, and mislike that as a matter of policy, even the consideration of doing so was rejected.”

“That sounds like a you problem,” I said. I infused as much good cheer into my words as I could manage, which turned out to be quite a bit, and dropped into the open chair across from him. “Besides, I meant what I said. You weren’t wrong—this isn’t me manipulating mana myself, it’s tool use.”

“The hand that holds—”

“Kartom, you know how part of our friendship is that I tell you when you’re having a domain problem?” Kelly dropped into the chair next to me as she interrupted him, hissing a little as she landed a little more heavily than she’d expected. “You’re having a domain problem.”

A lot of things changed about his body language in the span of her two sentences, landing eventually on resignation. He nodded a few moments later, and thought for a few moments more. “I hear you,” he said. “I do not understand, but I accept that a distinction exists.”

“Thank you,” I murmured to her—and I would have said more, but our plates arrived and my eyes went wide.

Keldren smirked at my expression, not bothering to play off how pleased he was as he placed the food in front of my seat. “It’s an experiment,” the refectory assistant declared. “I’d appreciate your thoughts on how the dish came out.”

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“This is hamim,” I said wonderingly. I took a deep breath, the scents of two thousand years reaching down into my very spine to wrap every neuron of my mind in a hug. “I…”

“It’s not going to be perfect,” he said softly, “because nothing ever is. Especially not my first try. But there’s no halving that distance without the effort, and I thought—well. I hope it’s to your liking.”

“Keldren, you don’t do fuckall by halves.” My voice was trembling-tight and hoarse, and tears welled in my eyes. I took a deep breath, as if to settle my emotions, but it was full of cumin and coriander, of chicken fat and rice and saffron. “Thank you.”

“Let me know—”

“Keldren,” I interrupted him gently, “I’m going to cry. Please come back later.”

My vision blurred as the tears fell, and my world narrowed to exclude him and everyone else. I took another deep breath, letting the spices and herbs both familiar and unfamiliar transport me back for a moment to the kitchens of my family. It had been my grandmother, when I’d been a small child, and then my mother’s and her cousins in turn—from Baghdad they’d come, seeking refuge and building a new life. They’d carried with them memories and a few books, all that was left of two millennia of flourishing, and it hit me suddenly that all of that was gone.

I’d left, left seventeen years before coming across that glade in the woods and the Goddess who was bathing within it. But there was a difference.

I could tell even before the first bite that it wasn’t quite right. There hadn’t been enough fat, and the heat hadn’t been quite high enough; the crust hadn’t properly developed on the rice that was up against the side of the pot and it didn’t have the right texture regardless. The saffron was too much, and there wasn’t enough garlic, but when was there?

I was a world away from anyone who could do better, and my hand was shaking as I dipped the spoon into the bowl for the second bite. The bowl was wrong, too; he’d added broth, obviously far too much of it, and in order to contain the soupiness he’d used a bowl, and where was the cardamom? The texture needed a counterbalance, except that it didn’t because there wasn’t enough fat to act as the counter-pole to potatoes or carrots, and I had to put the spoon down for a moment.

I picked the spoon up again a moment later, because to do otherwise would be to disrespect the meal and the artisan who’d made it.

It was delicious. I held that in my head, cultivated it in my heart, and wrestled with the anger and sorrow and loss. Keldren had so casually made something that cut through every defense I’d built around my heart, and every taste was a reminder of how far I was from where I’d begun. I was, in the manner of my people, a stranger in a strange land—or I should have been, but as the rice and meat started to settle in my stomach, my eyes began to clear and my heart settled.

“You know,” I began slowly, “I used to make jokes about sprinting down the road to emotional intimacy like it was a race. Even as a kid; two weeks in a summer studying the canon and the Law, and I’d have a friend so twinned to my heart that each of us was finishing half the other’s sentences. And then we’d be gone forever, two ships passing in the darkness, except that maybe we’d see each other again the next year, or on a bus, and it would be like no time had passed—or we’d never see each other again in our lives, and we’d keep not the memories of each other but the memories of that bond, abstracted from the shooting star whom no kind wind would blow back our way.”

“And then?”

I glanced over at Kelly, my watery grin firming into something more like my usual smirk as I had another bite of food, then another. “And then,” I said, “I grew up, and I kept doing it, and so did everyone around me, in a self-reinforcing cycle. A night was enough to come to love someone as deeply as I’ve ever loved anyone; a week was enough to make me either loathe or latch on to a friend, a group, a home.”

There was a spice in the food, something backloaded that was layering a delicious fire up my sinuses and down to my stomach. That part, at least, was completely unlike how any family whose food I’d eaten had made the dish, and my tears were shifting to ones of a different sort.

“Miss Sophie, what does loathe mean?”

I looked over at Kanatan, taking a moment to process the sheer mundanity and familiarity of the words that had just come out of the kid’s mouth. Slowly, I put my spoon down onto the table—with motions just as slow and controlled, I put my head into my hands and stifled my laughter as best I could. I overheard Kan explaining that I was having some big feelings and needed a moment before I could answer, and Kanatan’s deliberate, considered okay, both of which helped and also didn’t help.

It didn’t exactly feel like a release of tension, and there was no particular experience of mirth or mania to it. I just laughed and laughed, mind emptying of everything that was in it, until Kelly’s hand came to rest softly on my shoulder and I realized that I wasn’t laughing anymore. I was just… calm, filled with a quietness and appreciation.

“Loathe,” I said absently, “is a word that means you very much don’t like something, but more than that. I don’t like to exercise, but I wouldn’t say I loathe it. I think… I think to loathe something is to be angry or disgusted that it exists, not just to not like it. I loathe a lot of things about where I came from, and a lot of people.”

Kanatan nodded slowly at that, visibly thinking. “Mama says that I shouldn’t call things disgusting because it’s rude, but Auntie says that it’s okay to call poop and throw-up names, but when I asked why she just said I should ask Mama, and Mama said that if Auntie wants to say things then Auntie should explain them. Do you loathe throw-up?”

“No,” I said firmly, “but sometimes when I’m sick, I get mucus dripping down my throat, and that makes me throw up, and I loathe that. Your Mama is right, by the way—are there things you like that other people call disgusting?”

I glanced around the table as Kanatan responded excitedly—glanced around at the family sitting at the table.

Kartom, weaver of magics, a towering intellect that sought to understand every facet of the world. Kan and Ketana, stone-shapers and civic leaders whose hobbies made crafts that eased lives across the village—and whose seniority and soft, permeating influence I suspected that I had only barely started to glimpse. Kanatan, perfect in his childhood brilliance, centered in the obvious, absolute knowledge that he was safe and supported.

Kelly Avara, my First Friend. A prodigy, tucked in a deceptively quiet corner of a backwater nation, bubbly and pretty and only just coming into the fullness of her adulthood in the eyes of those around her. My first friend in Yelem, my student and teacher, guide and assistant; oathbound as we were, our every word bared our hearts to each other. We had sworn to choose honesty over comforting lies, and we luxuriated in the ironclad certainties behind every truth and every act of support that had come since then.

I felt a tension unravel as I met Ketana’s knowing smile, felt my stomach growl insistently as I raised the spoon to my lips again. I’d saved a life, and was still paying for that in hunger and lessened capacity—I missed Spark’s voice and presence, missed the steadying touch of my Attributes and Skills.

I’d saved a life. Made friends, inspired art, furthered knowledge. Dealt with Tricksters and come out ahead on the bargain, dealt with Gods of fire and creation and nature who saw me in all my flawed mortality and found me lacking only in the common sense I’d never pretended to have. I’d spoken quiet, heartfelt under starlight and danced with a connection more powerful than I’d ever imagined; I’d seen a woman’s eyes light with a bonfire of hunger and desire, felt control nearly slip from hands that could shatter me with a thought.

All of that was two fortnights, I thought to myself, feeling the vastness of it sink in. Here’s to the years to come.