Nan had laid out his good shirt.
It was on the bed when he got back from the Quarry, folded the way she folded things, which was not the way anyone else folded things. Corners tucked under. Creases pressed with her palm because the iron had stopped working in January and neither of them had mentioned it. The shirt was grey. Everything Orrin owned was grey or brown or somewhere between the two because Ashen Ford didn't sell colors so much as suggestions of colors that had given up.
"The toast is at six," Nan said from the kitchen. Her voice carried through the thin wall between the bedroom and everything else. The cottage had three rooms and you could hear all of them from all of them. "I pressed your shirt."
"I see that."
"With my hands. Because the iron is broken."
"I know."
"I'm mentioning it in case you wanted to fix it."
"I'll fix it."
"You said that in January."
He put the shirt on. It smelled like Nan's soap, which smelled like nothing specific. Just clean. The kind of clean that happens when someone washes something carefully in cold water because heating water costs firewood and firewood costs money they didn't talk about not having.
The Grade Toast was held in the square outside the Awakening Hall every year. Same square, same tables, same lanterns strung between the same posts. The town brought food. Families brought their newly Awakened children and stood behind them while a registrar read the grades out loud and everyone clapped politely or enthusiastically depending on the color.
Orrin had been dreading it for three days.
Not the event. The people. Forty-seven people had watched his notification turn gold. By now the number who'd heard about it was probably closer to four hundred. Ashen Ford had eight thousand residents and a gossip network that moved faster than the mail service.
Nan walked slowly. She'd been walking slowly for months but tonight it was worse. She held his arm on the way to the square and he matched her pace and didn't comment on how her fingers gripped tighter on the uneven cobblestones. Her breathing had that whistle again. Louder in the open air than it was inside.
The square was already half full when they arrived. Tables with food. Lanterns doing their best against the April dark. People in their good clothes, which in Ashen Ford meant clothes with fewer patches than their regular clothes.
Heads turned.
Not all of them. But enough. People who'd been mid-conversation paused for a beat when they saw him. Some went back to talking. Some kept looking. A woman near the baker's table leaned to her husband and said something behind her hand. The husband looked at Orrin, looked away, looked back.
Orrin counted. Twelve people watching him cross the square. That was twelve more than usual.
"Ignore them," Nan said. She'd noticed. She always noticed. "People stare at things they don't understand. It's not personal."
It was a little personal.
He found a table near the edge. Away from the center, away from the lanterns, away from where the registrar would set up. The chairs were wooden and one of them rocked on uneven legs. Nan sat in the stable one. He took the rocking one.
"Pryce."
The registrar was a thin man named Hald who had been recording awakenings in Gravemark Province for longer than Orrin had been alive in either of his lives. He carried a portable scanning device, a leather case full of forms, and the expression of someone who considered social events a professional obligation.
"Your public scan, if you don't mind." He held the device out. Small, brass-colored, about the size of a compass. Standard Bureau-issue for provincial registrars.
Orrin put his hand on it.
The device hummed. A small panel on its face flickered and displayed text.
Class: Summoner. Grade: Rare.
Not Sanctum Warden. Not gold. Not sealed. Summoner. Rare. Clean and simple and completely wrong. The System had looked at the scanning device and decided to lie.
Orrin stared at the display for two seconds longer than he should have. The registrar didn't notice. He was already writing.
"Summoner, Rare-grade." Hald's pen moved across the form in small, precise letters. "That's a useful class. The garrison always needs summoners." He said it the way you'd say "the hospital always needs bandages." Functional. Necessary. Not exciting.
"Thank you," Orrin said. He didn't know what else to say. Thank you for writing down a lie the System told you. Thank you for not looking up when the device displayed something that should have made you pause.
Hald packed the scanner away and moved to the next table. The form with Orrin's name went into the leather case. The case would go to the provincial capital by courier. From the capital to the Bureau's Eastern Province desk. From there into a system that catalogued every Awakened in the empire by class, grade, province, and date.
He watched the case close. His name was in there now. Filed under Rare. Under Summoner. Under a version of himself that didn't exist.
The System had lied for him. He didn't know whether to feel relieved or terrified. He settled on both, which wasn't comfortable but was at least honest.
"Rin."
Nan was looking at him. Her eyes were sharp even when the rest of her wasn't. She'd watched the scan. She'd watched his face while the scan happened. She didn't miss things.
"Rare," she said. Quiet. Just for him.
"That's what it said."
She held his gaze for a moment longer than comfortable. Then she patted his hand. "Good. Rare is good. Rare is safe."
She knew. Not the details. Not the gold or the sealed grade or the Sanctum Warden name. But she knew the scan had shown something different from what was real. She knew because she'd raised a boy for two years who wasn't quite the boy she'd had before and she'd learned to read the spaces between what people said and what was true.
She didn't ask.
He didn't tell.
The food was what Ashen Ford food always was. Grain-heavy, simple, filling in a way that had more to do with volume than flavor. Bread with butter that tasted slightly of the iron churn. Stew that was mostly potato and optimism. Orrin ate because not eating would draw attention and drawing attention was the last thing he needed tonight.
"Okay but this bread is actually good."
Fen appeared from somewhere to the left, holding a plate piled high enough to qualify as structural engineering. He sat down at their table without being invited, the way he did everything, as if the concept of not being welcome had occurred to him and he'd decided it didn't apply.
"I'm Fen," he said to Nan. "I go into dungeons with your grandson. He's very quiet and his summons are better than the military and he saved my life yesterday. The bread is good. Did you make any of this?"
Nan blinked. Then something happened to her face that Orrin hadn't seen in weeks. The corners of her mouth lifted. Not a full smile. The ghost of one. The suggestion that smiling was still something her face remembered how to do.
"I made the stew," she said.
"The potato one?"
"They're all potato."
"Right. Right, of course they are. Is there a non-potato option?"
"This is Ashen Ford."
"So no."
"So no."
Fen ate the stew. He talked while eating, which should have been unpleasant but wasn't because Fen's talking had a rhythm to it that turned eating into punctuation. Bite, sentence, bite, question, bite, observation that nobody asked for but that was somehow interesting anyway.
He asked Nan about the cottage. About the iron bells on the door. About whether she'd lived in Ashen Ford her whole life. About the Hum and whether you really stopped hearing it after a while. Nan answered. Short answers at first, then longer ones. She told him about the bells, which were tradition, which kept the Rift wisps out, which her husband had hung thirty years ago with nails he'd forged himself.
"He made nails?" Fen said.
"He made everything. Horseshoes, hinges, nails, half the door handles in town. He was a blacksmith."
"Was?"
"Was."
Fen went quiet for exactly three seconds. Orrin counted. Then Fen said, "The stew is really good," and Nan smiled again and the conversation moved on without forcing the moment into something it wasn't.
Orrin watched them. Nan and Fen. His grandmother and his... whatever Fen was. Dungeon partner. The kid who'd asked "why" and hadn't believed the answer. The Common-grade who showed up to things he wasn't invited to and somehow made them better by being there.
He didn't know what to do with the feeling in his chest. Not the mana. Not the cramp. Something else. Something that didn't have a tactical explanation.
Across the square, the registrar was packing up. The leather case was full. He buckled it shut with the careful movements of a man who understood that paperwork was the real infrastructure of civilization. A courier was waiting near the square's edge with a horse that looked as tired as Hald did.
The case went onto the horse. The horse went north. Toward the provincial capital. Toward a desk in a building Orrin had never seen, where someone would open the case and sort the forms and enter the data into whatever system the Bureau used to keep track of its empire's Awakened.
Summoner. Rare. Gravemark Province. April.
Orrin Pryce, filed and categorized and completely wrong.
Nan's hand found his under the table. Her fingers were cold. They were always cold now.
"You did well, Rin," she said. Not about the scan. Not about the class. About being here. About sitting at a table in public and eating stew and letting Fen talk to her about iron bells. About showing up even though showing up was the thing he was worst at.
He didn't answer. He held her hand and watched the courier's horse disappear up the north road and tried not to think about what was in that case.
The lanterns swayed in the April wind. The Hum was there, underneath everything, the way it always was. Fen was telling Nan about the Quarry and the crystals and the way the mana tasted at the deeper levels and Nan was listening with her head tilted the way she listened when something genuinely interested her.
The north road was dark. The horse was gone. The case was traveling.
Somewhere in the provincial capital, a desk was waiting for it.