Aelindra Moonwhisper's Arc

Chapter 9 of 9

Morning came gray and quiet. Aelindra unlatched the shutters and set fresh loaves on the sill to cool. The boy came down the stairs in his mended shirt and stood by the counter. He had swept the floor before she was awake. The oven hummed low in the back wall, moss soft along its stones. Nimbus hung by the window and watched the lane. Three people passed and none threw anything. One nodded at the door. Aelindra kept her hands on the counter to steady them. She had been turning the question over for a week. She looked at the boy. He was thin under the shirt. His face was still marked from the sickness. She said his name. She asked if he would let her adopt him. She said the room upstairs was his either way, but she wanted him as her son. The boy did not answer at first. He looked at the flour on his fingers. Then he said yes. He said it flat, the way he said everything, and then he said it again. Aelindra came around the counter and put her hand on the back of his head. He leaned into her robe. The light changed. It started at their feet and went out through the floorboards. Purple and blue rose off her arms and off the boy's shoulders. It did not burn. Nimbus drifted back from the window and said nothing. The oven's moss shivered. The light pushed through the walls and out into the lane. Aelindra opened the door because she had to see. The light was moving down the street in a slow wave. Where it passed, the soot on the shopfronts lifted and blew away. A cracked lintel two doors down knitted itself shut. The woman from the lane stepped out of her house holding her child, and the child's cough stopped mid-breath. Down at the square, the fountain ran clear for the first time in years. Flowers opened in the cracks between stones. People came out into the street. The man with the bandaged hand unwrapped it and flexed his fingers. An old woman set down her cane. No one spoke for a long minute. Then a few of them looked toward the bakery. The boy was standing in the doorway beside Aelindra with his hand in hers. The vines above the beam had bloomed white. "That was you," Nimbus said. Aelindra shook her head. "That was both of us," she said. She looked down at the boy. He was watching the street with the same flat face, but his fingers were tight in hers. "Back inside," she said. "We have bread to sell." She closed the door behind them. Outside, the town was already deciding something new, and she could hear the footsteps starting toward her shop.