Lira Halvorsen learned to walk at ten months and immediately applied this capability to following Luc everywhere he went, which was not an exaggeration and was not a figure of speech but a literal description of her primary activity from that age onward. She toddled after him with the focused, slightly breathless determination of someone who has identified a destination and sees no reason to approach it gradually, and when she reached wherever he was she would arrive and look at him with an expression of profound satisfaction, as though the journey's purpose had been not to go somewhere but to confirm that he was there.

  He did not find this annoying. He found it, very quickly, to be one of the more reliable constants of his daily experience, which was a different category from family obligation — she was not following him because she had to, she was following him because she had decided to, and there was something in that specific quality of chosen presence that resonated with the same part of him that had responded, years ago, to Sven crossing the training ground. People who decided to be present were different from people who were present by circumstance, and Lira had been deciding to be present since she could walk.

  She turned up at his training sessions for the first time when she was two and he was seven, and the episode had become something of a legend in the Halvorsen household — the way she had marched onto the training floor with the full authority of someone who has decided they belong somewhere, and sat directly in the path of whatever Luc was doing, and watched him with enormous ice-blue eyes and the fixed intensity of a person who has found the thing they were looking for. He had adapted his footwork patterns around her without picking her up and removing her, which was the sensible response and the one that Sigrid had expected, but which would have required treating Lira's decision as a mistake, and he had already learned enough about Lira to understand that her decisions were not mistakes, merely occasionally inconveniently placed.

  "You're explaining your training to a two-year-old," Sven observed one afternoon, from his post at the training fence, with the tone of someone who has accepted a situation he cannot explain but has decided to enjoy.

  "She asked what I was doing," Luc said.

  "She said 'whassat.' That could have meant the floor. Or the ceiling."

  "The question was clear enough from context." Luc settled into the stance he was working on, aware of Lira as a small blue-haired constant in his peripheral vision. "She wants to understand things. That's worth taking seriously."

  Sven looked at Lira for a moment, who was looking at Luc with her full, focused attention, and then he climbed over the training fence — Sven always used the direct route, regardless of whether a gate was available — and picked her up and put her on his shoulders, where she grabbed two fistfuls of his blue hair and looked extremely pleased with her new altitude. "There," Sven said. "She can see better. Train."

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  The three of them moved through the afternoon in a configuration that would remain familiar for years: Luc working through whatever adaptation he was developing, narrating when Lira asked questions in the vocabulary available to her age, Sven translating the answers into sounds she had better odds of parsing, Lira watching everything with the attention that was already her most distinctive characteristic. She was, from a very young age, a person who watched things properly — not glancing but looking, not hearing but listening, in the way that some people absorb the world through its surface and some people absorb it through its depth, and Lira was the latter without effort.

  She began asking him real questions by the time she was five. Not the surface questions of a curious child, but questions with a quality of genuine inquiry behind them — why do the ants build in spirals sometimes and sometimes in grids, what does the Law of Structure feel like from the inside, if the pendant is warm does it mean something is close or does it mean something is thinking about him, could she feel the vibrations too if she tried. He answered all of them as fully as he knew how, which was more fully than most adults would have answered a five-year-old's questions, and she received the answers with the focused appreciation of someone who had been expecting to be given less than she was given.

  She started a question journal at six, which she carried in a small leather case that Fen had made for her without being asked, because he had seen her writing things on scraps of material before she had a better option and had quietly solved the problem in the way he solved most problems. The journal had her questions on one side of each page, and the answers Luc had given on the other side, and notes about what the answers made her think about next. He found this, when she showed it to him, to be one of the most moving things he had encountered, not because it was flattering but because it showed him that she had taken the conversations seriously enough to preserve them, that she had decided they were worth keeping the way he decided certain things were worth keeping.

  "You're very organized for six," he told her.

  "You organized me," she said, which was probably true.

  He thought about this later and understood it differently than she might have meant it — not that he had organized her directly, but that being around someone who took things seriously had given her permission to take things seriously, and that this was perhaps the most useful thing one person could do for another, to simply make the taking-seriously feel like a reasonable response to the world rather than an eccentricity.

  Lira was seven when she told Torval, in the market square, that Luc was smarter than him and his hair was nicer but that hair was not the same as intelligence. She had said this with the complete equanimity of someone stating observable facts, looking up at a boy four years older than her with the placid confidence of someone who has not yet been taught to be intimidated by size or age, and Torval had stared at her for a moment and then simply left, which was perhaps the most reasonable thing he had ever done in relation to the Halvorsen family.

  Luc heard about it from Sigrid, who had witnessed it from across the square and had found it difficult to manage her expression appropriately.

  "She's going to cause trouble," he said.

  "She already does," Sigrid said. "She's your sister. What did you expect?"

  He thought about this and found that he had not expected anything specific, having arrived at the relationship the way you arrive at the closest things — not by planning or anticipating but by simply being present long enough that presence became something more than circumstance. He had not chosen Lira any more than she had chosen him, but he had, at some point, chosen to take her seriously, and she had done the same in return, and that mutual choosing was the thing that made it what it was — not biology, not obligation, but the decided thing. The same principle he had recognized in Sven, and in Fen's quiet mornings at the training ground. The people who mattered most were the people who had decided to matter.

  He would not have said this aloud. It would have embarrassed everyone, including him. But he thought it, in the clear, systematic way he thought about things that were important, and then he went to find Lira and check her question journal for anything he hadn't answered yet.