Chapter 13 — Sylvaine
Morning came to the guest room the way it seemed to come to everything in this house — quietly, without announcement, sunlight easing through the window rather than demanding attention.
Sylvaine woke without the fog.
That was the first thing she noticed. The fever had broken properly two nights ago — she remembered the conversation with Rhea clearly now, remembered asking about the man and the daughters and getting answers delivered in that careful, too-controlled voice Rhea used when she was hiding something from both of them at once. She remembered the tea. She remembered saying it’s alright to let it be what it is and meaning it, and she remembered Rhea not answering.
What she hadn’t done yet was get out of the bed.
She corrected that now.
Her legs held. Not steadily — there was a looseness to her joints that spoke of two months of hard travel and several days of fever finally catching up with her all at once — but they held, and after four hundred years of measuring her own body’s limits with great precision, she trusted the assessment.
She stood.
Rhea was not in the chair.
That, too, was new. For two days — she understood the shape of it now, pieced together from half-conscious fragments and Rhea’s own account — Rhea had barely left that chair. The fact that she wasn’t in it now meant one of two things: either she had finally been convinced to sleep somewhere resembling a proper bed, or she was somewhere in this house doing something Sylvaine intended to have opinions about.
She dressed slowly, in clothes that were not her own — someone had laundered and mended what she’d arrived in, and she recognized the careful, precise stitching immediately. Syla, she thought. Rhea had described her well enough in that fevered conversation that Sylvaine felt she already knew the shape of her before meeting her properly.
She opened the door.
The sound reached her before the sight did.
A kitchen. Voices — several of them, overlapping, the specific chaos of people who loved each other enough to talk over one another without malice. She followed it down the hall, one hand trailing the wall for balance she didn’t entirely trust yet, and stopped in the doorway to take in the scene before anyone noticed her.
Four girls at a table. A man at the stove, moving with the unhurried competence of someone who had done this every morning for years.
And Rhea — at the counter, carefully, deliberately following instructions from the quiet-eyed girl beside her, cutting something into pieces with the focused concentration of someone determined not to repeat a prior disaster.
Sylvaine watched for a moment longer than necessary.
She understood, now, looking at it directly rather than hearing it secondhand through a fevered haze, exactly what Rhea had been failing to say two nights ago.
The loud one — Ren, it had to be, matching every detail Rhea had described — noticed her first.
"YOU’RE UP."
The volume was, Sylvaine noted, exactly as advertised.
Every head in the kitchen turned. Rhea’s knife stopped mid-cut. The man at the stove turned with the same unhurried quality as everything else he did, and for the first time Sylvaine saw him properly — not through fever, not through the doorframe of a dim room, but clearly, in daylight, in the middle of his own kitchen with his own family around him.
She understood, with the specific clarity of someone who had lived long enough to recognize things quickly, why four girls loved him without reservation and why the woman standing frozen at the counter with a knife in her hand had spent two nights insisting it was nothing.
"You should be resting," he said. Not sharp. Just factual, the way he seemed to say most things.
"I’ve been resting for two days," Sylvaine said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. "I’ve decided against a third."
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile, the same restrained almost-expression she remembered from the one time he’d come to check on her. "Sit, at least."
"That I can agree to."
She was given a chair. Someone — the quiet one, Syla, moving before anyone else had finished processing that Sylvaine was upright — put tea in front of her without being asked, the same careful precision Sylvaine recognized from the mended clothes.
"Thank you," Sylvaine said. "For the clothes as well. And the tea two nights ago. And, I gather, the fever remedy that kept me from dying, which I understand was largely your work."
Syla went faintly pink and said nothing, which Sylvaine understood immediately was simply how she accepted things.
"I’m Sylvaine," she said, to the table generally, since introductions seemed to be expected and Rhea had clearly not managed them from her position frozen at the counter.
"We know," said the sharp-eyed one at the end of the table, not looking up from a book propped against a teapot. "Rhea told us. Mira," she added, by way of introduction, still not looking up.
"The merchant negotiator," Sylvaine said.
Mira looked up then. Something crossed her expression — mild surprise, quickly filed away. "She told you that too."
"She told me a great deal, in a room, over the course of an evening, while attempting very hard not to tell me the one thing she actually wanted to say." Sylvaine sipped her tea. It was, she noted, very good. "I’ve had four hundred years of practice extracting things people don’t want to say. It’s become something of a specialty."
Vera — direct, arms crossed even while seated, exactly as described — studied her for a long moment. "You talk like Mira," she said. Not quite an accusation. More an assessment.
"I’ll take that as a compliment," Mira said.
"It was one," Vera confirmed, and went back to her breakfast.
Sylvaine looked at Rhea, who was still standing at the counter, knife forgotten, ears low, looking like she very much wished the floor would open beneath her.
"Sit down," Sylvaine told her. "You’ve been standing vigil for two days. You’re allowed to eat a meal sitting like a person."
"I was helping —"
"You can help after you eat."
The man at the stove — Cidd, she assumed, though nobody had formally introduced him and she suspected it wasn’t necessary — glanced at Rhea. "She’s right," he said. Simply.
Rhea sat.
Sylvaine noted the speed of her compliance with considerable private amusement.
Breakfast was, Sylvaine decided, one of the more entertaining meals she had attended in several decades, and she had attended banquets thrown by kings.
Ren narrated everything — the tournament two days prior, Vera’s victory, the promised day out that Vera brought up twice more with the calm insistence of someone building a case, the goldbroth noodles that apparently had no proper name in this world and had been christened by committee. Mira interjected precise corrections whenever Ren’s narration drifted from accuracy. Syla said little but managed, somehow, to ensure everyone’s plate stayed full without visibly doing anything.
And Cidd ate his food and listened to all of it with the particular stillness of a man who had learned, somewhere along the way, that this — exactly this, loud and overlapping and entirely unguarded — was worth more than anything he could have had instead.
Sylvaine watched him across the table.
She had met heroes. She had met kings who mistook cruelty for strength and called it leadership. She had outlived most of the people she’d ever respected and had grown, over the centuries, quite comfortable with the specific loneliness of simply continuing.
She had not expected, walking into a remote village kitchen on the arm of exhaustion and fever, to find someone who made her reconsider the shape of that loneliness.
She filed the thought away with the same discipline she filed everything else.
"You’re thinking something," Mira said, not looking up from her book, but clearly not entirely absorbed in it either.
"I think several things at any given moment," Sylvaine said. "It’s a side effect of having had four centuries to develop opinions."
"You’re thinking something specific," Mira said. "About Father."
The table went very slightly quiet.
Sylvaine looked at this ten-year-old with the sharp, unblinking patience of someone twice her apparent age and felt, for a brief and genuinely startling moment, entirely outmatched.
"I’m thinking," she said carefully, "that this is a remarkable household, and that I am grateful for the hospitality, and that I have known you all for approximately eleven minutes."
"That’s not what she asked," Vera said.
"It’s what I’m answering."
Ren grinned at her over a piece of bread. "You’re good," she said, with genuine admiration. "Most people crack faster than that."
"I’ve had considerably more practice than most people."
Cidd, mercifully, chose that moment to stand and begin clearing plates, which redirected the table’s attention with the ease of a man who had clearly done this before — created a small distraction at the exact moment his daughters’ curiosity outpaced his guests’ comfort.
Sylvaine caught his eye briefly as he passed.
There was something there — not obvious, not stated, but present. An understanding. I know what they’re doing. I’m sorry. I also can’t stop them.
She found, to her mild surprise, that she didn’t particularly mind.
Later, once the kitchen had emptied into the day’s various tasks — Vera to the training clearing, Mira back to whatever perpetual research occupied her, Ren off toward the village with the loose orbit of someone who simply enjoyed people — Sylvaine found herself outside, seated carefully on a bench near the eastern side of the house, watching the framework of a new room take shape against the wall.
Rhea joined her, sitting close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.
"That’s for us," Rhea said, nodding at the timber frame. "He started it yesterday. Said we’d have our own space once it’s finished."
"Generous."
"He’s like that." Rhea’s voice had the careful evenness she used, Sylvaine now understood, specifically around this subject.
"I noticed," Sylvaine said mildly. "I noticed a great many things this morning that you spent two nights very carefully not telling me directly."
Rhea’s ears flattened.
"I told you what happened," Rhea said. "The kitchen. The daughters. The —"
"You told me facts," Sylvaine said. "Very thorough, very organized facts. What you didn’t tell me was written all over your face the entire time you were telling them." She looked at the timber frame. At the man now visible past it, working with the same unhurried competence she’d already come to recognize as simply who he was. "I understand now."
Rhea said nothing.
"I’m not going to tease you about it," Sylvaine said, more gently. "Much."
"You’re already teasing me."
"A little. I’m allowed. I nearly died and you sat in a chair for two days holding my hand and refusing to sleep and the least I can do in return is observe, accurately, that you are hopelessly gone for a man you’ve known for three days."
Rhea’s silence was, in its own way, a complete confession.
"For what it’s worth," Sylvaine said, watching Cidd set a beam into place with the specific care of someone who never did anything halfway, "I don’t think you’re wrong to feel it."
"His daughters have already claimed him. Formally. Repeatedly."
"His daughters are children with strong opinions and a great deal of love and no actual authority over who their father eventually cares for," Sylvaine said. "I’ve lived long enough to know the difference between a declaration and a destiny."
Rhea looked at her.
"And you," Rhea said slowly. "What did you think of him."
Sylvaine considered the question with the same care she gave everything.
"I think," she said, "that I have spent four hundred years becoming very good at not letting people matter to me quickly, because quickly is dangerous when you outlive everyone." She watched him laugh — quietly, briefly, at something Vera called across the clearing. "And I think that this morning, over the course of one breakfast, that particular skill failed me rather completely."
Rhea stared at her.
"Don’t look so shocked," Sylvaine said. "You weren’t the only one who noticed something."
The timber frame continued rising, beam by beam, in the autumn light.
Neither of them said anything else for a long while.
They didn’t need to.