Aima Wren's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

Three days passed before the visitor arrived. Aima was in the upper room of the observatory when she heard the knock — not at the base of the tower where most people gave up, but on the door to her workshop floor. Someone who knew the way. She opened it to find a woman in a dark green cloak, holding a ceramic jar that glowed faintly from within. The woman's face was unfamiliar, but her eyes moved past Aima into the workshop with the quick assessment of someone looking for a specific person. "I'm looking for Gedda Foss," she said. "I was told he might be here." Aima stepped back without answering, letting the woman see the empty room behind her. The woman's shoulders dropped slightly. "Then I've missed him." She held out the jar. "He made this while he was traveling. Said if anything happened to him, it should go to someone who understood broken things." The glow inside pulsed once, like a heartbeat. Aima took the jar carefully, feeling its warmth through the clay. The surface was carved with a pattern she recognized — willows, but simplified, the way someone would draw them if they'd learned the design from memory rather than from a teacher's hand. Gedda's work, but from before he came home. "Where did you meet him?" she asked. The woman glanced toward the stairs. "Far enough that I need to leave before dark. There's a carriage waiting." She didn't offer more. Aima wanted to ask what Gedda had been like then, whether he'd spoken, whether he'd been different. But the woman was already turning toward the door, and Aima understood that some answers weren't meant to be carried back. She watched from the window as the woman climbed into a horse-drawn carriage below and disappeared down the road. The jar sat on her workbench, still glowing. Aima ran her fingers over the carved willows and realized what she was holding — proof that Gedda's silence hadn't started when he came home. He'd been learning to speak differently long before he returned. The circlet she'd made was still at his workshop, untouched. But this jar told her something the circlet couldn't. Gedda had already found a way to be understood by someone else. The question wasn't whether he could communicate. It was whether he wanted to communicate with her.