They walked further into the slum. Colette didn't narrate the route, didn't point at anything, just moved and expected him to keep up. He did.
She stopped in front of a building that had once been a shop. The sign above the door was too faded to read, but the shape painted on it was round, and the faint smell of old flour still lived somewhere in the walls. The windows were boarded from the inside. The door was solid wood, noticeably better quality than anything else on the street.
"So you live here," Levi said.
"Yep." Colette knocked twice and pushed it open. "Hello."
A beat of silence inside. Then something being set down fast, and footsteps coming from two directions at once.
"Sister's back!"
"Colette's back!"
Two boys hit the doorway at the same time from opposite sides and nearly collided. Behind them came a girl moving at a normal pace, apparently having decided she was too old to run. Behind her, smaller, gripping the older girl's sleeve, another girl who looked straight at Levi and didn't look away.
Colette stepped inside. Levi followed.
The front room was the old bakery counter and not much else. The counter had been pushed against one wall and turned into a shelf for the things they owned: a folded blanket, two tin cups, a cloth bundle, a small clay jar with a cracked lid. A piece of canvas hung across the back of the room, dividing it into two sections. The floor was swept clean. The surfaces were organized. Someone had been taking care of this place for a long time and it showed in every corner.
The four of them stood near the counter and watched him.
"This is Levi," Colette said. "He's a librarian from the capital. Here for a few days to look around. I'm showing him the city."
Nobody said anything. The small girl tightened her grip on the older one's sleeve.
Colette looked at the group. "He's the one who sent the food yesterday."
The older boy, maybe eleven or twelve, glanced at Levi once and then at the wall, which was at least a response. The younger boy checked the older one's face first before deciding what he thought about this. The older girl's shoulders dropped half an inch, not much, but enough to change the shape of her. The small girl kept staring.
Levi had been thinking about this on the walk over. One meal sent from a distance was not the same as a stranger standing in the room. He reached into his coat, into the inventory pocket that looked strange from outside because the depth didn't match the fabric, and pulled out a cloth bundle he'd put together that morning before leaving the inn. He set it on the counter and folded back the cloth.
Cookies. A dozen of them, thick, with dried fruit pressed into the top.
He pushed the bundle toward them and stepped back.
"Consider it a bribe," he said.
Nobody moved for a moment. Then the younger boy looked at Colette. She gave a small nod. He picked one up and bit into it, and his face shifted entirely.
The older boy took one. Then the older girl. The small girl let go of the sleeve, crossed the room in four quick steps, took two at once, checked Levi's face to see if he was going to say anything about the two, went back to her position near the older girl when he didn't.
"Whoa." The younger boy looked at Levi's coat with new focus. "Are you a wizard, uncle?"
Levi pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. "Just call me Levi."
"Okay, wizard Levi."
"Just Levi."
"Okay."
Colette had turned toward the counter but her shoulders were shaking slightly.
.
.
.
The older girl was Mira, thirteen. She pointed at the bench along the wall without asking and said "sit there." Levi sat there. She had a way of moving around the space like she knew the exact position of everything in it, which she probably did. When she handed Levi a tin cup of water later she did it without asking first, and without making a thing of it, just handed it and moved on.
The older boy was Theo, eleven. He ate his cookie slowly and found reasons to be in other parts of the room, checking on something near the canvas divider, adjusting the blanket on the counter shelf, never standing still long enough to be in direct conversation with Levi but never leaving the room either.
The younger boy was Pip, nine. He finished his cookie in four bites and then started a wide looping circuit of the room that kept bringing him closer to Levi's coat, specifically to the left side, the pocket he had decided the cookies came from. Each pass got slightly tighter. Levi watched this without comment.
The small girl was Sable, eight. She had finished both cookies and was now sitting cross-legged on the floor directly in front of Levi, close enough that standing up would have required stepping over her.
"You're very tall," she said.
"I'm about average," Levi said.
She looked at him for a moment. "No you're not."
Pip snorted. Mira looked at him. He straightened up and said nothing.
"Where do you live?" Sable asked.
"The capital."
"Is it nice there?"
Levi thought about it honestly. "Parts of it."
"Is your house nice?"
"It's a library."
She considered this. "You live in a library?"
"I run it. I live there too."
"Are there a lot of books?"
"More than I've counted."
She picked up a small stone from near her knee and turned it in her fingers. "Did you really send the food?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
Across the room, Colette made a quiet sound that wasn't quite a word.
"Because you needed it," Levi said.
Sable kept turning the stone. "People need things all the time. Most people don't do anything about it."
"That's true."
"So why did you?"
He thought about it. "Because I was there and I could. When both of those are true at the same time, not doing anything feels like a waste."
Sable looked at him. Then she held the stone out toward him. It was small and smooth, with a thin white line through the middle.
"You can have this," she said.
"Sable," Mira said, from behind the counter.
"It's mine. I can give it if I want."
Levi took it. It was warm from her hand. He closed his fingers around it.
"Thank you," he said.
Sable nodded, satisfied. She glanced over at Pip, who had gotten close enough to Levi's left side that his hand was approximately six inches from the coat pocket.
"Pip," Theo said from across the room, without looking up from whatever he was doing with his hands.
Pip drifted back.
.
.
.
Mira started asking about the capital. Not what it looked like or whether it was pretty, but what things cost there, how many people, whether the road north was paved all the way or just patched in sections. She listened to the answers carefully. Pip moved from questions about flying mages to questions about whether warriors could punch through walls, and when Levi said there were probably books on the relevant physics, the look on his face was clear and immediate.
"Can I come to the library?"
"Pip," Colette said.
"I'm just asking."
Levi looked at him. Then at the room. Mira watching from the counter. Theo quiet in the corner, apparently focused on a piece of fraying rope he was winding around his hand and unwinding again. Sable, who had moved at some point from the floor to the bench beside Levi without announcing it, her shoulder pressed against his arm. Colette sitting on the counter with her legs dangling, watching all of it with something different in her expression than she'd had in the market or the tavern or the slum. Less like she was checking for the problem. More like she was just watching.
"We'll see," Levi said.
Pip understood that this was not a no. The grin that followed was the grin of someone already planning the logistics.
"The food you sent," Mira said. She had refilled the cups from the jug near the canvas without asking. "The brown rice. I didn't understand why at first. But it kept them full longer. That was real."
"The white kind loses most of what's in it when it's milled," Levi said. "The brown holds more. Minerals, fiber. It processes slower in the body."
"What else works like that?"
"Eggs over bread if you have to choose one for protein. Beans and lentils cooked together give more than either one alone because they have different amino acids and your body needs both. The dark greens I picked, the bitter ones, cook them into the lentils with the cured meat and the fat helps carry what's in the greens into the body. The bitterness softens and it ends up being one of the more complete meals you can make cheaply."
Mira listened without interrupting. She wasn't writing anything down. She didn't need to.
Beside Levi, Sable looked up at him.
"Are you going to come back?" she asked.
"I'm here for a few more days."
She looked at him steadily. "That's not what I asked."
He looked at her for a moment. Outside the slum was settling into evening, fires going, people coming back, the city shifting into its other register.
"I'll come back tomorrow," he said.
Sable nodded and put her shoulder back against his arm.
Across the room Theo looked up. He met Levi's eyes and held them for a second. Then he gave one small deliberate nod and looked back at the rope in his hands.
He'd said maybe four words the whole afternoon. The nod meant more.