He spent two more days resting before Maret stopped positioning herself near the door with the particular energy of someone prepared to use a cane for purposes beyond walking.
He didn't argue with her. His shoulder still ached and the lump above his ear had mostly gone down but not entirely, and the rest gave him time to think. Which turned out to be more interesting than he expected.
The first thing he noticed was small. The morning of his second day recovering, one of the other boarders, an older man named Cessil, was trying to fix a broken strap on his work satchel and making a disaster of it. Thick fingers, cheap awl, wrong angle, the same mistake four times in a row while muttering things under his breath that probably would have offended the gods if any of them were listening to Ashfen Lane at that particular moment.
Jisoo watched for about a minute then said "Tilt the awl toward you, not away."
Cessil squinted at him. "Since when do you know leatherwork?"
"I don't," Jisoo said honestly.
Cessil tried it anyway. The awl went through clean. He made the grunt that apparently served as his version of thank you and finished the repair without further trouble.
Jisoo sat with that for a while afterward. He had never worked leather in his life. He didn't know where the advice had come from. It had simply been obvious, the way things sometimes became obvious when he paid close attention, except clearer than usual. Like the difference between trying to read something in poor candlelight and reading the same thing in full daylight.
He filed it away.
The second thing happened on his third day when Maret finally accepted he was well enough for a short walk and let him leave without the look. The afternoon was bright and crisp and he wandered without direction until he ended up near the practice yard behind the watch house on Millgate Street, where two city watchmen were running sword drills.
He'd seen sword drills before. Everyone in the lower quarters had. But he stopped at the fence this time and actually watched, and something clicked in his head almost immediately. The way the senior watchman's weight shifted before every strike, using the momentum rather than fighting it. The way the younger one kept making the same small error with his back foot and losing power because of it, three times before the senior finally stopped to correct him.
Jisoo could see exactly what the error was before the correction came.
He stood there longer than he meant to. When he finally left he was turning the footwork over in his mind the same way he turned over the things he learned from watching Aldric, letting the shape of it settle somewhere it could be useful later.
He went back to Ashfen Lane and didn't mention it to anyone.
That night the warmth in his chest was a little more present than it had been the night before. Steadier. And with it came something that felt almost like amusement from whatever was sitting on the other side of it. Like something was watching him piece things together and finding the process entertaining.
He lay on his mat in the dark and thought about the awl angle and the watchman's footwork and the way Aldric's hands always slowed before a cut. Three completely different things. Three different crafts. And all of them had started to feel, in the past three days, like they were written in the same language.
He fell asleep thinking about that and slept better than he had in a long time.
He was back at the docks the following morning. Sera's ears did the not quite flat thing when he arrived. Torvin handed him a crate without a word, which from Torvin was essentially a warm welcome. The half-elf woman with the book, whose name he still didn't know, glanced up once and said "Glad you didn't die" in a tone so completely matter of fact that it startled a short laugh out of him before he could stop it.
She looked mildly surprised that he'd laughed. Then she went back to her book.
It was a good shift. The sun stayed out. The loads were steady and the boats came in on time, which put Sera in a rare agreeable mood that made the whole dock feel easier somehow. Torvin, in what Jisoo was beginning to understand was a significant display of friendliness for a dwarf of few words, told him that the lump on his head looked less ugly than it had yesterday.
"Thanks," Jisoo said.
Torvin nodded seriously and picked up a crate that would have taken Jisoo two trips.
At Greystone Cartwright's the following morning Aldric looked him over once when he arrived, said nothing about the fading bruise above his ear, handed him a sanding block, and pointed at a pile of wheel spokes. Which was its own kind of welcome.
Jisoo got to work.
He was halfway through the pile when he noticed something. The grain on the third spoke ran slightly differently to the others, a subtle twist that would cause a problem under long term stress if it went into a wheel without being accounted for. He almost let it go. It wasn't his place to say anything. He was the boy who sanded things, not the craftsman making decisions about materials.
He set it aside in a separate small pile anyway.
Aldric noticed at the end of the morning. He picked it up, turned it over in his hands, looked at Jisoo for a moment with an expression that was difficult to read.
"Grain's wrong," Jisoo said simply.
Aldric looked at the spoke again. Then he set it with the discard pile and went back to his work without a word.
But he didn't give Jisoo the look. The one that meant the question was beneath the craft.
That felt like something.
Walking home that evening with sore palms and sawdust in his hair, Jisoo thought about the academy letter that had arrived three weeks before his accident, the one he still hadn't fully decided what to do with. A letter bearing the seal of Seven Crowns Academy, the largest school in the known world, addressed specifically to him in handwriting that was too careful and deliberate to be a mistake.
He'd assumed at the time it was an error. Some clerk's misplaced correspondence. A name mixed up with another.
He was starting to think, for the first time, that maybe it wasn't.
The warmth in his chest flickered gently, like a candle in a still room, and told him nothing useful whatsoever.
He kicked a loose stone off the road and kept walking.