Chapter 5 — Ren
The fifth hour of morning in Ashfeld was cold, quiet, and completely wasted on anyone with any sense.
Ren had very good sense.
She was therefore asleep.
She was specifically asleep in the warm center of her bed in the position she’d refined over ten years of dedicated practice — on her side, both arms curled around a pillow that had been designated the primary comfort pillow through a rigorous selection process, blanket pulled to exactly the right height, hair spread out behind her in a way that was either artful or accidental depending on who was observing.
She was deeply, completely, professionally asleep.
Until the back door opened.
She didn’t move. Didn’t open her eyes. Just registered it the way she registered most things — fully, immediately, without making a production of registering it — and identified it by sound as Cidd coming in from the clearing, morning forms finished, which meant it was approximately the fifth and a half hour which meant she had at minimum another hour before breakfast needed to exist.
She went back to sleep.
She woke up properly when the kitchen started smelling like something worth waking up for.
This was her actual alarm system and it had never failed her. Not sound, not light, not Vera thundering past her door at volume — smell. Specifically the smell of breakfast being made by someone who knew what they were doing, which in this house meant either Cidd or herself, and since she was currently horizontal it was Cidd.
She lay there for another few minutes enjoying the smell existing in her direction.
Then she got up.
Getting up was a process. Ren had opinions about getting up and those opinions were that it should happen slowly and with full acknowledgment of what was being left behind. She sat at the edge of the bed for a moment. Looked at her hands. Decided they were acceptable. Stood up.
Walked to the door.
Opened it.
"FATHER," she called down the stairs, at a volume that suggested she was concerned about being heard from a different building. "I NEED TO BE CARRIED."
A pause from the kitchen.
"Your legs work," Cidd called back.
"They work but they don’t want to." She leaned against the doorframe. "It’s cold and the stairs are far. Please."
Another pause.
"Ren."
"I’ll be very still. I’m an excellent carrying experience. Ask anyone."
"Ask anyone what?"
"Ask anyone if I’m an excellent carrying experience." She considered this. "Actually don’t ask Vera, she’ll make it competitive."
The sound of something being moved in the kitchen. Then footsteps on the stairs.
Ren smiled.
She was, in fact, an excellent carrying experience.
She had perfected the art of being carried over many years of field research — arms around his neck, weight distributed correctly, head at the right angle. Not a burden. An arrangement. There was a technique to it that she considered one of her more underrated skills.
"You’re ten years old," Cidd said, on the stairs.
"I’m aware."
"You can walk down stairs."
"I can," she agreed. "This is better though."
He brought her to the kitchen and set her in her chair with the particular patience of a man who had long ago processed his feelings about this situation and arrived at a kind of settled resignation that Ren privately found very comfortable.
She looked at the stove.
"That smells like the flat noodles," she said.
"The brown broth ones," he confirmed.
She sat up straighter. The flat noodles in the brown broth were from his other world — he made them occasionally, from memory, with local ingredients that weren’t quite right but were close enough that the result was something that didn’t exist anywhere else in Anastacia. She didn’t know what they were called. None of them did. They just knew they were the best thing that happened on the days they appeared.
"Why today," she said.
He stirred the pot. "Felt like it."
She looked at his back.
He made the food from his other world when he was thinking about something. She’d noticed this years ago and had never said it out loud because some things you noticed about people were yours to keep. When he was nostalgic — which he didn’t call nostalgia — he cooked. The flat noodles. The rice with the particular seasoning. The egg dish that Vera had once described as tasting like being somewhere very familiar that you’ve never been.
She watched him at the stove.
"Father," she said.
"Mm."
"I love you."
"I know Ren."
"I’m just saying it." She pulled her feet up onto the chair. "You don’t have to do anything with it. I just like saying it."
He glanced at her over his shoulder. The expression he had when he didn’t know what to do with her, which was different from the expression he had when he was actually troubled — softer at the edges, slightly resigned, with something underneath that she’d spent ten years trying to find the right name for.
She’d given up naming it. She just liked that it was there.
Breakfast was an event.
It was always an event but the flat noodles in the brown broth elevated it to something that required full attendance and complete attention. Even Mira closed her books. Even Vera sat properly in her chair instead of sideways.
They ate with the focused reverence of people consuming something that didn’t exist and might not exist again for weeks.
"What are these called," Vera said. Not for the first time. She asked every time, as though the answer might have changed.
"They don’t have a name here," Cidd said.
"They should have a name."
"Name them then."
Vera considered this with the seriousness she gave sword forms. "Something that sounds important. These taste important."
"Syla should name them," Ren said. "She names things well."
Syla looked up from her bowl. Looked back down. "Goldbroth noodles," she said quietly.
Everyone considered this.
"That’s good," Vera decided.
"It’s accurate," Mira said, which from Mira was high praise.
Ren nodded. "Goldbroth noodles. Father, your goldbroth noodles are the best thing in Anastacia."
"They’re just noodles."
"They’re goldbroth noodles and they’re the best thing in Anastacia." She held out her bowl. "More please."
The morning had a particular quality of good to it that Ren had learned to recognize over ten years — the kind of morning where everything was easy, where the light was right and the food was good and nobody was in a difficult mood and Ashfeld was doing its quiet thing outside and the house was warm from the kitchen and all five of them were in it at the same time with nowhere urgent to be.
She tried to stay in these mornings as long as possible.
After breakfast — which she did not help clean up, this was a known quantity, she had made peace with being the one who didn’t clean up and everyone else had made peace with it too on the grounds that she cooked dinner most nights and the trade was fair — she relocated to the main room and arranged herself on the large chair by the window.
The large chair by the window was her chair. This had never been formally declared. It had simply become true over time through consistent occupation.
She looked out at Ashfeld going about its morning.
Old Brenvar was at the fence talking to his horse. Brenvar talked to his horse constantly and the horse had the expression of an animal that had made peace with its situation. Three houses down, the miller’s wife was hanging washing. The children from the eastern houses were doing whatever children did in the morning — she could hear them but not see them, a sound like controlled chaos with occasional direction.
She knew all of them. Every family in Ashfeld, every name, every approximate situation. This was not something she’d done deliberately — she’d just never found people uninteresting, had never been able to look at someone and not want to know the specific texture of their life. It happened naturally and now she knew things about Ashfeld that even Elder Broft didn’t know, mostly because people told her things and people told her things because she listened like she had nowhere else to be, which was because she usually didn’t.
Cidd came through on his way to the village.
"Where are you going," she said.
"Aldren’s fence post."
"I’ll come."
"You don’t have to."
"I want to watch." She stood up from her chair with the ease of someone who had conserved energy specifically for this. "I like watching you work. You do that thing with your hands."
He looked at her.
"What thing," he said.
"The thing where you figure out what’s wrong before you touch it. You just look at it and your hands already know what they’re going to do." She fell into step beside him toward the door. "It’s interesting."
He said nothing to this.
She took that as acknowledgment.
Aldren’s fence post was the third from the northern corner and had been leaning since the ground froze and thawed last spring. Aldren himself was a broad quiet man who farmed with the patient dedication of someone who had decided that the land and he had an understanding and he was going to honor his side of it. He nodded at Cidd when they arrived and looked at Ren with the expression Ashfeld reserved for her, which was warm and slightly uncertain, like you could never quite predict the specific shape of what she was going to do next but you were glad she was going to do something.
"Morning Ren," he said.
"Morning Aldren. How’s the horse."
"The horse is fine."
"He looked thoughtful this morning."
Aldren considered this. "He gets like that."
"I know. It suits him."
Aldren nodded as though this was a normal conversation, which in Ashfeld it was, and went back to his morning tasks.
Ren watched Cidd look at the fence post.
There it was — the thing she’d described. His eyes moving over it, hands at his sides, completely still. He wasn’t touching it yet but she could see from the way his weight settled that he’d already understood it, already knew what it needed, already had the sequence of what he was going to do assembled and ready.
He crouched down. Checked the base.
"Frost damage at the root," he said, mostly to himself.
"Can you fix it today."
"Mm." He was already reaching for the tools he’d brought. "Needs a new base socket. I have something that’ll work."
The something he had was, as far as Ren could tell, a piece of enchanted metal he’d made in the workshop. The workshop was the building at the back of their property that she had been in exactly twice because it gave her the feeling of standing next to someone’s brain — too much in it, too much going on, the particular organized complexity of someone who thought in ways she didn’t have the language for.
She sat on the fence rail and watched him work.
He worked the way he did everything — quietly, efficiently, with no wasted movement. The new base socket went in with a precision that Aldren, passing by, stopped to observe with the expression of a man recognizing craft.
"Where’d you learn that," Aldren asked.
"Another life," Cidd said.
Aldren nodded. In Ashfeld this was an acceptable answer.
Ren watched his hands.
She thought about the goldbroth noodles and the other things he made sometimes — the devices in the house that nobody questioned anymore because they’d been there so long they’d become part of what the house was. The box that kept food cold. The lights that didn’t burn. The thing in the kitchen that pumped water without the handle needing to be worked by hand, which Syla had initially tried to understand and then accepted as a fact of life.
She knew he was from somewhere else. Not just another place in Anastacia — somewhere else entirely. She’d known this for years, the way she knew most things, through accumulation of small observations rather than any single revelation. The food. The devices. The way he occasionally said things that assumed a context that didn’t exist here. The specific quality of his tiredness sometimes, late at night, that wasn’t physical.
She’d never asked.
Partly because he’d tell her when he wanted to. Partly because she suspected the answer was something that belonged to him in a way that wasn’t hers to take.
She just watched his hands and sat on the fence rail in the morning light and let the not-asking be its own kind of thing.
By midday she had visited six houses.
This was not planned. She’d walked back from Aldren’s with Cidd and then simply continued walking in the direction of people and one thing had led to another. The miller’s wife had been having a difficult morning with the youngest and Ren had sat with her for a while. The children from the eastern houses had wanted someone to adjudicate a dispute about something that turned out to be extremely complicated for its apparent scale and she’d handled it with the focused diplomacy of someone who understood that small things were serious to the people they were small to. Elder Broft’s wife had been making preserves and had wanted company and Ren was constitutionally incapable of declining the offer of company.
She arrived home in the early afternoon in the good tired way — not depleted, just full, the way she felt after a day of being around people she liked.
Syla was at the kitchen table with the ledger.
"You were out all morning," Syla said, without looking up.
"I was visiting."
"Broft’s wife sent preserves," Syla said, nodding at a jar on the counter. "She gave them to you but you weren’t here so she gave them to me."
"She likes you."
"She likes you. She gave them for you." Syla turned a page. "Also Vera is in a mood because Father went to check the northern perimeter without telling her and she couldn’t follow because she was in the middle of the third sequence and didn’t want to stop."
Ren got a cup and sat down. "What kind of mood."
"The quiet kind."
"That’s the worst kind."
"Yes."
They sat for a moment in the particular comfortable silence of people who had been in the same space their whole lives and didn’t need to fill it.
"Syla," Ren said.
"Mm."
"Do you think Father was happy today."
Syla stopped writing.
She looked at the ledger for a moment. Then at the jar of preserves. Then, briefly, at Ren.
"He made the goldbroth noodles," she said.
"That’s what I thought too."
They were both quiet.
"He misses things sometimes," Ren said. Not a question.
"Yes," Syla said.
"I wish I could fix that."
Syla looked at her with an expression that was complicated in a way Ren understood — because she felt it too, the specific helplessness of caring about someone’s grief that you couldn’t reach. "You can’t fix missing things," Syla said. "You can just make sure there’s enough here that the missing doesn’t take over."
Ren thought about this.
"I’m good at that," she said.
"You’re very good at that," Syla agreed.
Ren smiled. Reached over and touched Syla’s hand once, briefly. Syla didn’t pull away.
Dinner was her domain.
This was simply the truth of the household. Cidd cooked when the other-world feeling was on him. Syla cooked when she was managing something. Ren cooked when it was time for dinner, which was most nights, because she was genuinely good at it and she liked the specific satisfaction of feeding people she loved.
She made something with the preserved vegetables from the cellar and the good spiced oil and the flatbread she’d learned from the baker’s wife three years ago. Not complicated. Just good, the way food that’s made with full attention is good regardless of what it is.
Vera came down from wherever her mood had taken her and sat in her chair and ate with the dedication of someone who had processed something physically and needed to refuel. Syla set the table. Mira came from the study looking like she’d been somewhere very far away in her head and had just returned to find herself hungry. Cidd came in from outside and washed his hands at the pump — the magic pump that nobody questioned — and sat down.
Ren put food in front of everyone.
The table was full and loud and warm.
Vera started explaining at length what she’d figured out about the seventh movement of the third sequence while she was in her mood and it turned out thinking angry was useful actually. Mira asked a question that redirected the entire explanation into something more technical and precise. Syla corrected a detail Vera got wrong about the form’s origin and Vera argued and Syla turned out to be right, which Vera accepted because Syla was always right about things she’d actually read.
Ren ate and listened and felt the table doing what it did — the specific aliveness of five people who knew each other completely taking up space in the same room at the same time.
She caught Cidd’s eye across the table.
He had the expression again. The one at the edges.
She smiled at him.
He looked back at his food.
She ate her dinner and said nothing about it and let it be what it was.
Late.
The house was quiet. The lamp in Mira’s study was still on — she could see the line of light under the door. Vera’s room was dark. Syla’s door was closed but no light, which meant she’d finally gone to sleep at a reasonable hour for once.
Ren stood in the hallway.
She looked at the light under the study door.
She went to the kitchen. Made tea — the strong one, the one that kept you going rather than the one that settled you down, because if Mira was still in the study at this hour she was in the middle of something and didn’t want to stop.
She went to the study door.
Knocked once, soft.
Mira’s voice: "Come in."
She opened the door. Set the tea on the corner of the desk that wasn’t covered in books. Mira glanced at it, glanced at her, went back to the page.
"Thank you," Mira said.
"Don’t stay past the third hour," Ren said.
"I’ll stay until I’m finished."
"Third hour," Ren said again. Not a request. The specific tone she used for the small number of things she was actually firm about.
Mira looked at her.
"Third hour," she agreed.
Ren nodded. Pulled the door mostly closed.
Stood in the hallway.
Looked at Cidd’s door.
The lamp was off. Which meant he’d gone to sleep at a reasonable hour, or at least gone to his room, which was close enough.
She stood there for a moment in the dark hallway.
Then she went to his door. Pressed her hand flat against it once, briefly. The way you’d check that a fire was still warm without opening the grate.
Satisfied.
She went to her room. Got into bed. Arranged the pillow. Pulled the blanket to exactly the right height.
Outside Ashfeld was quiet. The pine hills were dark. The stars were doing their thing.
She closed her eyes.
She thought about the goldbroth noodles and the things he missed and what Syla had said about making sure there was enough here that the missing didn’t take over.
She was very good at that.
She was going to keep being very good at that.
She went to sleep.