Even Remmie.

I love him to pieces, I do, but sometimes I can’t believe we’re related.

The laneways she walked were bordered each side by flower-straggled hedgerows. Fireflies danced above them, glimmering brightly in the lowering dusk. Tonight, though, not even their whimsical beauty soothed her. Rankled still by the loss of that other clock, the clock Arndel should have let her create, that he’d as good as stolen from her, she stamped the damp grass underfoot and with each step imagined Lord Traint’s inferior clock smashed to shards beneath her heels.

I’m glad no-one will ever know I made it. Let every mage who sees it think Traint’s journey clock is Arndel’s monstrosity. He deserves to be tarred with that brush. My day will come. In time the whole world will know my name. It will see what I’ve created and be dumbstruck with awe.

It was almost properly dark by the time she reached home. Stars pricked overhead, and glimfire lamps burned in the unshuttered windows of the hamlet schoolmaster’s cottage.

“There you are!” said Remmie, turning from the sink as she entered the kitchen. “I was about to do a searching for you.”

Though she was tired and disgruntled, she couldn’t not smile at her brother as she sniffed the fragrant air. “Yes, here I am, you fussy old mother hen.”

“Hen yourself,” he said, shoulders hunching. He didn’t much care for that kind of teasing. “Do you think I don’t have enough to contend with, that I need fears for you rattling round in my head?”

The mood she was in, it would be far too easy to strike sparks with him. She took a deep breath and after a heart-thumping moment let go of her peppery temper, along with all her bitter thoughts. Remmie was the soft, kindly one, and always had been. The boy in him still felt the too-soon loss of their parents, was quick to dark imaginings and leaping to the worst conclusions. With her own scars from that wounding long since healed, she found it easy to forget.

“I tarried at the artisanry,” she said, her voice deliberately gentle. “Not thinking. I’m sorry. Is that mutton-and-barley stew on the hob?”

“Not that you deserve any,” he said. “Why did you tarry? There’s no trouble at Arndel’s, I hope.”

His question stung, but it wasn’t entirely unfair. They were each other’s only family and he had picked up and moved with her every time her restless impatience caused her to fall foul of an employer, or abandon one position in search of the next. And if she fell foul of Artisan Master Arndel, or lost patience entirely with working in his artisanry, her brother would follow her again.

Which was why she strove so hard to stay sweet with Arndel, to not care so much that she wasn’t properly appreciated. Remmie wanted to stay in Batava. Teaching in its little school pleased him, deeply. He never would listen when she wailed that he wasted himself on other people’s offspring.