“But I’m not allowed to put it off any longer. Why does it have to be seventeen? It used to feel like the day would never come, that I still had time to think it over, and now it’s so rushed. If I don’t Declare this week, then I’ll get assigned. Maybe that would be better. Just go with what the justiciar’s office sticks me with.”

“How do you mean?”

He shook his shoulders the way he used to when he was small and frustrated over a trouble he couldn’t fix. “The things I want, I can’t have. To join an imperial order as anything but a menial you have to be Manor-born. Well, sure, it’s true the calligraphers are open to anyone, but we never had enough coin to buy me the training I’d need to qualify. That wouldn’t be so bad. Writing up contracts in beautiful letters.”

She raised her eyebrows. This was the first time he’d mentioned aspiring to the Imperial Order of Calligraphers. “Maybe, but if you think a deputy courier’s rounds are boring, then I have to wonder if you’d find such painstaking work tedious after a month. By then it would be too late, the die cast, and your life settled.”

“It’s not how it happened with you and Mama,” he murmured peevishly. “You didn’t even grow up here. You made a place for yourselves after the normal age for Declaration. Why can’t I explore and try out more things before I have to settle down?”

“Our circumstances were unusual. It’s only because we arrived in Orledder Halt in the midst of a virulent Spore irruption. We had useful skills when the locals desperately needed help. That’s why we were invited to stay. Otherwise, two women and a toddler-in-arms would have been granted the customary three nights of hospitality and then required to move on.”

He’d heard the story before, of course. But now he asked, “Do you ever wish you could have kept traveling? Seen more of the empire?”

She shut her eyes, swallowing a spike of pain and terror. Surely the past could not catch up to them. What did the past care about humble Orledder Halt and its unimportant inhabitants? “I’m content here, Kem. So was your mama. Her especially. I like being a courier. She was a good midwife. People respected her.”

He wiped his eyes. “I wish I could be what she was, like she wanted me to be. But I can’t.”

“I know.” She rested a hand on his hair. “You are who you are. And I love you for it. She did too.”

“Did she?” he said in a low voice.

“She didn’t always know how to show it. You know that.”