After that it was more or less chaos, in the best possible sense.
His father's golden retriever — named Haru, Edric decided, after some thought — produced a neat stream of clean water that arced directly onto the dry patch of garden bed that his mother had been meaning to water for two days. His mother looked at this with an expression of profound practical appreciation.
'He's useful,' his father said, with the specific warmth of a man whose love language was functionality.
'He's very useful,' Arthur confirmed.
Clara, emboldened by Bella's demonstration and with Kiiro now back on her shoulder looking out at the world like a small golden empress, said: 'Kiiro, can you do something fun?'
Kiiro considered this request for approximately one second. Then she looked at Clara, held the look, and Clara's feet left the ground.
The float spell lifted her smoothly, without wobble, to a height of about two meters, where she hovered with her hair hanging down and an expression on her face that went very quickly from startled to delighted to an overbearing scream of pure joy.
'She's floating me,' Clara said, from two meters up. 'Arthur, she's floating me!!'
'Yes, we can see.'
'This is — ' She looked around at the view from two meters. 'This is the best gift ever.'
Kiiro, from her shoulder, surveyed the yard from the elevated position with the expression of something that had correctly identified the optimal viewing angle and had made it available.
Thomas was watching Kona. Kona, the black labrador, had been sitting quietly beside Thomas on the fence with the settled quality of something that was already at home in its assignment. Thomas looked at the labrador. The labrador looked back.
'Can you —' Thomas said, and then stopped. 'Can you show me something?'
Kona had a very meaningful answer. He stepped off the fence and hit the ground at labrador size and then continued going, the black form expanding with the quiet certainty of something that knew exactly how large it was capable of being and had been waiting to demonstrate it. He stopped at the size of a large wolf — chest high to Thomas, easily, with the broad head and steady amber eyes of a creature that had tripled its mass and found it perfectly comfortable.
He turned, lowered himself to the ground, and looked at Thomas with an expression of patient invitation.
Thomas looked at the large black dog. He looked at Arthur.
'He wants me to get on??' Thomas said.
'Haha it sure seems that he does,' Arthur said.
Thomas, who was not given to hesitation once a decision had been made, got on.
Kona stood. He turned his large head to look back at his rider, checked the position, and began moving at a trot that covered ground with the smooth efficiency of something that had been built for exactly this purpose. Thomas's expression, which was normally the expression of someone who had long since arrived at his conclusions and saw little reason to revise them, became the expression of someone whose conclusions were being revised at speed and who was deeply invested in the process.
'Oh,' Thomas said, from the far end of the field. And then, quieter, mostly to himself: 'Oh, this is excellent.'
◆ ◆ ◆
Shadow emerged from the barn's shadow at Arthur's silent invitation.
Not the small form, not the indoor form — Shadow at the size she chose when she chose to be visible, which was larger than a dog and considerably more present, with the ember-eyes warm and the form full and the seven years of their partnership alive in the connection between them. The family had seen Shadow before. They still paused slightly at the full presence of her, the way you paused at something you had known for years and that still, occasionally, reminded you of what it was.
Arthur looked at Shadow. Shadow looked at him.
'I think,' he said, 'we should go for a ride.'
He heard Clara, still floating, say: 'Wait, he gets a ride too? That's not fair! Arthur, can we ride our partners too?'
Kiiro set her down, unhurried, and Clara landed in time to watch Arthur step onto Shadow's back and Shadow shift to accommodate him with the ease of something that had done this ten thousand times.
Thomas and Kona were already at a canter along the fence line.
'Can yours do that?' Lyra asked Clara, looking at Kiiro.
Kiiro answered this by expanding. Not to wolf-size — to something sleeker, a form between large cat and something older and stranger, still recognizably the golden cat but at a scale that made the kitten proportions suddenly, completely unironic. She sat in the yard at the size of a young lion and looked at Clara.
Clara said nothing. She got on.
Tsuki looked at Lyra. Lyra looked at Tsuki. 'If I fall,' Lyra said carefully, 'I need you to catch me.'
Tsuki's response was to expand to a smooth low-slung form that Lyra could not fall from easily, and to cast something that Lyra felt as a warmth across her legs and hands — a gentle binding, like a seatbelt made of wind, that settled her firmly into place without constricting her.
'Oh,' Lyra said. 'Oh, that's clever.' She looked down at the silver-streaked white form beneath her. 'Ready?'
Tsuki moved.
Lyra made a sound that was mostly delight with a thin edge of the specific fear that arrived when something you loved turned out to be faster than you had fully prepared for. Then the fear dissolved and the delight took all the space, and her laugh reached Arthur from halfway across the east field.
Mira held Bella and watched her children ride magical creatures around her farm.
'This is,' she said, to no one in particular, 'very unusual.'
Bella turned her face up toward Mira with an expression that communicated: we could be doing this too.
'I am an adult woman,' his mother said firmly.
Bella's expression did not change.
Two minutes later, Mira Voss was on a silver-grey cat the size of a pony, riding at a smooth canter after her daughters with the expression of someone who had made a decision and was fully committing to it.
◆ ◆ ◆
They ended up at the far edge of the newly purchased land perched upon a hill overlooking where the farmland stopped and the forest began.
The family assembled there naturally, without plan — each mount slowing as they reached the summit of the hill, everyone arriving at roughly the same time at the view showcasing what was theirs and what was beyond it. The mounts shifted back to comfortable sizes, and everyone sat or stood looking out at what the farm had become.
From here you could see it all.
The stone house was no longer visible at this distance. The barn. The east field, the south field, the new northern strip that had been Renwick's until two years ago, all out of sight at this distance. The garden. The fence lines, straight and well-maintained, marking the edges of a property that had been one modest plot seven years ago and was now something considerably different.
His father stood beside Haru and looked at it with the expression of a man looking at the accumulated evidence of years of good work.
Perhaps now arriving so far away and not being able to see home, raised Lyra's interest. 'Dad,' Lyra said, with the quality of someone doing a calculation and arriving at a larger number than expected. 'Where are we? Who land are we on?'
'We are on our land. All of it. This is all ours.' Edric proudly said.
'What about the forest?' Clara asked.
'Much of it. The purchase covered forty square kilometers total. About ten percent under cultivation. The rest is forested area that borders the Veiling Forest Wilds— it came with the eastern parcel, the previous owner was glad to be rid of the maintenance concern.'
'Forty,' Lyra said. Working through the number. 'That's — that's enormous. I can't even see home anymore dad.'
'It sure is. We've been busy,' their father said simply.
They all looked at the forest. It ran from the edge of their cleared land into the distance without any obvious end point — the Veiling Forest, which Arthur had been hunting the outer edges of for seven years, whose inner reaches he knew only from absorbed memories and careful reconnaissance to be considerably more than a forest. The largest in the country. Its outer margins were manageable — the creatures there were strong but not extraordinary, the kind of thing that a careful hunter could handle and a careful farmer could avoid. The interior was different. The deeper you went the stronger and larger they became. The forest was larger than the Amazon rainforest in Arthur's past life. It was so massive and nearly impenetrable. The trees are harder than iron so it is impossible to clear a road, the high mana density nourishes the monsters making them stronger, and more magically diverse.
'Are there monsters in there?' Clara asked. She was looking at the tree line with the expression of someone who would very much like the answer to be no but suspects it is yes.
'At the edges, some. Nothing too serious,' his father said. 'The deeper you go, the more dangerous it gets. The interior — ' He paused, with the quality of a man choosing his words carefully. 'The interior of the Veiling Forest is different territory. Creatures that don't come to the edges. And deeper still, demihuman tribes. They've been there longer than the farms have been here.'
'Have you ever gone in?' Lyra asked.
'No,' his father said. 'No reason to. We have enough land.'
Arthur said nothing.
He looked at the Veiling Forest and felt, through Shadow's network which extended into those outer trees with hundreds of waiting amber eyes, the quality of what was in there. Not threat — he had assessed the outer forest as manageable years ago and that assessment had not changed. But depth. The specific quality of a place that went a long way in and had its own weather patterns and its own logic and its own history that had nothing to do with the farms at its edge.
He thought: I have been hunting the margins for five years. I have not gone deeper because I did not need to and the risk-reward was not there.
He thought: I am considerably different from the person who made that calculation.
He did not say this out loud. He filed it, in the category of things that were not yet decisions but were taking shape in the direction of becoming ones.
Around him, his family looked at the full extent of what his father had quietly, carefully built. Each of them reaching the same slow recognition: the Voss farm was not the small holding it had once been. It was something else now. Something that deserved a different word.
His father put his hand on Arthur's shoulder, the brief unhurried gesture that was his version of everything.
'Good morning,' Edric Voss said. To the farm. To the family. To the forest at the edge of what was theirs.
Haru leaned against his leg and wagged.
◆ ◆ ◆