Wynn found him before he found her.

  He had come downstairs meaning to look for her -- Da had said Wynn would tell him his duties. The morning was already moving around him, the kitchen sounds, the smell of porridge, the creak of the stair under his feet. But Wynn was in the front hall with a cloth in one hand, wiping the sideboard with short efficient strokes, and she turned when he reached the bottom step as though she had known exactly when he would arrive.

  "Come," she said.

  Gerald followed her through the hall and down the kitchen corridor. Mary was at the stove, stirring the large pot with one hand, reaching for the salt with the other. The kitchen smelled of porridge and woodsmoke -- the kitchen hearth was the only fire in the main house, rougher heat than what bled from the Hot House through the walls. It crackled and shifted in a way the rune furnace never did. Mary did not look up.

  Wynn stopped at the kitchen threshold and faced him. She did not kneel. She did not lower her voice.

  "Four things," she said. "Every morning, before breakfast. In this order."

  Gerald waited.

  "One. The table. Bowls, spoons, bread board, salt cellars, butter crock. The bread comes from Mary. The butter is on the cold shelf in the pantry."

  He nodded.

  "Two. Sweep the front hall. Start at the far wall. Work toward the door. Move the furniture."

  He nodded again.

  "Three. The woodbox beside the kitchen hearth. Fill it. The wood is in the shed behind the house. Stack it properly."

  "How much?" Gerald asked.

  "Until the box is full."

  He looked at the woodbox. It was large. He was not.

  "Four. The chickens. Grain is in the covered bin beside the coop. One scoop. Scatter it in the run. Check the water."

  Wynn paused. Gerald thought she might say something else -- something about the workshop, about what these four things were leading to, about how long he would have to do them before the real work began. She did not.

  "Questions?" she said.

  He had many. None of them were about bowls or brooms or chickens.

  "No," he said.

  "Start with the table."

  The dining hall was empty and too large.

  Gerald had eaten at the community table every morning of his life, but he had never been in the room before the table was set. The chairs were pushed in. The salt cellars stood on the sideboard in a row with their small wooden lids closed, where Tom had placed them the night before. The bread board was bare. The room smelled faintly of the beeswax Wynn used on the wood and the river stone underneath everything -- the same clean mineral smell the hall had when it rained.

  He went to the cupboard beside the kitchen door. The bowls lived there, heavy earthenware, glazed brown on the inside and rough on the outside. He could carry three at a time without risking a drop. Twelve bowls. Four trips.

  He laid them out one at each place, spacing them as he had seen them spaced every morning -- an arm's length apart, roughly, though he was not sure which side of the table got the wider gaps. The spacing looked right from the head of the table and wrong from the foot. He stood at the foot for a moment, then moved back to the head. Better.

  The spoons were easier. He carried all of them at once in the crook of his arm, and only one slid free and clattered onto the table. He placed them to the right of each bowl. Or was it the left? He had eaten at this table every morning of his life, and when he tried to picture which side the spoon sat on, the image went sideways in his mind, the way a word sometimes goes strange when you say it too many times.

  Right. He put them on the right.

  Mary handed him the bread without a word -- two loaves on the board, the crust dark and cracked, still warm. He set the board at the centre of the table and went back for the butter crock, which was heavier than it looked. He carried it with both hands and set it down harder than he meant to. The thud sounded loud in the empty room.

  Salt cellars last. He placed them at intervals along the table, then stood at the end and looked at what he had done.

  It looked like a table set for breakfast. The bowls were not aligned. The butter crock was off centre. But it was done. It did not feel like anything in particular. A table with bowls on it.

  He went to sweep the hall.

  The broom was taller than he was.

  He had not thought about that when Wynn said "sweep the front hall." Other people swept and the broom had never seemed to matter. But the handle reached past his shoulder and the bristles dragged instead of pushing when he tried to move them across the stone floor.

  He started at the far wall, as Wynn had said. The front hall ran from the door to the base of the main stair, floored in river stone set in mortar -- the same stone as the Rainbow Wall outside, but without the glass. Dust gathered in the grooves between the stones, along the skirting boards, behind the legs of the two heavy chairs that sat against the left wall beneath the coat pegs.

  Gerald swept the open floor first. The dust moved ahead of the bristles in a grey wave. He pushed it toward the door in long uneven strokes, the broom rasping dry against the stone, and for a few passes he fell into a rhythm that felt almost like something.

  Then he reached the chairs.

  He looked at them. Solid oak, dark with age, the kind that had been in the hall since before he was born. The dust behind their legs was a thin grey line where the bristles had not been. He would have to pull each chair out, sweep behind it, and push it back.

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  He swept around them.

  It was faster. The dust along the edges came partly with the broom as he worked past the legs. The rest stayed. Gerald pushed the main drift out over the threshold and turned back to look at the hall.

  The open floor was clear. The grooves between the stones were mostly empty. The chairs stood where they always stood, and behind them the dust sat where it always sat. He could see it from here -- the faint grey line along the skirting board, undisturbed. He could move the chairs. Two minutes, maybe less.

  Through the front glass panel, the yard was bright with morning. Beyond it, above the workshop roof, the shimmer of heat rising from the vents. He could hear the hum even here, faint through two walls and a hallway.

  He leaned the broom against the wall and went to get the firewood.

  The woodshed was behind the house, past the kitchen garden. Gerald crossed the yard in the early light. The air was cool and damp with the night's dew, and the grass between the flagstones was wet under his feet.

  He could hear the Hot House.

  The rune furnace did not crackle or pop. It hummed -- low, constant, underneath everything, present the way the river was present. The Hot House door was closed this early. Through the small window beside the door, Gerald could see the orange glow of the interior, and above the roofline the thin shimmer of heat rising from the vents. He stopped walking. The glow was steady. The hum was steady.

  He was the boy with empty arms who was supposed to be getting firewood.

  He went to the woodshed.

  The wood was split oak, stacked against the back wall in rows that smelled of sap and rain and the iron of the splitting maul. Gerald gathered what he could carry -- four logs cradled against his chest, the bark rough against his shirt, the weight pulling at his shoulders. He carried them back across the yard to the kitchen door and set them in the woodbox.

  The four logs sat at the bottom of the box. The box was deep. Mary glanced at it and said nothing.

  Gerald went back. On the second trip he tried five and managed four and a half -- the top one shifted as he crossed the yard. It slid from his arms and hit the flagstones with a flat crack, splitting along a line he had not seen, falling into two uneven halves that rolled apart.

  He looked at the split pieces on the ground. He looked at the four logs pressed against his chest. He looked at the kitchen door, ten paces ahead. The Hot House window was behind him and to the left, still glowing its steady orange.

  He carried the four logs inside and stacked them. He went back for more. He did not go back for the split pieces.

  Three more trips. On the last one his arms ached above the elbows where the bark had been grinding against the soft parts. The woodbox was full -- nothing like Tom's work, each log fitted against the next like teeth in a jaw, but full. The logs leaned on each other at angles that did not inspire confidence. The stack held. It looked like it was thinking about whether to keep holding.

  He went to do the last thing on his list.

  He did not do the last thing on his list.

  He walked out of the kitchen meaning to go to the chicken coop, which was behind the stables. He was walking in that direction. He knew where it was.

  But the path between the kitchen and the stables passed the Hot House, and the Hot House door was open now.

  Gerald stopped.

  Tomis was inside. Gerald could see him through the doorway -- dark hair tied back, leather apron on, moving between the furnace and the workbench with the unhurried stride of a man who had made this crossing a thousand times. The furnace glow caught the side of his face and turned it amber. Heat pressed outward through the open door.

  Gerald could hear voices. Da's, low and even, saying something he could not make out. The clink of tools on the rack. The scrape of a punty rod being turned. And underneath everything the furnace hum, the bass note the morning was built on.

  Tomis crossed in front of the furnace mouth and the heat-shimmer made him wobble, the way the world wobbled through Gerald's bedroom window. For a moment Tomis looked like he was made of the same stuff as the air -- wavering, not quite solid. Then he stepped past the shimmer and was Tomis again, reaching for a blowpipe on the wall.

  Gerald did not know how long he stood there. The dew dried on the flagstones around him. The morning moved on. The men inside did not look toward the door, and the furnace hummed its mineral hum and did not care whether Gerald Glass was watching or sweeping or carrying wood or standing in the yard with his arms at his sides and his chest full of something that had no name.

  "The chickens."

  He turned. Wynn was beside him. Not behind -- beside, as though she had been walking toward the stables and paused. She was not looking at him. She was looking at the washing line where the morning's linens were already hanging. Her voice was the same voice she used for everything: level, unhurried, fact rather than instruction.

  Gerald's stomach dropped. The chickens. He had forgotten the chickens.

  "Yes," he said, and his face went hot, and he walked to the coop.

  The grain bin was where Wynn had said it would be. He filled the scoop and threw the grain in a wide arc the way he had seen Pim do it, but the throw was too hard and the grain scattered past the run and into the weeds beyond. Six rust-coloured hens and a grey rooster came out anyway and pecked at what had landed close enough to matter. The rooster looked at Gerald with one flat amber eye, which Gerald took as the closest thing to approval the bird was likely to offer.

  He checked the water trough. Full. He went back toward the house.

  The morning was well along now. Through the open windows of the dining hall he could hear the table filling -- voices, the clatter of bowls, Pim's laugh at something. The estate had woken fully while Gerald was carrying and sweeping and forgetting and standing in the yard. He had been part of it the way a stone on the riverbed is part of the river. Present, but not doing anything the current would notice.

  He went in through the kitchen door and down the corridor to the dining hall. The table he had set was full of people eating off the bowls he had placed. Tom was at the sideboard with the small beer. Pim was talking to Harrold about something on the north fence. The salt cellars were in use, the butter crock open. Everything Gerald had laid out that morning was being used, and nobody had mentioned any of it, because that was what a set table was -- invisible until it was wrong.

  Gerald sat in his usual place. Sable was already there, eating porridge, reading something folded beside her bowl. She did not look up.

  Nessa brought him a bowl. The porridge was hot and thick and tasted of porridge, which was what it was supposed to taste of on a morning that was not his birthday.

  Across the table, Grandfather lifted his spoon from the right side of his bowl and set it on the left. He did this without looking at Gerald, without pausing, without any change in his expression. He picked up the spoon that was on the wrong side and put it where it belonged and went on eating.

  Gerald watched it happen. He had guessed. The guess had been wrong. And Grandfather had fixed it without a word, which was worse than being told, because being told would have meant someone thought it was worth mentioning.

  The porridge sat heavy in his stomach.

  Halfway through breakfast, he saw Wynn cross the front hall through the open doorway. She did not come to the table. She did not look in. She walked through the hall he had swept, and as she passed the chairs against the left wall, her hand dropped and her fingers ran along the top of the skirting board behind the chair legs.

  Gerald could not see what her fingers found. He did not need to.

  She continued down the hall and through the far door and was gone.

  He put his spoon down. The porridge was finished. He had done all four things on his list and every one of them badly, and no one had said a word about any of it. The hall was loud around him -- Pim laughed at something, the Wood Guard came through the side door with mud on their boots, Tom collected bowls -- and Gerald sat inside the noise with his wrong spoons and his dusty chairs and his crooked woodpile and his late chickens and the silence that was its own kind of answer.

  He carried his bowl to the kitchen, because that was what the others did. Mary took it without comment.

  He went out into the yard. The split log was still on the flagstones where he had dropped it, the two halves lying pale-side-up in the morning sun. He walked past them.

  The Hot House door was open. The hum reached him. Through the doorway he could see shapes moving in the amber light -- Da, Tomis, a third figure that might have been Aaron -- working at the pace the furnace set, which was the pace of something that never hurried because it never needed to.

  Gerald stood near the well. Close enough to feel the heat on his face. Not close enough to see what they were making.

  He put his hand in his pocket and found Grandfather's boiled sweet from yesterday, still in its waxed paper. He held it there, feeling the paper crinkle under his fingers.

  Tomorrow he would do them again.