"Um." Okay, someone else is taking what he's carrying and now it's awkward because he doesn't have a reason to keep walking with her except that she's talking to him. "No, Madama. My mother was Antivan. She taught me the food and the language when I was growing up."

There is warm fondness in his voice, a memory of the smells of sandalwood and cloves, smoke rising up from a fire beneath her one giant kettle. Fragrance of cumin and texture of noodles, the sound of her mellifluous accent. She never really treated her children like children. They were her apprentice adults, learning how to act like people ought. When she was proud of her children, she wasn't scaling down her pride to fit into a child-sized shape. She was as proud of Colin's cooking as she would have been if he'd been a grown man. He wasn't good for a ten-year-old; he was just good.

"It's good to hear it again," he says wistfully. "The language and the accent."