The hour of peace lasted fifty-three minutes.

  This was, by Levin's subsequent calculation, approximately fifty-two minutes longer than he had any right to expect, given that he had just eliminated a goblin infestation in front of eleven witnesses, each of whom possessed a functioning mouth and a social network that extended to every corner of a village containing two hundred people who had nothing better to discuss.

  Information in Thornwall moved at a speed that physicists would have found troubling. It did not travel through the air, or along wires, or via any medium that could be measured, intercepted, or slowed. It simply appeared — simultaneously, comprehensively, and with editorial embellishments — in every kitchen, shop, field, and goat pasture within the village boundaries, as though the gossip had been pre-distributed and was merely waiting for a signal to activate.

  The signal, in this case, was Berta.

  Berta had arrived home from the march at approximately quarter past noon. By twenty past noon, she had told her husband. By half past noon, her husband had told the fishmonger's wife, who had told the chandler, who had told the woman who sold eggs from a cart near the village well, who had told the well itself, or at least had spoken loudly enough in its vicinity that anyone drawing water received the information as a complimentary service.

  By one o'clock, the story had completed its first full circuit of Thornwall and was beginning its second, gathering mass and momentum and increasingly creative details with each retelling, in the manner of a snowball rolling downhill through a landscape made entirely of exaggeration.

  Levin, during this period, was behind the bar.

  He had swept the floor. The broom had pulled left. He had corrected. He had polished four glasses, refilled Marda's tea, eaten half of Berta's bread roll (the other half he had set aside as a potential doorstop, paperweight, or foundation stone, depending on future need), and was now sitting on his stool with his third cup of tea, staring at the far wall with the particular vacancy of a man whose body was present and whose mind had gone somewhere quieter and was not accepting visitors.

  The warmth behind his sternum hummed at its new frequency — louder, deeper, a bass note that vibrated in his ribs and made the tea in his cup produce tiny concentric ripples on its surface, though this might also have been the building settling, or the cat walking across the roof, or the fundamental instability of a structure that had been groaning since before Levin arrived and would continue groaning long after he left.

  Ria was in the kitchen.

  She was making soup. She was always making soup. Soup had become, in the ecosystem of the Leaky Sovereign, a constant — a fixed point around which the rest of reality organised itself, the way planets organise themselves around a star, except that the star was a sixteen-year-old girl with a rosemary fixation and the planets were root vegetables.

  The soup smelled extraordinary.

  Levin was considering a fourth cup of tea — a decision that required no deliberation whatsoever but that he was pretending required deliberation because the pretence of deliberation gave the afternoon a structure that it would otherwise lack — when the front door of the tavern opened.

  The door opened with force.

  The door opened with the particular force of a door being opened by someone who had arrived at speed and who regarded the door as an obstacle between themselves and their destination rather than a boundary to be negotiated with courtesy.

  Alderman Fitch stood in the doorway.

  He was breathing hard. His waistcoat was buttoned incorrectly — the third button occupying the fourth hole, the fourth button occupying the fifth, and the fifth button hanging free with the bewildered air of a fastener that had been left out of the sequence and was unsure where to go. His cravat had come untied on one side and hung from his collar like a flag of surrender. His ledger was under one arm. His quill was behind his ear. His inkwell was in his hand, uncapped, and a thin trail of black ink ran from the inkwell down his wrist and along his forearm, tracing a line that looked, from a distance, like a very precise and very unfortunate tattoo.

  "Levin," Fitch said.

  "Fitch," Levin said.

  "You need to come outside."

  "I'm drinking tea."

  "The tea can wait."

  Levin looked at his tea. The tea sat in its cup, steaming gently, offering no opinion on whether it could wait, because tea — whatever its other virtues — maintained a strict policy of neutrality in disputes between humans and did not take sides.

  "What's outside?" Levin asked.

  "Everyone," Fitch said.

  ----------

  "Everyone" turned out to be a slight exaggeration, in the way that "slightly damp" is a slight exaggeration when applied to the ocean.

  The village square — the roughly trapezoidal area of packed earth where three roads met and where Thornwall's civic life occurred with the frequency and enthusiasm of a clock that had been wound once and was running down — was full.

  Full in a way that Levin had never seen it full.

  Full in a way that suggested every person in Thornwall who was capable of standing, walking, or being carried had converged on this single point of geography with a unanimity of purpose that the village had not demonstrated since the Great Goat Escape of 1347, which had required the coordinated effort of the entire population to recapture fourteen goats that had breached Tommas's fence and scattered across the valley with the tactical dispersion of a military unit executing a pre-planned retreat.

  Levin stood in the tavern doorway and counted.

  He stopped counting at eighty because the crowd had compressed to a density that made individual enumeration impossible, and because several of the individuals were children, and children moved with a Brownian randomness that defeated any attempt at systematic tallying.

  The crowd occupied the square, the roads leading into the square, the steps of the buildings facing the square, and — in the case of three particularly enterprising boys — the roof of the chandler's shop, from which vantage point they had an excellent view of proceedings and a precarious relationship with gravity.

  The crowd was noisy.

  The noise had the particular quality of a large group of people who had gathered for a purpose and were now in the phase of the gathering where the purpose had not yet been formally initiated and everyone was filling the gap with conversation, speculation, and the kind of ambient vocal energy that a crowd produces simply by existing — a hum of humanity that was part excitement, part curiosity, part the low-grade social anxiety of people who had assembled in public and were now wondering whether they were standing in the right place and whether their hair looked acceptable.

  Levin stepped out of the tavern.

  The crowd saw him.

  The noise changed.

  It changed the way weather changes — a shift in pressure, a rotation of the wind, a sudden and unmistakable alteration in the atmospheric conditions that preceded something. The conversations didn't stop. They redirected. Two hundred voices pivoted from talking to each other to talking about the person who had just appeared in the tavern doorway, and the pivot produced a wave of sound that rolled across the square like a tide coming in.

  "That's him—"

  "—one spell, Dorin said one spell—"

  "—the whole cave—"

  "—Level 1, can you believe—"

  "—my chickens, though, he didn't get my chickens back—"

  "—the smell, apparently the smell was—"

  "—chicken, the goblin smelled like chicken—"

  "—no, the goblin king smelled like chicken, the regular goblins smelled like—"

  "—compost, my cousin said compost—"

  "—your cousin wasn't there—"

  "—Berta was there, Berta said—"

  Levin's hand tightened on his staff.

  His other hand, the one that had been holding the doorframe, released it and dropped to his side, where it hung with the studied casualness of a hand that was trying very hard to look relaxed and was failing in the way that all deliberate attempts at relaxation fail — by producing a result that was visibly effortful and therefore the opposite of relaxed.

  Fitch appeared at his elbow. The inkwell was still in his hand. The ink trail on his forearm had extended to his fingers, giving him the appearance of a man who had been writing on himself and had run out of paper.

  "The council met," Fitch said. "Emergency session. Thirty minutes ago. In my kitchen. My wife was not pleased. The vote was unanimous."

  "Vote on what?"

  "The parade."

  Levin's left eye twitched.

  "The what?"

  "The parade. A civic procession through the village. In your honour. To celebrate the clearance of the goblin threat. The council voted unanimously — seven in favour, none against, one abstention."

  "Who abstained?"

  "Old Maren. She was asleep. We counted it as an abstention rather than wake her, because waking Old Maren requires a commitment of time and emotional resources that the council was not prepared to allocate during an emergency session."

  "Fitch."

  "The parade route has been planned. It begins here, in the square, proceeds north along the main street to the guild hall, turns east past the bakery, south along the market road, and returns to the square. Approximately six hundred yards. Estimated duration: twenty minutes, depending on pace and crowd density."

  "Fitch."

  "Berta has volunteered to lead the procession. Dorin has volunteered to carry the village banner, which we located in the guild hall's storage closet approximately fifteen minutes ago and which is, I should note, in reasonable condition considering it has not been used since the coronation of the current king, which was — let me check—" He consulted his ledger, flipping pages with ink-stained fingers. "—eleven years ago. The banner has a small tear in the lower left corner and a stain of unknown origin in the centre, but from a distance of ten feet or more, these defects are not visible, and the parade route does not require anyone to examine the banner at a distance of less than ten feet."

  "Fitch."

  Fitch stopped flipping pages. He looked at Levin. His eyebrows, already at their customary altitude, rose another fraction of an inch, entering airspace that his forehead had not previously been asked to accommodate.

  "I don't want a parade," Levin said.

  The words left his mouth and entered the square and were immediately absorbed by the crowd noise, which was growing louder and more organised as the gathering shifted from "people standing around" to "people standing around with a sense of purpose," which was a fundamentally different kind of standing around and which produced a fundamentally different kind of noise — directed, anticipatory, and containing the particular energy of a crowd that had been promised a spectacle and was now scanning the environment for signs that the spectacle was about to begin.

  "The council's decision is final," Fitch said. "Section nine, paragraph three of the village charter: 'In recognition of extraordinary service to the community, the council may, by majority vote, authorise a civic procession in honour of the individual or individuals responsible for said service, said procession to be conducted at the earliest practical opportunity and to include such ceremonial elements as the council deems appropriate.'"

  "The charter has a section on parades?"

  "The charter has a section on everything. It was written by a man who believed that the absence of a rule was an invitation to chaos, and who responded to this belief by producing a document of seven hundred and forty-three pages that covers every conceivable aspect of village governance, including but not limited to: road maintenance, well usage, goat registration, bell-ringing schedules, the proper storage of grain, the improper storage of grain, the distinction between proper and improper grain storage, an appendix on grain storage disputes, a sub-appendix on the resolution of grain storage dispute appeals, and — yes — civic processions."

  "Seven hundred and forty-three pages."

  "Seven hundred and forty-five, if you count the index. Which I do."

  Levin looked at the crowd. The crowd looked at Levin. The exchange of looks produced no resolution, because crowds do not negotiate and Levin's look — calm and communicating a preference for being elsewhere that was so intense it was practically a travel itinerary — was not the kind of look that disperses two hundred people who have been promised a parade.

  From somewhere in the crowd, a child's voice rose above the general noise.

  "Le-vin! Le-vin! Le-vin!"

  The chant was taken up by a second child. Then a third. Then five more, because children possess an instinct for rhythmic vocalisation that is matched only by their instinct for doing it at the worst possible moment, and the chant spread through the under-twelve population of Thornwall with the speed and inevitability of a head cold through a schoolroom.

  "Le-vin! Le-vin! Le-vin!"

  Levin's jaw tightened. A muscle in his cheek fired. His grip on the staff produced a creak from the wood that the Staff Maintenance skill helpfully identified as "stress response in the third micro-fracture, upper grip zone."

  He did not want this information.

  He did not want any of this.

  He wanted tea, and the bar, and the broom that pulled left, and the ceiling with its three water stains, and the quiet, unremarkable afternoon that had been taken from him by a village that had decided, without his consent and against his explicit preference, to be grateful.

  Gratitude, he was discovering, was a force of nature. It could not be reasoned with, deflected, or returned to sender. It arrived uninvited, occupied every available space, and refused to leave until it had expressed itself fully, which in Thornwall's case apparently meant a parade, a chant, and two hundred people standing in a square staring at a man who wanted nothing more than to go back inside and finish his tea.

  "Fine," he said.

  The word came out quiet. Resigned. Carrying the accumulated weight of every "fine" he had said since arriving in this world — fine to the goblins, fine to Ria, fine to the spiders and the rats and the troll and the cooking lesson and the sleeve management and the entire cascading sequence of events that had brought him from a cot above a tavern to the front steps of that tavern, facing a crowd that was chanting his name with the rhythmic enthusiasm of people who had found a syllable they liked and intended to use it until it wore out.

  "Fine," he said again, louder.

  Fitch's quill appeared from behind his ear. He wrote something in the ledger. Levin suspected it was the time, because Fitch recorded the time of everything, including — Levin was fairly certain — the time at which he recorded the time.

  ------------

  The parade assembled with the organisational efficiency of a village that had never held a parade and was constructing one from available materials, personnel, tools, and a collective memory of parades that was based entirely on descriptions heard from travellers who had attended parades in larger, more competent settlements and who had probably exaggerated.

  Dorin appeared at the front of the procession carrying the village banner.

  The banner was a rectangle of blue cloth, approximately four feet by six, attached to a wooden pole by means of brass rings that had tarnished to the colour of old pennies. The cloth depicted the Thornwall village seal — the stylised hill with the tree on top, or the hat on the table, depending on interpretation — embroidered in gold thread that had faded to a colour best described as "ambitious yellow."

  The tear in the lower left corner had been repaired with a piece of fabric that was almost, but not quite, the same shade of blue as the original, producing an effect that was visible from considerably further than ten feet and that gave the banner the appearance of a flag that had been in a minor altercation and had received first aid.

  The stain in the centre remained unexplained and unaddressed.

  Dorin held the pole with both hands, the banner hanging above him in the still air, limp and motionless, because there was no wind and banners without wind are just cloth on sticks, which is a less inspiring visual than the designers of banners generally intend.

  Behind Dorin, Berta had positioned herself as the head of the civilian column. She had removed her apron — a gesture of formality that Levin had not previously witnessed and that transformed her from "baker" to "baker who has removed her apron," which was, in Thornwall's limited ceremonial vocabulary, the equivalent of putting on a dress uniform.

  The rolling pin was still present. The rolling pin was always present. The rolling pin had transcended its original purpose and become an accessory, a statement, a part of Berta's silhouette that was as inseparable from her person as her shadow, and considerably more dangerous.

  Behind Berta, the crowd had arranged itself into something that approximated a column.

  The approximation was generous.

  The column was wide, uneven, and prone to bulging at points where the road narrowed or where two people had stopped to continue a conversation that the parade's commencement had interrupted but not concluded.

  Children wove through the column like fish through coral — darting, pausing, darting again, their chant rising and falling in waves as they moved from the front of the procession to the back and then to the front again, propelled by an energy source that adults had long since lost access to and that the greatest archmages had never successfully identified.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  "Le-vin! Le-vin! Le-vin!"

  A cart had been procured.

  It belonged to Aldric.

  It was a farm cart — wooden, flat-bedded, rough and beat down, designed for transporting grain and turnips and other agricultural products that did not require comfort or suspension. Its wheels were iron-rimmed and produced, on the packed earth of the village road, a sound that was part rumble, part grind, and part the anguished protest of axles that had been designed for a maximum load of five hundred pounds and were now being asked to support a different kind of cargo entirely.

  The cargo was Levin.

  He sat on the cart's flat bed with his legs hanging over the front edge and his staff across his knees and his face arranged in an expression that he hoped communicated dignified tolerance and that, in practice, communicated a particular discomfort.

  Ria sat beside him.

  She had claimed the spot with the territorial swiftness of someone who had identified the most strategically advantageous position in the parade and had occupied it before anyone could object. Her satchel was on her lap. The bronze medallion caught the afternoon sun with each bump of the cart, flashing like a signal lamp.

  She was not sitting quietly.

  Ria had never, in the entirety of Levin's acquaintance with her, sat quietly. Sitting quietly was antithetical to Ria's fundamental nature in the same way that staying still was antithetical to the fundamental nature of a river — the capacity existed in theory, but the practice required conditions so extreme as to be effectively impossible.

  She was talking.

  She was talking to everyone.

  She was talking to the people walking beside the cart, and the people walking behind the cart, and the people standing on the roadside watching the cart pass, and the children running alongside the cart, and — on two occasions — people who were inside buildings and visible only through open windows, at whom she directed her voice with the projection of someone who had spent her formative years communicating across open fields and who regarded walls as suggestions rather than barriers.

  "—one spell!" she was saying, to a cluster of women walking alongside the cart's left wheel. "One! He stood at the cave entrance and raised his hand and the light — you should have seen the light, it was blue-white, like lightning but solid, like you could reach out and touch it except you absolutely should not touch it because it would turn you into dust — and he sent it into the cave and there was this boom—"

  She clapped her hands together. The clap was loud enough to make the nearest cart-walker flinch.

  "—and then silence. Complete silence. Every goblin in that cave — forty, fifty, maybe more… maybe hundreds — gone. In one second. Less than a second. In the time it takes to blink. And he just stood there afterward, calm as anything, like he'd just swept a floor or made a cup of tea, and he turned around and said 'let's go home.' Just like that. 'Let's go home.' As if he'd just finished doing the washing up."

  The women were staring at her with expressions that occupied the full spectrum between fascination and alarm.

  "He's my master," Ria added, with the proprietary pride of someone displaying a particularly impressive piece of livestock at a county fair. "I'm his apprentice. He taught me magic. Shield spells. Theory. The four classical elements — Force, Form, Flow, and Flux. He sent me into a cave full of spiders for six hours as a training exercise. Fourteen spiders. I survived all of them. I got a commendation."

  She held up the medallion.

  The medallion flashed.

  "Operational merit. From Guildmaster Harwick. For holding a position. I also threw a bread roll at a man. That part isn't on the commendation, but it should be."

  Levin sat on the cart and stared at the road ahead.

  The road ahead contained: Dorin, carrying the banner; Berta, carrying the rolling pin; approximately sixty people walking in a formation that bore the same relationship to a military column that a dropped plate bears to a mosaic; and the main street of Thornwall, which stretched before him in a straight line of packed earth and modest buildings and the accumulated architectural mediocrity of a settlement that had never expected to host a parade and was rising to the occasion with the enthusiasm of a student who has been told the exam is optional.

  Bunting had appeared.

  The bunting was a mystery. Thornwall did not, to Levin's knowledge, possess bunting. Bunting was the kind of decorative infrastructure that required foresight, planning, acquisition, and access to coloured fabric, none of which were qualities that Thornwall possessed in abundance. And yet there it was — strung between buildings on both sides of the main street, triangular flags of red and blue and yellow cloth that fluttered in a breeze that had arrived specifically for the purpose of making the bunting flutter, because even the weather, apparently, was participating.

  Someone had made the bunting.

  Someone had, in the fifty-three minutes between Levin's return to the tavern and Fitch's arrival at the tavern door, produced approximately forty feet of bunting from materials that Levin could not identify and had strung it across the main street at a height that cleared the heads of the tallest villagers and snagged on the tip of Dorin's banner pole, producing a brief and dramatic moment in which the banner and the bunting became entangled and Dorin had to stop walking and perform a series of overhead manoeuvres with the pole that looked, from the cart, like a man trying to fight a very long and very colourful snake.

  The bunting was freed. The banner was freed.

  The parade resumed.

  "Le-vin! Le-vin! Le-vin!"

  The children had found a rhythm.

  It was simple — two syllables, equal stress, repeated at a tempo of approximately one hundred and twenty beats per minute, which was the tempo of a brisk march and also, coincidentally, the tempo at which Levin's left eye was twitching.

  A girl of perhaps eight had climbed onto the cart's rear gate and was hanging there with both hands, her feet dangling, her face split by a grin that occupied approximately seventy percent of her available facial real estate.

  "Are you the goblin man?" she asked.

  Levin looked at her. "I'm a man who dealt with some goblins."

  "My da says you blew up a whole mountain."

  "It was a cave."

  "He says the mountain exploded and goblins went everywhere like — like—" She searched for a simile. Her eight-year-old vocabulary offered several candidates, and she selected the one that appealed most to her eight-year-old sensibilities. "Like snot from a sneeze."

  "That's... vivid."

  "Did they really go everywhere?"

  "They went nowhere. That was rather the point."

  The girl considered this. Her grin did not diminish. The distinction between "everywhere" and "nowhere" was, at eight, a philosophical nuance that could be safely ignored in favour of the more pressing question, which was:

  "Can you do magic? Right now? Can you show me?"

  "I'm on a cart."

  "You can do magic on a cart. Magic works everywhere. My da says."

  "Your da says a lot of things."

  "He says you're Level 1 and you killed a troll."

  Levin's jaw worked. The muscle in his cheek fired again.

  "He says the troll was big as a house and you put a hole through it."

  "The troll was big as a — it was thirteen feet tall. That's large for a troll and small for a house. Your da is conflating two different scales of measurement."

  "What's conflating?"

  "It's what your da does."

  The girl laughed. The laugh was high and bright and carried no self-consciousness whatsoever, because eight-year-olds have not yet developed the capacity for self-consciousness and are, for this brief and precious window of their existence, capable of laughing at things simply because they are funny, without the intervening filter of social awareness that turns adult laughter into a negotiation.

  She dropped off the cart's rear gate and ran back into the crowd, shouting to another child: "He said my da conflates!"

  The other child shouted back: "What's conflates?"

  "I don't know but the goblin man said it!"

  Levin closed his eyes. He opened them. The parade was still happening. The bunting was still fluttering. The children were still chanting. Ria was still narrating his achievements to anyone within earshot, which, given her volume, included people in neighbouring villages.

  "—and the troll," Ria was saying now, to a new audience that had formed on the cart's right side — three men and a woman, walking in step with the cart's slow progress, their faces tilted upward toward Ria with the attentive expressions of people receiving testimony. "On the south road. Cairn Bridge. Thirteen feet tall. Level 14. It regenerated — every wound, every burn, every bolt he hit it with, the skin just closed up, like watching water fill a hole. He hit it with lightning. He hit it with barriers. He hit it with everything he had, and it kept getting up, and it kept coming, and then—"

  She paused.

  The pause was theatrical. Ria had discovered, over the course of the parade's first two hundred yards, that she possessed a natural talent for dramatic narration, and she was deploying this talent with the instinctive skill of someone who had been telling stories to goats for years and was now, for the first time, performing for an audience that could appreciate the craft.

  "—then he did something new. Something I'd never seen. He brought both hands together, and the light — it wasn't a bolt anymore. It was a beam. A solid beam of light, blue-white, bright as the sun, and it went through the troll. Through its chest. Out the other side. Through the bridge. There's a hole in the bridge. Garren saw it. Eight inches wide. Clean through granite."

  The audience's mouths were open. Four mouths, four slightly different configurations of astonishment, arranged in a row like a display of commemorative plates.

  "One beam," Ria said. "One shot. The troll fell like a tree. And Levin just stood there. He just stood there and looked at it. And then he said—" She lowered her voice, adopting a flat, calm tone that was, Levin had to admit, a passable impression of his own delivery. "'Let's go home.'"

  She grinned.

  "That's my master."

  "I'm not your master," Levin said, to the road ahead.

  "He says that," Ria told the audience. "He always says that. He's modest. It's his worst quality."

  The parade turned east at the guild hall.

  Harwick was standing in the guild hall doorway, mug in hand, beard freshly combed, filling the frame with his considerable dimensions. He watched the procession pass with an expression that contained professional assessment, grudging acknowledgement, and the faintest suggestion that his beard was concealing something that might, under laboratory conditions, be classified as a smile.

  He raised his mug as the cart passed.

  Levin raised his hand in return — a small gesture, barely a wave, more of an acknowledgement that the mug existed and that the person holding it existed and that the moment was occurring and would, mercifully, soon be over.

  "Thick wrists!" Harwick called.

  "Working on it," Levin called back.

  The parade continued east. Past the bakery, where the smell of Berta's bread — dense, structural, load-bearing — drifted from the open door and mingled with the smell of the crowd and the dust and the faint, lingering trace of goblin that still clung to Levin's clothes and that no amount of parade could fully dispel.

  Past the market stalls, where vendors had abandoned their wares to join the procession and where the egg woman from the well had positioned herself at the roadside and was distributing eggs to the crowd, which was either a gesture of celebration or a clearance sale, and which resulted in several children carrying eggs and one child dropping an egg and another child stepping on the dropped egg and a brief, localised incident that was resolved by a mother with a cloth and a vocabulary that the child would remember and deploy at school the following week.

  Past the chandler's shop, where the three boys on the roof were waving and shouting and leaning over the edge at angles that made Levin's stomach perform a small, involuntary contraction, because the boys were approximately thirty feet above the ground and the ground was packed earth and the gap between "waving enthusiastically" and "falling enthusiastically" was measured in inches and governed by the same physics that governed everything else, which is to say: impartially and without regard for the age, enthusiasm, or rooftop privileges of the participants.

  The boys did not fall.

  This was, in retrospect, the most impressive feat of the entire parade.

  The procession turned south on the market road.

  Fitch walked beside the cart, ledger open, quill scratching.

  He was recording the parade.

  He was recording the route, the time, the number of participants (estimated), the condition of the bunting (adequate), the behaviour of the crowd (enthusiastic), and the demeanour of the honouree (reluctant), because Fitch recorded everything, and a parade that went unrecorded was, in Fitch's administrative cosmology, a parade that had not occurred.

  "Smile," Fitch said, without looking up from the ledger.

  "I am smiling," Levin said.

  "You are not smiling. You are performing a facial operation that shares certain superficial characteristics with smiling but that lacks the fundamental component of voluntary muscular engagement in the zygomatic major. You are, if I may be direct, grimacing."

  "The grimace is the smile. They're the same thing. The muscles are doing their best."

  "The charter specifies that honourees of civic processions should present 'a countenance befitting the occasion.' Section nine, paragraph seven."

  "What countenance does the charter recommend?"

  "It doesn't specify. It leaves the matter to the honouree's discretion. Your discretion is producing a grimace."

  "Then the grimace befits the occasion. The occasion is a parade I didn't ask for, through a village I arrived in by accident, celebrating an achievement that consisted of pointing my hand at a cave. The grimace is appropriate. The grimace is, if anything, generous."

  Fitch wrote something in the ledger. Levin suspected it was "grimace (justified)."

  The parade completed its circuit.

  The cart rolled back into the village square, where the crowd had reformed into a dense semicircle facing the tavern steps.

  The bunting fluttered overhead.

  The banner hung from Dorin's pole, limp and stained and torn and magnificent in the way that all imperfect things are magnificent when they are being used for their intended purpose after eleven years in a storage closet.

  The cart stopped.

  The crowd stopped.

  The children stopped chanting, which produced a silence so sudden and so complete that Levin's ears rang with the absence of his own name, the way ears ring after a loud noise — the ghost of the sound persisting in the auditory system, replaying itself in diminishing echoes.

  Fitch climbed the tavern steps.

  He stood on the top step, ledger in hand, inkwell in the other hand (still uncapped and dripping, the ink trail now extending from his forearm to his elbow and producing a pattern that resembled, if you squinted, a map of a river delta), and he cleared his throat.

  The throat-clearing was professional. It was the throat-clearing of a man who had cleared his throat before crowds — admittedly small crowds, infrequent crowds, and admittedly crowds that were primarily composed of farmers who had been summoned to discuss grazing rights and who would rather have been anywhere else — and who understood that the throat-clearing was not merely a physiological act but a ceremonial one, a signal that what followed was official and should be received accordingly.

  "Citizens of Thornwall," Fitch said.

  His voice carried across the square.

  "We are gathered here to recognise and celebrate an act of extraordinary service to our community. This morning, at dawn, a party of thirteen — led by Levin Kai, Level 1 Mage, Bronze rank, Thornwall Chapter of the Adventurers' Guild, thin wrists and all — marched north into the deep forest to confront a goblin infestation that had been threatening our farms, our livestock, our families, and our way of life."

  He paused. He consulted the ledger.

  "The party located the goblin stronghold — a cave in the old-growth forest, approximately two miles north-northeast of the village. The stronghold contained an estimated forty to sixty goblins, including a goblin king."

  A murmur ran through the crowd. The murmur contained the word "king" repeated at various volumes and with various inflections, because a goblin king was a different thing from a goblin, in the same way that a thunderstorm is a different thing from a cloud — same basic components, dramatically different implications.

  "The goblin threat was eliminated," Fitch continued. "Completely. In a single engagement. By a single spell."

  The murmur grew.

  "The spell was cast by Levin Kai."

  The murmur became a sound.

  "Level 1 Mage."

  The sound became a roar.

  The roar was not the roar of a colosseum or a battlefield or any of the large, organised venues where roars are traditionally produced. It was the roar of two hundred people in a small village square who had been living with a goblin problem for weeks and who had just been told, officially and on the record, that the problem was gone, and that it had been removed by a man who was sitting on a farm cart in a dusty shirt with a wooden staff across his knees and an expression that suggested he would rather be literally anywhere else.

  The roar contained relief, gratitude, astonishment, and the particular joy of a community that had been afraid and was no longer afraid, and that was expressing the transition from fear to safety in the only way a crowd knows how — by making noise, because noise is the currency of collective emotion, and this crowd was spending freely.

  Levin sat on the cart.

  The roar washed over him.

  It was warm. It was loud. It was overwhelming in the way that all genuine expressions of gratitude are overwhelming — not because of their volume but because of their sincerity, and sincerity, directed at a person who had spent seven weeks avoiding attention and cultivating anonymity and treating his own extraordinary capabilities as a mild inconvenience, was a force that his defences had not been designed to withstand.

  His hands gripped the staff.

  His jaw was tight.

  His eyes — which had been fixed on the road ahead for the duration of the parade, focused on the middle distance, on the packed earth, on anything that was not two hundred faces looking at him with an emotion he had not earned and did not know what to do with — his eyes moved.

  They moved to Ria, who was sitting beside him on the cart, clapping, her face bright and wet and split by a grin that was so wide it had exceeded the structural capacity of her face and was now being supported by her ears.

  They moved to Marda, who was standing in the tavern doorway with a towel over her shoulder and her arms crossed and her face arranged in its default configuration, except that the configuration had a crack in it — a hairline fracture in the fortifications, visible only if you knew where to look, and Levin knew where to look, and through the crack something was leaking that Marda would deny and that Levin would never mention and that was, despite its smallness, the most remarkable thing he had seen all day, including the inside of a goblin cave.

  They moved to Berta, rolling pin raised above her head, leading the crowd in a second round of cheering that she conducted with the authority of a woman who had been managing ovens and opinions for thirty years and who applied the same technique to both — high heat, firm hand, and the absolute conviction that the thing she was producing was going to turn out right.

  They moved to Dorin, banner held high, the fabric finally catching a gust and unfurling — the hill, the tree, the stain, the tear, all of it spread against the afternoon sky like a declaration that this place existed and that the people in it mattered and that a torn banner with a mysterious stain was, when held by the right hands at the right moment, as fine a flag as any kingdom had ever flown.

  Levin's grip on the staff loosened.

  His jaw unclenched.

  His face did something.

  It was small. Subtle. A relaxation of the muscles around his mouth and eyes that produced an expression that was not a grin and not a grimace and not the flat, neutral mask that he had been wearing for seven weeks like armour.

  It was a smile.

  A real one.

  Brief — perhaps three seconds — and visible only to Ria, who was sitting close enough to see it and who received it with a sharp intake of breath and a brightening of her already luminous face that suggested she understood, with the instinctive clarity of someone who had been watching him for days, that the smile was rare and significant and that she was witnessing something that the crowd could not see and that Levin would not repeat and that she would remember for a very long time.

  The smile faded.

  The mask returned.

  Levin raised one hand.

  The crowd quieted. The quieting was gradual — a recession of noise that moved from the front of the crowd to the back, each row falling silent as the raised hand registered, until the square held only the ambient sounds of a village afternoon: a dog barking, a shutter creaking, the bell-ringer shifting his weight in the tower above.

  "Thank you," Levin said.

  Two words. Delivered flat. Carrying everything that needed to be said and nothing that didn't.

  The crowd erupted again.

  The eruption was louder than the first, because crowds that have been quieted and then given a reason to make noise again always make more noise the second time, the way a spring that has been compressed and released always bounces higher than its resting position.

  "Le-vin! Le-vin! Le-vin!"

  The children resumed their chant.

  The adults joined.

  Two hundred voices, synchronised by the simple two-syllable rhythm, filling the village square and the main street and the market road and the spaces between buildings and the air above the rooftops, where the sound rose and dispersed into an afternoon sky that was blue and cloudless and indifferent and beautiful.

  Levin climbed down from the cart.

  His boots hit the packed earth of the village square. His staff tapped the ground once. The blue-white glow along his forearms — faint, barely visible in the afternoon light, a ghost of the power that had emptied a cavern that morning — flickered once and went still.

  He walked through the crowd.

  The crowd parted. The parting was instinctive — the same instinctive movement that had occurred in the guild hall when he'd walked to sign Fitch's form, the same unconscious creation of space around a person who was moving with purpose.

  He reached the tavern door.

  He pushed it open.

  He crossed the common room.

  He went behind the bar.

  He put the kettle on.

  He counted to two hundred. He thought about clouds. Cumulus. Big, white, calm, uncomplicated, shaped like nothing in particular, because clouds were clouds and they did not arrange themselves for the benefit of people who were looking for meaning, and Levin was not looking for meaning, he was looking for tea, and tea was simpler than meaning and more reliable and did not require a parade.

  He poured.

  He took a sip.

  Acceptable.

  Outside, the celebration continued. The crowd dispersed slowly, reluctantly, the way crowds disperse when the main event is over but the energy persists — breaking into smaller groups that lingered in the square and on the street corners and in the doorways of shops, talking, laughing, retelling the story of the morning to people who had already heard it and who listened again anyway, because stories improve with repetition and the story of a Level 1 Mage who had cleared a goblin horde with a single spell was the kind of story that a village like Thornwall had been waiting its entire existence to tell.

  Ria came through the door.

  Her face was flushed. Her braid was half-undone. Her eyes were bright and wet and shining with the particular luminosity of someone who had spent the last twenty minutes telling everyone in Thornwall that her master was the greatest mage in the world and who believed it with a conviction that was immune to evidence, argument, or the master's own objections.

  She crossed the common room. She went behind the bar. She stood beside Levin.

  She did not speak.

  She stood there, shoulder almost touching his, and she breathed, and the breathing was the breathing of someone who was happy — genuinely, simply, uncomplicatedly happy — and who was sharing the happiness by proximity, the way a fire shares warmth, without effort or intention, simply by being what it was.

  Levin took another sip of tea.

  The warmth behind his sternum hummed. Six hundred and something increments larger than before at a rate he no longer understood other than the fact that his mana pool was vast like an ocean. The secondary harmonic pulsed beneath the primary. The five combat skill notifications sat in their queue, patient and waiting. The sweeping skill was at Level 9. The cooking skill was at Level 6. The plating score was six out of ten. The sleeve management skill existed, and would continue to exist, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Level 1.

  The number sat in its blue box, serene and immovable, unchanged by the goblins and the troll and the parade and the chanting and the two hundred voices that had filled a village square with his name.

  Level 1.

  The number did not care about parades.

  The number did not care about anything.

  The number was a number, and numbers were, in the final analysis, just marks in boxes, and boxes were just containers, and containers told you nothing about what was inside them, and what was inside Levin — the reservoir, the warmth, the growing and patient and vast and humming thing that had started as a thimble and was now something that language had not yet found a word for — what was inside him did not fit in any box and never would.

  He set the cup down.

  He picked up the broom.

  The broom pulled left.

  He corrected.

  Outside, the celebration continued. Inside, the tavern settled around him — the creaking timbers, the groaning cot upstairs, the three water stains on the ceiling, the cat on the windowsill, the smell of rosemary from the kitchen, and the sound of Ria humming beside him as she began to prepare the evening soup.

  The hum was bright. Slightly off-key. Completely unselfconscious.

  It filled the kitchen and leaked through the doorway and spread into the common room, and Levin swept, and the broom pulled left, and he corrected, and the afternoon light came through the grimy windows and lit the dust motes, and the dust motes drifted like tiny, purposeless pilgrims through the air of a tavern in a village in a valley between two hills that had tried to become mountains and thought better of it.

  Thornwall had a hero.

  The hero was sweeping.

  [Sweeping: Level 10!]

  [Milestone reached. New technique unlocked: Ambidextrous Sweep.]

  [Note: Skill XP does not contribute to Class Level progression.]

  He swept.

  The broom pulled left.

  For the first time in seven weeks, he let it.