The clothes had been a topic for three weeks.
Not a controversial topic — nobody in the household had anything negative to say about dragon leather boots that did not wear or crack in the January cold, or about coats that were warmer than anything they had owned and that an accidental farm tool impact simply bounced off. The topic was that nobody could stop noticing them, which produced a stream of small observations that had been running continuously since the first morning everyone had worn them.
Edric had dropped a fence post on his foot. He had looked down at his boot. He had looked at Arthur. Nothing more was said but the look had been comprehensive.
Thomas had been working the east field when one of the enchantments had activated — the light heal, triggered by a minor cut from a tool edge, closing and gone before he had fully registered it. He had come in and said: 'The coat healed me.' Arthur had said: 'Yes.' Thomas had gone back out.
Clara had discovered that her dress was fire-resistant on the second day by accident, which was the kind of discovery that was both reassuring and also raised questions about what had been happening before the fire-resistance. Arthur chose not to pursue the questions.
Saya wore hers with the specific satisfaction of someone who had been consulted on the design and whose input had been incorporated. The tail accommodation had been a genuine engineering problem that she and Clara had solved together over an afternoon, and the result was construction that Saya had examined closely and pronounced correct, which was the highest evaluation she gave to things she had strong opinions about.
Maren had been quiet about hers in the way she was quiet about things that mattered to her. Arthur had seen her run her hand along the sleeve in the early morning before anyone was up, the specific private gesture of someone checking that something real was still there.
◆ ◆ ◆
The Thomas situation had developed with the specific quiet consistency of Thomas himself.
Arthur had noticed it in October — the way Thomas's normal peripheral awareness of the household had reorganized to include Maren as a distinct data point, the small recalibrations that were not obvious unless you were watching for them and Arthur was always watching for them. He had filed it and not intervened because there was nothing to intervene in. Thomas was eighteen. Maren was thirteen. Thomas's approach to things he cared about was patient and thorough and not given to rushing, which in this case expressed itself as being reliably present without making it a fact worth discussing.
He fixed the hinge on her room door without being asked, on the morning it started sticking. He noticed when she was carrying something heavy and was nearby to take half of it without comment. In the evenings when the household was in the basement his seating position had shifted over three weeks from the workshop bench to the game table, which was where Maren usually sat.
Clara had noticed all of this before Arthur and had been significantly more interested in it than Arthur was, which was consistent with their respective personalities.
She had gone to Maren about it directly — this was Clara's approach to most things — and had returned from the conversation with the specific expression of someone who had gotten information and was deciding what to do with it.
'She says he's a gentleman,' Clara reported to Lyra, with the quality of someone delivering a verdict. 'She says he's very attentive. She appreciates it.'
'That's Thomas,' Lyra said, without looking up from her book.
'She smiled when she said it,' Clara said.
Lyra looked up. 'What kind of smile?'
Clara demonstrated the expression. Lyra looked at it for a moment and then went back to her book. 'Ah,' she said.
Arthur, who had been at the workbench and had not been part of this conversation, had nonetheless heard it, and filed it under: things that were happening and were not his business and were also going to be fine.
Thomas was a good person. Maren was a good person. The farm was a good place. He had constructed this situation deliberately and he was not going to be surprised when it produced decent outcomes.
◆ ◆ ◆
He raised the trip at dinner.
Not as a plan — as an idea first, which was how he raised things with his family when he wanted their input rather than their compliance. He had been thinking about it for a week: a town south of Thornwick, large enough to have a guild office and a market and buyers for materials that would not look obviously suspicious, far enough from the county that familiar faces were unlikely.
He could teleport them all. He had never teleported more than three people at once but the mechanic scaled with pool capacity and his pool capacity combined witht the three weeks of dragon was not what it had been in November.
The constraint was that he needed to have been to the destination first. The transit required a known anchor — somewhere he had stood, somewhere Shadow had touched and mapped. He had not been to this town. He would need to fly there.
'How far,' Edric said.
'Two hours by wing. South past the county line, the town is called Vareth. Large market, guild office, an established dealer in unusual materials — the kind that operates without asking for provenance on smaller purchases.'
'How do you know about it,' Mira said.
'The information brokers in Calmere had files. Renart's man visited one of them and I had a spider on the man.' He paused. 'The broker's records included Vareth as a primary resale market for unusual finds from the Veiling Forest region. It's the closest large market that wouldn't immediately connect a dragon scale to a farm two miles from the Thornwick border.'
His parents looked at each other.
'Extra money,' Thomas said, simply.
'And supplies we can't get in Thornwick,' Arthur said. 'The guild office will have materials I need for the enchantment work. Lyra's book on monster biology is the best resource I currently have and it's not complete.'
Lyra looked up. 'They might have more volumes,' she said. This was apparently sufficient motivation on its own.
'We would be gone one day,' Arthur said. 'Back by evening. I fly to Vareth tomorrow morning, teleport back. We leave the following day as a family.'
Edric looked at Mira. This was the specific look they exchanged when they had already reached the same conclusion and were confirming it.
'One day,' Edric said.
'One day,' Arthur confirmed.
'We sell two scales,' Edric said. 'No more. And not at the same stall.'
'Two scales and two of the smaller horn sections,' Arthur said. 'Different buyers. The scales to the guild dealer — they're equipped to handle it discreetly — and the horn sections to a materials merchant who won't know what they came from.'
Thomas nodded. This was his assessment vote.
Clara had been vibrating with contained excitement since the word teleportation. 'Are we teleporting through there with spatial magic or going through the shadows,' she said.
'Shadow transit for the family. I'll have the anchor point set.' It was a more mana efficient mode of mass transit using shadow and spatial magic combined rather than just spatial/dimensional magic.
'Can I fly there too?' she said.
'No.'
'Can Lyra fly.'
'No.'
'Can — '
'Nobody is flying to Vareth except me,' Arthur said. 'One person flying over a county is less notable than five plus I will be moving very fast.'
Clara absorbed this with the expression of someone accepting an outcome while formally registering that she found it suboptimal. 'Fine,' she said. 'But next time.'
'Next time,' he said, which was neither a yes nor a no, which she had learned to receive with patience, which was growth.
He went to bed with a destination in mind and woke before dawn and went to the east field where the morning shadow was long and dark and cold, and found his wings, and flew south.