T

The bus sighs down the last cobbled grade and stops with its nose pointed at gray-green water, and Sera is already out of her seat before the door opens, one hand on the rail, the other up like she's flagging a cab. "Convalescence," she's saying to Galahad, who has not left his seat and looks like a man being asked to approve a holiday. "It's a word. It means we take a week and nobody asks us to kill anything." Galahad folds his arms. "A week." "A week, sir knight. A hot bath, a bed that doesn't move, and somebody else's cooking." She grins at him, all teeth and auburn, and Galahad—who watched a quarter mile of ridge turn to glass yesterday—actually snorts. "The last time I took a week," he says, "the Danes came." "Then don't take one," Sera says. "We will."

Aria steps down onto the gravel with her hair already lifting in the salt wind, and the afterimage of the hill is still there behind her eyes—the six seconds, the smoke, the sound the rock made—but it's a thing she's carrying now, not a thing carrying her. Her hands are steady. Her knees know how to take her weight. Fen is at her elbow before she's taken three steps, and up close the girl looks like she hasn't slept and has decided to make that everyone's problem. "I want to stay," Fen says, and then, immediately, quieter, like she's correcting her own tone: "With the party. While the knights go back. I'd—there's a hostel in the village and I can file from anywhere and nobody at the hall will miss me, I've checked, I made a list of who'd notice and it's three people and two of them are on this bus." Her ears are going pink. She keeps her eyes on Aria's collarbone instead of her face. "I'm asking. I'm aware that's not how this works, but I'm asking anyway."

Behind Fen, on the top step of the bus, Gareth has gone still. One hand finds his coat pocket and his face does the thing it does when he doesn’t like how things are shaping up: the eyes go flat and the mouth sets and he says nothing at all. Galahad watches him from the seat, unhurried, the way a man watches weather he's already decided not to argue with. Aria lets the silence run long enough that Fen starts to fidget, then turns back to her with the wind in her teeth. "You made a list," she says. "Of who'd notice you were gone." Fen nods, once, like she's being graded. "You're going to fit in fine."

She looks at Gareth—really looks, past the pocket and the flat eyes—and it lands the way it did at the kitchen table: he's already doing the math on whether this is a defection or a loan, and the fact that he isn't saying so out loud is the closest thing to a gift the man owns. "She stays," Aria says, and it isn't a request, and Gareth's hand comes out of the pocket and hangs at his side, empty, the key still in there, unspent. Fen breathes out through her nose, sharp, and gets her pen up before she remembers there's nothing to write on, standing on a cobbled street with the sea going dark below the wall. Galahad shakes his head, saying nothing aloud as he pulls Gareth back into the seat, “Mistress Mithlass will look out for her, Gareth.” That's probably what Gareth is afraid of.

"Come on," Aria says, already turning toward the smell of salt and diesel and somebody's chips frying two streets over. "You clearly need to get out more. I can help with that."

Two streets over, the chips are frying in oil that's older than the sign above the door, and Sera's already got a paper cone in each hand before anyone else has caught up — one for her, one she holds out to Fen like a bribe she's confident will land. Then it comes, quiet and close, a voice in Aria's skull that isn't her own:

She made a list of who'd notice.

Sera doesn't look over; she's still negotiating with the man at the fryer over salt and vinegar, but the thought arrives with her particular warmth, dry and delighted, like she's telling Aria a secret in a crowded room.

Keep her. I like her. She's the only one on that bus who checked first.

Aria doesn't answer out loud — she catches Sera's eye across the crowd and lifts one brow, which is enough, and Sera grins around a mouthful of potato like a woman who has just won an argument nobody else heard. Mike's already claimed a bench by the harbor wall, long legs stretched out, and Dani's beside him with her boots up on the rail, watching the water go from gray to slate as the light drops. Marcus has cornered Fen at the end of the bench and is talking at her about tide charts with the specific joy of a man who has found a fresh audience, and Fen — pen out at last, scribbling on the back of a chip wrapper — is actually writing things down. Aria settles onto the wall between Mike and Dani with her own cone of chips going cold in her hands, and for a minute nobody says anything at all. The sea does the talking. It's the first time since the hill that the quiet in her chest isn't the shape of the hill.

Then Gareth comes down the cobbles with his coat buttoned wrong and stops a few feet off, not sitting, not leaving, and Aria watches him do the arithmetic one more time — the hall, the report, the analyst who stayed behind on a bus that was supposed to carry her home. "We're just borrowing her," Aria says, before he can open his mouth. "You can have her back when we're done." Gareth's jaw works. He looks at Fen, who has not noticed him and is drawing a little diagram on her wrapper for Marcus, and something in his face gives a quarter-inch. "The hall won't like it," he says. "The hall can write me a strongly worded letter if they like, I promise to read it," Aria says mischievously, and holds out the paper cone of chips she hasn't touched. Gareth stares at it for a long second, then takes one, gives a half smile, and heads back to the bus.

The B&B sits at the top of the harbor road, a narrow stone house with a hand-painted sign that reads SEA VIEW and, beneath it, in smaller, more honest letters, MOSTLY. Sera takes the steps two at a time and gets the door open before anyone else reaches it, herding them in with both arms like a woman penning chickens. Inside smells of lemon polish and old carpet and someone's actual dinner, and the woman behind the desk looks up, takes in the six of them — the knight, the archmage, the elf, the two women who move like they're used to being the most dangerous thing in the room — and hands over keys without a single question. Sera takes hers and Fen's off the hook before Fen can reach for them. "You're on the top floor with us," she says, and Fen's mouth opens, closes, and settles into something that isn't quite a smile but is trying to be.

Upstairs, the room is small and low-ceilinged, two beds under a sloped roof, a window that looks out over the water going pewter in the last of the light. Sera runs the tap until it's hot and washes her face with both hands, then flicks water at Fen, who flinches and laughs — an actual laugh, rusty from disuse, and she looks startled by the sound of it. Down the hall, Marcus and Mike have claimed a room and are still arguing through the wall about whether the chips were better than a proper American fry, Marcus making the case for the vinegar and Mike refusing on principle, their voices rising and falling like the tide. Dani pulls Aria into their room and closes the door and just stands there a moment, holding both of Aria's hands, looking at her the way she's been looking at her since the hill — like she's checking the arithmetic of her wife and finding it adds up.

"You did good down there," Dani says, quiet. "With the girl. With Gareth." She tucks a strand of silver-blond hair behind Aria's pointed ear, and her thumb stays there a beat longer than it needs to. "Now come on. I'm starving, and I want to see what a Welsh pub thinks it's doing." She takes Aria's hand again — the same hand, the same grip, palm to palm and fingers laced — and leads her back down the narrow stairs, where Sera and Fen are already waiting at the door and Mike and Marcus have finally stopped arguing long enough to find their coats.

The pub is called the Ship and it leans into the hill like it's been holding the same position since before anyone thought to write it down, low beams and whitewashed stone and a fire in a hearth wide enough to stand a person in. Inside it's all talk — Welsh on one side of the room, English on the other, a table of men arguing about rugby with their pints half-sunk into the wood — and nobody looks up when the six of them come in, which is its own small mercy. Sera finds the corner booth first, a big scarred semicircle of a thing built for a crew, and slides in with her back to the wall like the habit never left her. Mike takes the far end, Dani folds in beside him, Marcus and Fen land opposite, and Aria ends up in the crook of the curve with Sera's knee already against hers under the table and Dani's boot nudging her ankle. The whole party, arranged by nothing in particular into a shape that keeps all of them in sight of each other.

The food comes out of the kitchen in a tide — lamb stew dark with stout, two pies with crusts like roofing slate, a plate of fish that was swimming this morning, and bread thick enough to build with. The ale comes in pints, and Aria wraps both hands around hers and drinks like a woman who has earned it, and it's good, honest, malty, and she's halfway down the glass before Fen — three seats away, mid-sentence about tide charts — makes a small strangled sound. Aria looks up. Fen is staring at the pint. The pint is no longer ale. It's pale and fizzing and the color of a blush, and it's been that way for the last three swallows, and Aria has absolutely no memory of deciding to do that. She sets the glass down slow. Under the table her fingers move against her thigh, the old gesture, the one that's half habit and half apology to a world that keeps catching her mid-miracle, and she feels the little tug of the working she must have cast without noticing — a cantrip, a nothing, a flick of Prestidigitation that turned her bitter pint sweet and pink because some part of her wanted it and her hands have stopped asking permission. She lifts the glass and drinks again, and it stays rosé, and she tips it at Fen with the exact expression of a woman who chose this on purpose. "House special," she says. "You have to ask for it."

Fen's mouth opens, closes, opens again. She has the pen out before she knows she's doing it, the cap already off, and she gets as far as writing "subject can transmute—" before Aria's hand comes across the table and takes it, clean, two fingers and a thumb, and flips it end over end over Fen's head to the far end of the booth where Mike catches it one-handed without looking up from his stew. Fen makes a noise like a kettle finding its note. "That was a primary source," she says. "That was a primary source and you just—" "You were going to write 'transmute,'" Aria says, and drinks. "It's not transmutation. It's a cantrip. It's the same trick that keeps my boots clean." She leans in, conspiratorial, lowering her voice to the register of a woman sharing a secret that is also a lie, because the room is full of strangers and one of them has been watching their booth since the door. "Every elf can do it. It's in the blood." Fen stares at her. Then at the pint. Then at Sera, who is eating her pie with the serene expression of a woman who has watched her wife commit a misdemeanor against physics and decided not to testify.

Dani doesn't look up from her pie when she says it, which is the whole trick of it — the flat delivery of a woman who has decided the funniest possible move is to pretend she isn't making one. "You're the only elf in the world, though." She drags a fork through the crust, carves off a corner, keeps her eyes on her plate. "So when you tell her every elf can do it, you're technically telling her every elf on Earth can do it. Which is just you. Which means she already knew that." She lifts the fork, finally meets Fen's eye across the table, and chews with the unhurried patience of a woman watching a stone skip across a pond. "Sorry. I didn't want you to build a whole theory on a sample size of one."

Fen's hand is still up in the air where the pen used to be. Her fingers close on nothing, open again, close — a small mechanical grief, the way a tongue keeps finding the socket of a missing tooth. She looks down the booth at Mike, who has the pen laid flat beside his stew and no intention of giving it back, and something in her face does the math on whether she can ask for it and survives the answer. She doesn't ask. She sits on both hands instead, which is somehow worse, and Aria watches her do it and watches her decide to do it, the whole negotiation happening behind her eyes in under a second: the analyst's reflex screaming *record this, this is primary data, there will never be another first pint* against the newer, shakier instinct that says *they kept you, don't be the woman who takes notes on dinner.* The newer instinct wins. Barely. Fen's jaw sets like she's swallowing a stone, and she reaches for her own ale with a hand that's doing its best impression of a hand that was never holding a pen at all.

"You know," Sera says, from the crook of the booth, conversationally, to nobody, "she's going to remember every word of this anyway. She doesn't need the pen. She's got the whole thing filed." Fen goes very still. Sera's knee presses a little harder against Aria's under the table, and she tips her glass at the girl with the mild, terrible warmth of a woman who has just handed someone a compliment shaped exactly like a threat — because it is one, and it's true, and Fen knows it's true, and the knowing is what makes her ears go from pink to red and her hand come down flat on the scarred wood like she's pinning something in place. Across the booth, Mike finally looks up from his stew, catches Aria's eye over the rim of his glass, and raises one eyebrow in the exact dialect of brothers — the one that says *she's fine, this is fine, keep going* — then goes back to his stew without a word, which is its own small permission.

Mike's eyebrow is all the permission Aria needs. She leans across the scarred wood, elbows on the table, chin propped on her knuckles, and gives Fen the slow, delighted once-over of a cat that has just heard a mouse's footsteps stop. "Primary Source…" she says. "I don't think I've ever been one of those." Aria smiles genuinely now at the young analyst, “I'll take it though, as long as you won't complain when I get us matching t-shirts, mine will say ‘Primary Source’ and your will say, ‘Primary Source stole my pen’.” Fen's hand comes up like she's going to argue and then just—doesn't. Her mouth works. Her ears are still red. Sera snorts into her ale and doesn't even pretend it was the ale's fault.

Down the booth, Marcus sets his glass on the wood with a small, deliberate click, the way a man does when he's about to enjoy himself at someone else's expense and wants everyone to know it's coming. "Fen," he says, and his voice has gone into the particular register Aria has learned to recognize over two years and one apocalypse—warm, devastating, absolutely on her side and absolutely not on Fen's. "You can't give Aria an inch when it comes to these things. You give her an inch and she'll take the whole booth." He turns his glass a quarter-turn, watching the light through it, and the wry smile arrives on schedule. "She's like a hunting dog when she thinks she's found a good way to entertain the room. She'll point at you and she'll hold the point until somebody throws the ball, and the ball is you, Fen, the ball is always going to be you."

Fen's pen arm has gone slack at her side. She looks from Marcus to Aria and back, trying to find the seam in it, the place where the joke ends and the information starts, and finding neither. "That's—" she says, and stops, because Marcus isn't finished.

"It isn't personal," he says, and means it, and the smile goes a shade softer around the edges. "It means she likes you. It means she wants you to stick around. She doesn't bother with people she's decided not to keep." He lifts his glass, tips it an inch toward Fen, and drinks. "Being teased and embarrassed by Aria is like getting Galahad to show you his sword collection. It's not an insult. It's an invitation. The only question is whether you're going to stand there with your mouth open or sit down and look at the swords."

A

Aria sets her glass down and holds up one finger, and the whole booth goes quiet in the particular way a table goes quiet when the person most likely to cause trouble has just raised a hand. "First of all," she says, and the bell of her voice has gone flat and amused, "I don't *keep* people. Nobody in this booth is a horse. I don't own anybody, I don't hold anybody's papers, and if I ever start talking like I do, one of you is legally required to hit me." She turns to Fen, and the flatness softens into something with a grin behind it. "Especially you. You're not a hunting dog and I'm not pointing at you. Marcus has a very cinematic way of describing me and about sixty percent of it is true."

"Second of all," she says, and leans back, and the wind of it is all mirth now, "I didn't keep you. I told Gareth I was *borrowing* you. Those are different words and he knows it and he ate a chip about it." She ticks it off on her fingers like she's reading minutes. "So here's the deal, Fen. You're on loan. The library rental period ends when you say it ends, and if you want to go home and be weird at Gareth instead, that's a valid choice and I'll walk you to the bus myself. But if you want to stay—" she spreads her hands, palms up, the whole scarred table between them, "—then stay. Just don't be weird in a *bad* way. Weird in a good way is encouraged. Weird in a bad way and it's back to the hall with you, and you can be weird with Gareth in the dark, and he can *file* it."

Fen stares at her for a beat, then two, and something in her face cracks along a line it's clearly been holding shut for a long time — she laughs, a real one, short and startled, and she has to put her hand flat on the table to steady it. She looks down the booth at Gareth's empty seat like she's checking the distance, then back at Aria. "Fine," she says, and picks up her own pint, and drinks to it. "But I'm writing the t-shirt thing down later. Once I get my pen back." She doesn't look at Mike when she says it, and Mike doesn't look at her, and the pen stays exactly where it is.

Aria stands, tucks two cloth napkins off the table without ceremony, and says, "Back in a minute," to nobody in particular — the way a woman steps out to check on a horse, not the way a woman steps out to powder her nose. The booth barely registers it. Marcus is mid-anecdote, Sera's knee is still against the empty space where Aria's knee was, and Fen is pretending with great discipline not to look at Mike's stew, which is where the pen is.

She's back before Marcus finishes the anecdote. Same doorway, same low beam, same salt wind off the harbor pushing in behind her — except she's holding two shirts now, folded flat over one forearm, and the napkins are gone. She drops the first one in front of Fen with a snap of violet cotton and silver glitter that catches the firelight and throws little flecks of it across the scarred wood. The shirt reads, in lettering that looks hand-cut and is absolutely not: PRIMARY SOURCE STOLE MY PEN. Fen's mouth opens. Then Aria shakes out the second one — nearly identical, same violet, same glitter, same font — and turns it around so the booth can read it. PRIMARY SOURCE. She pulls it on over her head in one motion, tugging it down past her ribs, and the silver lettering settles across her chest like it was always there. "There," she says, and sits back down in the crook of the booth, and picks up her pint, which is still rosé. "Now we match. It's a whole thing."

Fen's hands close around the cotton before her brain catches up, and she holds it out at arm's length like it might go off. "You made this," she says. Not a question. "In the toilet. In under a minute."

"I made it in the hallway," Aria says, “what kind of lunatic does magical embroidery in the toilet?" She tips her glass and the ale stays rosé, and Fen looks at the shirt, then at Aria's chest where PRIMARY SOURCE sits in silver, then down at her own lap where PRIMARY SOURCE STOLE MY PEN is lying face-up on her knees like a warrant. "It's a cantrip," Aria says, mild. "Same one that keeps my boots clean and my ale pink and my dress unwrinkled. It's not even a spell, it's a *chore*."

Fen's jaw works. Then she pulls the shirt on over her head — awkward, elbows everywhere, her glasses going crooked — and tugs it down past her ribs, and the lettering settles across her chest, and the whole booth gets a look at it. Marcus sets his glass down and applauds, slow, twice, and doesn't stop grinning. Sera hooks her ankle around Aria's under the table and drains the rest of her pint in one pull. Mike, at the far end, finally picks the pen up off the wood, holds it over the table between two fingers, and waits until Fen sees it before he sets it back down exactly where it was. "You can have it back," he says. "You just have to ask her for it."

Fen looks between them — the two shirts, the pen, the rosé pint, the whole scarred booth of them arranged in a shape that keeps her in it — and something in her face does the last quarter-inch of a decision she's been circling since the bus. She leans forward, elbows on the wood, and tell Mike, “You keep it."