He had been back at the house for ten minutes when a second thought arrived, quieter than the first.
He could do this every day. He had the forest and Shadow's network and more than enough hunting range to fill a pit once a day without making a dent in the local monster population. He could take Clara and Lyra out every morning, run the transfer, watch the numbers climb.
He sat with that thought and then set it down deliberately.
Too fast was its own problem. He had grown slowly over seven years, each absorbed level building on the one before it, his body and mind and pool adjusting at a rate they could handle. The festival night had been a jump — significant, real — but it had come after seven years of foundation. Without the foundation, a jump that size would have been dangerous. He was fairly certain his sisters did not have seven years of foundation yet. Plus this was his unique skill, his body might be built to handle this "leveling up" but he would need to take care not to overwhelm his sisters.
Once a month. The pit, around a level's worth of transfers, then a full month of practice and consolidation before the next one. That was the pace. Fast enough that they were genuinely growing, slow enough that the growth was built on something solid.
He filed it as decided and moved on to the next problem.
Thomas and Mom.
He had been thinking about this since before the festival. He had started with Lyra and Clara because they were home more and the teaching project had to start somewhere. But the logic that applied to his sisters applied to everyone.
He went to find them.
Thomas was in the east field mending a section of fence line when Arthur found him.
He looked up when Arthur approached, assessed the expression, and set down his tools with the unhurried calm of someone who had decided that whatever this was, it was worth the interruption. Thomas operated that way — no wasted motion, no unnecessary questions, just a quiet willingness to be present for what was coming.
Kona sat up beside him and wagged once in greeting.
'Sit down a moment,' Arthur said.
Thomas sat on the fence rail.
The diagnostic on Thomas was different from both sisters in the way that Thomas was different from both sisters: steady, deep, and not particularly showy about it. His reservoir was larger than either of theirs — he was eighteen, broader and more physically established, and the mana had been building quietly in him for longer. The signature had a weight to it, a density. Earth and water, Arthur thought, the elements of things that would benefit him most as a farmer.
He built the spell list across four parallel threads — Thomas was established enough to receive them simultaneously rather than one at a time, and Arthur had done this enough times now that the construction was clean and quick.
Earth Shape: compress and mold soil without a shovel. Water Draw: pull clean water up from shallow groundwater into a container. Soil Read: a diagnostic for crop health, which told you what a field needed the way Arthur's healing diagnostic told him what a body needed. Root Bind: fix a fence post in place with a thread of earth magic that made it immovable without physical contact. Furrow: cut neat rows in tilled soil for planting. Weather Sense: a light version of the monitoring construct Arthur had been running for years, giving a few hours' accurate read on incoming rain or clear sky. Water Purify, Barrier Patch for mending small gaps in a structure, Stone Set for placing fieldstones without mortar, and last — because it seemed right — a clean version of the Carry construct, a low-cost levitation for moving heavy loads across a short distance.
Ten spells that covered the work Thomas actually did.
He imprinted them.
Thomas went still in the particular way of a person who was receiving something entirely new and was processing it with the same thoroughness he processed everything. It lasted longer than it had for his sisters — Thomas wasn't slower, he was more careful, and being more careful took more time.
When he came back he was quiet for a long moment, sitting on the fence rail, looking out at the field he had been working on.
'Those are useful,' he said finally.
'That was the idea.'
'The soil one.' He meant the Soil Read. 'I've been guessing at the north corner for two seasons. Too wet some years, too dry others.'
'Haha yup, you won't need to guess anymore.'
Thomas nodded once, in the way he had of nodding that meant the conversation was complete and satisfactory and he was moving to the next thing. He hopped off the fence rail and looked at Kona.
'Come on then,' he said to the dog.
Kona was already up.
Thomas walked out into the north corner of the field, crouched down, pressed one hand to the soil, and cast the Read.
Arthur watched him go still for a moment as the information came back. Then watched him stand and look at the field with the expression of someone who had just been handed a map of a place he had been navigating by feel for years. He said something to Kona. Kona wagged.
Thomas picked up his tools and went back to work, already using the new understanding.
Arthur thought: that was the fastest anyone has ever thanked me and gone back to work. He felt entirely correct about it.
◆ ◆ ◆
His mother was in the kitchen.
She was doing four things at once — the particular domestic multitasking that Arthur had been watching his entire life and had always found quietly impressive — and she looked up when he came in with the alert warmth of someone who was always happy to see a specific person, regardless of what she was doing.
'Mom I have a present for you,' he said.
'A present? For me?', She set down what she was holding and sat across from him at the kitchen table without question, which was one of his mother's specific qualities that he had always appreciated. She gave her attention completely and without reservation when it was asked for.
He ran the diagnostic.
His mother's signature was the warmest of any he had read so far — warmer than Clara's, warmer than Thomas's, with a quality that he could only call open. Like a window that had been left wide rather than cracked. Whatever she had been doing with herself for twenty-eight years, she had been doing it with her whole self, and the mana had followed that. It was well-suited to what he had in mind.
He built her list thoughtfully.
Clean Wash: fabric and surface cleaning without water or scrubbing, the single most time-consuming task in her daily life made effortless. Quick Dry: following immediately from the first. Freshen: a light air-purification spell for enclosed rooms, which in a farmhouse with six people in winter was not a small quality-of-life improvement. Mend: basic textile repair, closing small tears and re-setting seams. Warm Hold: keeping food and water at temperature without a fire, useful for meals that needed to stay hot between Edric coming in late from the field and dinner. Soften: a skin and hand spell he had built specifically for her, something that did quietly what his purification treatments had been doing externally — because her hands worked hard and she had never once complained about it. Cool Breeze for summer, Fire Tend for winter that kept a hearth burning longer on less wood. Pest Ward to keep insects and small vermin out of the pantry. Fragrance, a small spell for no reason other than that she loved the smell of the garden and winter was long. And last, a Comfort Cast, the gentlest version of his own healing work, enough to ease a headache or a sore back at the end of a long day without requiring Arthur to do it for her.
Ten spells. He had taken slightly longer on this list than any of the others.
He imprinted them.
His mother's eyes went soft and distant in the way he recognized — the spell-dream, the vision of all ten arriving at once. Her face moved through several things: quiet wonder, then recognition, then something that was very close to emotion and that she was keeping in its proper place with the practiced ease of a woman who kept things in their proper places.
She came back slowly, both hands flat on the table.
'Oh,' she said softly. 'Arthur.'
'Are you all right?'
'I'm wonderful.' She touched the back of one hand — the hand that had been rough since before he was born. 'That Soften one.'
'Try it when you want.'
She cast it quietly, right there at the table. He watched the small golden warmth move across her hands. She turned them over and looked at them, and her expression was the expression of someone receiving something they had not thought to ask for.
The kitchen was quiet for a moment.
Then his mother folded her hands together and looked at him across the table with a look he knew well — the one that went past the surface of things.
'You know,' she said carefully, 'sometimes I feel embarrassed.'
'About what?'
'About — ' She stopped. Tried again. 'You do so much. For all of us. You always have, even when you were so small we could barely see you.' She shook her head slightly. 'And what do I do? I make meals. I clean things. I manage the house. You're seven years old and you've already done more for this family than I — '
'Mom.' His voice came out more firmly than he intended. He softened it. 'Stop.'
She looked at him.
'I was born into this family,' he said. 'You were there from the first day. You fed me and held me and stayed up with me and you made everything feel — safe. When everything was strange and new and I didn't know how anything worked yet — it was you. Every morning. Every night.' He held her gaze because it was important that she believe this. 'You didn't know it was doing anything. But it was doing everything. I couldn't have built any of this if I hadn't had that first.'
She was very still.
'I still need you,' he said. 'That doesn't change because I can do spells. I love you and I still need you and I just want you to be proud of me. That's it. That's all I've ever wanted from you.'
His mother looked at him for a long moment.
Then her expression did something that was entirely past words, and she stood up from her chair, came around the table, and scooped him up.
He was seven. His body was the body of a seven-year-old and it had no particular opinion about being picked up — it simply went, because seven-year-old bodies went when picked up, that was what they did, and no amount of thirty-seven years of prior experience in a different body changed the basic physics of the situation.
She settled on the couch with him in her lap and wrapped her arms around him and said, against the top of his head:
'I am proud of you. I have been proud of you every single day since the first one.'
He opened his mouth to say something measured and appropriate and adult.
What came out was a giggle.
He could not fully account for this. It was involuntary. It appeared to be a product of being held in a very warm and comfortable manner by someone who loved him unreservedly while his body was specifically and unavoidably seven years old and found this state of affairs extremely agreeable in a way it had no intention of suppressing.
He giggled again.
'There he is,' his mother said warmly.
'I am a person of great dignity,' Arthur said, from inside the hug.
'Of course you are.'
'I want to be clear that this is involuntary.'
'Completely involuntary,' she agreed, not even slightly convincingly, and pulled him closer.
He could have gotten down. He had the physical capability to remove himself from this situation at any time.
He did not get down.
He stayed where he was with his mother's arm around him in the warm kitchen with the afternoon light coming through the window, and twelve processing threads running their various tasks in the background, and the parallel minds managing the barrier and the network and the monitoring constructs and the ongoing project of keeping his family safe.
And the part of him that was just Arthur, seven years old, sat in his mother's lap and was, very simply, at peace.