He gave himself, at best, twelve days.
Not thirty. Twelve. The curse allowed thirty, but Kael couldn't afford thirty. Without the death-prediction ability, he had no warning system. The enemy who'd incinerated the village's southwest corner might or might not return. And every day he spent in Ella Village was a day he wasn't learning to fight in a world where columns of fire that could vaporize a human body.
Twelve days to make a sixteen-year-old girl fall in love with him and confess it sincerely.
The approach would need to be indirect. A direct pursuit would be too fast, too aggressive, too transparent in a village this small. Worse, it would put Kael in the active role, and in matters of manipulation, the passive party held the advantage. He needed Violet to come to him. He needed her to believe the feelings were her own, arising naturally, unmanufactured.
Which meant the first step wasn't Violet at all. The first step was the village.
—
Twenty-nine days, nine hours.
Kael woke with the countdown in his peripheral vision and the sound of the village already at work outside. Hammering. Voices. The scrape of debris being dragged. Ella Village did not have the luxury of sleeping late. Neither did he.
He dressed in the stolen clothes and went outside. The morning air smelled of ash and damp earth and the faintly sweet rot of burned thatch. Woodall was already directing crews, his voice carrying across the village with the blunt authority of a man who expected to be obeyed and usually was. When he saw Kael, he waved him over.
"Barrow. You're up. Good. We're clearing the southwest zone today. You feel well enough to work?"
Kael let a small hesitation cross his face, the visible effort of a man pushing through pain. "I'm fine, village chief. Tell me where you need me."
Woodall clapped his shoulder. "Good lad."
—this one's got spine. Luton Village's loss is our gain. If I can keep him here through the winter, the town assessor will see the numbers and back off about the levy—
Kael heard Woodall's thoughts and filed them. Useful. The village chief wanted him to stay, which meant Woodall would protect him, promote him, give him room to operate.
He helped an elderly woman carry a basket. He held a plank steady while two men nailed it. He asked questions, not too many, not too pointed. About the village, its people, its rhythms. With each interaction, the mind-reading ran in the background, feeding him the unspoken layer beneath every conversation. He learned who resented whom. He learned who was sleeping with whom. He learned which families had lost the most in the fire and which had privately been relieved that the damage had spared their corner of the village.
He learned that the villagers had already begun to construct a narrative about Barden's death.
"Must be a punishment from God," a man said, stacking charred wood. "Barden must've done something wicked. Got himself some strange clothes from who knows where, put them on to show off, and then—boom."
"Hey, stop. He's dead. Leave him alone."
"I'm just saying. That monster came down from the sky and went straight for him. You don't get that kind of attention for nothing."
Kael listened. His face showed the appropriate concern of a newcomer hearing about a tragedy he'd narrowly missed.
Strange clothes from who knows where. Xi repeated the phrase.
That was all.
—
The southwest zone was a graveyard of structures. Three houses had burned to their foundations, leaving nothing but blackened timber and cracked stone. Four more were standing but damaged—walls blistered, roofs partially collapsed, support beams exposed and charred.
The eye tagged every surface as Kael moved through the zone: material composition, structural integrity, temperature damage assessment. The information arrived in clinical streams, dispassionate and precise. A beam's load capacity reduced by sixty percent. A wall's mortar compromised by thermal expansion. A roof joist split along the grain, holding together by habit rather than strength.
Woodall assigned him to a crew clearing the worst of the rubble. Kael worked alongside three men, moving burned timber and salvaging what could be reused. He moved carefully, performing the stiffness of a body not fully healed, and the men around him did what people always did with someone who worked through visible pain: they respected it, and then they stopped watching him closely.
That was the window.
Midmorning, Woodall asked for volunteers to assess the remaining standing structures, check which ones were safe to enter and which needed to come down. Kael volunteered. The village chief hesitated—
—he's still injured. But he's got sharp eyes, this one. And none of my usual men know what to look for. They'd just kick the walls and say it's fine—
—then agreed. Kael was paired with an older villager named Gerrit, a man whose primary contribution to the assessment was holding a torch and muttering about his knees.
They worked through the four damaged structures one at a time. Kael entered each building and let the eye do its work, reading the structural data flowing across his vision while Gerrit stood in the doorway and provided commentary that was, from an engineering standpoint, worthless.
The third building was the one.
It had been a storage shed, single-room, with a heavy crossbeam running the width of the ceiling. The fire hadn't reached the shed directly, but the heat from the adjacent house had warped the southern wall, and the crossbeam's right support had shifted. The eye gave him the numbers: the beam was resting on a secondary brace, a wooden wedge, roughly cut, that the original builder had used to shim the support post into true. The fire's heat had dried and shrunken the wedge. It was still holding, but barely. A measured push at the right angle would unseat it, and without it, the beam's weight would exceed what the warped support could bear.
Not immediately. Not dramatically. But inevitably. The next strong gust through the open doorframe, the next vibration from work being done nearby, something would tip the balance, and the beam would come down.
Kael crouched beside the support post, examining it. Gerrit was outside, smoking something pungent and arguing with a passing neighbor about whether chickens could sense earthquakes. No one was watching.
He placed his right hand on the support post, visibly testing it. His left hand, the one Xi couldn't see, found the wedge.
It was a small movement. Less than a centimeter. He pressed the wedge sideways with his thumb, felt it shift in its groove, and stopped. Not enough to drop the beam now. Enough to halve what little margin remained. The beam didn't move. The building didn't groan. Nothing visible had changed.
Kael stood up, brushed off his hands, and walked out.
"This one's dangerous," he told Gerrit. "The crossbeam's compromised. We should mark it."
Gerrit glanced inside, saw nothing obviously wrong, and shrugged. "If you say so, kid. I'll tell Woodall."
They moved on to the fourth building. Kael said nothing more about the third. Behind him, the storage shed stood in the late morning light, looking exactly as damaged and exactly as stable as it had looked before he'd entered it. The difference was invisible. The difference was a wedge shifted half a centimeter to the left, and a crossbeam that had gone from probably fine to waiting.
Xi was quiet. Kael didn't know if she'd seen. He didn't know if she could see something that subtle through his left eye's peripheral vision while his right eye—her eye—was pointed at the support post. The uncertainty was itself useful information. He filed it and moved on.
—
By noon, Kael had mapped the village.
Not physically, this was a social map. Through five hours of light work and mind-reading, he'd assembled the complete emotional architecture of Ella Village, and it looked like this:
Woodall ran the village through a combination of genuine authority and careful favours. His wife Hilde was the social backbone. the one who remembered birthdays, settled disputes between women, and decided who got extra rations during lean months. Their power was real but fragile, dependent on the village producing enough to satisfy the town's levy.
Grandma Kana was the information hub. Everything flowed through her eventually: gossip, news, opinions, grievances. She was seventy-one, widowed, lonely, and her primary entertainment was the romantic lives of people younger than her. She had opinions about every possible pairing in the village and was not shy about sharing them. In a village this size, that made her more powerful than Woodall in certain matters.
Kael needed her.
He found her struggling with a woven basket near the eastern houses, an area that had been spared from the fire. She was trying to carry salvaged fabric to Violet's workshop, a lean-to behind the orchard where Violet did her tailoring. The basket was too heavy for her. The path was uneven. She was proud enough to refuse help from the younger villagers who'd offered, but she accepted Kael's because he approached differently.
"Let me help you with that, Ma'am,"
He didn't offer to carry it for her. He fell into step beside her and took one handle without asking, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It left her holding the other handle, which preserved her dignity, she was helping carry the basket, not being helped. and it put them side by side, walking at her pace, with the entire path between the eastern houses and the orchard to fill with conversation.
"Thank you, dear boy. And please, call me Grandma Kana. These old bones aren't what they used to be." She coughed lightly, examining him with a sharpness that her frail posture didn't advertise. "Though you shouldn't strain yourself either, being injured."
Her thoughts:
—nice boy. Polite. Didn't make me feel like an invalid. Hilde said Woodall's impressed with him. Interesting. Very interesting. Black hair, those eyes—the girls will be fighting over this one by the end of the week—
"It's no trouble, Grandma Kana. The village has been so kind to me. I should return it where I can."
He let a beat pass. Timed it. Then, as if the thought had just occurred to him:
"This fabric—is it going to the tailor? The girl who brought me water yesterday?"
He knew her name. He knew her profession, her level, her routine, the contents of her surface thoughts for the past sixteen hours. But Barrow wouldn't know any of that. Barrow was a shy refugee who'd been given water by a kind girl and remembered the gesture.
Kana's eyes lit up.
—he's asking about Violet! He remembers the water! Oh, this is—oh, I haven't had anything this good since Baron got drunk and told the miller's daughter she had nice teeth—
"Violet, yes! She does all the tailoring for the village. Wonderful girl. Strong, but gentle. She's been through more than her share, that one." Kana paused, waiting for him to ask. When he didn't—because not asking was the move that would make her want to tell—she continued anyway. "She practically keeps this village running. The orchard, the mending, always the first one working and the last one to stop. Woodall and his wife took her in when she was young. Treated her like their own."
"She seems well-respected," Kael said. Neutral. Understated. Leaving space for Kana to fill.
Kana filled it enthusiastically.
"Respected? More than respected. That girl's the heart of this village, even if she doesn't know it." She leaned closer, conspiratorial. "You have such a careful way about you, do you know that? Reminds me of how Violet tends her plants. Always mindful of the details."
Kael let colour rise in his cheeks. Not much. A trace of warmth, accompanied by a slight turn of the head, as if embarrassed by the comparison. The effect on Kana was exactly what he'd calculated:
—oh! Oh, he's BLUSHING. He likes her! I knew it! One day in the village and he's already—oh, this is wonderful—I must tell Hilde—no, I'll tell Maren first, Maren will tell Hilde, and then by dinner—
"She was very kind to bring me water," Kael said, and now his voice carried just the right note of quiet sincerity. Not too much. Not enough to seem practiced. Just a young man saying something true about a girl who'd shown him kindness, with a faint and endearing inability to hide that the kindness had affected him.
"Ha!" Kana's laugh was knowing and delighted. "Young man, I've been around long enough to recognize that look in your eyes. Though I must warn you—" her tone shifted, acquiring an edge of protectiveness that was genuine and fierce beneath the gossip's warmth "—that girl's been through enough hardship. We're quite protective of her here."
"Grandma Kana!" Kael protested, flustered, exactly the right amount of flustered, the precise degree that would cement Kana's suspicion into conviction. "I just wanted to thank her properly for her help."
"Of course, of course." The knowing smile was back. "And I'm sure you asked about her out of simple gratitude. Well, don't think you can court her without my approval, mind you! I may be old, but I've got sharp eyes still."
"I should go help with the cleanup," Kael managed, ducking his head.
"Run along then. And thank you for helping these old bones. Perhaps I'll mention your kindness to Violet when I see her..."
He left her at the edge of the orchard and heard, before he was out of earshot, the sound of her already murmuring to herself. By nightfall, every woman in Ella Village over the age of thirty would know that the new boy had blushed when someone compared him to Violet. By tomorrow morning, the information would have reached Violet herself, not as a direct statement but as an atmosphere—a change in the way people looked at her when he was nearby, a knowing quality in Grandma Kana's smile, a conversational weight that hadn't been there yesterday.
That woman is terrifying. Xi's voice carried something akin to genuine awe.
You gave her a blush and a name. That's it. A blush and a name. And she's going to turn it into a village-wide campaign.
'Grandma Kana has probably been doing this longer than either of us has been alive.'
He wouldn't need to pursue her. The village would carry her toward him. All he had to do was stand still and let it happen.
—
Evening came. The village ate together again, not organized, just the natural drift of tired people toward the communal fire pit, holding bowls of stew and bread. Kael sat where he was placed, among the men he'd worked with, and listened to their thoughts while eating their food.
—that Barrow kid works harder than my own son. Shame about the Luton business. At least some good came of it—
—Kana's been going around with that face all afternoon. Something's got her excited. Probably trying to match someone again. God help whoever it is—
—my back is killing me. If that boy suggests one more building needs tearing down I'm going to cry—
Ordinary thoughts. The inner weather of ordinary people. Kael consumed them the way he consumed the stew—mechanically, extracting what was nutritious, discarding the rest.
Across the fire pit, at the edge of the gathering, Violet appeared. She'd come from the direction of the orchard, her hands dirty, her hair escaping its cloth tie. She accepted a bowl from Hilde with a nod—no words, just the efficient gratitude of someone who was used to feeding herself last—and sat on the ground near Grandma Kana.
Kana leaned toward her immediately. Kael couldn't hear the words from this distance, but he didn't need to. He read Violet's thoughts instead.
—she's doing it again. 'That nice young man' this, 'Barrow' that. She says he helped her carry the basket and he was so polite and so strong despite his injury. She's looking at me like she's waiting for me to react. I'm not going to react. I'm eating my stew—
Violet ate her stew. Kana talked. Violet gave nothing. Her face was neutral, her posture closed, her attention on the bowl. From the outside, it looked like a girl politely enduring an old woman's gossip.
But Kael could see the inside. And the inside was:
—careful hands. She said he has careful hands. That's a strange thing to say about someone you've known for one day. Why do I keep thinking about that? I'm not thinking about it. I'm eating stew. This stew needs salt—
The denial was louder than the thought itself. She was telling herself not to think about it, which meant she was thinking about it, which meant the seed Kael had planted in Kana's mind that morning had traveled through the village's gossip network, arrived at its target, and lodged in the exact place it was designed to lodge: the space between what Violet allowed herself to feel and what she couldn't quite stop herself from noticing.
Kael looked away. He did not make eye contact with her. He did not position himself to be seen. He laughed at something one of the workmen said and let the firelight catch his face at an angle that was, from Violet's position across the fire pit, visible but not directed at her. Present but not pursuing. There if she wanted to look. Gone if she didn't.
She looked.
One glance. Brief. Over the rim of her bowl, disguised as a general scan of the gathering. Her eyes found him for less than a second and moved on.
But it had been there. For a fraction of a second, something wordless had moved through Violet's mind at the sight of him. But the eye had caught the flicker, and Kael had seen it, and he knew what it meant.
The armour had a seam.