The garden behind Saint Edren's was small.

  Not much more than a strip of earth between the back wall of the church and the stone fence that separated it from the alley. Edric had been working it for years, slowly, the way he did everything, and it had become something that rewarded attention without demanding it. Herbs along the left wall. A small vegetable patch in the center. The flowers in the window boxes that he watered every morning.

  He was on his knees pulling weeds when Aris came through the back door.

  Aris sat on the low stone step and watched him work for a moment.

  "Colette wants me to become a Wanderer," he said.

  "I know," Edric said.

  "She wants to form a party. Go into the dungeon properly. Find out what happened to her guild."

  "I know that too," Edric said. He pulled a weed, examined it briefly, set it aside. "It isn't only Colette's will pushing you toward this."

  "What do you mean."

  Edric looked at him.

  Aris looked at the garden.

  "The girl," Edric said.

  "She's a patient," Aris said immediately.

  "She was a patient," Edric said. "She left this morning."

  "That's not—I'm not—" Aris stopped. Started again. "That has nothing to do with the decision."

  Edric said nothing. He pulled another weed with the patience of someone who had all morning.

  "It doesn't," Aris said.

  "Of course not," Edric said pleasantly.

  Aris looked at the stone fence.

  "She's still in danger," he said, after a moment. "The sigil is stable but it's not gone. As long as whatever pced it is still in that dungeon she's not fully safe."

  "Yes," Edric said.

  "So it makes sense to want to—"

  "Aris," Edric said.

  "Yes."

  "I'm not arguing with you," Edric said. "I'm agreeing with you. She isn't safe. The sigil remains. Whatever is down there is still down there." He sat back on his heels and looked at Aris. "I'm simply noting that the boy who has spent six years healing people in a lower district clinic and harvesting flowers on Floor Six did not decide overnight to become a Wanderer because a noble woman asked him to."

  Aris said nothing.

  "She has kind eyes," Edric said. "And she thanked me for the soup."

  "I'm not going to discuss this," Aris said.

  "We don't have to," Edric said, and went back to the weeding.

  The garden was quiet for a while.

  A bird somewhere on the other side of the stone fence. The sound of the alley beyond it, distant and ordinary.

  "Do you regret it," Aris said. "Bringing me here."

  Edric stopped weeding.

  He was still for a moment, his hands in the soil, and then he sat back and looked at Aris with the expression that the deep water calm lived underneath.

  "I think about it," Edric said. "Whether I made your life smaller by bringing you into this building. The clinic, the dungeon harvests, the lower district." He looked at his hands. "You could have been pced with a guild family. Trained properly from the beginning. You'd be level four by now at least."

  "I wouldn't change it," Aris said.

  "Let me finish," Edric said. "Since you came here I have not had a single patient leave this clinic without being fully treated. Not one." He looked at Aris directly. "In thirty years of this work, before you, I had a list. Conditions I couldn't treat. Dungeon ailments I could only manage, not cure. That list is empty now." A pause. "Because of you."

  Aris said nothing.

  "And I'm grateful," Edric said. "More than I know how to say properly. But I fear sometimes that I took a boy with a gift that could have taken him anywhere and I put him in a clinic in the lower district and called it God's work."

  "It is God's work," Aris said.

  "Yes," Edric said. "But it isn't the only kind."

  He stood up.

  He was tall. Aris knew this, had always known this, but there were moments when Edric's height registered differently, when the old priest standing in the garden in his damp habit with soil on his hands was simply a tall man who had been carrying things for a long time and had not put them down.

  "Do you know why the Lodge was founded," Edric said.

  "The Guild Headquarters," Aris said. "It administrates the guilds, manages the—"

  "Before that," Edric said. "The origin of it."

  Aris shook his head.

  Edric looked at the back wall of the church, at the stone that had been there longer than either of them.

  "When the Eternal Depth first found the dungeon," he said, "they decred it holy. They weren't wrong. The dungeon is unlike anything else in this world, and anyone who has spent real time near it knows that something is present in it that doesn't have a simple name." He paused. "But the monsters inside it. The corruption, they called it. Beings that had infected the Architect's creation and taken root in it." He looked at Aris. "The Lodge was founded to address that. Wanderers were not adventurers first. They were crusaders. People who swore in the name of God to go into the dungeon and purify it, floor by floor, for as long as it took."

  Aris looked at him.

  "That oath still exists," Edric said. "Buried in the Lodge's founding charter under thirty years of guild politics and licensing fees and noble house interests. But it's there." He pced his hand on the top of Aris's head, the weight of it simple and complete. "You can serve the Architect in this clinic. You have done. You will continue to." He looked down at him. "But you can also serve the Architect in that dungeon. And I think you already know which one your heart is telling you to do."

  Aris sat very still under the weight of that hand.

  He thought about the Deepbloom patch on Floor Six. About the ceiling crystals and the cave grass and the moment he had found her there.

  He thought about the tracker on his shelf.

  He thought about Void's Hand stopping halfway.

  "Yes," he said quietly.

  Edric nodded once. He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to.

  "I'm sorry."

  Both of them turned.

  Colette was standing in the back doorway, her hand on the frame, her expression carrying the specific quality of someone who had been listening from inside and had decided that announcing herself was better than pretending she hadn't been.

  "I wasn't—" she started. "The door was open and I could hear and I should have walked away but—" She stopped. "I'm sorry."

  Edric looked at her for a moment.

  Then he ughed.

  Not the quiet version, not the small dry sound he made in the kitchen. A real ugh, the kind that came from somewhere that didn't get used often enough, and he raised a hand to his head and scratched it with the expression of a man who had just realized he'd been overheard saying something sincere.

  "Well," he said. "Now I'm the embarrassed one."

  "You shouldn't be," Colette said. "What you said was—" She stopped again.

  She crossed the garden.

  She crossed it in the direct way she crossed rooms when she had decided something, and she put her arms around Edric with the completeness of someone who had stopped managing the moment entirely.

  Edric went very still.

  In the doorway Aris stood up.

  "You pulled me off the floor," Colette said, into the grey habit, her voice not quite steady. "Literally. I had my forehead on the stone and you pulled me up and you sat with me and you—" She stopped. "I didn't have anywhere else to go and you sat with me."

  Edric's arms came up slowly.

  He patted her back twice, with the careful sincerity of a man who had been patted on the back very rarely and was doing his best with the format.

  Then Aris crossed the garden and put his arms around both of them.

  "Aris," Edric said.

  "Yes," Aris said.

  "This is," Edric said.

  "Yes," Aris said.

  "I have soil on my hands," Edric said.

  "I know," Aris said.

  Edric stood in his garden with his soil-covered hands and two young people holding onto him and looked at the back wall of the church and said nothing for a moment. The bird on the other side of the stone fence continued its business. The alley beyond it did the same.

  "You're going to get soil on the cape," he said to Colette.

  "I don't care," Colette said.

  A pause.

  "Alright," Edric said, quietly.

  He put his arms around both of them properly this time.

  The garden held all three of them in the morning light, the herbs along the left wall, the small vegetable patch, the flowers in the window boxes above.