By the end of my first month, I had a working profile on everyone in the house.
This was habit, not suspicion. In my previous life I had made a point of understanding the people around me before I needed to depend on them. Character assessment was a professional skill that had served me well for twelve years and had, ultimately, failed to save me from the one situation where I had trusted without assessing at all. I did not intend to make that mistake again.
Even if the stakes were currently limited to whether someone remembered to change me on schedule.
Aldus Duren, husband and father, approximately forty-two years old based on the lines of his face and the gray starting at his temples. Farmer. Not a simple man despite the simple work. He had the habit of saying things that were obviously true in ways that made everyone around him feel slightly outmaneuvered. The first time he told Rynn that she was training wrong and then demonstrated the correct form with a wooden post in the yard, I had immediately recalibrated my estimate of him upward. He was not educated in any formal sense. He was observant in a way that formal education often obscured.
He also had a consistent inability to take anything seriously in a crisis, which I had first identified as a defense mechanism and later revised to understand as something more fundamental. Aldus found the world genuinely funny. Not cruelly funny. Just funny. The gap between how things were and how they were supposed to be struck him as inherently comedic, and he responded to this with a patience that I suspected was the most radical thing about him.
Mara Duren, wife and mother, approximately thirty-eight. The first thing I had identified about Mara was that she was the person everyone in the village came to when something went wrong. I had evidence for this within my first two weeks. Three different people had knocked on the door with problems of varying scales, and all three had left looking lighter than they arrived. She fed people. She listened to people. She gave practical advice in a tone that made it sound like comfort rather than instruction.
She cried easily and was not embarrassed about it, which I found confusing for longer than I would like to admit. In my previous life, visible emotion in a professional context was a liability. In Mara's context, it seemed to function as a form of communication. When she cried because she was happy, the people around her became happy. When she cried because she was worried, the people around her paid attention. She had somehow converted sincerity into a form of influence, and she did it without appearing to notice she was doing it.
The food she made was also genuinely extraordinary. I had eaten at twelve-course tasting menus. I had expensed client dinners at restaurants with three-month waiting lists. Mara's soup was better than any of it. I had no explanation for this and had stopped looking for one.
Rynn Duren, older sister by approximately eight years, currently about eight years old, therefore making her the most precisely calculable person in the house. Loud in the way of someone who has never been told to be quiet and has therefore never learned to modulate her volume as a default setting. She had decided in the first week that I was her project and had not revisited this decision since.
What I had initially logged as excessive enthusiasm I had recategorized, over observation, as something closer to commitment. When Rynn decided to do something, she did it. She had been training with a wooden practice sword in the yard every morning for three months, I was told, before I arrived. She had not missed a single morning. She did not have a teacher. She was working from a book she had borrowed from somewhere and teaching herself, which was objectively inefficient and also objectively impressive.
She talked to me during my waking hours the way Mara talked to me, which was constantly and without expectation of reply. But where Mara narrated the world, Rynn asked me questions. What did I think about her technique? Did it look faster than yesterday? Did I think she could make rank C by the time she was fifteen?
I thought her footwork needed significant improvement and her grip was creating a torque problem that would worsen with a heavier blade, but I could not tell her this yet, which was professionally frustrating.
The three of them together constituted a household that operated on a logic I had no prior framework for. They were kind to each other with the same consistency that I had previously only observed in well-run organizations with exceptionally good culture, and they extended this to everyone around them without appearing to track it or expect return.
In my previous life, this would have made me suspicious.
I was working on that.
The village was called Maxentius, I had gathered from overheard conversations. Small. Agricultural. Located somewhere at the edge of a larger territory that people referred to with a mixture of pride and resignation, the way people talk about a parent who is objectively difficult but still family. The kingdom of Aridun.
I did not know much about Aridun yet. I knew it was large, desert-oriented in parts, and that the people here considered themselves somewhat separate from its formal concerns.
That was fine. I had time.
Threat level of immediate environment: zero.
Sincerity level: dangerously high.
I was going to have to adjust.