Hiraeth is nearly fifteen, and there are only four buildings in the village he doesn't have to duck to enter. One is their own little house, two are barns, and the last is the temple. His voice is changing without asking him about it first, and over the winter the headaches get so bad he can barely see.

When Link is home, he forces himself to go to school anyway, even if the best he can manage is assigning the younger students a ridiculously flawed proof to fix and a hundred pages of reading before he has to retreat to comforting darkness of the storage room.

Link is away working on some kind of bridge project in the lowlands when the worst storm he can remember hammers the little village. The ground is already sodden, and the road turns into a mudslide. Two houses and three shops in the village are pushed off their foundations, and Hiraeth hides in his bedroom with the curtains drawn. Even when the rain stops and he begins to feel normal again, his stepmother urges him to stay back, and makes him pot after pot of a strange kind of sour tea.

He goes back to school mostly so he can get away from her hovering. And the tea.

He bribes the twins to handle the youngest students, and prompts the middle ranks into a debate over the significance of the wolf and the 'night goer' in early chaos era epic poetry. The teacher swears at him when the discussion turns into an outright war, but it's the funniest thing he's seen in months and he can't bear to stop them.

Half an hour later the entire room has split into ideological factions over it. The teacher gives up on restoring order to the class, sitting back in her chair with her hands over her mouth to keep from laughing. The ringleaders of each are threatening their opponents with literal violence and their insults have gone from creative to obscene, so at last he stands and bellows for silence.

It works exactly long enough for the teacher to issue a strangled dismissal.

Hiraeth's sisters look at him oddly, and don't wait for him to pack his own things. The teacher manages to stifle her laughter just long enough for the rest of the students to leave.

"Be honest, Hiraeth," she says, stern as she can manage through her snickering. "Did you start that riot apurpose?"

"If what you mean is, 'can I do it again' then perhaps my students should move their lessons outside for the sake of the furniture," he says, though it comes out as a bit of a rumble.

"Your talents are wasted on this life," she says, shaking her head. "Anyone who can rouse that much passion for archaic poetry in a bunch of half-grown rustics has no business idling in a backwater village for any longer than it takes to change a broken cart wheel and buy a hearty dinner."

Hiraeth shrugs. "My father does not approve of big cities."

"Bullshit," says his teacher, folding her arms. "I made inquiries years ago. Everything your family has is because of the connections he has in and work he does for the big city."

"No doubt half the reason he hates it so much," says Hiraeth, returning his books to the locked chest in the storage room.

His teacher follows, leaning against the doorframe. "What's the other half?"

He shrugs, accepting the excuse to linger in the comfortable darkness. "Why does anyone ever hate anything?"

"Barring madness and the influence of demons? Betrayal, usually," says his teacher with a frown of confusion.

Hiraeth rolls his eyes at her. "Demons are just a convenient fiction to justify the acts of tyrants."

"When you do go to the city someday, take care who overhears your heresies," she returns.

"I had the kids on the verge of a brawl over artistic symbolism before noon. Imagine what I could do with a few choice words in a city marketplace," he says with a shrug. "A little riot now and again might be good for this country."

"The revolution might want to bide his time until his voice is done breaking," she says with a wry shake of her head.

Hiraeth makes a rude noise. "Even so. A monarch whose authority flows from the divine must always be right. I need only be right once."

She clicks her tongue at him. "What have I told you about quoting assassins in the classroom?"

"We aren't in the classroom," he says, wagging a finger at her. "Anyways, why should I give a good goddamn about offending a spoiled old man in a fancy hat when I have five sisters who would each of them cheerfully murder me in my bed for an extra slice of cake and a bolt of Cloudisle silk?"