The King Who Broke Heaven’s Tithe

Chapter 102 The Brother at the Stove

Jun knew her brother by the way he swore at a spoon.

It slipped from his left hand, struck the stove rim, and fell behind the wood basket. He said the same useless curse he had used as a boy when a fishing knot defeated him.

Then he saw her in the doorway.

The sixty seventh afternoon seemed to stop around them.

Jun had imagined running to him. She had imagined anger, tears, a speech about how long they had searched. Instead she stood still while Tev stared as though she were another fever making promises.

“Jun?”

She crossed the kitchen in three steps.

He tried to hide his right hand before she reached him. She caught his sleeve gently and put both arms around him, leaving the scarred fingers untouched between them.

He was thinner than the person she remembered.

He was warm.

For a while, that was all her mind could hold.

Pellan waited by the door with Senn's empty medicine basket. The guide had brought them through the ridge detour and the southern service lane after two days lost to a flooded crossing. He had never called the delay safe merely because it was slow.

Now the journey ended in a kitchen that smelled of onions and old smoke.

Tev began laughing against Jun's shoulder. Then he was crying, and she was too, and neither tried to apologize.

Neve closed the outer door to keep the draft from reaching them.

“Sit before you both fall into my stove.”

They obeyed her without argument.

Jun looked at Tev's hand only when he let her. The skin across the fingers had healed tight and glossy. Two fingers bent poorly. He could close them partway, but not around the spoon he had dropped.

“I can use the other,” he said quickly.

“I saw.”

“I'm not useless.”

Jun felt anger rise so sharply that she had to turn it away from him.

“I didn't come to collect useful hands.”

He looked down.

“I know.”

She was not certain he did yet.

They had enough grain left for one more full day after this one. Senn had shared roots on the difficult stretch, and the medicine carrying had paid for his guidance. Nothing about arriving erased the need to eat tomorrow.

Neve offered water and a place in the visitors' alcove. Jun accepted both, then asked whether Tev wanted to leave.

“Yes,” he said.

The speed of the answer hurt more than hesitation would have.

“Then why does the kitchen master say you can't?”

“Because the treatment account isn't closed.”

Neve laid a folded board on the table.

“The account is disputed. The boiler belonged to the works contractor. His injury was entered as an ordinary patient's expense.”

“Can you correct it?” Pellan asked.

“I can testify to what I treated. I can't make the works office pay by changing a kitchen book.”

Tev rubbed his left thumb over the scarred palm.

“The master says I owe enough that I should stop asking.”

Jun put Selka's visiting request beside Neve's board.

“Then tomorrow he can tell us what he means while other people listen.”

Tev's face tightened.

“Don't start a fight here.”

She almost promised she would not.

Instead she asked what frightened him.

“They'll move me. Or say you came to take a worker. Or stop Neve treating the others because she helped.”

The list had clearly been living in him for a long time.

Jun listened to all of it. Then she told him about Sive keeping the bowl, the search at White Stair, and the record that finally carried his name toward them. She told him the truth about Selka's part, too, without asking him to forgive a woman who was not there to hear the answer.

He stayed quiet at that.

“I remember her seal,” he said at last.

Jun nodded.

There would be time for the rest of that conversation. She would not use his first hour with family to demand a judgment from him.

“Does Grandmother still burn the bottoms of her oatcakes?” Tev asked.

“Only yours. She says you liked them that way.”

“I told her that once because she looked tired.”

Jun laughed, and the small sound unsettled him more than her tears had. He stared at her, then began asking questions too quickly: whether the roof still leaked, whether their neighbor's dog lived, whether she had kept his winter coat.

Some answers hurt. Their old room was gone. The dog had vanished during the removals. His coat had been traded for food months ago.

Jun refused to build a homecoming out of things she could not give him.

“But your bowl is there,” she said. “And Sive. And me.”

He turned the spoon over between his left fingers.

“I thought I might not know where to stand.”

“You can stand beside me until you decide.”

Outside the kitchen, someone called for more hot water. Tev flinched toward the sound before remembering he was sitting with a visitor.

Jun waited until he looked back at her.

Near evening, Tev returned to the stove to finish the broth he had begun. Jun rose to help, then stopped when he shook his head.

“Let me show you.”

He wedged the bowl against a folded cloth, used his left hand to lift the ladle, and poured without spilling.

Jun sat down again.

This time, watching him work did not mean accepting that the kitchen owned him.

It meant letting her brother show her what he had learned while she was gone.

He set the bowl in front of her.

Tomorrow, they would ask for the account.

Tonight, she finally heard him say her name again.