Chapter 8 — If You Win
The trouble started, as trouble in this house frequently did, with Ren.
Specifically it started at the sixth hour of morning when Cidd did what he did every morning without incident for ten years — knocked on her door, opened it, said her name in the tone that meant breakfast was happening and she needed to be part of it.
What happened next was new.
"Mmm," Ren said, from the center of her bed, from the precise warm center of her carefully maintained sleep arrangement, without opening her eyes. "Kiss."
Cidd stood in the doorway.
"Ren."
"Wake up kiss," she said, with the clarity of someone who had been planning this sentence since before she fell asleep. "It’s more effective than sound. Scientifically."
"That’s not science."
"Father." She opened one eye. "I’m very tired. The festival was yesterday. My body needs a gentle reintroduction to consciousness." She closed the eye. "Kiss on the forehead. Very normal. Daughters get those."
"Get up."
"I’m considering it." A pause. "The consideration is going better with a kiss."
"Ren."
"Just a small one —"
"Breakfast is ready."
Both eyes opened. She assessed him from the pillow with the specific look of someone recalculating. "What are we having."
"Eggs and the good bread."
A longer pause.
"I’ll be down in four minutes," she said. "But I want it noted that I’m doing this under protest and the kiss conversation isn’t finished."
"It’s finished."
"It’s resting," she said. "There’s a difference."
She came downstairs in three minutes which was a personal record and immediately sat in her chair and looked at the table and then at Cidd and said to the table at large: "I asked Father for a wake up kiss and he said no."
The table received this information.
Vera looked up from her food. "You asked for what."
"A wake up kiss. Very normal thing. Daughters and fathers —"
"That is not a normal thing —"
"It’s extremely normal in some cultures —"
"WHAT CULTURES —"
"Vera," Cidd said.
Vera pointed at Ren. "She asked you —"
"I know what she asked."
"And you said no."
"I said no."
Vera sat back with the expression of someone who had complicated feelings about this outcome — relieved on one level, irritated on another, and somewhere underneath both of those things making a note for future reference.
Syla had gone pink at some point during the exchange and was now looking at her eggs with complete focus in the way she looked at things when she was trying to become less visible.
Mira was eating with the composed expression she used when she was observing data.
"To be clear," Ren said, to everyone, "I’m going to keep asking."
"To be clear," Cidd said, "the answer is going to keep being no."
"That’s fine." Ren picked up her fork. "I have time."
Vera made a noise that was not quite a word.
Syla made a noise that was not quite a noise.
Mira wrote something small on the edge of her napkin.
Cidd drank his tea and considered that the day had barely started.
The village tournament was an annual thing.
Not formal — nobody had organized it officially, it had just accreted over generations the way village traditions did, through repetition and the human tendency to make competition out of anything that could be competed at. Sword forms for the young men. Strength tests. Archery. A cooking competition that the baker’s wife had won eleven years running and that everyone entered anyway out of respect for the tradition and hope for a miracle.
It happened in the square the morning after the festival when the decorations were still up and the energy hadn’t quite gone yet and people wanted one more reason to be outside together before the work week came back.
Vera had been preparing for the sword tournament specifically since approximately the moment she learned it existed.
She had been preparing with the focused dedication of someone who viewed a village sword tournament not as a fun community event but as a personal assessment opportunity and also an opportunity to do something in front of Cidd that would make him proud, which she would not have said out loud but which was the actual primary motivation underneath everything else.
She found him at the edge of the square mid-morning, watching the first of the preliminary rounds, drinking tea with the peaceful expression of a man who had completed his morning tasks and was now enjoying the day.
She stood next to him.
"I’m going to win," she said.
"Probably," he said.
"Not probably. Definitely."
He looked at her sideways. "Confidence is good. Overconfidence gets you hit."
"I’m not overconfident. I’m accurate." She watched the two young men in the ring with the assessing eye she’d been developing for four years. "Aldren’s son drops his right shoulder before he attacks. The miller’s apprentice telegraphs with his feet. Neither of them has fought anything that fights back."
He said nothing. Which meant she was right, which she knew, but hearing nothing from him was its own kind of confirmation.
"If I win," she said.
"Mm."
"You have to do anything I want."
He looked at her properly now. The look he used when he was deciding whether something was a joke. She met it with complete seriousness.
"Anything," he said.
"Within reason," she added, because she was strategic and she knew the word anything would make him cautious and cautious meant no. "One thing. My choice. You can’t say no."
He considered this.
She waited.
He looked back at the ring. "If you win without using anything I haven’t taught you," he said, "one thing. Your choice."
She had already been going to win. This just made winning mean something specific.
"Deal," she said.
She walked toward the registration table with the energy of someone who had just signed a very satisfying contract.
Syla had not entered the tournament.
This was partly because competitive sword fighting was not her primary interest and partly because she had found something more interesting to do, which was the cluster of village children who had gathered at the edge of the square watching the tournament with the distracted energy of children who wanted to be part of something but weren’t sure how.
She had been passing by. She had noticed. She had stopped.
"Do you want to learn something," she’d said to the nearest child, a girl of about seven with her mother’s eyes and a piece of festival ribbon still in her hair.
The girl had looked at her with the assessment children applied to older children who spoke to them — determining authority, intent, interest level.
"What kind of something," the girl said.
"Magic," Syla said.
The girl turned to her friends. A rapid wordless communication happened. Then they all looked at Syla.
She sat down in the grass at the edge of the square.
They sat in a semicircle in front of her.
She showed them the simplest thing she knew — a small light, mana shaped into a sphere no bigger than an apple, floating between her palms. Warm, steady, the color of afternoon sun.
The children were absolutely still.
She handed it to the nearest one.
It popped like a bubble when he touched it and he jerked back and then laughed and everyone laughed and Syla made another one.
That was how it started.
Within twenty minutes she had eleven children and the semicircle had become a full circle and she was in the middle of it teaching them how to feel for the mana inside themselves — not use it, not yet, just feel for it, like finding a heartbeat, just knowing it was there — with the patient precise gentleness of someone who had been taught exactly this way and had never forgotten how it felt to find it for the first time.
Elder Broft passed by.
Stopped.
Watched for a moment.
Moved on with an expression that suggested he was filing something away.
Mira was at Garren’s shop.
Not because she’d been asked — Garren hadn’t asked, would never have asked, was constitutionally unable to ask for things after two years of managing alone. She was there because she was there, the same way she was everywhere that had a problem she could see the shape of.
The problem today was the post-festival accounting, which Garren was doing at the counter with the focused suffering of a man who was very good at selling things and not very good at the records that followed.
She sat across from him.
He looked at her.
She held out her hand.
He gave her the ledger.
She had it organized in forty minutes. Cross-referenced against yesterday’s sales, which she’d recorded, categorized by item type, with a note at the bottom about the supply recommendations she’d made yesterday and a projected income figure for next year’s festival if he implemented them.
Garren looked at the ledger.
Looked at her.
"You’re ten," he said.
"You’ve mentioned that," Mira said.
"I keep hoping it’ll start making sense."
She closed the ledger. Pushed it back to him. "The carved figures are your highest margin item. You make them yourself so the material cost is minimal. You made fourteen this year and sold all of them. If you made twenty five next year —"
"I can only carve so fast," he said. "These hands aren’t what they were."
She looked at his hands. At the particular stiffness in his right knuckles that she’d noticed yesterday and hadn’t mentioned because it wasn’t the moment.
"Have you seen the healer about your hands," she said.
He was quiet.
"Garren."
"It’s just age," he said.
"Age is a reason, not a solution." She stood up. "I’ll ask Syla. She knows more about remedies than the healer does."
"You don’t have to —"
"I know," she said. Which meant she was going to anyway.
Ren had set up at the edge of the food stalls.
This had not been planned. She’d been walking through the square and had stopped to talk to the baker’s wife and then to the miller’s wife and then to Brenvar who was judging the strength competition with the expression of a man taking this responsibility seriously, and somewhere in all of that she had simply become part of the day — helping carry things, holding things while people sorted them, being the person who knew where everything was because she’d been paying attention.
At some point someone had given her a task and she’d done it and then been given another task and she’d done that too and by midday she was functionally running the food distribution end of the post-festival market with the cheerful authority of someone who had never been officially put in charge and therefore felt no pressure about it.
She also kept track of the sword tournament.
Specifically she kept track of Vera’s matches.
Vera won all of them.
Not easily — not the later ones, anyway. Aldren’s son she handled in thirty seconds, the shoulder tell she’d identified exactly as predictable as expected. The miller’s apprentice took longer because his telegraphing was consistent but his reach was longer than hers and she had to work around it, which she did, methodically, with the patience of someone who had been taught to see a fight as a problem to solve.
The third match was against a man from the eastern farms who was thirty years old and had been winning this tournament for four years and who looked at the ten year old girl standing across from him with an expression that cycled through several stages before settling on careful.
He was right to be careful.
She won in two minutes.
The fourth match — the final — was against the guard captain’s eldest, nineteen, trained properly, who had watched the previous matches and made adjustments accordingly. He came in with a different approach than the others — more conservative, testing, not committing.
Vera recognized the approach. Cidd used it.
It took her four minutes.
When it was done the square was louder than it had been during the festival and Vera was standing in the center of the ring with the controlled expression she wore when she was extremely pleased and was not going to show it yet because there was someone specific she needed to show it to first.
She found him at the edge of the square where she’d left him.
Still with the tea. Which was impossible, it should have been cold by now, but he had a warming enchantment on the cup that he’d made himself and never mentioned because he didn’t mention most things he made.
He was looking at her with the expression.
The one at the edges.
"I won," she said.
"I saw," he said.
"Without anything you didn’t teach me."
"I know."
"So." She looked at him with complete directness. "One thing. My choice. You can’t say no."
He held her gaze.
"One thing," he confirmed.
She had been thinking about this since the moment he’d agreed to the deal. Since before that, honestly. Since the step, since the night she’d told him and he hadn’t argued and she’d fallen asleep against his arm.
"A full day," she said. "Just you and me." She held his gaze without flinching. "A date."
The square was loud around them.
In that particular spot it went very quiet.
He looked at her.
She looked back.
"Vera —"
"You said one thing, my choice, you can’t say no," she said. "Those were your exact words. I have witnesses." She gestured broadly at the village of Ashfeld which had, over the course of the tournament, become entirely aware of this conversation and was now watching it with the focused attention of people who had correctly identified that something historic was happening.
Cidd looked at the village of Ashfeld watching him.
He looked at Vera.
He looked at the tea in his hand.
"A day," he said. "As in —"
"Father and daughter," she said, and then without a single change in expression, "on a date."
From somewhere to the left there was a sound.
It was Ren, who had arrived at some point during the final match and was currently standing six feet away with her hand over her mouth and an expression of absolute delight.
From somewhere behind her came Syla, who had heard from a child who had heard from someone else and had arrived just in time to hear the word date and had gone the color of the autumn leaves on the pine hills.
Mira materialized from the direction of Garren’s shop with the expression of someone who had predicted something and was now watching the prediction play out and was experiencing complicated feelings about being correct.
"She asked for a DATE," Ren said, to nobody in particular, to everybody in particular, at a volume that confirmed that yes, the entire square knew, and also possibly people in Drenfall.
"It’s a father daughter day," Vera said calmly.
"You called it a DATE —"
"Semantics."
"THAT’S NOT SEMANTICS THAT’S THE ENTIRE —"
"Ren," Cidd said.
Ren stopped.
Everyone looked at him.
He looked at Vera.
She looked back with the patience of someone who had already won and knew it and was simply waiting for the paperwork to be completed.
"One day," he said.
Her expression did something enormous that she contained in approximately one second and replaced with calm. "One day."
"Not a date."
"A day," she agreed, in a tone that agreed with the word and nothing else.
He closed his eyes briefly.
Opened them.
"Fine," he said.
The square cheered.
Ren made a sound that was somewhere between a scream and a laugh.
Syla turned to face a completely different direction and appeared to be having a conversation with the air.
Mira wrote something in the small notebook she kept in her pocket and underlined it twice.
Vera turned back to the ring where the guard captain’s eldest was still standing, slightly dazed by the last four minutes of his life.
"Good match," she told him.
He stared at her.
She walked back to her family with the contained satisfaction of someone who had executed a plan perfectly and was now ready to move on to the next phase.
The afternoon unwound slowly.
The tournament ended. The square stayed full — people in no hurry to go home, children running between adult legs, the musicians playing again because someone had asked and they never needed much convincing.
Vera stayed near Cidd for the rest of the day with the specific proximity of someone who had won something and was enjoying the winning. Not loud about it. Just there. A step closer than usual. Occasionally looking up at him with an expression that was pure Vera — direct, decided, completely unashamed.
He bore this with the patience he applied to most things Vera did.
Ren had recovered from her initial reaction and graduated to the stage of thinking about it, which was in some ways more dangerous. She circulated through the afternoon crowd with her usual warm efficiency but Cidd could tell — could always tell with Ren — that part of her was somewhere else, turning something over.
She found him at the water trough at the edge of the square late in the afternoon.
"Father," she said.
"Mm."
"When I win something," she said, "I want the same deal."
"Win something first."
"I’m going to win something." She looked at the square thoughtfully. "What competitions do you have."
"That’s your problem to solve."
She looked at him sideways. Then she smiled — the real one, the one that was different from her regular smile, that had something quieter in it. "You agreed to it," she said. "The day. You didn’t have to but you did."
He said nothing.
"I know why," she said, still in the quiet tone.
He looked at her.
She had already turned back toward the square. "Come on," she said, over her shoulder, back to the full-volume Ren, "Brenvar is about to lose the strength competition to his own son and he needs moral support."
He followed her.
Syla spent the afternoon teaching.
The children had not gone home. Some of them had brought more children. She was sitting in the same spot at the edge of the square with a different, larger semicircle and she was teaching them about mana the way Cidd had taught her — patiently, precisely, making the difficult feel possible without pretending it was easy.
One of the children — the girl with the ribbon from this morning — had found her mana.
Not controlled it, not shaped it, just found it. Felt for it the way Syla had described and found something there, a warmth, a presence, the first awareness of a thing that had always existed but had never been noticed.
The girl’s face when it happened was something Syla recognized.
She’d made that face once. Sitting in this same village, years ago, when Cidd had shown her how to look for it.
She helped the girl hold onto it. Just hold it. Not do anything with it.
"What do I do now," the girl said.
"Nothing today," Syla said. "Just know it’s there. Come back tomorrow if you want to learn more."
The girl looked at her with the complete focused trust of a child who had just been shown something real.
"Will you teach me," she said.
Syla looked at the circle of children. At the afternoon light on the square. At her father at the other end of it, talking to Brenvar while Ren stood beside him being a narrative force.
"Yes," she said. "I’ll teach you."
She hadn’t planned that.
It felt like something that had been waiting to be said.
That evening, home, the kitchen full and loud and warm.
Ren had cooked. The good stew, with the herbs from the garden and the preserved vegetables, the one that meant she was in a generous mood which she clearly was.
Vera sat in her chair — properly, for once, not sideways — with the expression of someone whose day had gone exactly right.
Syla talked more than usual. The girl with the ribbon, what she’d felt, how her face had looked. Her voice had the particular quality it got when she’d found something that mattered to her — slightly faster, eyes brighter, the shyness retreating in the face of something she cared about more than she feared the attention.
Mira reported on Garren’s accounts and Garren’s hands and the conversation she’d had with Cidd’s medical book that she’d found in the study this morning, which she’d cross referenced against the herb garden’s current contents, and her conclusion that a specific compress applied three times weekly would help significantly.
Cidd listened to all of them and ate his food and had the expression.
The one at the edges.
Under the table Vera found it necessary to check that his hand was still there, which she did by putting her hand next to it briefly and then returning to her stew as if nothing had happened.
He let her.
After dinner — after the washing up, after Mira went to the study and Syla went to make tea and Ren was halfway through a story about Brenvar’s son that had no clear ending but was clearly not finished — Vera found him on the back step.
She sat beside him.
The stars were doing their thing.
"Father," she said.
"Mm."
"I’ve been thinking about our day."
"Have you."
"I want to go to the forest. The eastern part, not the northern. And I want you to teach me the mana pressure thing you did with the bear." She looked at the clearing. "And I want to eat something from your other world. Something I haven’t had before."
He was quiet for a moment.
"That’s three things," he said.
"It’s one day with three activities," she said. "Completely different."
He looked at her.
She looked back.
"Fine," he said.
She leaned against his arm.
He let her.
From upstairs came the sound of Ren, who had apparently concluded her story and was now singing something quietly, and from inside the kitchen the soft sound of Syla moving cups, and from the study the lamp still on, Mira still reading.
He looked at the ring on his hand.
At the star-covered sky.
At Vera leaning against him with her eyes closed and the contained satisfied expression of someone whose life was going according to plan.
He chose it again.
The same thing every evening.
Every morning.
Every day in between.