Yours

Rynn was the kind of child who would bloody his own nose pressing it against the glass to get a better look at the Mages at work. He did so, quietly, as if the House of Magi, the building itself, could feel pain. Perhaps it did.

The building was holy to him. The pinnacle of Magic. The entry-key to the House was mastery of the Arcane. This Arcane, shrouded in mystery, subject to speculation, is known to the general populace only by hearsay: wizened men turning themselves into children, women with power to fashion silk into gold,

The House was where he came across this dusty, unmarked tome, yellowing and brittle at the edges. The book was sacred to him. A Catalyst, a bearer of spell. He knew he was in the wrong for sneaking in, stealing it, and running out. But he couldn't just return it, that would be...wrong. It was dusty when he found it, and if he never took it, perhaps when he died it would have been dusty still. And as such, Rynn smuggled it in his bag. His parents were gone for the week. He had the house all alone to himself to read. No one needed to know.

At night, by candlelight, he tried to read the text. He couldn't. Such was the barrier of entry to magic: you are either born with it, or you must give something to read it. Rynn was a commoner in every sense of the word. No one, ever, in his family, had been blessed with the Arcane. The words either danced, vanished, or stung Rynn's hands when he tried to turn the pages.

Enraged at himself, and the book, Rynn took his candle, and set the pages aflame. For good measure, once the flames died he hurled it out the window, into the river his fishermen parents chose to make their living by.

And then, he slept soundly.

The morning came, and it hadn't burnt. It had returned, but better! The pages were clean and white, the leather binding's title was made clear (Rynn still couldn't read it), and it floated. Mid-air. And pulsated blue strobe lights. Rynn stared at it for a long time, before tucking it inside his cabinet.

The next day came, and when Rynn awakened and opened the closet, it was no longer a tome. White filaments had emerged from the pages, tendrils snaking, spreading outward, searching, scanning. Rynn slammed the closet, pushed his bed against it, and weighed the pros and cons of calling the Mages and going to jail versus whatever was in there.

Through the cracks of the cabinet, Rynn would sneak peeks. It grew blue threads, like veins, branching outward to his clothes, one branch snaking outside to the river. And with each passing day, it seemed to take form. Sometimes avian, sometimes humanoid, always, always, smelling of sea salt.

Rynn's dreams began to change, to visions of inside the House. Rooms not open to the public. Things it wanted Rynn to see. In them, a low, airy voice rang out:

"You have come to me, and I now come to you."

By week's end, it had forced its way out of the closet. It was no longer content with merely floating, no, it grew a body that morphed to mimic whatever it gazed at with its filaments: birds, Rynn, the stray animals outside the house. Its form of white filament and river-water tapped against everything inside, sometimes high and shrill, sometimes low and harsh. Rynn, trapped inside lest he open the world and let the world see what he had done, eyed the glowing blue core of it with fear.

The light blinked, and Rynn saw the world with new eyes: his house crumbling down, the letters written across the tome's new body reassembling and forming imperatives:

Trust me. Trust no one but me. Use me. Know me.

It inched closer to Rynn, before resting a tendril upon his forehead.

Become my power. Shape me. Form me.

Then the world faded to black.

Love me.

The new week had started. The parents came home. Rynn awoke to everything in his house looking back to normal.

There was a new "tome" inside his closet, nice and clean.

Rynn stared.

It stared back.

The artifacts did not need watching. Corvell understood this. The High Council understood this. Everyone in the House of Magi understood this, with the unspoken understanding reserved for things that mattered to no one. The artifacts had been bound, layered, leashed, and warded by mages whose names were now read aloud only on saint's days. They could not be stolen. They could not be removed. They could not, in any meaningful sense of the word, be misplaced.

Corvell, Keeper of the Reliquary, looked after them anyway.

He walked the long gallery of the Reliquary by candlelight, although the gallery would have lit itself the moment he stepped onto its first stone. The candle was for his own peace. The mage-lights of the House had a way of inferring his mood and adjusting their hue accordingly, and Corvell did not care to be a colour. Tonight he would be yellow and unsteady, like everyone else with a flame in their hand had been for ten thousand years.

He paused at the first case. The Reed of Hallorin, plucked, so the inscription claimed, from the bank where the goddess had wept. It looked, to Corvell, like a reed. He moved on.

The Spindle of Vetch. The Knot of Three Knots. The Mirror that Showed You as You Were Six Years Ago, Approximately. (That last one had been catalogued by Magus Owen, who had a romantic disposition and a flair for the imprecise.) Corvell murmured each name as he passed, not for the sake of ritual but because the alternative was thinking, and he had had quite enough of thinking for the evening.

He passed the Brazier of Antholine. He passed the Cup. He passed the case where the Cup's lid was kept, because the Cup and its lid had quarrelled in the year 614 and had not, by any of the methods so far attempted, been reconciled.

At the centre of the gallery, on a black pedestal beneath glass, lay Ariathy's Tome.

Corvell did not stop. He never stopped. To stop at Ariathy's Tome was to admit, even privately, that one had a favourite, and Corvell did not permit himself favourites. He had read about Ariathy as a boy, the master conjurer, who had once drawn an army of glass-pale figures out of a single jug of river water, and sent them walking. He had read about Ariathy as a young man. He had read about Ariathy as a magus of the third tier, and somewhere between the second tier and the first he had been quietly informed that he would never read about Ariathy again. The Tome was not for him. The Tome was not, in fact, for anyone. The Tome was for itself, and the House merely held the leash.

He glanced sidelong as he passed.

He stopped.

He walked back three paces.

The pedestal was as it had been on every night of nineteen years: black stone, faintly warm, faintly humming. He laid his palm flat against the glass and felt the absence of something he had felt without noticing for nineteen years, the way one feels the absence of a clock that has stopped ticking in another room.

The glass was clean. The wards were intact. The pedestal was bare.

Corvell stood very still. Around him, very gently, the mage-lights of the gallery began to find his mood, and could not agree on a colour.

"Oh," he said, to no one. "Oh, dear."

He did not run. One did not run in the Reliquary. The floors had been laid by a mage of strict temperament and were known to take a dim view. Corvell therefore walked, quickly, too quickly, to the brass bell beside the great door. The bell was rung twice in the career of a Keeper, on the day he took the post and on the day he laid it down. No Keeper in living memory had rung it in between. Corvell took the cord in both hands. They were not quite steady.

He pulled. The bell did not sound so much as arrive, somewhere behind the ear, in a long low note that travelled through stone and timber and into the dreams of every member of the High Council, wherever in the world they happened to be sleeping. He pulled it again, which was not done, and then a third time, which was very much not done. Behind him, the mage-lights of the gallery had settled at last on a single colour. It was a thin, sickly grey.

Rynn discovered the changes slowly, in a way one might notice the tide has arisen only after the salt has stung one's eyes.

Three days after his parents returned, he helped his father untangle the morning nets when the water itself stopped moving.

Well, not entirely. That would have been impossible to explain, ignore or hide. The current still flowed deep, deep into the oceans. The current still rocked the boats moored to the docks. Yet, within an arm's reach of Rynn, the waters softened. It moved about his clothes as if not to bother him.

His father noticed that on the day, the cast was bountiful.

"Good haul today," he grunted, hauling his catch. "About bloody time."

Rynn was silent.

The water pusled and beeped at his toes.

Friendly.

At night, he opened the closet again.

The tome sat as he left it, upright, immaculate, propped against torn blankets and hand-me-downs too large from cousins and neighbors. Its leather binding no longer appeared aged. It looked damp, yet no moisture touched it. The symbols stitched across the cover shimmered blue whenever he blinked too slowly.

He stared. It stared back.

Not with eyes. Now, it had none. But in the same manner that one may feel the sun's gaze with closed eyelids, so too did Rynn percieve its gaze.

At this point, exhaustion from working the day hit him like a hammer. He shut the closet, and sat upon his bed. He cupped his face in his hands and sighed.

"No way you're real," he whispered.

The room turned damp.

Not suddenly. Slowly. Droplets formed on the windowpanes. The pitcher by his bedside overflowed loudly into the floorboards. Somewhere outside the house, the river's churning intensified, and a low creak from the dock stilts rang throughout the room.

Then, from inside the closet:

Knock.

Rynn stood bolt upright.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

He paused. The noise stopped. He looked down, and the water level hugged his ankles. He silently prayed to whatever gods watched over him that for the love of everything, please, please don't let my parents wake up right now.

He stepped forward, and rested his fingers on the door. The silence was nearly deafening. It was though all the motion in the world, the rivers, boats, had all been caught mid-movement.

His fingers fumbled with the door's catch, but he hesitated. Then, the feeling came again, not verbally, but moreso as a suggestion pressing gently upon his thoughts.

Open. Rynn.

Rynn swallowed hard.

"N-no."

Another feeling followed. Hurt. Confusion.

Open. Door.

He knew instinctively he should have called for the House. Even the village idiots knew this, that cursed objects, possesed artifacts, signs of the Arcane, even people who manifest powers should be reported immediately and the Magi would come. No fuss or frills. After all, the House knew best. It fixed all. This had been the way, it had been the law.

Yes, but laws are hard to obey when a book with limbs starts speaking softly to you at night.

Slowly, carefully, he slid the doors open. 
Then the filaments emerged again.

White strands poured from the spine and pages, weaving through the air like dandelions through sky. They did not force themselves upon the room this time. They explored it. Curious. One brushed the bedside table. Another touched the ceiling beam. Another hovered before Rynn himself.

He froze. The filament touched his wrist.

Sharp, sudden cold enveloped him from head to toe. Not painful, but vast. Rynn gasped as images burst behind his eyes:

A shoreline beneath a sky full of unknown constellations.

Waves as high as the castle walls arrested mid motion in the air. 

A figure standing at the center of a drowned city, arms raised, surrounded by shapes made of river-water and pale thread. 

And beneath it all, that same low voice:

Shape me.

The vision vanished. Rynn staggered backward into the bedframe, breathing hard.

The filaments recoiled instantly. Not in aggression.

Alarm. Fear. Hurt.

The strands gathered together slowly in the center of the room, twisting around one another with impossible intricacy. Water seeped from the floorboards, rose from the pitcher, crawled down from the walls in trembling streams. It wrapped around the filaments like skin over flesh.

A shape emerged.

Small. Humanoid.

Its body shimmered translucently, river-water suspended within a cage of glowing white threads. It had no face at first. Then, carefully, uncertainly, features pressed themselves outward from the smooth surface.

A nose.

A mouth.

Eyes like blue torches beneath deep water.

It looked at Rynn.

Then it smiled.

Not correctly.

Too slow. Too wide. As though it had learned smiling from watching others do it through warped glass.

Rynn couldn't move.

The thing tilted its head.

A moment passed.

Then another.

Finally, in a voice like water poured into an empty cup, it spoke.

"Rynn."

His own name sounded wrong coming from it. Reverent. Possessive.

Rynn's mouth went dry.

"What are you?"

The creature considered the question carefully, as though philosophizing the meaning of 'what' itself.

"I am..." it said slowly.

"...yours."

The bell's final note had not yet fully arrived at the ear when Corvell began to come apart.

Then he was gone, and he was somewhere else.

The Court was a long room. Magi were appearing in it. They arrived seated, and were caught, gently, by the chairs they had been intending to occupy.

At the far end of the room, on an adorned chair which was not quite a throne, sat the Archmagus.

His name was Theldwin. He was very old, in the way that mountains are very old, which is to say that one did not think about it. At his feet, with its head on its paws, lay a dog.

Corvell met its eyes for a moment, and then looked away.

The room had begun to fill with the roar forty-three magi make when pulled out of forty-three different beds and dreams and dinners and arrived simultaneously at the same opinion, which was that they would like to know why.

The Archmagus did not raise his hand. He did not raise his voice. He simply, with the gentle care of a man closing a door on a sleeping child, took the noise out of the room.

It was not silence, quite. Silence was a thing the world allowed sometimes. This was a silence the Archmagus had asked for, and was holding, and it had weight. One by one the magi noticed they were no longer speaking.

Theldwin looked down the long room.

"Corvell," he said. "Keeper. You rang."

"I did, Archmagus."

"Three times, I am told."

“I… Yes."

"Then I think we had best hear it. All of it."

Corvell told them. He stated the case, the pedestal, the absence, the wards, the glass, the time at which he had last passed. 

When he was done, the silence the Archmagus had laid down trembled, and broke.

“Nonsense!"

"It is bound!”

"Warded by Hallorin herself!”

"The boy is mistaken! The boy is mistaken!”

(Corvell was sixty-one. He had stopped being the boy at some point, he was certain of it.)

“A Tome does not simply walk off, it is not the Cup!”

"Nor the lid!”

The Archmagus gestured, very slightly, toward the empty air at the side of his chair, and the air obliged him.

A pedestal appeared there. Black stone, faintly warm, faintly humming. The glass above it was clean. The wards were intact. The pedestal was bare.

It was Corvell's pedestal. It was fetched into the Court by a man who had not, that Corvell could see, so much as turned his head.

The Court went quiet. Then it went the other way.

"Then the Keeper is responsible!”

“Obviously the Keeper!”

“A parlour-conjurer, in charge of that, what did we expect!”

"I have always said, you do not give a shelf-mage the work of a-”

"For heaven's sake," snapped a thin voice from the third row, “EVOTOMUS!!"

The word struck the empty pedestal and rolled off it, and a faint, embarrassed shimmer hung in the air for a moment where the Tome ought to have answered.

Nothing answered.

"Cresselt," said the Archmagus, without turning his head, "you have just attempted to summon, by common name, an artifact warded by seven oaths and a goddess. To my Court. From a Keeper's reliquary. Without leave."

“I…”

"Sit down."

She sat down.

The murmur began to rise again. It lifted, threatened to become a roar.

The Archmagus raised one finger.

"Silence," he said, amplified.

The word silence rang. That was the only way to describe it. It rang the way a bell rings, except that it was the absence of sound that travelled outward and held them.

When the Archmagus spoke again, it was almost gently.

"The Keeper will go."

A breath of objection rose, and was promptly and implicitly put down.

"The Keeper knows the Tome. The Keeper noticed its absence. The Keeper rang the bell. The Keeper will go.” He looked, for the first time, directly at Corvell, and Corvell felt the look settle on him like a hand on a shoulder. "And he will take my dog, Wen.”

The dog, which had been lying with patience, lifted its head.

"Find it, Keeper. Quietly, if you can. Loudly, if you must. The Council is dismissed."

They went the way they had come, in puffs and shimmers and forty-two suddenly unoccupied chairs.

Corvell remained, because the Archmagus had not yet looked away from him.

Theldwin rose slowly and came down the length of the Court at the pace of a man who had nowhere to be next. Wen padded at his side, and then, when Theldwin stopped before Corvell, she sat at Corvell's.

"Wen is an aralez," the Archmagus said, in a voice meant for the three of them and no one else. "When you cannot stand, she will stand. When you cannot find the way, she will find it. When you are very nearly dead, Keeper, do not be entirely dead. She does not care for that." A small, dry smile. "Few of us do.”

"Archmagus, I…” stammered Corvell.

He laid a hand, gently, on Corvell's shoulder.

"Go and find Ariathy's Tome, Corvell. And mind, it will not wish to be found."

He stepped back, and disappeared, leaving behind only a wisp of white smoke.

Corvell stood in the long empty Court with Wen at his knee, and for the first time in nineteen years he did not feel, in any meaningful sense of the word, like a Keeper.

He felt like a man who had been sent.

The thing slept badly.

Rynn learned this on the third night. He woke shortly after witching-hour to dripping.

Not ordinary dripping.

Intentional dripping.

The sort of dripping that behaved as though it wished very much to be noticed.

Rynn sat stiffly upright.

The room was dark, save for the soft blue glow in the corner.

The creature sat cross-legged beside the window.

It had become taller.

Not by much. Perhaps by a hand's breadth. Enough to be noticeable.
Orange-red streetlight filtered through it. Water flowed lazily beneath its pale filament skin. The glowing threads that made up its body pulsed faintly, rhythmically, like arteries learning the rhythm of a heartbeat.

It was staring outside.

Rynn followed its gaze.

The river.

Still.

Perfectly still.

No current. No ripple. No tide.

Just waiting water stretching silver beneath the moon.

The creature turned when it heard him move.

Its expression brightened immediately.

"Rynn," it said, pleased.

"What are you doing?" Rynn whispered, looking at the river.

The creature tilted its head.

"Watching."

"What? Watching what?"

A pause.

"You."

Rynn regretted speaking.

He pulled the blanket tighter around himself.

The creature stood.

Water gathered beneath its feet and it moved gently across the floor.

Not walked.

Water gathered beneath its feet and moved it gently across the floor.

"I watched sleeping," it explained proudly.

Its voice had neither age nor breath. Every syllable sounded pieced together by parts rather than spoken.

"You watched me sleep?"

"Yes."

Rynn found, with intense conviction, that this was horrifying.

The creature seemed to notice his discomfort.

Its face changed.

Not emotionally. Practically.

The mouth softened. Eyebrows lowered. It adjusted itself into what it apparently believed was a reassuring expression.
"I protect."

"You stare."

"Protect by stare."

Fair enough, Rynn thought. That was difficult to argue with.

He rubbed his face.

"You're not supposed to be out."

The creature looked genuinely confused.

"You opened door."

"I—"

He stopped and sighed.

That was true, technically.

He did indeed open the closet.

He made a mental note to be careful with wordings around magical entities.

The creature moved closer.

Slowly, this time.

Cautiously.

As though learning fear.

"Rynn unhappy?"

Its voice had changed again. Softer now.

Rynn hesitated.

No one had asked him that in weeks.

Maybe ages.

His parents had returned tired. Their week of fishing had gone poorly upriver. The house smelled of wet rope and exhaustion. Adults had a way of mistaking quiet children for content ones.

"...I don't know," he admitted.

The creature considered this very seriously.

Then it held out its hand.

Water gathered in the air above its palm.

Rynn tensed.

The water spun.

Twisted.

Shimmered.

And formed—

A fish.

In every sense of the word a very bad, bad fish.

An embarrassingly terrible fish.

With wrong proportions. Overly-sized eyes. Tail bent sideways as if someone had described what fish should look like to a painter who deeply hated fish.

And the fish swam through the air.

"...what is that?"

"Joy."

Rynn blinked.

"No, I mean—"

"I made joy."

The terrible fish flopped midair.

Its enormous eyes rotated slowly in opposite motions.

Something in Rynn cracked.

He laughed.

He didn't mean to.

Really, swear to the Gods, he didn't.

But the fish looked so impossibly stupid that the sound escaped him all at once.

The creature froze.

The room froze.

Even the river outside was still frozen mid-motion.

Then, its smile returned.

Larger.

Brighter.

The fish exploded into harmless water. Rynn shielded his face, but the water hovered a few inches before him, before returning to the creature.

"Again," it said immediately.

"What?"

"Rynn."

The word had improved. Less assembled now. More practiced.
"Make Rynn laugh again."

"N-no, I have to sleep."

"Again."

"Do you even sleep?"

"Can learn."

"You. Absolutely. Cannot."

"Again."

The creature sat beside the bed.

Thinking.

Then:

"I am learning Rynn."

The sentence settled strangely, yet simultaneously comfortably in the room.

Somewhere downstairs, wood creaked.

Outside, the river shifted against the stilts of the docks with a long, groaning sound. It resumed moving.

At the glowing eyes.

The misshaped smile.

This impossible body made from river-water and pale thread.

He should have been afraid.

He was.

But underneath the fear sat something quieter. Loneliness recognized.

He had spent years pressing his face against the House of Magi windows, watching wonder happen to other people.

Magic belonged elsewhere. To other families. To gifted children. Not fishermen's sons. And now something impossible sat beside his bed trying very hard to (re)invent comedy.

"What do I call you?" Rynn asked quietly.

The creature looked up.

Its whole body literally brightened.

A pause followed. Long. Deep.

Pensive, as though it had never before considered itself something that might require a name.

"...what does Rynn want?"

Corvell departed at first light, which was a stately way of saying he left before he was properly awake.

The road from the House to the coast was a road in name only, and within an hour it was a path, and within two it was a strong suggestion. Wen trotted at his heel as though she had walked it many times, which she possibly had. The aralez had been the Archmagus's dog since before Corvell had been Keeper, and possibly since before Corvell was born.

He had packed sensibly. (A man who spent his life cataloguing other people's belongings developed a sensible relationship with his own.) He had also packed three vials of an ointment he had not used since the academy, on the grounds that they had been on the shelf, and one did not leave things on a shelf.

The village, when they arrived, smelled.

It smelled, specifically, of fish and rope and the slow patient rot of things that lived near water. Brackenmouth, the sign claimed, though the second half of the word had been weathered into a polite suggestion. Boats slept against the docks. Gulls argued about something abstract. Smoke from cookfires hung low over the thatched roofs.

Corvell stood at the village's edge with the dog at his knee, and considered the breadth of the difficulty before him.

He had been sent to find an unusual movement of water in a place where every man, woman, and child was paid by the unusual movement of water. He had been sent to detect anomalous magic in a place where, by long custom, the river itself was held to be slightly enchanted on Sundays. It was the equivalent, he thought, of being sent to find a single drunkard in a tavern, and the tavern being on fire.

He began, nonetheless.

He asked the fishmonger first. The fishmonger told him, at length, that the river had always been a bit funny near the second bend, on account of a girl who had drowned there in his great-grandfather's time and would not lie down.

He asked the old woman mending nets on the steps. She told him the moon had not been the right colour for forty years, and that the House, with great respect to the gentleman, knew this and did nothing.

He asked the boy who minded the harbour ropes. The boy told him, in the deeply confidential whisper of someone repeating gossip he did not understand, that the mages had stolen the tides in 902 and never given them back properly, which was why the herring went where they went.

A baker informed him that her bread rose better on the nights the river ran black, and always had.

A drunkard, sitting on a crate of empty bottles, explained that there were three kinds of water in the world and the village had only two of them, and he could not, at present, recall what the third one did.

By midafternoon Corvell had a notebook full of folk wisdom and not a single thing he could put in a report. He sat at the end of the longest dock with Wen pressed warm against his leg, and watched the river go about its business of being a river, which it did with the practiced indifference of a thing that had been a river for a very long time.

"Wen," he said, after a while.

The dog looked up.

"I haven't the faintest idea what I am looking for."

Wen, who had stood beside the Archmagus and walked the road from the House more times than Corvell had walked from his bed to his desk, put her chin on his knee.

She did not, in any meaningful sense of the word, disagree.

"...what does Rynn want?"

The question landed heavier than it should have.

Because suddenly Rynn understood something uncomfortable.

The creature did not merely obey him.

It arranged itself around him.

Its shape.

Its voice.

Its smile.

Perhaps even its thoughts.

As though becoming what he needed was the closest thing it knew to existing.

Rynn looked toward the river.

Then back at the strange thing beside him.

"You smell like the sea," he said eventually.

The creature waited.

"So..." Rynn hesitated.

"...Sal."

He recognized it as one of the words initially written on the tome’s cover. Salt. Sal rolled faster off the tongue, though.

The creature repeated it immediately.

"Sal."

Testing.

Learning.

Its smile widened.

"Sal."

And downstairs, unnoticed by either of them, every bucket in the house quietly filled itself to the brim.

Morning arrived badly.

Not in terms of weather, no, the weather was lovely.

Morning arrived badly in the sense that something was wrong before anyone knew precisely what.

Rynn sensed it from the moment he woke.

The house felt swollen. Humid. 

Heavy.

As though the air had spent the night gulping water.

His blanket clung damply to his skin. The floorboards gleamed faintly. Even the ceiling beams looked darkened, bloated with moisture.

Beside the bed sat Sal.

Watching. Smiling.

Still.

Perfectly still.

Like it had not moved all night.

Blue eyes fixed on him.

"...good morning?" Rynn offered cautiously.

Sal brightened immediately.

"Morning."

"You've been staring again."

"Protect Rynn."

"You have to stop saying it like that."

Sal tilted its head.

Then frowned. Not correctly, but enthusiastically.

"Rynn hates protection?"

"No, I dislike waking up to someone standing over me like a murderer."

Sal considered this.

Then:

"What is murderer?”

"A killer," said Rynn slowly. "and you must never become a killer."

Sal nodded solemnly.

"Not murderer."

Nice.

Not bad.

A crash sounded downstairs.

Rynn froze.

His mother's voice followed.

"RYNN?"

Another crash.

His father let out a string of expletives.

Sal vanished.

Not disappeared.

Collapsed.

Water unraveled from its body all at once and slipped beneath the floorboards with impossible speed, white filaments retreating into the closet where the tome landed with an innocent-looking thump.

Rynn stared.

"...fiddlesticks," he muttered.

The tome remained diplomatically silent.

Downstairs had become chaos.

Every container in the house was overflowing.

Buckets.

Bowls.

Cooking pots.

Water spilled endlessly across the floor despite no visible source. The washing basin had flooded half the kitchen. Cups filled themselves and tipped over. The kettle hissed angrily from being somehow, impossibly, overfilled.

His mother stood ankle-deep in water.

His father held a bucket with the expression of a man personally betrayed by reality.

"What happened?" Rynn asked, aiming for innocence and nearly achieving it.

He prayed. He really did.

His mother turned.

"That's what we'd like to know!"

"No rain," muttered his father. "River hasn't risen."

Another cup overflowed beside him.

He glared at it.

The cup continued committing crimes against physics.

Rynn swallowed.

Behind him—

tap.

From upstairs.

The closet.

Rynn did not look.

He absolutely did not look.

His father scrubbed a hand through his beard.

"There’s something wrong with the river."

Rynn stiffened.

"What?"

"Fish."

That word landed heavily.

“F-fish?”

"Too many," his father said.

"What?"

"Thousands."

His mother crossed herself.

"They're crowding the docks."

Rynn laughed nervously.

"...t-that's good, right?"

"No fish behaves like that," his father said quietly.

The room shifted.

Not physically.

Emotionally.

Adults knew rivers.

Fishermen especially.

And suddenly his father looked unsettled in a way Rynn had never seen before.

"Feels..." he said slowly.

He hesitated.

Then shook his head.

"Like the river's waiting."

Rynn stopped breathing.

And upstairs—

Tap. tap. tap.

Pleased.

The tip, when it came, did not announce itself as a tip.

It arrived as a commotion. A gaggle of villagers at the far end of the docks, pointing down into the water and talking over one another in the urgent, delighted way people talk about a disaster that is not yet theirs.

Corvell rose. Wen rose. They went to look.

The water at the dock's edge was not behaving. It was thick with fish. Not schooling, not feeding, but gathered. Hundreds of them, packed gill to gill, fighting against a current that should have scattered them, all facing the same direction with the patient attention of a congregation waiting for the sermon to begin.

"Never seen the like," said the fishmonger, who had seen, by his own account, everything by now.

Corvell crouched at the edge. He did not touch the water. (One did not touch unfamiliar water. This was among the first things the academy taught, and among the few he had retained.) He held his palm above the surface and felt it. It was faint, cold, threaded through everything, the particular signature he had passed beneath glass every night for nineteen years and would have known in his sleep.

"Oh," he said quietly. "There you are."

He stood up and walked the way the fish were pointing.

It was not difficult. The nearer he came, the louder the water grew, until he stood before a crooked house at the river's edge from which water was, gently and continuously, escaping. It ran from under the door. It beaded on the windowpanes from the inside. The thatch dripped, though no rain had fallen in a week.

Wen made a low grumble in her chest.

"Yes," Corvell agreed. "I rather think so too."

He raised a hand to knock and the door opened before he reached it. A boy came through it sideways, half-carrying a bag that was wrong in a way Corvell recognised at once: a bag that leaked a faint blue light at the seams, a bag that smelled, even at this distance, of sea salt.

The boy saw him.

For a moment neither moved. Corvell, sixty-one, Keeper of a reliquary now short one tome. The boy, perhaps twelve, soaked to the knee, holding the most warded artifact in the House of Magi as though it were a sack of turnips.

"Ah," said Corvell.

And the water rose.

It came up between them in a wall. Not threatening, exactly, but interposing, the way a dog sets itself between its charge and a stranger. Through it Corvell saw the boy's face bend and swim, and beside the boy something else: something pale-threaded and blue-cored that had not been there an instant before, observing Corvell with an expression he did not care for in the slightest.

“Wait…” Corvell began.

They did not wait.

The boy turned and ran, and the river ran with him. Where the road had been there was suddenly a long bright ribbon of water, carrying two figures out of the village faster than any boy had business moving. The wall before Corvell let go all at once, soaking him to the waist and a good portion of the dock besides.

He stood there, dripping, in any meaningful sense of the word a fool.

Wen was already three paces down the road, looking back at him.

“Very well" said Corvell, wringing out one sleeve. “Loudly, if we must.”

The river tired long before Sal did.

Rynn did not know how long they had been moving. Long enough for Brackenmouth to vanish behind tower-high forest. Long enough for the docks and shouting and the terrible moment of being seen to begin dissolving canopy of leaf.

Not long enough for his lungs.

"S-Sal, please stop—"

The ribbon of water carrying them broke apart at once.

Rynn hit the muddy riverbank with all the dignity and grace at the disposal of a frightened, undersized twelve-year-old, which was to say not very much at all.

He lay there gasping.

Sal stood proudly upright beside him.

Untired. Dry. Watching.

"Rynn safe," Sal said.

Rynn sat up sharply.

"No! No, not safe! That man saw us! Oh, my parents are going to murder me!"

Sal tilted his head.

"Him. Bad young boy."

"That's no boy! H-how—what old man— he had Magic! And you don't know if he's bad!"

"Rynn ran."

"You MADE ME RUN!"

Sal sat with this thought. Rynn stopped to catch his thoughts. Silently, he stared up and cursed his luck.

The river beside them slowed.

Somewhere overhead, birds resumed arguing.

"...good running?" Sal offered cautiously.

Rynn stared. It looked hopeful. Its face had improved. No way human, never, but closer. Expressions started to form with unnerving accuracy, though always half a moment late, as though assembled from observation.

Rynn pressed his hands into his face.

"I. Am. Dead."

Sal crouched beside him immediately.

Trouble seemed to concern him.

"Why?"

"The House!"

Sal became quiet, and stopped moving. Like water becoming ice beneath the surface.

"The House takes things," Rynn said quickly. "Like Magic things. Dangerous things. Stolen things."

Sal blinked.

"Sal is thing?"

"No—Yes, wait, I mean—"

Rynn stopped.

Because yes.

Objectively speaking—

Yes.

"You’re... Sal."

This appeared satisfactory.

The tension in the water eased.

Sal nodded once.

"Sal not stolen."

"You literally came from a stolen book. I stole that book."

"I came to Rynn."

The certainty of it unsettled him. Not defensive nor angry, simply true. Like saying water was wet. Rynn looked back downstream.

Nothing. No shouting. No pursuit. No strange old man. No unnerving probably magic dog.

Still, the memory stayed with him. The old man had not looked angry. Just tired. That somehow made things worse. People who looked angry, Rynn understood. People who looked disappointed in advance felt dangerous.

"I think should go home," he muttered weakly.

Sal's expression changed.

Again, not correctly.

Not quite fear.

But concern.

"House boy there."

"I can't see—where is he?"

Sal looked toward the river.

The current stirred around its feet.

Then quietly:

"He knew me."

Rynn swallowed.

"Sal. What do you mean?"

The answer came slowly, assembled piece by piece.

"Smelled..." Sal frowned, struggling. "...remember."

You remember the House?"

A very long-seeming pause.

The water around Sal darkened.

For a moment, impossibly, Rynn thought he saw shapes moving inside him: cities beneath waves, white towers drowning, hands reaching upward through black water.

Then it vanished.

Sal's head flattened into a smooth sphere.

"...don't like remembering."

That frightened Rynn more than anything so far.

Because Sal had always seemed new. Young. Emotionally, maybe his age. Strange, yes, but young.

And suddenly, sitting beside the river, Rynn had the uncomfortable feeling one gets upon realizing a sleeping thing may have been awake longer than anyone imagined.

Sounds pierced the silence.

Six pairs of footsteps. Crunches. Branches.

Wen emerged first, mildly annoyed. As though children escaping at impossible speed had complicated an otherwise manageable afternoon.

"Oh no."

The dog paced. Highly rigid, forward-leaning posture.

Sal stood immediately. The river lifted. Not violently. Protectively. A low wall curling around Rynn's shoulders.

Then Corvell stepped into the clearing.

He looked damp.

Very damp.

One sleeve dripped with active resentment.

He regarded the scene before him for several moments.

Child who couldn't possibly be a teen yet.

Water-being.

River being bent into defensive shield.

Ancient dog.

General misunderstanding.

Then sighed. He had not been a boy for quite a while, and his joints chose this moment to inflict the effects of the journey taken.

"Oh, honestly," he said tired rather than threatening. "Must we do this dramatically?"

Nobody answered.

Corvell raised both hands.

Slowly. Tired.

"I should like," he said carefully, "to make one thing exceptionally clear before anyone floods me again."

His eyes moved to Rynn. Then Sal. Then back.

"I am not here," he said, with the grave weariness of a man already regretting the sentence, "to separate children from their catastrophically poor decisions."

Sal narrowed his glowing eyes.

"House boy lies."

"I very rarely lie," said Corvell. "I mostly catalogue."

A pause.

Then, to Rynn:

"Young man, if I had intended harm, I would not have announced myself by knocking."

He gestured vaguely at his own soaked state.

"As you may observe, this approach has not served me particularly well."

Wen, beside him, sneezed.

Corvell glanced down.

"Yes, thank you, I noticed."