Chapter 116: His Mother at the Gate

Chapter 116: His Mother at the Gate

By eleven, Silas had cleaned the room twice and was considering a third time out of nerves.

The books were off the floor. The bed was made with the corners tucked, which he hadn’t done since arriving. The kettle shone. And it still didn’t look like a young nobleman’s room. A drill block sat by the wall, a padded target hung from the ceiling hook, silver moss lined the windowsill on its slate and its little stones, and a dart case lay on the desk beside a scrap of paper that said Corwen’s. Sticks in two days. It looked like exactly what it was.

He picked up the bent spoon from the corner of the pillow.

"No," Nim said, appearing from nowhere directly beside his hand.

"It’s bent," Silas said.

"It’s mine bent." Nim put a paw on it. "I found it."

"My mother’s coming," Silas said. "She’ll see a bent spoon on my pillow and think I’m living like a crow."

Nim considered this, took the spoon in his mouth, and vanished it into his little pocket of space with a look that said the matter was closed. Silas decided it was a fair compromise and went to meet the coach.

***

The coach stop was a paved square outside the main gate. The noon coach was eleven minutes late, and Silas spent them walking up and down beside the bench.

Then it came in, dusty to the windows, and the door opened, and the fourth person down the step was his mother.

She had on the good gray blouse and a traveling coat he didn’t recognize, and she was looking around the square with a medic’s quick sweep, as if counting exits. Then she saw him.

Mara didn’t run. She put her case down on the paving where she stood, which was very unlike her, and held out her arms, and Silas crossed the square and walked into them.

For a moment he forgot about the case and the people moving around them. She held him hard, one hand between his shoulder blades. He rested his cheek against her hair and let her.

Then she held him at arm’s length and looked.

He knew that look. Her eyes went to the color in his face, then his eyes, then down to how he stood, weight even on both feet. She took his wrist in her fingers without seeming to notice she’d done it, and he felt her count.

"You’ve filled out," Mara said.

"I eat now," Silas said.

"You eat now," she repeated, and her mouth wobbled for a second before it steadied. "Look at you."

The last time she’d seen him in person, her hand had fit all the way around his upper arm. He stood a little straighter and didn’t mention it.

He picked up her case. She let him.

Her lodging was a boarding house on Wick Street, ten minutes from the gate, with a green door. The room was small and clean, with a window onto the street and a basin in the corner. He’d wanted to find her somewhere better. She hadn’t asked him to, and she’d booked it herself, so he set the case down by the bed, showed her on the little map in his pocket how the street ran to the infirmary, and left her for an hour to wash and change.

***

When she came up to his room in the middle of the afternoon, she paused in the doorway and took it in, and Silas found he was holding his breath.

She stepped in, and Nim sat up on the pillow, and the two of them regarded each other.

"You’re Nim," Mara said.

"Yes," Nim said, then, after visibly searching for something polite, "You smell like a coach."

"I’ve been on one since dawn." She held out her hand, palm down, the way Silas had told her once on a call, and Nim sniffed it with great seriousness and then lay down again with his chin on his paws, which seemed to be approval.

Mara looked around the way she checked a ward, touching nothing and seeing everything. The books he’d put back on the shelf with paper slips sticking out of them. The notes on the desk, full of crossings out. The tin of crackers by the kettle, open and half eaten. The moss on the windowsill, which she bent to look at closely.

"You’re growing that," she said.

"Trying to," Silas said. "I’ll tell you the story later. It’s a long one, with a ruin in it."

"I’ll want the ruin." She straightened, and her eyes went to the chair by the bed, where a pair of his trousers hung over the back. The knee had been mended in small, even stitches, much neater than anything he could manage.

Mara picked them up and turned the knee to the light.

"That’s good work," she said. "That isn’t yours."

"No." Silas found he’d become very interested in the kettle. "Elyra did that. A friend. She’s the one I told you about, who’s coming to dinner tomorrow. After your assessment. If you still feel up to it."

"The girl who taught you about spirits?" Mara asked.

"Yes," Silas said.

Mara examined the stitches again. "Who mends trousers."

"She says I’m bad at it," Silas said.

"You are bad at it." Mara put the trousers back exactly as she’d found them. "Of course I’ll be up to it. I’d like to meet her."

That was all she said. He couldn’t tell how much she had guessed, which was somehow worse than being asked. A skitter running up a pane of loose glass hadn’t made his face this hot.

He made her tea strong enough to stand a spoon in, and to rescue himself, asked about the flow plate.

Mara laughed and sat down in the guest chair with the cup in both hands.

"I went to the town clinic," she said. "Old Brannock’s, by the bridge. I told the doctor there I’d been out of practice for seventeen years and had never touched one, and would she let me sit with it in the evenings. She looked at me as if I’d asked to borrow her husband. Then she said yes."

"And?" Silas asked.

"And on the first night I put her apprentice’s hand on it and told her very seriously that the boy had a blockage in his left hand, a bad one, right at the base of the thumb." Mara was already laughing. "She let me finish. Then she turned the plate round, because I’d been reading it from the wrong end, and pointed out that it was also his right hand."

Silas laughed so hard Nim lifted his head to see what was wrong.

"By the last few evenings, I could read it properly," Mara said, still smiling. "I’m still slow. But I’m not reading it upside down."

***

He walked her back to Wick Street after supper, under lamps that were coming on one by one, and she squeezed his arm at the green door and went in. Then he went home.

He set the padded target swinging from its hook.

He was trying to meet the returning bag with his left palm while Remote Grasp brought it to a stop. The room made it easy to hold the weight. Getting his body and the Talent to act together was harder.

He stepped in. His palm met the bag. A fraction afterward, the Grasp closed, and by then he’d already put his weight into the push, so the bag stopped and he kept going and had to catch himself on the next step.

On the fifth attempt, Battle Evolution made the delay plain. He was stepping in to stop the bag with his body, then calling on Remote Grasp after the impact.

He had spent the afternoon trying not to fuss over his mother. Apparently his hands couldn’t leave a job to anyone else either.

So start it sooner, he thought. Start it while the foot’s still in the air.

He tried. The Grasp closed as his foot came down, his palm arrived on a bag already slowing, and he simply stood there with his hand on it while it stopped.

It worked on the next try, and the one after that.

Then he set the bag swinging from the other side, on a longer arc, and it hit him in the chest and knocked him back a step. The answer he’d found belonged to that one swing. It didn’t belong to this one.

He laughed out loud, alone in his room, rubbing his chest.

He did three more from the long side, and got one of them right. Then he looked at the time, thought about Kerr’s appointment at nine and his mother walking into it, and stopped the bag with his hand and went to bed.