I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities

Chapter 395: Home to Mara

The villa smelled like food long before he ever reached the wrought-iron gate.

It wasn’t a quick, thrown-together meal. Whatever she had decided to make, it had been simmering on the stove for at least an hour, probably much longer. The rich, earthy aroma drifted all the way down the garden path to meet him in the crisp winter air. It was the distinct scent of a kitchen that had been occupied and purposeful for a good portion of the afternoon.

It was the kind of smell that wasn’t merely about satisfying hunger. It was about something else entirely. It was an anchor.

Vane pushed the heavy wooden door open.

Mara was standing at the kitchen counter. Her back was to him. Her dark hair was tied up in the familiar, severely practical knot she favored when working, and her sleeves were pushed up past her elbows.

She heard the thick click of the door latch. Vane stopped in the entryway, watching her shoulders. He saw them make the tiny, almost imperceptible adjustment they always made—bracing, calculating. She was reading the cadence and weight of his footsteps, identifying the sound before she even turned around.

Then, she turned.

The inventory ran exactly the way it always did. It took her exactly two seconds. Her amber eyes swept over him from the boots up, clinical and sharp. Checking for new injuries. Assessing his baseline fatigue. Calculating his overall physical condition after a three-day ocean crossing.

She found whatever it was she was looking for, gave a single, tight nod, and looked back down at the cutting board. She immediately went back to what she was doing.

"Sit down," she said, her voice entirely steady. "It’s nearly ready."

Vane walked into the kitchen and sat on one of the high wooden stools at the counter.

The villa was incredibly warm, a stark, jarring contrast to the freezing deck of the leviathan and the biting wind of the docks. The pale afternoon light angled through the garden window—taking the exact, slanted trajectory it always took during the deep winter months—laying across the stone floor in a long, flat strip of gold.

He took a slow breath, letting the warmth settle deep in his lungs, and looked around the room.

It was a space thoroughly inhabited. A heavy accounts ledger sat open on the corner shelf. A chipped ceramic cup overflowed with wax crayons. And dominating the far wall was the third alphabet she had been working on, the parchment sheets pinned flat against the plaster with four heavy iron tacks.

There were notes scrawled in the margins, dark ink smudges, crossed-out syntax trees. It was an entire year of her life, quietly accumulated in the span of a single room.

"The third alphabet," Vane said, his voice a little rough. He nodded toward the wall. "How far along are you?"

"Seventy percent," Mara replied. She didn’t turn around from the stove, stirring a heavy iron pot. "The grammar rules are significantly harder than the first two. The sentence structure runs in the completely opposite direction. You have to conjugate the emotional intent before the verb."

"But you’re at seventy percent."

"Yes," she said. "Seventy percent."

He looked back at the pinned pages. He could see the obsessive, careful notation. The dense web of cross-references drawn between different root words. It bore the heavy, undeniable density of someone who learned things simply because the knowledge was worth having, not because a tutor was evaluating it. She had taught herself simply because she refused to be idle.

Mara turned off the heat. She picked up a ceramic bowl, walked around the island, and set it down gently in front of him.

"It’s the Seorak recipe," she explained, taking a step back. "I finally found the correct spice substitute down in the lower market back in October. The proportions took me three tries to get right." She climbed onto the high stool across from him, resting her hands in her lap. "This is the third version. It should be correct."

Vane picked up the heavy iron spoon. He scooped up the dark, fragrant broth and tasted it. The heat bloomed down his throat, complex and perfectly balanced.

He lowered the spoon. "It’s right," he said.

"I know," she said quietly.

She sat there and watched him eat. Vane took another bite, but his attention drifted up. He looked at her across the wooden expanse of the counter. She was staring intently at the bowl in front of him, her small hands clasped tightly together.

Her amber eyes held a very specific, terrible weight.

It wasn’t that she was actively suppressing her emotions. She wasn’t putting on a theatrical performance of composure. She was simply carrying a burden that was unspeakably heavy, and she was choosing to carry it with absolute, rigid correctness.

Vane recognized that look intimately. He had been watching people carry that exact same expression since Oakhaven. It was the look of someone surviving purely on momentum.

He set the spoon down with a soft clink.

"Mara," he said.

She looked up.

Her amber eyes locked onto his. She held his gaze for exactly two seconds.

And then, something deep inside her carrying structure finally gave way. It didn’t happen all at once. It wasn’t dramatic or explosive. It broke in the quiet, inevitable way a dam fractures when the immense pressure it was built to hold back suddenly vanishes. The reason she had been holding herself together was sitting right in front of her. The waiting was finally over.

Her face crumpled.

It was not a practiced or performed sound. It didn’t build up slowly or announce itself with a tremor. It was just a ragged, breathless sound. The sound of a thirteen-year-old girl who had been entirely alone for twelve months in an empty villa on a floating island.

For a year, she had balanced the estate accounts. She had managed the household staff. She had rigorously taught herself complex foreign alphabets. And every single day, she had told herself that her brother always came back.

He had. He was here. And her body had unilaterally decided that it was finally safe to let the year out.

Vane stood up, walked quickly around the edge of the counter, and slid down the cabinet to the floor.

Mara practically fell off her stool. She dropped down onto the cold stone tiles right beside him, burying her face violently into his shoulder, her hands gripping tight handfuls of his coat. She cried.

Vane wrapped his arms around her small, shaking frame and pulled her tight against his chest. He leaned his back against the wooden cabinet and rested his chin against the top of her head. He didn’t say anything comforting. He didn’t offer any empty platitudes. There was absolutely nothing useful to say.

She was thirteen years old. She had been left alone for a year while he bled and fought on a frozen continent. The agonizing reality of that carried a steep, brutal cost that no visual inventory could ever quantify, and no neat accounting ledger could ever balance.

So, she cried. She sobbed until her lungs hitched and her throat went raw, pouring a year of terror and isolation into the thick fabric of his coat.

Vane didn’t move. He sat on the kitchen floor of the villa, surrounded by the smell of the perfected Seorak recipe, and held his sister. He just let her let it out. He didn’t rush her, didn’t speak, and didn’t ask a single thing of her.

It took a long time.

When the shaking finally subsided, she pulled back. She sniffled loudly and wiped her wet face roughly on her sleeve, employing the exact same pragmatic, ruthless efficiency she brought to all physical problems. She took a shuddering breath and looked up at the bowl sitting abandoned on the counter above them.

"Your food is getting cold," she whispered, her voice incredibly hoarse.

"I know," Vane said.

"You should eat it."

"I will."

Mara looked down at the stone floor. She traced the grout line with the toe of her boot. "I kept saying it," she mumbled. "The whole year. Over and over. He always comes back."

"I know," Vane said softly.

"I meant it every single time I said it," she insisted, looking up at him with red-rimmed eyes. "I really believed it." She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs. "But twelve months is a very, very long time to have to believe something."

"It is," he agreed.

"It got so much harder in the middle," she admitted, her voice dropping to a fragile whisper. "October. November. Those months were... hard."

She turned her head, looking across the room at the pinned pages of the third alphabet. "So I started focusing heavily on the grammar. Whenever it got really hard to breathe, I just did more grammar."

Vane followed her gaze to the wall. He looked at the dense, ink-stained pages.

"Seventy percent," he said.

"Yes," she nodded, wiping her nose one last time. "Seventy percent."

They sat there on the kitchen floor for a while longer. The afternoon light shifted, crawling its way across the stone floor as the sun dipped lower. The stew went completely cold in its bowl. Neither of them made a move to get up.

Eventually, the stone grew too cold to sit on. Vane pushed himself up and offered her a hand. He reheated the bowl of stew over the stove, and they sat side-by-side at the counter while he finished every last drop.

After that, the fragile emotional air settled into something resembling normalcy.

Mara brought out a textile sample she had acquired from Sera at the Seorak barter market. It was a complex, pre-consolidation weave containing a hidden, encoded pattern language. She spread it out over the counter and meticulously explained what sections she had successfully translated, and which threads were still giving her trouble.

Vane listened to all of it, giving her his complete, undivided attention.

Then, she dragged out her notes on the specific grammar problem in the third alphabet—the one that had been stubbornly refusing to resolve. Vane looked over the complex syntax trees for several minutes before admitting he had absolutely no useful contribution to offer.

Mara sighed, rolling her eyes in a distinctly teenage fashion. She told him she already knew he wouldn’t be able to help; she just wanted to show it to someone. Vane smiled and told her that was a perfectly sufficient reason.

By the eighth hour, the oil lamp in the main room was burning low.

Mara was sprawled out on the wide bed, the heavy accounts ledger open next to her, with dozens of her third-alphabet pages scattered haphazardly across the quilt. Sometime between the seventh and eighth hour, the scratch of her pen had finally stopped.

Vane walked over and stood by the edge of the mattress.

He looked at the dying lamp. He looked at the chaotic spread of her academic work. Then, he looked down at her. She was thirteen years old, dead asleep, her face finally slack and peaceful. It was the deep, dreamless sleep of someone who had finally been permitted to put an incredibly heavy burden down.

Moving with slow, practiced care, Vane gathered the loose papers and the heavy ledger, stacking them neatly on the nearby wooden table so they wouldn’t get crushed.

He walked around to the other side of the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress. He looked out the large garden window. The island was quiet outside. The night had fully settled over the grounds, and high up on the hill, the Academic District’s lights were burning steadily in their standard, comforting evening sequence.

Vane lay back against the pillows, letting the exhaustion of the three-day crossing finally claim him.

He was asleep long before the lamp flickered out.