Chapter 18: Part Three & Fourth — The Daughters, Three Years Later
Vera was, by general consensus of everyone in Ashfeld who had ever watched her train, the finest swordswoman in the village.
The qualifier everyone added, always, was except her father, which Vera accepted without dispute because it was accurate, and Vera had no patience for disputes that weren’t accurate.
At thirteen she had outgrown the training dummies. At fourteen she had started sparring with the village guard and had, within two months, made it gently clear to the guard captain that his people needed better training, which she volunteered to provide and which the guard captain accepted with the bruised dignity of a man who had watched his finest fighter lose to a fourteen-year-old girl in under three minutes and had chosen to reframe this as an opportunity.
She trained them hard. They got better. She got faster.
At fifteen she was something the village had started pointing out to visitors with the specific pride of ownership — that’s Cidd’s girl, the one with the sword, yes we know, remarkable isn’t it — and sparring partners from three neighboring settlements had started making the trip to Ashfeld specifically to test themselves against her and leaving with the information that they needed to train harder.
She was fifteen and she already knew, with the same complete certainty she’d brought to everything since childhood, exactly what she was going to be.
Not here. Not in Ashfeld, where she’d long since outgrown what anyone could offer her. Out there, in the world her father had moved through and shaped and left his marks on, where there were things worth becoming the best for.
Tomorrow she was leaving for the capital.
She stood in the clearing at dawn and ran the forms and felt the specific weight of last mornings the way she felt everything — directly, without looking away.
Mira had been trading since she was ten.
By thirteen she had a network. Not a large one — Ashfeld was remote and her resources were limited to what she could manage through correspondence and the occasional carefully planned trip to Drenfall with Cidd’s supervision — but real. Genuine connections with merchants, suppliers, information brokers who had initially dismissed her on the grounds of age and had stopped dismissing her after the second or third interaction where she demonstrated that her read on market conditions was better than theirs.
By fifteen she had outgrown the network’s capacity. Not because she’d made mistakes — she hadn’t made mistakes, or when she had she’d identified them faster than anyone else would have and corrected them before they compounded — but because the ceiling of what could be built from a remote village through correspondence alone had been reached, and reaching ceilings was, for Mira, simply the signal that it was time to find a larger room.
She had told Cidd this six months ago, sitting at the kitchen table with the ledger open between them, in the specific direct way she told him things that mattered — clearly, with the evidence laid out, without softening the conclusion.
He had looked at the ledger. At the projections. At her.
"The capital," he’d said.
"The merchant guild’s central hall is there," she’d said. "I’ve already made contact with three senior members through correspondence. They’re expecting me."
"You made contact with the central guild at fifteen."
"Fourteen, technically. The first correspondence was fourteen months ago." She’d looked at him. "I’ve been building toward this for a long time."
He’d been quiet for a moment. Then: "I know."
She’d seen it on his face then — the specific combination of pride and the thing he never said out loud, the thing she’d read in his diary six years ago and understood completely and had spent six years figuring out how to address. The thing that said: I’m glad for you and I don’t know what to do with the space you’ll leave.
She’d reached across the table and covered his hand with hers, briefly. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to.
He’d looked at her hand. Then at her face. Then back at the ledger.
"Show me the capital projections," he’d said.
She’d shown him.
He’d had three good questions and one observation she hadn’t considered and which she’d incorporated immediately, which was exactly what she’d hoped for.
Tomorrow she was leaving for the capital.
She sat at the kitchen table one last time with her ledger and her books and felt the house around her — the sounds of it, the warmth of it, the specific irreplaceable texture of the only home she’d ever known — and wrote in her personal ledger in the small handwriting she used for things that mattered:
The foundation was built here. Everything else is built on top of it.
She closed the book.
Syla had been teaching for two years.
It had started with the girl with the festival ribbon — the one she’d noticed at the autumn festival four years ago, who’d felt her mana for the first time in Syla’s hands and looked at her with the complete focused trust of a child who has been shown something real.
She’d come back the next day. And the next. And the day after that she’d brought two friends, and the week after that she’d brought three more, and by the end of the first month Syla had eleven students meeting her three times a week in the village hall’s back room, which Elder Broft had made available without being asked because Broft was, despite his long speeches, a man who recognized what was worth supporting.
She was a teacher in the specific way that good teachers were teachers — not because she performed the role but because she understood, in her own body, what it felt like to learn something that changed what you thought was possible, and she wanted other people to feel that, and the wanting was so genuine that it communicated itself regardless of how quietly it was expressed.
The students trusted her completely. She still went pink when they thanked her directly and still looked at the floor and still managed, despite all of that, to maintain the specific quiet authority of someone whose expertise was beyond question even when her social confidence wobbled.
She had, over two years, become something Ashfeld hadn’t had before — not just a teacher, but a particular kind of teacher, the kind that changed the ceiling of what people in a small remote village thought was available to them.
The girl with the festival ribbon was thirteen now and could maintain a sustained mana barrier for forty minutes without dropping it.
Syla was prouder of that than almost anything.
Tomorrow she was leaving for the capital. There was a position — junior faculty at a mage training institution, entry level, nothing remarkable from the outside, everything remarkable from the inside because she already knew what she intended to build it into.
She made tea the last morning. Set the cups out in their places. Sat at the kitchen table and held her own cup with both hands and let the house be what it was around her.
Cidd came in from the clearing and saw her and the cups and said nothing for a moment.
"You’re up early," he said.
"I didn’t want to waste the morning," she said.
He sat down across from her. Picked up his cup. The ring was on his hand the way it always was — Marta’s ring, worn every day for three years now, so familiar she’d stopped consciously seeing it and started simply knowing it was there the way you knew the particular quality of a specific morning.
They sat in the quiet kitchen and drank their tea and the house breathed around them.
"Father," she said.
"Mm."
She looked at her cup. "Thank you. For everything. From the beginning."
He looked at her for a long moment with the expression she’d spent fifteen years learning every variation of.
"Thank you," he said. "For the tea. Every morning. From the beginning."
She looked at her cup so he wouldn’t see her face do the thing it did.
Ren had spent three years becoming several things simultaneously, which was entirely consistent with how Ren approached most aspects of existence.
She was the village’s informal emotional infrastructure — the person everyone told things to, the person whose presence at any gathering raised the quality of it without her doing anything in particular, the person whose absence was noticed immediately and whose return was always slightly louder than everything else.
She had also, over three years of sustained and genuine enthusiasm for it, become a genuinely capable fire mage. Not the most powerful or the most technically sophisticated — Syla had her comprehensively outclassed on precision and Mira had approached the theoretical side of magic with more systematic rigor — but effective in the specific way of someone who brought complete feeling to what they did and whose fire consequently had a warmth to it that spells cast from pure technique often lacked.
And she had remained, consistently, absolutely, across three years and every possible variation of circumstance, herself. Completely, unreservedly, without apology.
This was, the village had collectively decided, one of the better things about her.
The morning before leaving she came downstairs and found the kitchen already occupied — Syla and Cidd at the table, tea, the specific quality of a moment she could feel from the doorway.
She considered leaving them to it.
She came in instead, because she was Ren and this was her kitchen and her family and she had never once in her life voluntarily removed herself from a moment she wanted to be part of.
"Move," she told Cidd, gesturing at the chair beside him.
He moved. She sat. Stole his tea without asking.
"Ren."
"Yours is better. Syla makes mine differently because she knows how I like it and she makes yours differently because she knows how you like it and I want yours today."
Syla, at the counter, made a sound that was not quite a smile and was clearly a smile.
Cidd looked at his stolen tea. At Ren drinking it with complete unrepentant satisfaction. At Syla’s back.
"I’ll make more," Syla said.
"Thank you," Ren said. Then, to Cidd, in a different register — still warm, still completely Ren, but underneath it something she usually kept a layer further down: "We’re going to be fine, you know. All four of us. We’re ready."
"I know," he said.
"And you’re going to be fine too." She looked at him directly. "You have people here. You’re not going to be alone."
He looked at her for a moment.
"I know," he said again, differently.
She studied his face with the specific attention she gave things she wanted to remember properly.
"Good," she said. Picked up his tea again. "Because if you weren’t I’d come back and be very loud about it until you were and I think we both know that’s not good for anyone."
He said nothing.
But the expression was there — the one at the edges — and she saw it and filed it and let it be what it was.
Part Four — The Last Evening
Dinner was full.
All four daughters. Rhea who had made the main dish properly this time, with technique learned over three years that still surprised her occasionally with its results. Sylvaine at the far end with her measured portions and her dry commentary on Ren’s story about something that had happened at the market that afternoon involving Brenvar’s horse and a merchant from Drenfall who had underestimated both.
The table was loud and warm and full of people who had different histories and different futures and the same present and Cidd sat in the middle of it and ate his food and said the things he said and the ring was on his hand and the lamp would be on in the study later and the step would be empty unless someone came to sit on it which someone usually did.
Rhea, clearing plates with Syla, caught Sylvaine’s eye across the kitchen.
Sylvaine looked back at her.
Something passed between them — three years of parallel feeling, of chopped wood and checked doors and pressed-down things that hadn’t stayed pressed, of a village that knew and teased and pointed and a man who remained, with impressive and slightly maddening consistency, the last person in Ashfeld to fully understand what was happening around him.
Rhea set the plates down and looked at him at the table, talking to Vera about something, easy and present and entirely himself.
She thought about the basket at the front gate.
About twenty women in Ashfeld who had noticed exactly what she’d noticed.
About Sylvaine saying the right moment will not announce itself.
She made a decision.
Not tonight. Tonight was the daughters’ last evening and it belonged to them completely.
But soon.
She looked at Sylvaine.
Sylvaine’s expression said: I know. Me too.
They went back to clearing plates.
Later, the step.
Cidd sat alone for the first time in a while — the daughters had gone inside earlier than usual, some unspoken agreement about the last night, about sleep before the early morning departure, about leaving him his hour.
He sat with the ring on his hand and the stars above the pine hills and Anastacia going on in every direction without consulting him.
He was aware of things.
He was aware of Rhea’s cooking getting better every month and Sylvaine correcting Broft’s historical inaccuracies with a fondness she would deny and the village’s consistent amusement about both of them and the specific quality of his house with more people in it than it had ever held and how that felt different from how he’d expected more to feel.
He was aware, in the specific way he was aware of most things — fully, without drama, without knowing what to do with it yet — that something had changed in the past three years and was continuing to change and he hadn’t found the right way to look at it directly yet.
He was aware that tomorrow four daughters were leaving for futures he’d spent fifteen years helping build.
He looked at the ring.
He sat for a long time.
The step was occupied fifteen minutes later.
Rhea.
She sat beside him with the ease of three years of this — not close, not far, the distance that had become its own comfortable language.
Five minutes after that, Sylvaine came out and sat on his other side.
Nobody said anything for a while.
The stars did their thing.
"They’re going to be extraordinary," Rhea said, eventually. About the daughters.
"Yes," he said.
"They already are," Sylvaine said.
"Yes," he said again, differently.
They sat in the quiet that had grown, over three years, into one of the more comfortable silences he’d known, which was saying something because he’d had a lot of silences and most of them had been the other kind.
He was aware of things.
He looked at the stars.
He sat with the awareness and didn’t do anything with it yet, the way he sat with most things that were large enough to need time.
But he sat with it.
That was new.