Chương 19: Small, Stupid things.

Voss's kitchen had a radio problem, which was to say it had no radio at all, and Aurelian had apparently decided this was a crisis worth solving personally.

"We need music," he announced, dropping into a chair at the table hard enough that the whole thing rocked.

"Not garrison drums. Not the bell. Actual music. I'm going insane in this house."

"You've been in this house for months," Keth said, not looking up from the bread he was slicing, thinner than Voss ever managed, more even, a habit he'd picked up without quite noticing when he'd started taking over the morning meals more often than not.

"I've been surviving this house for months. There's a difference." Aurelian propped his boots on the table's edge until Voss, passing through with a stack of requisition forms, kicked them back down without breaking stride or looking over.

"Ow. Anyway. There's a tavern near the harbor gate that has an actual fiddle player some nights. I heard two conscripts talking about it."

"We don't have coin for taverns."

"We have coin for one tavern visit, and I'm proposing we make that visit tonight, because I have decided that if I don't hear something other than wind and Lira correcting my footwork one more time this week, I will personally set fire to the training post out of sheer boredom."

"You don't have a Flame Echo."

"I'll find a way." Aurelian grinned, wide and unbothered, and Keth found himself smiling despite the early hour, because some part of him, the part that had spent weeks quietly grieving an empty mattress still recognized how badly he needed exactly this kind of nonsense in his life right now.

"I want to go," Keth admitted, and Aurelian's grin somehow widened further, as if he'd been expecting more of a fight.

"Obviously you want to go. You like dancing more than you like most people, don't pretend otherwise."

"That's not true."

"It's completely true. You danced with three separate barracks kids at the winter solstice gathering and none of them could keep up with you, and afterward you tried to teach me the footwork for an hour and I still don't understand what my feet were supposed to be doing."

Keth didn't argue that, mostly because it was true, and he'd never quite been able to explain to anyone why it felt so different from sword drills, the same discipline, the same attention to where his body sat in space, except dancing never once asked him to imagine hurting someone at the end of it. It was the one thing that felt, in his whole life since the breach, entirely his own. Nobody had taught it to him for survival.

He'd simply liked it, the way some people liked bread warm from the oven, the way Talia liked pulling things apart to see what they were made of.

"Fine," Keth said.

"Tonight. But I'm not paying for your ale if you get us thrown out again."

"That happened one time."

"It happened enough times that the barkeep at the last place recognized your face and asked if Voss knew where you were."

"Voss always knows where I am. That's a him problem, not a me problem."

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. Talia joined them at the yard gate that evening, having somehow talked her squad leader into an early release with what Keth suspected was another confidently delivered lie, and she arrived already mid-sentence about something she'd apparently been thinking about all day.

"—so the thing is, if the coral's hollow the way I think it is, then it should be significantly lighter than it looks, right, buoyancy-wise, except when I actually lifted a piece it weighed almost exactly what a solid piece that size should weigh, which means either my density measurements were wrong, which, unlikely, I'm very careful, or there's something inside the hollow structure that isn't visible from a surface fracture, some kind of—""Talia," Aurelian said.

"We're going to a tavern." She blinked, visibly rebooting out of whatever internal monologue she'd been running since lunch.

"Oh. Yes. Good. I like taverns." A beat.

"Do you think the fiddle player would let me ask him where the wood for his instrument came from? Because if it's harvested from the Spiral Forest at all, the grain density would be completely different from normal timber and I've been wondering whether—""No," Aurelian said, already walking.

"You're not interrogating a fiddle player about wood density on my one night off from Lira's drills."

"You're no fun."

"I'm plenty fun, I just also want to have a normal evening for once in my life." Talia fell into step beside Keth instead, undeterred, her enthusiasm apparently requiring an audience regardless of which one agreed to listen.

"You'll let me tell you about the coral thing, right? Later. You're a good listener. You do this thing where you nod like you actually understand, even when I know you don't."

"I understand some of it," Keth said, which was mostly true. He understood the shape of her excitement even when the specifics of buoyancy and density measurements slid past him, and he'd found, over the months of knowing her, that the shape was usually the part that mattered most.

"That's more than most people manage." She bumped his shoulder with hers, friendly, easy.

"You know what I like about you, Keth? You never once told me to stop talking about this stuff because it's weird. Everyone in the barracks thinks I'm strange for caring this much about plant density and monster biology instead of, I don't know, whatever normal sixteen-year-olds are supposed to care about."

"I like that you care about it," Keth said, honest.

"Most things out there just want to kill us. It's nice that someone's trying to actually understand it instead." Talia went quiet for a second, a real quiet, not the performing kind she sometimes wore for effect, and something in her face softened before the grin came back, brighter than before.

"Good answer," she said.

"You're getting better at those."

The tavern was small, warm, crowded enough with off-duty soldiers and dock workers that nobody paid the three of them much mind, which suited Keth fine. The fiddle player was exactly as promised... an old man with a face like weathered rope, playing something quick and bright that had half the room tapping boots against the floorboards whether they meant to or not.

Aurelian got his ale, nursed it slower than usual after Keth's warning, and spent most of the evening arguing amiably with a table of off-duty conscripts about whose barracks had worse food, a debate that apparently had no possible winner and therefore no natural end.

Talia found a corner near the fire and struck up a conversation with an old dock worker who, to Keth's genuine amazement, turned out to know an unreasonable amount about which harbor plants could be brewed into something useful, and within twenty minutes she had produced a scrap of paper and was taking notes with the focused intensity of someone who had, quite by accident, stumbled into exactly the kind of night she loved best. Keth danced.

Not with anyone in particular at first, just alone near the edge of the floor, letting the fiddle's rhythm move through him the way it always did, footwork quick and light, the kind of motion that asked nothing of him except attention and joy.

A few dock girls pulled him properly into it eventually, laughing at how easily he picked up a pattern he'd never heard before, and for the length of three songs, Keth forgot entirely about walls and Echoes and brothers in barracks uniforms and the particular ache of watching someone you loved get slowly absorbed into a machine that didn't care what it cost him. He caught Aurelian watching him at one point, mid-argument, a strange, fond look on his face that Keth couldn't quite name.

"What?" Keth said, breathless, when he finally rejoined the table.

"Nothing." Aurelian's grin came back, softer than usual.

"Just — good to see you like this. That's all. You don't look like that very often anymore." Keth didn't have an answer for that. He drank his water, watched Talia scribble another note by the fire, watched the old fiddle player start into something slower, and let himself, just for one evening, exist as nothing more complicated than a boy who liked to dance and had good friends and a warm room to stand in. It wouldn't last.

He understood that, even in the middle of it — some part of him always understood, now, that peace came with a shelf life he couldn't read the date on. But he'd learned something from Lira's training that applied here too, he thought: you didn't refuse a good moment just because you knew it wouldn't hold. You took what it gave you, moved with it while it lasted, and let that be enough.

They walked home late, Aurelian slightly too loud, Talia still talking about brewed harbor plants, Keth quiet and warm and pleasantly tired in a way that had nothing to do with training. Voss was still awake when they got in, papers spread across the kitchen table, and he looked up at the three of them with something almost like relief on his face — the particular relief of a man who had spent the evening worrying quietly and was glad, now, to set the worry down.

"Good night?" he asked.

"Great night," Aurelian said, dropping into a chair.

"You should come next time. Might loosen you up."

"I loosened up twenty years ago," Voss said.

"It didn't take." Keth laughed — a real laugh, easy, unguarded — and went to bed that night with music still faintly ringing in his ears, and for the first time since the letter had arrived on a Tuesday months ago, he slept without dreaming of anything at all.