The street was quiet by the time Percy turned into his road.
Most of the windows along the row had gone dark. The lamps burned low at either end, their light not quite reaching the middle stretch where the stones were oldest and most uneven. Percy had learned which ones to step around without looking.
He slowed as he neared his door. Mr. Callyst was sitting outside.
The old man occupied the rocking chair he kept beside his front step, a blanket across his knees despite the fact that the evening wasn't particularly cold.
He had his pipe and was looking at nothing in particular down the empty street. Percy stopped beside the low fence between their properties.
"Good evening, Mr. Callyst."
The old man looked over. "Percy."
"It's late to be sitting outside."
Mr. Callyst took a slow draw from the pipe and let the smoke out through his nose. "Whim," he said simply.
Percy accepted this. Mr. Callyst operated on his own reasoning and rarely felt obliged to share it. Pushing further would only produce a longer silence.
The front door of the Callyst house opened before he could say anything else. Mrs. Callyst stepped out, and behind her, small creatures who had decided she was the center of the world, came five cats in a loose procession.
The gray one split off immediately toward Percy, which bend down to scratch it's chin.
"Percy. There you are."
"Good evening, Mrs. Callyst."
"Good evening." She folded her hands. "Now. I have been seeing your light on at odd hours and you don't answer yesterday when i called out for you ."
Percy opened his mouth.
"I am not finished," she said pleasantly. "When you should be home I cannot find you. When you should be at work I cannot find you either. So I would very much like to know where exactly you have been."
Mr. Callyst rocked his chair once and said nothing. Percy looked at Mrs. Callyst for a moment.
Then he reached down and scratched the gray cat behind the ears, mostly to give his hands something to do while he thought.
He had not planned to tell anyone.The Eclipse Syndicate was out of the question entirely, and even the Union Law Syndicate felt like something that required careful handling.
But Mrs. Callyst was watching him with the patient certainty of someone who had already decided she would wait as long as it took, and Percy found he did not have it in him to invent something.
"I joined the Syndicate," he said.
Mrs. Callyst blinked. "The Union Law Syndicate?"
"Yes."
A short silence followed. Mr. Callyst's chair stopped rocking.
"When?" Mrs. Callyst asked.
"Recently. It's " Percy paused, choosing the words carefully. "The work is different from the tailor shop. I don't know yet how much time it will take or what the hours look like."
"And the shop?"
"That's the problem," Percy said. "I haven't told them yet."
"Why not?"
"Because " He stopped. "We've worked together for a while. All of us. Silia taught me most of what I know about the work. Bram gave me a chance when he didn't have to." He shook his head slightly. "It doesn't feel like a small thing to walk away from."
"It isn't a small thing," Mrs. Callyst said.
"No."
"But avoiding it doesn't make it smaller."
Percy said nothing to that because there wasn't much to say. The gray cat had settled against his ankle and showed no interest in moving.
Mrs. Callyst was quiet for a moment.
"You don't have to tell them before you're ready," she said finally. "But ready and avoiding are two different things, and I think you know which one this is."
"Yes."
"If the Syndicate gives you time before they need you properly, use it. Go to the shop. Finish what you started. And when the time comes, tell them honestly." She tilted her head slightly. "They care about you. They will understand better than you think."
Mr. Callyst resumed rocking.
Percy looked down at the cat for a moment. Then back up.
"Thank you, Mrs. Callyst."
She waved the thanks off in the way she always did, as though it were unnecessary, which somehow made it mean more.
"Now," she said, turning toward her door, "wait there."
---
Percy walked home carrying two containers.
One was what Mrs. Callyst had made that evening. The other she had pressed into his hands with the explanation that she had meant to bring it yesterday and had simply not found him in. Both were wrapped in cloth and still faintly warm.
He set them on the kitchen table and opened the first.
The smell alone was enough to make him feel considerably better about the day. A thick stew, darker than the last one she had made, with what looked like two kinds of root vegetable and something that smelled of herbs he couldn't name but appreciated unreservedly.
He ate standing at the counter the way he sometimes did when he was too hungry to bother with chairs, and finished more of it than he intended before switching to the second container.
That one held rice cooked with something savory, pressed into a neat shape that suggested Mrs. Callyst had taken more care over it than the occasion strictly required.
Percy ate slowly this time and thought about it.
She cooked the way people cooked when they had done it for a very long time and had stopped having to think about it. Everything was seasoned exactly right. Nothing was over or under anything.
He found himself wondering, not for the first time, what Mrs. Callyst had done before at her younger days .
"Acook " he thought. "Or someone who learned from one."
He didn't know enough about her to say. Which struck him as strange, given how often he sat in her kitchen and how many meals she had fed him. He knew the cats' names, three of them anyway. He knew Mr. Callyst had been a soldier. He knew she had friends on Luken Street and that she owned nothing that looked expensive and yet seemed to know everyone who mattered.
Beyond that, Mrs. Callyst remained mostly Mrs. Callyst.
He cleaned up, put the containers aside to return tomorrow, and headed upstairs.
---
The room was dark until he lit the lamp. The small yellow light spread across the desk and the bed and the drawer beside it.
Percy stood in the middle of the room for a moment.
Then he crossed to the drawer and opened it.
The box was there.
He looked at it for a while without touching it. This was the drawer he had locked it in once before, the night he had wrapped it in cloth and tied it with rope and come back to find it gone. Now it sat here calmly .
He picked it up and turned it over slowly.
"Does it go back", he wondered, "or does it choose?"
The box had followed him across the city once. It had disappeared from a locked drawer and reappeared under a table in an inn across town. And yet here it sat in the same drawer as though this were simply where it lived.
Maybe the box understood something about place that he didn't yet. That a locked drawer in a room you came back to every night meant something different from a locked drawer in a place you were only passing through.
Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe the box went where it was needed and came back when it was done.
He was still turning the thought over when the sound came.
*Click.*