Hahavit is four years old when Pap sits him down for a Talk. In the Golden Bazaar, the evening is sunny and blazing hot; Mam isn't back from her trip to the forest, so he got the very important job of salesmanship, which means sitting on top of the counter and smiling winningly at everyone who goes by, while Pap takes care of all the boring numbers and handles all the gil.
"Do you remember yesterday, when I told you to take all your toys out of the main room so Mam and I could put a bedroll down?" he asks. They are - or rather, Pap is - taking inventory at the end of a good day's work, of all the tolls collected and defensive jewellery sold.
Spewing the crumbs of his cookie with every word, Hahavit replies, "Mm-hm. It was big! Are we all sleeping there tonight?"
"No. We're not."
Even as a small child, Hahavit knows what a Sad Voice sounds like. Pap is using one now: a long, quiet weariness in his sentences, the lines around his eyes crinkling into darker shadow. "I received a message from your Mam. She's bringing someone home to stay with us for a while."
He doesn't get it. (How could he?) "What's sad about that?"
"Nothing for you to worry about," Pap says, closing a fist around his linkpearl, "but she's only a little bit older than you, and she's had a very bad moon. I need you to be nice, Hahavit. Can you do that for me?"
(Hahavit remembers being four years old, when the girl who would be his foster sister was just under double that number.)
Because it's very, very, Hahavit asks, "Will her toys get along with Lady Luffula?" A stuffed aldgoat she may be, but she tolerates no nonsense in her court.
(He is four, and she is seven, and when the guards at the Hawthorne Hut found her she was half-starved and drenched in the drying blood of her family.)
If it were possible, Pap's Sad Face would get even sadder at that. Because it isn't, he only sighs, "I don't think she has any toys, Hahavit. Do you think you can share yours, if she asks?"
(Fourteen days ago, Garlemald burned Ala Mhigo's newly-won freedom to ash. Eleven days ago, Ausbord crawled out from under her father's corpse, picked up her mother's axe, and started stumbling west. The elementals decreed that she could not stay. Vivita Vita, mother of one-now-two, decided otherwise.)
"Yep," Hahavit says, crunching down on the last of his cookie. He stoically endures an approving pat on the head, hops down from the counter, and starts walking home.