He nodded. Then, he caught my eye. “I bid you remember they are not Semadran. I know you know that. Between Abira and Sorcha and Cadlah I am certain you know that, but remember it. My family is not like yours.”

“I will remember.”

* * *

Dirva’s family was bound together by their traditions. The children orbited wildly, swinging out away from and back again to their parents again in settled rhythms. It was tradition for the children to strike out and join the Natives when they grew testy and adolescent. It was tradition for them to scrape a living in some half-illegal or wholly illegal way. They were a defiant, willful group: smart and crafty, street-seasoned, full to the brim of tempered bravado. It was tradition for them to have dinner with their parents once a week. These traditions were sacred: they were the glue that held the family together. Dirva methodically, intentionally, broke every single tradition he could. He was the only one to avoid the squat house. He sought out a formal education in the Semadran schools of the West Quarter. He left the family, left the City, and didn’t return for twenty-five years.

The family dinners were deeply private; to be brought to one meant you were adopted into the family. My closeness with Dirva and my growing friendship with Sorcha granted me entrance. It was there I met the rest of them: Dirva’s parents, his da, his older brother Falynn, and Amran, a man who I can only describe as Falynn’s other half though they were not married. Dirva’s father was a full red elf, old yet spry. He was a tender man, a man who doted on his children, but there was a coolness, an uneasiness between him and Dirva. They circled each other like wary animals, both afraid the other was about to strike. There was love between them, but it was a broken thing, something shattered long ago and never fully repaired. Dirva’s mother was the unquestioned head of the household. She was an improbable scientist—street-born, abandoned, illiterate until nearly adulthood, but she’d been taken under the wing of an academically minded half-Magi man in the City and had produced volumes of work on the mathematics of time. She could not seem to utter a sentence without a curse word in it. She had a total lack of patience with everyone around her. Dirva resembled her inside and out. They understood each other, I think, and it smoothed things between them when he came back after so long.