The spare clothes are a large black sweater and flowing pale pink pants with a drawstring to tighten. I think I pull them as tight as they can go while Zan valiantly does not laugh.

  I find myself wishing he would actually feel safe to laugh with me.

  Instead, he crouches down to roll up the cuffs of the pants so they're not dragging on the floor only to discover that they don't stay rolled, which causes me to shake silently with laughter.

  Zan scowls, but his eyes are dancing. "Hang on."

  Zan disappears into another room while I regard the image I present of drowning in his clothes, and then he returns with a bolt of blue cloth.

  He reaches for me and then hesitates. "May I?" he asks.

  I have no idea what's happening anymore, but I nod.

  Then he touches me.

  I feel that strange surge of feelings again—warmth, but also a rush—gone before I can place it.

  But I'm more conscious this time of the experience, so I file away the sensation for later examination.

  In the meantime Zan has hoisted the pants much higher and wrapped the blue cloth around my waist like a sash to hold everything in place. The oversized black sweater is big enough that it mostly covers it.

  "Why do you have such big clothes?" I ask him. "You're not this big."

  His black shirt is a little loose, but not like this, and his pants are fitted. He wears a blue sleeveless collared robe over it belted at the waist with a rope that shows how slender he is. I'm smaller than him, but not that much smaller.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  "Some Kameyans are." Zan sounds exasperated at us. "Better too big than too small."

  Prepared to help a sage escape without warning.

  Like he didn't do for me all those years ago.

  I wonder if the fact that the pants are a pink that perfectly coordinates with my eye color has anything to do with that.

  "And I'll have you know you look fashionable," Zan tells me.

  "Drowning in clothes?"

  He shrugs. "I don't make the rules. Roll up your sleeve cuffs though so you don't have to pull on them constantly."

  I would have just let them hang uselessly.

  I'm used to simply accepting whatever is given to me and not making a fuss about it, because if I make a fuss...

  That's my past.

  I roll up the cuffs.

  All the sensations are new. These are the first clothes I can remember wearing that the priests didn't give me.

  Maybe someday I'll choose some for myself.

  "There," Zan says. "Let me show you the rest of the cottage, and we'll see what we need to get."

  Now he takes me to the other side of the cottage. He points. "That door is my room."

  Where the stray blue cloth had come from—does he make his own clothes?

  Zan opens the other one and says, "This one is a spare room. It changes based on what people living here need, so it's pretty empty right now. You can do what you want with it."

  It is indeed empty. Table, chair, shelves.

  One wall, though, is painted with a mural of a dragon flying beyond a cottage on a mountain.

  I look at Zan. He does that shrug again. "Kovan and Tasa made it a nursery. People repaint it occasionally."

  A wealth of information in two such short statements.

  Kovan and Tasa made a space for Zan here, in their family, with the most vulnerable part of it.

  That painting has been here for five hundred years, and the sages who've come since have felt it was important to keep it, this monument to Zan's guardianship of their sanctuary.

  I wonder what's in Zan's room that he isn't showing me.

  He has a right to his privacy, though, so I only nod, and he closes the door and leads me to the other side.

  I don't know what I would do with an empty space. I'm impossibly relieved that most of the house comes furnished already.

  But then Zan opens the other door next to the bathroom, and I revisit that.

  "This is your room," he says.