Ink & Crown

Chapter 92 – The People Behind the Pages

The first orders went out within the hour.

Mira called them from the counter the way she called everything, clear and unhurried, like she'd been running this branch for a year instead of a single morning. Lira moved behind her with trays. Edrin worked the floor. The students who'd wandered in off the path were already settling into the window seats, half of them still glancing at the people they recognized and trying to pretend they weren't.

Lucien watched it from near the back and let himself take it in for a moment. The branch was open, and it was working.

Then Evelis came up beside him.

"Your parents haven't met the Crownspire side yet," she said.

Lucien looked across the room. Cerys was near the counter with Miss Elayne. Darius stood by the window, holding a cup he hadn't drunk from, watching the students.

It had gotten away from them. His family had been the last to arrive, slipping in just before the ribbon, and the cutting had eaten whatever time there might have been for introductions. Everyone else had spent the morning meeting and mixing, names turning into faces all over the room. His parents had walked in at the very end and gone straight to the front, and so they and the Crownspire side had spent what was left of the morning a few tables apart without ever crossing.

"No," Lucien admitted. "They haven't. It all happened too fast."

"Then let's fix that."

She was already moving.

---

Of the three of them, Taren spoke first.

"Mr. and Mrs. Ashborne," he said. "I've been to your café twice now and managed to miss the two of you both times. I'd started to take it personally."

Cerys took his hand in both of hers. "Evelis said there were still people we hadn't met from the publishing side." She looked at the three of them. "So you're the ones who'll be working on his books now."

"Taren Halvek." He paused. "Though in fairness, I'm barely less new than they are. I signed on last night myself, maybe an hour before I talked these two into following me." He nodded toward Rowan and Talia. "None of us has had a full day. And here we all are, at an opening."

Talia didn't wait for a cue. "We were at the main branch last night, actually. That's where we agreed to all this." She glanced around the new branch. "We had the food. We didn't get to meet the family. So I've been looking forward to this part."

"You signed on at our café and nobody introduced you properly?" Cerys said.

"Oh, we were fed. Thoroughly." Talia put a hand briefly to her chest. "The hand pies are a problem. I've thought about them more than once since."

Rowan leaned in, easier and slower than Talia. "What she means is we're glad to finally meet the people behind all of it. We only started yesterday. We're still figuring out what we've signed up for."

Cerys glanced at her son, then back at Rowan. "Not even a day in, and he's already got you here."

"He works fast," Rowan said.

"He always has," Cerys said.

Lucien decided not to engage with that.

---

Cerys turned toward the window. "Darius. Come and meet them."

He came over in his own time and stopped beside her. For a moment he just looked at Taren, saying nothing.

"My husband, Darius," Cerys said. "He watches more than he talks. You'll get used to it." She turned to him. "These three just signed on at Crownspire. Lucien's publishing house. They came for the opening."

Darius considered them for a moment. "You've read what he writes, then."

"I have," Taren said. "It's most of the reason I'm here." He paused. "And there's not much for me to fix. He turns in clean work. Cleaner than people twice his age."

Darius said nothing to that. He looked at Lucien, then back at Taren.

"He's always been like that," Darius said.

Taren met his eyes, gave a small nod, and let it sit.

Cerys filled the quiet the way she always did. "Have the three of you eaten? Properly, I mean. Not pastries you grabbed standing up."

Talia opened her mouth.

"That's what I thought," Cerys said. "Sit. I'll have Lira bring something out. You're my son's people now. I'm not letting you run on pastries."

"Mrs. Ashborne, we don't want to—"

"You're not putting anyone out. Sit." She was already turning toward the counter. "You can argue with me or you can eat. You won't win the first one."

They sat.

---

Alina arrived the way weather arrives.

She'd been holding court at the window table since the ribbon, presiding over a small territory of crumbs, and she crossed the room now with the air of someone doing an inspection. She stopped in front of the Crownspire table and looked at the three of them.

"You're new," she announced.

"We are," Talia agreed. "I'm Talia. This is Rowan and Taren. We help make your brother's books."

Alina considered this. "The story ones or the food ones?"

"The story ones."

"Those are the good ones." Alina climbed onto the empty chair beside Talia without being invited, which was how Alina did most things. "I'm in one. Not by name. But there's a little girl who draws on napkins and that's me. Lucien won't admit it but it's me."

"It's definitely you," Talia said.

"See." Alina pointed at her brother across the room. "She gets it."

Rowan was trying not to laugh. "Do you draw on a lot of napkins?"

"All of them. It's my job. I'm the artist." She said it with the flat certainty of a six-year-old who had been given a title once and intended to hold it for life. "I did the chalkboard outside. The pie has steam. You should look at the pie."

"I'll look at the pie," Rowan promised.

"Look at it properly. Not just walking past."

Taren set down his cup and gave Alina the first uncomplicated smile Lucien had seen from him all day. "I'll look at it properly," he said. "I take art seriously. It's my whole profession."

Alina decided she approved of Taren. It showed on her face the way everything showed on her face.

---

Cerys returned with Lira and a tray, and set plates in front of people who'd insisted they weren't hungry and then ate anyway.

Darius watched the table fill. He didn't sit. He rarely sat when there was a room to keep an eye on. Something in his shoulders had eased, though, and Lucien caught it.

"What," Lucien said quietly, beside him.

Darius took a slow drink from the cup he'd been holding all morning.

"Your books," Darius said. "The printing, the selling, all the parts that turn what you write into something real. It happens across the city, in rooms I've never been in." He nodded at the table, at Gareth and Theo and the three who'd started only yesterday, all of them eating his wife's food and talking about his son's work. "I never see any of it. Today I've met the people behind it."

He set the cup down.

"They're good people," he said. "That matters more than I thought it would."

He went back to the window after that, but he stood a little closer to the room than before.

---

Toward midday the gathering began to thin.

Chancellor Voss was the first to leave. A word to Mira about the branch, a nod to Lucien, and she was gone. Aelric stayed longer. He gathered himself eventually and clapped Lucien once on the shoulder on his way out.

"You've built something here," Aelric said. "Try to remember to enjoy it before you start worrying about the next one."

"I'm not worrying about the next one."

"You're already worrying about the next one." Aelric smiled. "I've known you for years, Lucien."

He left before Lucien could decide whether to argue.

Gareth made to go around the same time, Theo with him. Lucien caught him near the door before he could slip out quietly.

"You've still never been to the café," Lucien said. "The main branch. Theo's been. Taren's been. Half the people in this room have."

"I've been busy."

"He's been avoiding it," Theo said, beside him.

Gareth gave his son a look. He didn't deny it.

"Come this week," Lucien said. "My mother will feed you whether you want it or not. You've met everyone else now."

Gareth glanced back at the room, at the full tables and the warm noise of it. Then he made a low sound that might have been a laugh.

"I don't much like being the last one who hasn't," he said. "Fine. I'll come."

The fan page members went in a loose cluster, Kiro and Sera last, both of them looking like they'd collected enough material for a month of posts and weren't sure they were allowed to be that happy about it. Sera stopped in front of Cerys on the way out.

"Thank you for the food, Mrs. Ashborne."

"You've been coming to our café for quite some time now, Sera. You don't have to thank me for food anymore." Cerys considered her. "You look tired. Are you eating at the dormitories or are you living on the café?"

"...The café, mostly."

"That's not an answer either." Cerys patted her arm. "Come by the main branch this week. I'll make sure you eat something with a vegetable in it."

Sera left looking like someone who'd been adopted against her will and didn't entirely mind.

---

By the time the last of the gathering had gone, the branch had become only itself, a café full of students on an ordinary day that happened to be its first.

Lucien stood near the counter and looked at it. The window seats were full. Mira was showing Edrin something about the register. The Crownspire team had stayed past everyone, and Taren was on his second cup, in no apparent hurry to leave.

Talia caught Lucien watching and lifted her cup at him. "It's a good café," she called over. "I'm going to be insufferable about having been here on the first day."

"You're going to be insufferable regardless," Rowan said.

"That's true."

Cerys came to stand beside Lucien. "They're nice," she said. "The publishing ones. I worried they'd be the kind of people who'd make you feel small for where you came from."

"They're not."

"I can see that now." She was quiet a moment. "It's strange. All these people in your life that I'm only just meeting. The chancellor of your institute, the man who owns the press, someone from the bank. And now these three." She nodded at the Crownspire table. "Every one of them came here today, to a café we nearly lost."

Lucien didn't say anything.

"I keep thinking about a year ago," Cerys said. "When we were counting shards at the counter after closing and pretending the numbers were better than they were." She looked at him. "I don't know how you did this."

There was an answer to that, and it was the one he could never give her. The real answer lived behind his eyes, in a library only he could see.

"I had help," Lucien said. "Everyone who came today. And you and Dad most of all."

It was true. It was also the part of the truth he was allowed to say, and he'd gotten good at it.

Cerys squeezed his shoulder and went to check on a table that didn't need checking, because the gathering was over and she needed something to do with her hands.

Lucien stayed by the counter a moment longer and let himself look at all of it. His father still at the window. The people who made his books and the people who'd raised him, together in a café they'd almost lost, half of them strangers to each other that morning.

Then he went to help finish the first day.