The breeding house Oliver had rented sat on a gentle rise near the edge of the district, and the first thing Elias did after they arrived—before unpacking, before anything—was set the realm back down.
He and Cassian worked it together, the reverse of the morning they'd left. Cassian's spiritual energy settled over the empty anchor in the breeding house's inner yard; thankfully, Oliver had rented a place with a platform already. Patient and exact, Elias wove his own in alongside it, and between them they gently lowered the core back onto the platform until it caught and held. The air shivered once. And then the secret realm was there again, rooted in Silverstream now instead of Heartwood, its whole small world intact—Briar's vines, the bees, the Butler Pigs, the one waiting horse—none of them any the wiser for having crossed half a continent.
Cassian stepped back from the anchor, and the tension of guarding the core all the long way finally went out of him. He did not go far, though. He never did.
With the realm settled and the household unpacking itself in its usual cheerful storm, Elias finally let himself look at Silverstream.
It took his breath a little.
The district lay cradled in water. Far off beyond its edge rose a glacier—an immense wall of ancient blue ice, catching the light and throwing it back in cold, clean colors—and from its foot poured the river that gave the district its name, a wide silver ribbon that split and split again into a hundred smaller streams threading between the buildings. Everywhere Elias looked there was moving water: canals instead of some of the roads, bridges arching over them, fountains in the squares, waterwheels turning slow and bright. The whole place shone. Boats poled along the wider channels, laden with baskets of pale river-fish and cut flowers; children leaned off the low bridges to trail their fingers in water so clear Elias could see the smooth stones on the bottom. The air smelled of cold snowmelt and green growing things, and under everything ran the constant soft sound of moving water, so steady that within an hour a person would stop hearing it and only feel it, the way one feels a pulse. It was easy, standing there, to see why an aquatic district had grown up in this exact spot, under that glacier, along that river—and easy, too, to understand a little better the two people who had come from a place like this.
For his parents, it was something else entirely.
Damian and Selena walked out into it slowly, and Elias watched the years fall off them as they went. This was where they were from—where they had been young and reckless and in love before any of the rest of it, before Heartwood, before him. Damian's composed face had gone soft and faraway. Selena, who was never quiet, was quiet, looking down a particular street as though she could see two foolish young people running down it decades ago. They did not say much. They didn't need to. They just walked, and remembered, and every so often one of them would touch the other's arm and point at something that was still there after all these years—a fountain, a corner, a particular old tree leaning over the water. Once Selena laughed at something Damian murmured, low and surprised, a young laugh from a face that did not laugh that way often, and Damian smiled at her the way Elias suspected he must have smiled decades ago, before any of them existed. It was a strange and lovely thing, to watch your parents be young.
Their beasts felt it too. Amia rode in her floating sphere of water at Damian's side, and Elias saw the old guppy go still and watchful, her emerald eyes taking in the streams and canals of the place her master had been born—the water here rich and clean in a way that clearly meant something to her. Eiren drifted overhead on silent wings, frost trailing behind her, wheeling once in a slow arc over rooftops she must have known long ago. Even Rime went briefly still—the floating rhombus of ice drifting close at Selena's shoulder, the restless frost patterns beneath its clear surface slowing for once.
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The stillness did not last, of course. Not with Kyle around.
Within minutes he'd recovered entirely and gone tearing off to see everything at once, and—of course—Rowan had gone with him. The two of them were a natural disaster together: Kyle all reckless energy, Rowan all easy grin and boundless appetite for anything new, egging each other on toward the waterwheels, the canal boats, a bridge that apparently needed running across three times. Kyle called back over his shoulder about something he'd found; Rowan laughed at whatever Kyle said next; and no one tried very hard to stop either of them.
Iris drifted off in the other direction, drawn to the shops—the district was full of them, little aquatic-themed places selling things Heartwood never had, and she moved from window to window with open, delighted curiosity. Seraphina, predictably, had already located a bookshop and disappeared into it, and would likely need to be retrieved later. Oliver watched all of it with the mild satisfaction of a man whose arrangements had worked out, and then went to go make sure the rest of them had.
And Cassian stayed by Elias. Where else would he be?
So Elias walked, and Cassian walked beside him, and Elias looked at everything.
It was a wholly new district, on the far side of the world from anywhere he'd ever been—and yet, the longer he looked, the more he began to notice things he knew.
There, in a flower-seller's window, a small hive of Lifebloom Bees worked among the blooms, their soft light unmistakable. There, climbing the wall of a healer's shop, a Hundred Fragrance Vine, its many blossoms scenting the whole street. There, at a shaded stall, a Blood Crystal Butterfly opened and closed its glittering wings for a delighted child. In a tea house there—unmistakable, upright, aproned, walking on its hind legs with perfect composure—a Butler Pig carried a tray of goods across a courtyard as though it had been doing exactly that its whole life.
Elias stopped walking.
He stood in the middle of a district he had never once set foot in, thousands of miles from home, and everywhere he turned he found the shapes of his own work looking back at him.
It had been about three years now since he'd become a breeder. Three years since the first quiet experiments, the first evolution paths written down and given freely away. He had always known, in an abstract way, that his findings spread—the letters told him so, and Maeve's reports, and Oliver's endless management of the demand. But knowing a thing and standing inside it were different. Here it was, made real and ordinary: bees and vines and butterflies and pigs he had never sent here, that had simply… arrived, carried out along a hundred hands and roads until they reached even a place like this, a place he hadn't known he'd touched.
His influence had spread further than he'd ever watched it go. All the way here, to the district his parents had run away from, to streets he was seeing for the very first time—and it had gotten here before he did.
It was a strange feeling. Not pride, exactly. Something quieter and larger than pride.
He thought of the plain, bees and vines no one had chosen. Of the Care Pigs, and the sheep, all the small overlooked creatures he found a future for—and here they were, or their cousins were, tucked into the corners of a stranger's district, making someone's life a little softer without anyone here ever knowing his name. That was the whole point of giving it away, wasn't it. That it went on without him. That it got here first.
Beside him, Cassian followed his gaze to the little Butler Pig with its tray, and then looked back at Elias's face, and said nothing at all—but there was something in the quiet of him that understood.
Elias let out a slow breath, and smiled, and looked back at the shining, watered, entirely new district that somehow already had a little of him in it.
"Come on," he said. "Let's go find some guppies."
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