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“What?”

“Come in before the whole lane does.”

As if Asha has invited her, the woman from the oil stall calls my name.

Two carters have stopped beside her awning. Their crates occupy the same patch of shade, and all three are explaining whose fault this is. I can see the space behind the water barrel that would solve most of their argument. My mouth starts to open.

“Vai, tell him,” the oil seller says.

I stop.

I have my sister beside me, hot bread in my hand and Daurek waiting to enter a kitchen he will barely fit inside. I want to hear what Tovi said to the innkeeper. I want to sit down with them before the bread cools.

“She’s visiting,” Asha calls across the lane. “Sort it out yourselves.”

She turns back to me and takes my elbow.

“Mind the step. Tovi still hasn’t fixed it.”

“That is a very large sack of flour,” Tovi says from inside.

Daurek looks at me.

“I warned you,” I whisper.

We get him onto the bench by moving it away from the wall and giving him the whole of one end. His antlers clear the beam if he sits a little forward. Tovi puts the bread board where he can reach it and regards the arrangement with satisfaction.

“Better than the inn.”

“You haven’t seen the room yet,” I say.

“I have seen the bed.”

Asha pours tea into the good blue cup and sets it beside my plate.

I run my finger around the rim. There is a tiny chip beneath the handle, exactly where I remember it. She has kept it high on the shelf, away from the working cups. I had seen its empty place beside me at the Heartwood so often that having it in my hand feels strange.

“You didn’t let Tovi have it.”

“He has his own.”

“It holds less,” Tovi says.

“It survives you.”

Daurek laughs. Tovi looks pleased with himself, which is how he generally responds to being insulted by Asha.

She asks about the forest. I tell her about Reivaka, and the room that made its own bed, and the first morning I woke to find my wet boots dry. Daurek corrects my account of Ziku only when I make him sound less troublesome than he is.

Tovi wants to know whether the Heartwood grows all its own chairs. Daurek says most of them, and Tovi looks toward the bench in a way I recognize.

“You like that bench,” Asha tells him.

“I was only asking.”

I sit back and drink my tea. Through the open door I can hear the oil seller still arguing with the carters about the crates. Here, Asha is cutting another loaf, and Daurek has ducked his head to listen while Tovi describes a tree that used to grow behind the well.

I don’t have to keep the conversation going. They have found enough to say to each other.