Page 2 of Lucent Academy: Trinity Awakens
"I need you to watch Lily while I help Mother with the bread. Can you do that? Keep her out of the vegetables and make sure she doesn't eat any bugs."
"She ate a beetle last week," Samuel reported solemnly.
"I know. That's why we're trying to prevent a repeat performance. Do you accept this mission?"
They exchanged a look, conducting one of those silent twin conversations that I had never quite learned to interpret, and then nodded in unison. "We accept."
"Excellent. I'm counting on you."
I left them to their task and returned to the kitchen, where Mother had moved on from bread to the day's stew. She handed me a knife and a pile of carrots without a word, and we worked side by side in comfortable silence, the kind of silence that only comes from years of shared labor and shared space. Through the window I could see the spires of Hartwick's central district rising in the distance, the grand cathedral and the clock tower and theglittering dome of the Merchant's Guild, all of it beautiful and impressive and utterly irrelevant to the life I had built for myself here.
"Your father's speaking with the baron today," she said after a while. "About the orchard expansion."
"Do you think he'll agree?"
"The baron? He's agreed to everything Thomas has suggested for the past twenty years. I don't see why he'd start refusing now." She smiled, but there was something behind it, some worry that she was trying not to show. "Though I suppose we should be grateful for that. The baron's been good to us."
I nodded, focusing on my carrots. The baron was good to us, it was true. He paid Father fairly and allowed us to live in the cottage rent-free and had never once, in all my years, treated us as anything less than valued members of his household. But there was always a distance there, an invisible line between his family and ours that everyone understood and no one spoke about. His daughter Seraphina was my age exactly, born on the same day in the same year, but we had never been friends. We had never been anything. She looked through me as though I were made of glass, and I had learned, long ago, to stay out of her way. I'd see her sometimes in town, shopping on the fashionable avenues with her friends, and she never so much as glanced in my direction. That was fine. We lived in different worlds, she and I, even though we lived in the same town.
"Mother," I said, "do you ever wish things were different?"
She stopped stirring and looked at me with an expression I couldn't quite read. "Different how?"
"I don't know. Just... different. If Father were a merchant instead of a groundskeeper, or if we lived in the city center, or if..."
"If we were rich?" She laughed, but it wasn't unkind. "Leah, I have a husband who loves me, four healthy children, food on the table, and a roof over my head. I have a garden that grows what I plant and neighbors who help when times are hard. What exactly would 'different' give me that I don't already have?"
"Adventure?" I suggested, though even as I said it, I knew it sounded foolish. "Excitement? A life that's... bigger, somehow?"
Mother set down her spoon and took my face in her flour-dusted hands, the way she used to do when I was small. "Listen to me, Leah. There's nothing wrong with wanting a big life. Some people are made for adventure, for excitement, for great deeds and grand stories. But there's nothing wrong with wanting a small life either. A good life isn't measured by its size. It's measured by its fullness." She kissed my forehead and went back to her stew. "Besides, adventure has a way of finding people whether they want it or not. Best to enjoy the quiet while you have it."
I thought about her words as I finished the carrots and moved on to the onions, as I set the table for the midday meal and called the children in from the garden, as I sat at my usual place and watched my family gather around the food we had made together. Father came in from his work smelling of earth and green growing things, and Lily climbed into his lap before he could even sit down properly, and the twins argued about whose turn it was to say the blessing until Mother silenced them with a look. It was all so ordinary, so familiar, so exactly the same as every other day of my life, and I felt a sudden fierce surge of lovefor all of it, for these people and this place and this simple, small, full life.
I was seventeen years and eleven months old on that sunny morning in our garden. In three weeks I would turn eighteen, and everything would change.
But I didn't know that yet, so I ate my soup and laughed at Simon's jokes and helped Mother clear the dishes when the meal was done, and I was happy in the way that only people who don't know what's coming can be happy: completely, carelessly, and without a single thought for the future.
CHAPTER TWO: THE AWAKENING
My eighteenth birthday dawned bright and clear, with a sky so blue it looked painted and a breeze that carried the scent of apple blossoms through my window. I lay in bed for a few minutes after waking, enjoying the rare luxury of stillness, listening to the sounds of the household coming to life around me. Eighteen years old. It seemed impossible, somehow. I still felt exactly like myself, no wiser or more grown-up than I had been the day before, and I wondered if everyone felt this way on their birthday, this strange disconnect between the significance of the number and the ordinariness of the self.
"Leah!" Mother's voice floated up from the kitchen. "If you want breakfast before your party, you'd better get moving!"
Party was perhaps too grand a word for what we had planned, which was really just a slightly nicer version of our usual midday meal, with a cake Mother had been working on for two days and presents wrapped in cloth because we couldn't afford paper. But it was my birthday, and my family would be there, and that was all that really mattered.
I dressed quickly and went downstairs, where I was immediately ambushed by the twins, who had been lying in wait behind the kitchen door with the patience of seasoned hunters. Theytackled me around the knees and nearly brought me down before I managed to steady myself against the wall, laughing and trying to pry them off.
"Happy birthday!" they shouted in unison, which was unsettling in the way that twin-speak always was.
"Thank you, thank you. Can I have my legs back now?"
"Mother said we had to wait to give you our present until after breakfast," Simon said, releasing me with obvious reluctance. "But she didn't say anything about hugs."
"A very clever interpretation of the rules."
"We thought so."
Breakfast was porridge with honey, same as always, but Mother had added dried berries to mine and the twins had insisted on serving it to me with great ceremony, nearly spilling it twice in the process. Father came in from his early rounds just as I was finishing, and he kissed the top of my head and pressed something small and wrapped in cloth into my hands.
