Nigredo: Latet Ignis

The bell went on tolling somewhere above them, one long note and then the next, and the door of the Axis Mundi stood open with Adrien just inside it.

He had opened it himself. Summer understood that a second later than she should have. He stood a step back from the sill with one hand still on the edge of the metal. Warm air came out past him, over both of them, and with it, faint and completely out of place, the smell of coffee: the kind of smell that belonged to somebody’s kitchen at six in the morning, not to the bottom of a volcano.

Autumn’s right hand was still up to knock. She lowered it slowly, knuckles first, and let it hang at their side. Summer’s left hand had nothing to hold anymore, not since the bell, and it closed into a fist without asking her.

He was still in the wedding clothes. Dark cloth, cut close to him, the cuffs turned back twice at the wrist as if he had been doing something with his hands and hadn’t finished. Summer had seen him in them at the Table earlier and she still wasn’t used to it. He looked like a groomsman who had wandered off before the photos and found a volcano.

“Summer,” he said, and his face turned to hers. Then it turned the rest of the way, to the other side of them. “Autumn.”

Nobody did that. People said hi, guys, or you two, to the air between their heads, or they picked one and talked to her and let the other one be furniture. Summer felt it land somewhere under her ribs and didn’t know where to put it. Beside her, Autumn’s eyes had gone to his face. They stayed there.

They stepped over the sill together. Behind them, the cold of the Path stayed on the glass where it belonged, and Adrien drew the door shut after them, a long low slide of metal on stone, unhurried. The bell went on outside, thinner now, and the two golems they had passed along the rail might as well have been on the moon.

The room opened out in front of them, wider than Summer had pictured. The walls were dark rock, cut so smooth they gave the light back like water, and at the far end a wall of glass held the glow of the caldera. Off to the right was a kitchen, all of it in plain sight from the door: a long stone counter, a stove with a low blue flame going and a pot sitting on it. Beside the door a coat hung on a hook. The hook next to it was empty.

There was a table by the kitchen with chairs at it, and every muscle Summer had wanted to go and sit down in one.

Say it standing. Both of you looking at him. You sit down after he agrees, not before.

So they stood. Summer turned her head to him and Autumn turned hers, both of them square to him. “Okay,” Summer said. Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. She tried again. “Um. Before—before anything. We have terms. Someone told us to say them first, so.”

“All right,” Adrien said.

“If either of us says stop, you stop. Whatever the situation.” She had practiced it on the stairs, out loud, and it still came out faster than she wanted. “Right then. On the word. And you take it from whichever one of us said it. You don’t check with the other one. You don’t look over to see if she agrees. It counts.”

He took his time with it. He was listening the way he listened to everything, to the end of it, and then a beat past the end in case there was more.

“If either of you says stop, I stop,” he said. “On the word. From whichever of you says it. I won’t look to the other one first.” He paused, and then he said it plainly, like a man setting something down on a table where they could both see it. “I’ll keep that.”

Summer breathed out. Her hand was still a fist. She left it. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. And the other one isn’t a term. It’s a question.” She could feel Autumn not moving beside her, the particular stillness that meant every bit of her was pointed somewhere else. “Have you worked out why Amabilis brought us here? Us. The two of us.”

There was a small silence. Not the kind where somebody was looking for a way around a question, Summer thought, but the kind where somebody had seen it coming down a long road and was only now letting it arrive.

He kept his eyes on hers to answer it. “I think the reason is in Ashcombe Vale,” Adrien said. “And I’m afraid the reason is me.” His voice didn’t change on the last word. It stayed exactly as level as it had been for the rest. “I have notes on the Vale. My own, in my own hand. I’ll show them to you after you’ve eaten.”

The bell stopped.

Summer hadn’t noticed it was still going until it wasn’t, and in the quiet it left she heard the stove tick and the blue flame breathe under the pot, and her own heart, which was being ridiculous. He had said it to her face, that last word, in a voice he might have used for the time. She had a dozen questions lined up behind it at once—what that meant, how, since when, did he mean the town or them—and they all wanted to come out together and get stuck in the door.

At home you fed people first. You set a plate down before you asked anybody anything, and you waited for them to eat it. The next one could wait for a plate.

Beside her, Autumn lifted the bundle out of the crook of her arm—the heavy gray-brown thing Drosia had pulled taut between her fists, with the pale one folded inside it—and turned with it, Summer following, and hung it on the empty hook beside his coat. One pale strap had worked loose from the fold and hung down against the dark weave. Autumn didn’t tuck it back in. She turned back to him with her right hand free, and she held it out.

Adrien looked at the hand. Then he took it.

Summer watched it happen. The right side had never been hers; she could see Autumn’s fingers close and his close over them, the backs of his knuckles, the plain fact of the two hands together, and that was all of it she got. She understood what it was, though. Autumn didn’t take anyone’s hand to be polite, not a teacher’s, not a doctor’s, not a boy’s on a porch. She took a hand when she meant to keep whatever had just been said, and then she kept it.

It lasted about one breath. Autumn let go first. He didn’t ask what it was for. Summer looked down at Autumn’s right hand, empty again, resting against the long pale dress where it hung wrong over their hip. What did he mean, the reason is me? She held on to it. After the meal.

“You should sit,” Adrien said. “I made coffee.”

He went to the stove. The flame sank to nothing under his hand as he lifted the pot off it, and he took three cups down from somewhere above the counter, plain heavy ones, and carried all of it to the table in one trip, the cups hooked on his fingers and the pot held well out from his body. Summer and Autumn crossed to the table. There was a chair at the end of it that faced the door, and they took that one, the door where they could see it.

He set a cup down by Summer’s left hand. He set the next one by Autumn’s right. He didn’t make anything of it, didn’t pause over it like a man getting something right; he just put them where they went, and set the third at a place across from them, and the pot in the middle.

Summer looked at the two cups, one on each side of them, and her chest let go about half an inch. “Thank you,” she said. And then, because she could finally feel a joke coming back up from wherever they had all gone: “You did the sides. Nobody does the sides.”

“Selene did,” he said. “At the Table.”

“Okay, so one other person does the sides,” Summer said.

Before he could move to pour the coffee, she picked up the pot with her left hand. It was heavier than it looked, and hot through the handle, and she leaned out over the table and filled his cup first, to the top, because that was how it went: the cook got his first. Then Autumn lifted hers in her right hand and held it out, and Summer poured into it, and the steam came up between them and Autumn bent her head over it a little, to have it on her face. Autumn was always cold. Summer filled her own last, and set the pot down, and wrapped her left hand around the cup and burned her fingers slightly and didn’t care.

It was good coffee. It was, honestly, better than the Refectory’s, which was not a thing she had expected to think tonight about anything. “Where do you even get coffee,” Summer said, “in the middle of a volcano?”

“I asked the kitchen for it.”

“You asked the kitchen.”

“It seems to listen.” He looked down into his cup. “It took me a day to stop thanking it.”

“We still thank the golems,” Summer said.

“Good,” Adrien said, and lifted his cup an inch, as if to the golems. When he was finished, he took his cup back to the counter and stood there, his back against the stone and the cup in both hands, the blue flame dead beside him and the wall of glass glowing over his shoulder, and he looked at the two of them sitting at his table as if he were trying to work out a recipe from a picture of a meal.

“What did you two eat,” he asked, “at home?”

Summer looked at Autumn. Autumn was looking at the coffee.

---

Autumn held the cup against their front with her right hand and let the heat come through the china into her palm. It was the first warm thing she had touched since the stairs. She kept her eyes where Summer had asked her to keep them, on his face, and waited for Summer to answer him, because a question about home was Summer’s to answer. Summer had the voice for it. Autumn only had the facts.

“Okay, so,” Summer said, “the honest answer is a lot of casseroles.” She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table. “Like, a lot. Tater tot. Green bean. There’s one with crushed-up potato chips on top that I’m not going to defend.” She stopped turning the cup. “But there’s one that’s—it’s the town’s, kind of. Potatoes and cheese and cream, all baked together, and something crunchy on top. It’s comfort food. You make it on holidays. And you make it when somebody dies. You take it over to the house while it’s still hot and you leave it on the counter, and you don’t ask for the dish back for a week.” She lifted one shoulder, the left. “Everybody in the Vale calls it a mercy. Like, ‘Has anybody taken them a mercy yet?’ That kind of thing.”

At the counter Adrien’s hands went still, both of them, flat, for about as long as it took to draw a breath and let it go. Autumn’s eyes were already on his face; she kept them there. His face didn’t do anything. His hands did, and then they didn’t, and her own hand had tightened around the cup until the heat in the china was nearly too much and she made it ease. “Mercy,” he murmured, and the word sounded different in his voice. Then he picked up his cup and drank from it, and set it down. “Will you show me how it’s made?” he said.

Summer blinked. “What, now?”

“If you’d like to,” he said. “I have potatoes.” A small pause. “I think I have potatoes.”

“Oh. I mean—yeah. Yes. Sure.” Summer looked at Autumn, and Autumn tipped her head a fraction toward the counter, which was all the yes Summer needed from her. “Okay. Yeah. Let’s make a mercy.”

They got up together and went around the table to the counter. It ran the length of the kitchen, one long piece of stone set flush into the rock, and before Autumn put any weight near it she laid the back of her right hand flat on its surface. It was so smooth it might have been poured.

“Cool,” she said. “Dry. This is some kitchen.”

Adrien glanced at her hand on the stone and let it be. He went along the counter opening things that Autumn hadn’t known were there—a door in the rock that hid a refrigerator, a drawer with no handle that slid out when he touched its edge. He came back with his arms full and set it all out in a row in front of them: a bowl of potatoes with the dirt still on them, a wedge of pale cheese, a jug of cream, butter on a dish, an onion. He ran the potatoes under the water at the sink and scrubbed them one by one with his thumbs, as if each of them had come to him from a long way off and wanted looking after.

“Skins on or off?” he asked.

“Okay, that depends who you ask,” Summer said. “Half the town leaves them on, and the other half thinks the first half was raised by wolves. Off. We’re off people.”

He peeled them with quick, professional moves, the skins coming away in long curls into the sink, and put them in a pot of water and the pot on the stove, and the blue flame came up under it at his touch.

Then he laid a knife on the counter at Autumn’s right, and a grater at Summer’s left.

He did it without looking at either of them. He had done the cups the same way. Autumn looked at the knife, the handle turned toward her hand, and then at the grater on the other side, and kept that too.

“Okay,” Summer said. She rolled her left shoulder, and Autumn felt the body settle into standing at a counter, which it had done in a lot of kitchens. “So. First thing, the potatoes have to boil until a fork goes in but they don’t fall apart. Not mush. If they’re mush you’ve made mashed potatoes with ambitions.”

“Not mush,” Adrien said.

Summer went on. “And the onion goes in butter, low, until it’s soft. Not brown. If it browns it tastes like a different casserole.”

He was already peeling the onion. He cut it on a board of his own, fast and small, the knife going in a rhythm Autumn could have counted if she had wanted to and didn’t. When he put the butter in the pan he cut a piece off the end, then looked at it, then cut it in half and put one half back on the dish.

“You’re measuring,” Summer said.

“I’m estimating.”

“You’re estimating very precisely.” Summer leaned in to look at the pan. “It’s butter. It’s a funeral casserole. Nobody at a funeral has ever said, you know, this could use less butter.”

He put the other half of the piece in. Summer made a small satisfied sound. Autumn watched his mouth, which had moved, and then watched it go still again.

The kitchen filled with onion and butter, and the steam came up off the potato pot, and for a while nobody needed to say anything. That was a kind of quiet Autumn knew from home: three people at a counter, each with a thing to do, and the stove talking for all of them. It was not a kitchen for show, Autumn thought, but one somebody cooked in: the board was the kind that had been scrubbed so often the grain stood up under your fingers, and the spoon by the stove was dark at the bowl from use. It was warmer here than anywhere she had been in the Athanor. Adrien looked at home in it, more so than anywhere else she had ever seen him. She stood close to the stove, closer than she needed to, and Summer let her.

“Who makes it?” Adrien asked, after a while, his eyes on the pan. “At home.”

“Everybody,” Summer said. “On holidays, it’s on everyone’s table. And when someone dies, whoever hears first. You hear somebody died and you go in the kitchen and you start peeling. By the time you’ve called anybody, there’s already three of them on the porch.”

He nodded slowly, as if he were writing it down somewhere, and went back to the pan, then checked the potatoes in the pot. When the fork went in and the potatoes didn’t fall apart, he held it up to Summer for inspection, and she squinted at it and said, “Yep. Perfect. Gold star.”

He drained them, rinsed them, and turned them out onto the board between the twins to cool. Summer said, “Okay, now cubes. Like, dice. Not tiny. About—” and held up her left thumb and finger a little way apart.

Autumn took up the knife. Summer’s left hand found the first potato and held it on the board with her fingertips curled back out of the way, and Autumn cut. It was a thing they did a lot of, at home: one hand to hold and one to cut, and neither of them watching the other’s fingers, because they had stopped needing to when they were small. Summer turned the potato a quarter turn and Autumn cut again. Turn, cut. The cubes fell over on the board in a little uneven pile.

“This is the part that takes forever,” Summer told him. “Whole families fight about who has to do the cubes. There are people in the Vale who haven’t spoken since a funeral in, like, 1998.”

“Over cubes,” Adrien said.

“Over who did the cubes, and who just showed up with the dish and took the credit.”

Adrien, beside them, had taken back the grater, since neither of their hands was free for it, and was grating the cheese into a bowl in long pale strings. He worked without talking. Once he looked over at the board, at the two hands on it, his eyes going from the left one to the right one and back again, and then he went back to the cheese.

The onion went into a baking dish first. The potatoes went in over it, and then the cheese. Adrien poured the cream over the top while Summer said “More,” and then “More,” and then “Okay, stop, that’s plenty,” and he stopped exactly where she told him. He folded it all together with a wooden spoon until the cheese was in everything.

“Okay,” Summer said, and looked down at the dish with her head on one side. “Now the top. At home the top’s cornflakes.”

“Cornflakes,” Adrien repeated.

“Crushed up. With butter on them. It’s the best part. People pick it off the top when they think nobody’s looking.”

Adrien looked along the counter, and then at the doors in the rock, and Autumn could see him going through them in his head and not finding any. “I don’t think this kitchen has ever heard of a cornflake,” he said. “But I have bread.”

There was a loaf on the end of the counter, cut halfway down, the crust dark. Autumn looked at it.

“The heel of that,” she said. “It’ll do.”

Adrien looked at her for a moment, and then at the loaf. One corner of his mouth eased, not much, like a knot coming a little loose. “The heel’s the best part,” he said, and cut it off the end of the loaf in one stroke, and set it on the board between the two of them.

Summer’s left hand folded it into a clean cloth from the counter, a loose packet. Autumn’s right hand took the pan Adrien had used for the onion, wiped, and brought the flat of it down on the cloth, hard, twice, and then a third time for the corners. When Summer opened the cloth the heel was crumbs, coarse and gold. Summer gathered them with her left hand and scattered them over the dish until the whole top was covered. Then she dotted the last of the butter over the crumbs and looked at him.

“There,” she said. “Now you get to put it in.”

The oven was set into the rock below the counter, a dark door with no handle that Autumn hadn’t noticed until he crouched in front of it. Before he opened it she held the back of her right hand out to the door, an inch from the metal, and felt the heat come off it into her knuckles.

“Hot,” she said.

“It should be,” Adrien said. He opened the door, and the heat came out over all three of them, and he slid the dish in onto the stone inside and shut it again. He stayed crouched in front of the oven door with one hand flat on the counter above him, as though listening to the dish settle in, and then he stood and went to the drawer with no handle and took out a bowl and a crock of flour.

“There’s room in there for one more thing,” he said.

“A second casserole?” Summer said. “Ambitious.”

“Something smaller,” he said.

He cracked two eggs into the bowl one-handed and beat them with a fork, fast, the fork ringing on the side of the bowl, and poured in oil from a jar and a long gold thread of honey, and then the flour, a handful and another and a little more. He measured none of it. Summer watched him and held her tongue, which Autumn could feel costing her. The batter went into a small round pan, and the pan went into the oven beside the casserole, and he shut the door on both.

Then he took the bowl back, rinsed it, dried it, and started again.

Flour, and water from the sink. A pinch of salt. One pinch, into the dough. He mixed the dough with his hand, pressing it against the side of the bowl and folding it back, and turned it out on the board and worked it there. When it stopped sticking to his palm he pinched it into balls and pressed each ball flat with the heel of his hand until it was thin and round and about the size of a plate.

He set a dry pan on the blue flame and laid the first round in it. No oil. It sat there a moment doing nothing, and then it began to blister, pale bubbles lifting under the surface, and he turned it with his fingers and the underside was spotted brown.

Summer, beside her, had picked up the knife they’d used for the potatoes, and was holding it out over the sink with her left hand so that Autumn could wipe it down. They always did the knife first. Autumn took the cloth in her right hand and laid it on the flat of the blade near the handle and began to draw it down.

The first round came off the heat. Adrien slid it onto the board, and reached into the salt cellar again, and scattered a second pinch over the crust while it was still hot enough to take it.

Autumn’s hand stopped, with the cloth halfway down the blade. She stood there holding it, and Summer stood there holding the knife, and the steam came off the bread between them. She looked at the second salt on the crust. “Salt it twice,” Autumn said. She said it to Summer, with her eyes still on the board. “That’s Dad’s rule.”

“Huh,” Summer said softly. “Yeah. It is.”

Adrien laid the next round in the pan. His back was mostly to them. “The second salt is what lets it keep,” he said. “A few days, instead of one. The crust holds better.”

Autumn finished drawing the cloth down to the point of the blade, and Summer set the knife down on the counter. Then Summer reached out with her left hand and broke the edge off the first loaf, a ragged piece the size of her thumb, and put it in her mouth before anyone could tell her it was too hot. She chewed. Her eyes went wide and then narrow.

“Oh,” Summer said, around it. “Okay. That tastes right. That tastes like—that tastes right.”

“Good,” Adrien said, and turned the bread in the pan. “It’s an old way of making it. Older than the oven.”

He lifted the second round out and laid it on the first, and salted it twice, the same as before. Then he said, still facing the stove, in the same voice he had used for the salt and the crust, “Someone I once knew taught me this recipe.” He laid the third round in the pan and stood over it, his back to them, waiting for it to blister.

The kitchen smelled of baked cheese now, and onion, and honey somewhere under it. Adrien took a thick cloth, opened the oven, and brought the casserole out bubbling at the edges, the crumbs gone the color of the bread crust, and then the small round cake, risen and split down the middle where it had cracked on top. He set the cake on the far end of the counter to cool and picked up the casserole, and the stack of flat loaves, and carried them both to the table.

The twins came back around and sat, in the one chair at the end, the door in front of them. He set a plate at Autumn’s right. He set one at Summer’s left. He put the third at his own place and sat down at it, for the first time since they had come in, and served them each a square of the casserole and a round of the bread, not much, because they had all eaten at the Refectory earlier that evening.

Autumn bowed her head.

It wasn’t long. A breath, with her eyes on the plate and her mind on nothing she could have said out loud. Beside her Summer’s head went down too, a half second behind. When she lifted her head, Adrien was sitting with his fork in his hand and his hand resting on the table, and the fork hadn’t moved. He was looking at the casserole and not at them. He waited until both of their heads were up.

Autumn ate everything on her plate, because Drosia had said to, and because it was very good. Summer ate everything on hers. “Okay,” Summer said, when she had finished, and laid her fork down on the plate. “Verdict. It’s good. It’s really good. It is also completely wrong, and if you served it at a funeral in the Vale, somebody’s aunt would take you aside afterward and tell you it was very interesting.”

“Wrong how?” Adrien asked.

“The top. The top is bread. The top is supposed to be cornflakes. You’ve made, like, a fancy European mercy.” She pointed her fork at him. “I’m not saying I don’t like it. I’m saying I’d never admit that in public.”

“That’s fair,” Adrien said. “The bread was your sister’s idea.”

“See, now you’re just trying to get her in trouble,” Summer said.

Autumn tore the last of her bread in two with her right hand and wiped the plate with it, unbothered. Adrien got up and went to the counter and came back with the cake on a board, and a knife, and set it down in the middle of the table where the casserole had been, a little away from himself, as if it belonged to the table now and not to him. It wasn’t a spectacular-looking cake. It was plain and gold and cracked on top, and it smelled of honey.

“It isn’t a wedding cake,” he said. “I know. But the last one we saw was still whole when they pulled the four of us out, and it seemed wrong to make another one.”

Summer looked at the cake for a long moment. “I said that out loud, didn’t I,” she said. “In the Athenaeum. ‘We didn’t even get cake.’”

“You did,” Adrien said.

“Okay.” Summer’s voice had gone a little rough, and she cleared it. “Okay. Well. Somebody has to cut it, and you’re not allowed, because you made it.”

She picked up the knife with her left hand and cut the cake in three, not quite even, one piece bigger than the other two, and put the big piece on his plate first.

“The cook gets his first,” she said. “That’s a rule.”

“Is it?” he asked.

“It is, at home.”

They ate the cake. It was dense and sweet and still warm in the middle. Adrien ate his slowly, in small pieces, and Summer licked a drop of honey off the side of her left thumb and didn’t pretend she hadn’t.

“It’s good,” Summer said.

“It’s plain.”

“Plain’s good,” Summer said. “Plain is so underrated. You have no idea how many fondant swans we’ve had to look at in our lives.” When it was gone there was still a corner of the casserole left in the dish, and one flat round of the bread, and Autumn looked at them and then at Summer, and Summer was already looking back. Nothing good got thrown out. Summer’s left hand pulled the dish toward them, and Autumn’s right hand took the clean cloth Adrien had left by the board, and between the two of them they wrapped what was left of the casserole and the last of the bread in it, tight, and tied the corners.

Adrien took the parcel from them without a word and set it on the counter by the stove. He stood there a moment with his hand still on it. Then he picked up his cup from the counter, where he had left it before the potatoes, and carried it back to his place at the table and set it down.

“The papers are next,” he said.

Summer reached for the coffee pot with her left hand. It had gone cold, or nearly; she poured anyway. His cup first, to the top. Then Autumn lifted hers in her right hand and held it out, and Summer filled it. Then her own. Autumn held the cup against their front. It had gone cold, nearly. She held it anyway, and kept her eyes on his face.

---

The Study was narrower than any room had a right to be and still be called a room. Adrien went in ahead of them with a chair from the Lounge in each hand, turned sideways to get them both through the door, and set them down beside the desk: one for himself, at the end of it, and one for the twins, angled so that whoever sat in it would be looking at the door.

He hadn’t asked which way they liked to sit. He had set it facing the door anyway.

Summer and Autumn came in after him and sat. The chair was an ordinary chair and it took them like one. The walls went up on every side of them, dark rock cut into shelves, and the shelves were full of things that didn’t belong together: books with no titles on their spines, rolled papers tied with string, a clay lamp, a brass instrument Summer couldn’t have named, a child’s wooden horse with one leg mended. The desk faced inward, toward the glow, and the glow came up through a narrow slot of glass at the end of the room and lay on everything like the light from a stove. The room smelled of paper and pencil shavings, a schoolroom smell, the last thing Summer would have expected at the bottom of a volcano.

Autumn’s eyes went to his face and stayed there. Summer knew it without looking, the way she knew when Autumn was holding a breath.

“These are my things,” Adrien said, frowning. “Notes I wrote over the years. Tools and instruments I made or owned. Amabilis either tracked them all down, or copied them.” He paused. “My entire life is in this suite, somehow.”

The composition book was already on the desk. It lay open, not at the beginning but at a page near the middle, where the margin carried a little pencil drawing of two faces in profile, overlapping where they met, and beside it, in his hand, one word.

Origin.

Summer read it, and it was the same word it had been at the Athenaeum table the day he wrote it, when she asked him whether he would tell them if he ever worked it out, even if it was bad, and he said he would.

Adrien put two fingers on the edge of the book and turned it around on the desk to face them, as carefully as if it were full to the brim.

“These are the papers I promised you at the door,” he said. “I want to be clear about what they are before I say anything else. They’re my own speculation. Notes, dates, things I’ve worked out and things I’ve guessed. That’s all. None of it is proof of anything, but it's an educated guess.”

Summer nodded. She didn’t trust her voice to do anything useful, so she let her chin do it.

He sat down in his own chair, at the end of the desk. He put his hands together on his knee and looked at them, and then he looked up.

“Your town’s history says Ashcombe Vale was founded around 1876, by a man named Martin Ashcombe,” he said. “That was me.”

The glow lay on the desk. Somewhere in the rock there was the faint tick of stone getting warm.

Summer had grown up with that name. It was the first thing in every history of the town anybody had ever made them read, the name at the top of the page, so old it had stopped sounding like a person and started sounding like a place. She had written it on every return address of her life. It was printed across the top of her library card, which was in a drawer at home.

For a second it wouldn’t attach to him. Martin Ashcombe was a name on a page, and this was a man in a wedding shirt with the cuffs turned back, who had grated cheese at her elbow an hour ago and stopped pouring the cream exactly where she told him to.

Then it did. A sound came out of her that was nearly a laugh and wasn’t. “No,” she said. “Okay, no. You’re—” It came out wrong. She tried again. “The town is—it’s named after you.”

“Yes.”

Autumn answered it before Summer could. She said it to him very quietly, in his own words. “’Maybe,’” she said. “You said that. ’A long time ago.’” It took Summer a second to place it: the House of Weighing, the first day, Autumn asking a stranger whether he had been to Ashcombe Vale before, because he looked familiar.

Adrien held Autumn’s eyes. “I did say that,” he said.

Summer’s face went hot. She thought of the counter, and the cubes, and the half of the town that left the skins on, and him saying Over cubes like a man hearing news from somewhere far away. “You let us tell you,” she said. “All night. How we do it in the Vale. You let us explain your own town to you.”

“Yes,” Adrien said. “I had not been in the Vale for almost a century and a half. Things change, over that much time.”

She looked down at the book. At the word. She kept her eyes there, because they had to go somewhere, and because if she looked at his face she was going to say more, and she didn’t know what it was going to be. Her left hand had found the edge of the seat beside her thigh and closed on it.

At the door she had kept one question back for after the meal: what he meant by himself. Now he was answering it, and she found she wanted to give the answer back to him and have the question again instead.

“It also says that in 1879 Martin Ashcombe announced a process for a fertilizer,” Adrien said, “for the land around the Vale, and that he sent out the first batches in 1880. It has those years right too.” He paused, a hand laying flat on the book, as if anchoring himself.

“I believe the fertilizer went into the ground,” Adrien said. His voice stayed as level as it had been at the door. “I believe it’s still there, in some form, and that it may still be affecting the people of the Vale. I believe that is why the Vale has the births it has.”

He stopped there, his eyes still on them.

He said births plainly, like a word off a form, and Summer heard the mercy. You made it when somebody died, and in the Vale the somebody was a baby more often than anywhere had a right to; she had carried her share of those dishes up other people’s porch steps since she was old enough to hold one level. Tonight she had stood at his counter and taught him how to make it. His hands had gone still on the stone when she said the word, and now she thought she knew why.

The casserole was still in her, warm and heavy, and for a moment she thought it was going to come back up. She breathed through her nose until it didn’t. And the others. The births that weren’t funerals. The ones like—

Her left hand let go of the seat and went to their front and lay flat there, on the long pale dress, over the body they shared, and stayed.

“And I can’t prove it,” he said. “I want you to hear that part as clearly as the rest. I can’t show you anything of mine in that soil, or in anyone’s blood. There’s no record that says it. My word, and my pencil.” He nodded toward the book. “That’s the whole of my evidence.”

The quiet after that was long. Summer’s eyes had begun to sting. Beside her, Autumn’s face hadn’t changed at all, except that her throat moved once, as if she had swallowed something hard. It was Autumn who broke the quiet, and she broke it the way Autumn broke things, carefully, from the edge.

“The town has its own account,” she said. “Of the births. Doctors came, a lot of them, over a long time. They studied it. They said it was the founding families marrying each other, early on, and then their children marrying each other. Inbreeding.” She said the word as if she were reading it off a card. “People in town said it was something in the soil. They always said that. Nobody wrote it down. The ones who did write it down—about the fertilizer—they were called cranks. It was discredited. Every time.” She stopped there. Summer knew that stop: there was more, and Autumn had decided to keep it.

Adrien listened to all of it with his hands together on his knee. At cranks one of his thumbs moved against the other, once, as if he were brushing a crumb off it, and then it was still.

While she talked her right hand had come up onto the desk, and her forefinger was moving on the wood beside the book, slowly, not touching the pages. Summer watched it. R. E. G. I. S. Autumn was spelling register.

“The council kept a register,” Autumn said. “A town register. Births, deaths, marriages, land. I’ve had it in my hands more than anybody in town.” The finger went on. T. E. R. “But the early years are missing, up to the year the town hall caught fire.” She lifted her eyes from the desk to his face. “That’s the one place your account could be checked. Against the town’s own book. And it can’t be.” A pause. “What do you remember about the fire?”

Adrien looked past them before he answered, not at the door but at the shelves, at nothing on them.

“I was there,” he said. “It was February, at night, and it was cold. The roof went over the east end first. We kept the rest of the building with a line of buckets from the well. The tiles on that end cracked in the heat, and when I left they were still a different color from the rest.” He looked back at Autumn. “I could give you those years.” He gestured to some of the books on the shelves. “I have my records, Amabilis somehow retrieved them. But you’d have it from me, and from nowhere else, and that’s the thing you’re checking.”

He was quiet for a moment, and then he said the rest of it to both of them. “I left when I understood what was happening in the houses, and couldn’t find any way to undo it,” he said. “I didn’t go back. Not until the day I came for you.”

Summer’s eyes spilled over, and she let them run. Her left hand stayed flat on their front. She was afraid of what it would do if she moved it.

He had looked at Autumn when he said that, and then at Summer, and then back at Autumn. And then he kept looking.

It wasn’t unkind, but it was careful. It was the look he gave a page he was reading, a problem with a shape to it, going from one of their faces to the other and back, taking in the place where the two of them met at the shoulders, and the hair, and the eyes, the way a doctor looks at a chart he has been waiting a long time to see. Summer knew that look. The doctors who came out to the Vale when they were small had looked at them like that, over clipboards, until Mom said no more studies. He watches. But he doesn’t stare. It’s… clinical. She had said that in the bathhouse, to Autumn, with the water up to their shoulders. She hadn’t known then whether it was a good thing.

He went on looking.

Beside her, Autumn’s finger had gone back to the start of the word and was tracing it again. It stopped on the G, and then the whole hand went flat on the desk, palm down, fingers spread, pressed to the wood. Autumn’s mouth opened. Summer heard the start of it—a breath, a lip, the shape of a P. And then nothing.

Pyrite. Summer hadn’t heard Autumn begin that word in three years, and she still had her line by heart: an early shift, thanks so much, this was so nice, and up, and out.

She glanced sideways at Autumn’s cheek. It was white, and very still.

Breaking a personal pattern! +1 Sulphur
First! x2

Then Summer turned her eyes back to Adrien, and kept them on him. Her left hand stayed where it was, flat on their front. She didn’t say anything about an early shift.

Adrien’s eyes had gone down to Autumn’s hand. He looked at it, flat on his desk, the fingers spread. Then he reached out and turned the open book over, so that it lay face down on the wood, and pushed it away from himself across the desk, slowly, until his arm was out straight. He took his hand off it and set it back on his knee.

Summer felt the body want to stand before she decided it, and felt Autumn want it too, and they stood up out of the chair together, the long pale dress catching at their knees. Adrien stayed in his chair, with his hand on his knee and the book at the far end of his reach.

“Can we—” Summer’s voice came out small and cracked down the middle, and she let it. “Can we go back in the Lounge? Please?”

“Yes,” Adrien said. “Of course.”

He stood then, and went past them to the door—around the side of the desk, the long way, not between them and it—and opened it. The Lounge was on the other side, warm and dim, the glass wall glowing at the far end of it, exactly where they had left it.