Edric was at the counter cutting bread when they came through the door.

  He looked up. Took in Elysse the way he took in every patient who had crossed from horizontal to vertical for the first time — a quick, practiced read, head to feet and back, the inventory of someone who had been assessing recovery for thirty years and had long since stopped needing to think about it consciously. Her color. Her posture. The way she was distributing her weight.

  Whatever he found satisfied him, because he turned back to the bread.

  "Sit," he said.

  Aris pulled out the nearest chair for Elysse without ceremony and went around to his usual side. Elysse sat — carefully, with the controlled economy of managed pain — and looked at the kitchen in the way she'd looked at the nave. That same quiet survey. Taking the measure of a place through its details.

  Edric brought the bread to the table. Went back for the pot. Ladled soup into three bowls with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this at this table for longer than some of the church's furniture had been standing. Set them down. Sat.

  He looked at Elysse across the table.

  "Edric," he said. "Edric Edren. I run Saint Edren's." A pause. "Which you've presumably gathered."

  "The statue made it fairly clear," Elysse said.

  "It does that." He broke his bread. "Eat. I'll talk while you eat."

  Elysse looked at the soup. Picked up her spoon.

  "The boy brought you in two mornings ago," Edric said, nodding toward Aris with the particular economy of a man who didn't use more words than the situation required. "In considerably worse condition than you're in now. You've been in his room since."

  Elysse glanced at Aris.

  "He healed you," Aris said. "The actual healing part. I just—"

  "Carried her through five floors of dungeon with cracked ribs," Edric said, without looking up from his bowl.

  "I was going to say I brought her here."

  "You did that too."

  Elysse set her spoon down and looked at Edric directly.

  "Thank you," she said. Simply. No performance in it — just the two words, delivered with the full weight of someone who understood exactly what they were thanking him for.

  Edric looked up from his bowl. Met her eyes for a moment with an expression that was warm and entirely unceremonious.

  "You're welcome," he said. "Now eat."

  She looked at him.

  "You need energy to recover," he said, already back to his soup. "The body rebuilds from what you give it. You haven't given it much in the past two days beyond what I managed to get into you while you were unconscious, so." He gestured at her bowl with his spoon. "Eat the soup."

  Elysse ate the soup.

  Aris, across the table, said nothing. But there was something in the way he was looking at his own bowl — carefully, deliberately at his own bowl — that suggested he was privately finding something about this moment worth noting.

  They ate in silence for a while. The hearth worked. The street outside continued its morning. Edric refilled Elysse's bowl without asking when it was half-empty, the way he refilled Aris's, the way he refilled his own — with the automatic attentiveness of someone who monitored the table without appearing to watch it.

  Elysse noticed.

  Aris watched her notice and said nothing.

  "How long will I need to rest?" Elysse asked.

  "Longer than you want to," Edric said.

  "That's not an answer."

  "It's the most accurate one." He looked at her. "Your ribs need two weeks minimum before I'd consider you fit for anything demanding. The wound at your side is closed but not rebuilt — that's another week on top of it." He said it plainly, without apology. "Three weeks before you should be thinking about dungeon floors."

  Elysse's expression did something brief and controlled.

  "Three weeks," she said.

  "At minimum."

  "I understand."

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  "Good." He pushed the bread toward her. "More."

  She took the bread. There was something slightly bewildered in the way she did it — not about the bread itself, but about the manner of the instruction. The complete absence of deference in it. She was a de Carvaine. People did not tell her more as though she were a child who hadn't eaten her dinner.

  Edric did not appear to have registered this as a consideration.

  Aris, across the table, was doing the thing with his bowl again.

  "You find something funny," Elysse said to him.

  "No," he said.

  "You're smiling at your soup."

  "I'm just eating."

  "Aris," Edric said mildly, without looking up.

  "He does this to everyone," Aris said, to Elysse, abandoning the pretense with the ease of someone who hadn't been committed to it. "You get used to it."

  "Does what?"

  "Feeds you and tells you what to do and doesn't treat you like anything other than a person who needs soup." He tore his bread. "It's the same whether you're a guild master or a dockworker or a—" He gestured at Elysse. "Whatever the correct term is."

  "Noble," Elysse said.

  "Right. That."

  Edric said nothing, which was the most Edric response available.

  Elysse looked at him for a moment — at the priest across the table, cutting his bread with the same focus he'd given the bread before she arrived, present and unhurried and entirely undisturbed by the fact that he was sitting across from the daughter of a noble family in his small kitchen feeding her day-old bread and yesterday's soup like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  Because for him, Aris understood, it was.

  She was in the chair. She needed soup. Those were the relevant facts. Everything else — the name, the family, the guild, the Floor 40 — was context for later, for when the soup was finished and the body had been given what it needed to do its work.

  Elysse ate her bread.

  And somewhere in the kitchen's quiet, in the sounds of the hearth and the street outside and three people eating at a small table that had held a great many people over a great many years, she stopped holding herself quite so carefully upright — not from pain, but from something else releasing, something that had been braced since before she'd opened the bedroom door that morning.

  Aris noticed. He was fairly certain Edric noticed too.

  Neither of them said anything about it.

  The soup was good. The bread was from yesterday. The morning came through the cracked window pane in a thin bright line across the floor.

  It was enough.

  They were most of the way through the soup when Edric said, in the tone of a man raising an observation he had been privately sitting with for some time:

  "In sixteen years," he said, "you have never once brought a friend to the church."

  Aris looked up from his bowl.

  "I thought, for a while," Edric continued, with the unhurried quality of a man who had the floor and knew it, "that perhaps you had friends somewhere that you were keeping separate. That there was a version of your life happening elsewhere that you hadn't mentioned." He broke a piece of bread. "I decided eventually that this wasn't the case."

  "Edric—"

  "You bring patients. Occasionally materials from the dungeon. Once, memorably, a piece of floor crystal that you said fell on you and that I suspect you took deliberately." He looked at Aris with the composed expression of someone delivering a findings report. "You have never brought a person through that door who was not either ill, injured, or paying for something."

  "She's injured," Aris said, pointing at Elysse.

  "You see, that's technically correct," Edric said, "and also not the point."

  "What is the point?"

  "The point," Edric said, "is that I always assumed that if you ever did bring someone through that door who wasn't a patient, it would be — gradually. Over time. A person you'd known a while. Perhaps someone from the dungeon you'd crossed paths with enough times to constitute an acquaintance." He paused. "I did not anticipate that the first person you would bring home would be a young woman you'd known for approximately four minutes."

  "I knew her for less than that," Aris said. "She was unconscious."

  "Even more surprising," Edric said pleasantly.

  "You're a priest," Aris said. The words came out with the specific energy of someone deploying their last available argument. "You are a priest of the Architect. You are supposed to be—"

  "Observant," Edric said. "Yes. I find I am."

  "That's not what I—"

  "Thoughtful?"

  "Edric."

  "Wise, perhaps—"

  "You're supposed to be above this," Aris said, with the expression of a man whose face was doing something he had not authorized. "This is exactly — this is what the people at the market do. The vendors. You're supposed to be — there's a statue of God twelve feet away—"

  "The Architect," Edric said, "is familiar with human nature. I'd argue more so than either of us."

  Elysse, across the table, was looking into her soup bowl with the careful attention of someone who had found something very interesting at the bottom of it.

  Her shoulders, Aris noticed with some irritation, were doing something that was not consistent with the expression of a person who found nothing about this situation amusing.

  "You find this funny," he said to her.

  "I'm eating my soup," she said.

  "You're—"

  "It's very good soup."

  "She said that already," Aris said to Edric.

  "She means it both times," Edric said.

  Aris sat back in his chair with the particular posture of someone who has lost an exchange they weren't sure they'd entered and is processing this with dignity. He looked at the ceiling. At the low, familiar, slightly discolored ceiling of the kitchen he'd eaten breakfast in for sixteen years, which was currently providing no assistance whatsoever.

  "I apologize," Edric said to Elysse, in a tone that suggested he was apologizing for the specific content of the remark and not at all for having made it. "That was forward of me."

  "It wasn't," Elysse said, looking up from her bowl with the composed ease of someone who had grown up in rooms where remarks like that were the mild end of the spectrum. "I've had worse said to me at formal dinners by people who were supposed to be demonstrating good breeding."

  "Have you," Edric said, with the interested expression of a man filing something away.

  "The daughter of a noble family attracts a specific quality of comment," she said. "Particularly from older men at formal dinners who believe they're being charming." A pause. "You're significantly less irritating than most of them."

  "High praise," Edric said.

  "It is, genuinely."

  Aris looked between them. At Edric, who had settled back into his soup with the satisfied expression of a man whose morning had exceeded his expectations. At Elysse, who was eating bread with the composure of someone completely at ease with the direction the conversation had taken.

  "You're both—" He stopped.

  "Both what?" Edric asked.

  "Nothing," Aris said, and returned to his bowl.