Steam rose from bowls of porridge and plates of fresh bread, but no one had touched much of it yet. The kitchen smelled of warm oats and woodsmoke, ordinary morning smells that sat oddly against the tension still left over from the night before.
Mitsu sat close to Mira, her hands folded tightly in her lap, her eyes moving around the table without settling on anyone for long. Elara passed around a pitcher of water with the focused quiet of someone who needed something to do with her hands. Mira kept glancing at the door, while Sara stood near the entrance with Selene beside her, both still in yesterday's clothes, both holding their coats over one arm.
Selene had not sat down. She stood slightly apart from Sara, close enough to the door that she could leave quickly if she needed to, her posture straight and her expression composed in the careful way of someone who has decided composure is the safest option in a room full of people she doesn't know well.
Mitsu had been watching her since she came downstairs. Not staring, just noticing, the way Mitsu notices things, quietly, from the side of her attention.
After a minute of everyone pretending to be interested in their bowls, Mitsu looked at Lys. She opened her mouth, closed it, then opened again, her voice coming out smaller than she intended. "I woke up, and there were voices everywhere, and the house was... I wasn't sure what was happening." She looked down at her hands. "Mira told me some of it, but I didn't want to ask too many questions before you were awake. Only..." She hesitated again. "Is that really true, that there's an engagement now? Is that, did something go wrong last night, or..."
She trailed off and didn't finish, which was its own kind of question.
Lys set down his spoon. He glanced once at Selene, then back at Mitsu, and started from the beginning.
He kept it simple. The council meeting, the argument about who would handle the guild's arrival, and Sara standing her ground. He described how it escalated without naming who was at fault for what. When he got to the crowd outside the house, he said only that things had gotten complicated and that Selene had been there and that the engagement had come out of a conversation that needed to happen. He did not editorialize. He just stated the shape of events and left the details inside their outlines.
Mitsu listened to all of it without interrupting. As he talked, her expression moved through several things, confusion at first, then a kind of careful attention, then something closer to disbelief, though she didn't let it become dramatic. When he finished, she was quiet for a moment.
"So all the people outside yesterday," she said slowly. "The lanterns. The noise. All of that was because of..." She stopped, looking at her bowl. "I heard it from Mira's room. But I didn't know what it was. I thought maybe I'd imagined it or something."
"Told you, you didn't imagine it," Mira said.
Mitsu nodded, still looking at her bowl. Then, in a voice that was barely above a murmur: "Was it because of what happened in the market square? Is that why everything..." She stopped again. "I mean. If the bucket hadn't, if I hadn't…"
"No, It's not your fault," Lys said.
She looked up at him.
"Things were already moving before the square," he said. "The council, the guild, all of it. That was already building. What happened yesterday was just..." He searched for the right word. "Moved the timeline a little bit. You can say that was bound to happen. Something closer to it, at least."
Elara set down the pitcher and put her hand briefly over Mitsu's, where it rested on the table. "The square was not your doing, sweetheart. You were just carrying a bucket. That is all you did. Don't blame yourself over some spilled water."
Mira opened her mouth, clearly ready to say something emphatic about whose fault it actually was, and then her eyes moved to Selene, still standing near the door, and she closed it again, picking up her spoon instead.
The table went quiet in a different way than before. Not uncomfortable exactly, just aware of itself. Selene had not moved from her position. Her expression had not changed either. But something in the set of her shoulders had shifted when the conversation touched on the square, a slight tension that she didn't let become visible in her face.
Sara, who had been watching all of this with the attentiveness of someone taking inventory, looked at Selene. Then she said, mildly: "Selene. Why don't you sit down and eat something? You haven't had anything since last night."
It was not a question. Selene heard the firmness under it, so she moved to the table without arguing, taking the empty chair beside Sara. Elara set a bowl in front of her without glancing at her, the same way she'd set bowls in front of everyone else. But still, it made Selene feel bad for some reason.
The meal picked up again. Mira started talking about something that had nothing to do with any of it, a problem with her loom mechanism that she'd been turning over in her head all morning, and the conversation moved with her, loose and easy, the way Mira could always pull a room. Elara sometimes asked questions about this or that. Mitsu listened with genuine interest, her posture gradually unknotting.
Only Selene ate in silence. She didn't contribute much, but she ate, and she didn't look like someone waiting to leave.
At some point, Mira said something that made Mitsu laugh, quick and soft, surprised coming out of her, and Mira grinned at the sound of it like she'd won something.
Lys watched this from his side of the table and said nothing, which was the right thing to do, he felt.
-----
It was after the plates were mostly cleared, when the meal had wound down to the comfortable nothing of people sitting with warm cups, that Sara looked at Selene again.
"Tell her," Sara said.
Selene glanced at her. "Now?"
"What? Didn't you say you would if you got the chance?" Sara's tone was easy, not unkind, pushing Selene to do something she wasn't comfortable with. "She is right here."
Selene set down her cup slowly and looked across the table at Mitsu, who had gone still, her hands wrapped around her own cup, eyes down. Probably realizing what Selene was going to say now.
"Uhh, Mitsu. I owe you an apology," Selene said. Her voice was level. Not warm exactly, but somewhat direct, which took its own kind of effort. "What I did in the square was wrong. The water spilling was an accident. I knew that, but I still responded the way I did." She glanced at everyone present before saying the last thing. "For that, I'm sorry."
Mitsu didn't say anything immediately. The silence between them stretched one second, then two.
Then, slowly, she lifted her head. Her cheeks were flushed, and she wasn't quite meeting Selene's eyes, but she was looking in the direction of them, which for Mitsu was close enough to direct.
She thought for a moment. Then she put her cup down and reached across the table, not quite far enough; she stretched a little and stopped halfway, her hand open, an offering more than a demand.
Selene looked at it. Then she leaned forward and shook it.
Mitsu withdrew her hand, folded it back in her lap, and went quiet again in the way she went quiet when she was working something out in her mind. The table waited for her to say something, but she was taking her sweet time to do it, without quite meaning to.
"You know," Mitsu started, then stopped.
Mira looked at her with a curious look. "What?"
Mitsu shook her head a little. "Uh, no, forget it. I was just thinking. It is probably nothing."
"Say it," Mira said.
Mitsu looked at her lap. Her voice came out carefully, like she was placing each word down before stepping on it. "I just thought it was interesting. What Lys did for me. And then..." She glanced toward Selene, then away again. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to say anything strange."
"You're not saying anything strange, just spill it, before I get real angry now," Sara said with a frustrated expression. Clearly frustrated by her way of making everyone curious about her inner thoughts, then not letting them know.
Mitsu took a breath.
She looked at her cup first, then at the table, like she was checking whether the thought was worth saying out loud. Then she began, quietly: "You know, I keep thinking about something. Since this morning."
Everyone's focus was on her now. The table just waited like what comes out now might be very important. As if knowing what goes on in Mitsu's mind was worth gold to them.
"When Lys stepped in at the square," she said, "I hadn't asked him to. We were neighbors for a little while, only when he was recovering, but that was all. He barely knew me. There was no reason for him to get involved in something that had nothing to do with him." She paused for a while. "And then, when I was worried about losing my job at the inn, he offered me a place here. Just like that. Without me asking for that either."
She turned her cup slowly with both hands. "I kept trying to figure out what he got from any of it, but I just couldn't find anything. There was nothing in it for him either time."
Lys was looking at his cup. He had the expression of someone who had not yet understood that he was the subject of the conversation.
"And then I heard about last night from Mira," Mitsu continued, her voice dropping slightly, "and I was listening to everything Lys just told us, and I..." She stopped. Pressed her lips together. Started again more carefully. "I'm probably reading it wrong. I do that sometimes. But it started to feel like the same thing to me. The same reason."
Mira leaned forward a little without meaning to.
Mitsu kept her eyes on the table. "He saw what happened in the square, and he saw where it was going to leave me, so he stepped in. And then last night too, he saw what his actions might do to Selene's situation, her reputation, her standing, all of it, so he might have..." She hesitated, choosing the words slowly. "He might have stepped in the same way. Because I think that is just what he does. It feels to me that when he sees trouble coming for someone, he puts himself in front of it. Not because they asked. Not because there's anything in it for him." She took a short pause, then said the last part slowly. "I think that's just what he is."
The room was very still, hearing her words. Considering it in their minds. Replaying the events until now, as she was speaking.
She finally glanced up, not at Lys, but in the general direction of the table's center. "So in that way, maybe Selene and I are not so different from him." Her voice was barely above a murmur. She still continued, "He helped us both. Just in different ways, for the same reason."
No one spoke, feeling everything she said might have been true all along. It's just they didn't realise it till she pointed it out.
Mira was staring at her brother with an expression that had moved past surprise into something quieter, the look of someone who had just heard something that confirmed that they had always been half-known about Lys.
Elara's hand was flat on the table, perfectly still, her eyes soft and fixed on Lys in the way mothers look at their children when they're proud and worried at the same time. Sara had her head tilted slightly, studying him with an attention that was different from her usual assessment, less strategic, more personal.
Selene had not moved. Her eyes were on the table in front of her. Whatever was working through her face, she was keeping it below the surface, but the effort of it was faintly visible in the stillness of her expression. She was reevaluating Lys in her mind now.
Lys had gone very quiet in the way a person goes quiet when something has landed, and they don't have an immediate way out of it. The heat of embarrassment had reached his face before he could stop it. He looked at his cup for one second. Then two. And as soon as he felt someone was gonna comment about what Mitsu said just now, he pushed his chair back and stood up.
"Uhh, I still feel a little tired, maybe I need some sleep," he said, and his voice came out almost like he was trying to flee from here. "I'll be in my room sleeping."
He didn't look at anyone on his way to his room. The bedroom door closed behind him, not with a slam, not with a bang. Just a little louder than usual.
The kitchen stayed where it was as he left.
Mira was still looking at the empty chair. Mitsu had gone red to her ears and was staring hard at the table with the focused attention of someone trying to disappear without moving. Elara quietly picked up a bowl and stacked it on top of another one. The soft knock of ceramic was the only sound in the room.
Sara and Selene had not yet moved toward the door.
A few seconds passed. Then Selene turned her head and looked at the staircase. Just once. Not long. Her expression gave nothing away, but she looked up, so that was itself something.
Then she lifted her coat from the back of her chair, put it over her arm, and walked to the door.
Sara followed her out before saying something to Mira.