By the time I was one year old, I had compiled a reasonably detailed picture of Maxentius.
I could not walk yet, which limited my direct observation, but I was carried everywhere Mara went, which turned out to cover most of the village in a given week. I listened. I watched. I organized what I learned with the same systematic attention I had once applied to quarterly market analyses, because the alternative was simply lying there, and I had never been good at doing nothing.
Maxentius had a population of approximately ninety people. It functioned on an agricultural economy supplemented by small-scale trade with the nearest town, which was about two hours away on foot. The village had a headman, an older man named Pell who everyone seemed to respect moderately and no one seemed to consider remarkable. There was no guild branch. There was no rank assessment office. There was one general store, one blacksmith, and one woman who functioned as the village's primary healer through a combination of herbs and what appeared to be a very small and carefully managed Aether gift.
The Duren family was, as far as I could tell, the most universally liked household in the village. This was not because they were powerful or wealthy or influential. It was because they were consistently useful and consistently kind in a way that had no apparent agenda behind it. People brought them problems. People brought them food when Mara had a difficult week. People stopped Aldus in the road to talk, and he always stopped, and he always listened.
I watched all of this and felt something I did not have a clean word for.
In my previous life I had employed people, paid people, negotiated with people, been betrayed by people. I had relationships I would have called good. Colleagues I trusted within professional contexts. A few people I might have described as friends if pressed on the definition. But the texture of what I was observing in Maxentius was different. It was not transactional. Nobody in this village was keeping a ledger.
I found this baffling for longer than was probably warranted.
The Aether situation in the village was, from what I could gather, approximately standard for a rural settlement far from any significant Conclave presence. Most people had no active development. A few had the small passive gifts that manifested as slight physical advantages, better healing, more consistent strength, nothing dramatic. Aldus and Mara were fully unremarkable in this respect, which had no bearing on anything but which I had noted anyway, because I noted everything.
Rynn was nine years old and training every morning with the focus of someone who had decided on a destination and was now purely occupied with getting there. She had improved her footwork since I had first assessed her technique. The grip problem remained. I still could not tell her.
I was developing a significant backlog of professional observations I was unable to deliver, which was its own particular experience.
The triangle mark on my ear had not changed. I had taken to examining it whenever I had access to reflective surfaces, which was not frequently but was often enough to confirm that it remained the same size, the same pale color, the same clean geometry. I had no explanation for it. I had stopped expecting one.
The plant situation had expanded my understanding of my own effects on the environment. Other plants near me did not universally die. They seemed to respond to proximity in proportion to how close and how long. A plant at the far end of a room would simply grow slightly slower. A plant directly beside me for an extended period would eventually brown at the edges and decline. The plant on the windowsill had died in four seconds because we had been very close.
Animals were more immediate. Anything with a developed nervous system seemed to receive the information faster. Cats left the room when I entered. Dogs, which came by the house occasionally with visiting neighbors, would stop at the threshold and refuse to approach. The chickens from the yard behind us had not come near the house since approximately my second week.
Mara attributed this to something she called strong energy, which was the local equivalent of a polite explanation that covered things people did not want to look at directly.
Aldus said nothing about it.
One evening in late autumn, when I was sitting propped against the cushions Mara had arranged for me near the fire, Rynn came and sat cross-legged in front of me with the seriousness she reserved for important announcements.
'I'm going to be the strongest knight in Eryndor,' she said. Not as a wish. As a statement of scheduled fact.
She looked at me for a moment.
'You're going to watch me get there, okay? You have to watch. You're my witness.'
I looked back at her.
Sure, kid, I thought. I will watch every step.
Rynn seemed satisfied by whatever she saw in my expression and went back to her practice, and I sat by the fire and listened to the village settle into evening and thought that witnessing was, perhaps, not such a bad thing to be asked to do.