Why yes, someone does appear to be home.  She is, thankfully for the tiny boy's chances of getting in her house, asleep right now --

-- but the wards her sister placed never do, and they're really quite clever.

The panels of the warding schema visible from the exterior interlock, woven together like maille; they seem to additionally be tied to a central node such that an attempt to disturb them, undertaken without sufficient caution, would definitely trigger...something.

Whatever-it-is is...not very distinct or discernible from outside the wards, and that was likely intentional on the designer's part.

He's not sure if those are actually unusual wards or if he's just missing a lot of memories including on which kinds of wards are usual in this country? Either way, he does need to get in there the hard way. He's only been in this body less than a fortnight and has not yet figured out Gates, and isn't sure he would have the reserves for it anyway; he definitely cannot safely tap nodes for energy, right now, with a not-yet-fully-mature Gift. 

He probably doesn't have the fine control to avoid triggering something, even if he could see the full mechanism of the spell, which he can't. He's already gotten quite a lot of practice at both mage-sight and shielding, though. Those - definitely look like wards that bite - but he has plenty of time to carefully layer shields on himself, and examine as much of the the structure as it's letting him see. He thinks he can at least block it from triggering an alarm, if there is one that would alert the house's occupants.

He approaches - not under cover of an illusion, which feels scary, but it's very dark outside - and reaches in with his Gift to nudge the interlocking panels apart enough that he can slip through the weather-barrier covering the window. 

Is he standing directly in front of the panels while he does this?

Nope, he’s crouching down as low as possible to the ground! And also significantly smaller than one would really expect a mage-gifted home invader to be.

Then the couple those-are-probably-levinbolts that stab out from the gap he's prised open with a soft crack, much faster than he expected them to travel, will still likely miss him!

And he can scramble in through the window, then step to the side and wave his hand in a "come-on" gesture, then continue forwards until his outstretched hand runs into something (gently), then turn and face the exterior wall and take no non-autonomic actions despite the deep gong of a warning-bell and the sudden total darkness that falls upon him.

He cannot take any actions but he is absolutely capable of COMPLETELY PANICKING about this! And probably bursting into tears if that counts as sufficiently involuntary! (It's very annoying how often that happens in this body every time something that would normally be mildly frustrating or startling or frightening happens.) 

...Hey wards, what the fuck?

...Well.  The good news is that this Tiny Baby is not dead from poking her wards.

The bad news is why the fuck is there a Tiny Baby inside her wards?!

She shoots her sister a look that reads "you explain this; I've got nothing", and, rather groggily underneath the adrenaline, sets about rearming the system after divesting the tiny child of metallic objects with the distinctive crack of Fetching.

...Well.  Her sister made the 'go ahead' gesture with one knife in her hand, so...hopefully this isn't some sort of absurd assassination attempt.

Sometimes people get that way around her sister; she's getting very tired of giving what she will politely call cultists a good whack in the brain about it.

"What on earth brings a small child out into the middle of nowhere and possesses them to try breaking through the wards on this house?"

There is a firm seriousness that settles over said tiny child if he is not shielded from Empathic influence; it calms the abject panic, but also has overtones of scrutiny that suggest his answer will be judged.

The world also feels a bit wibbly in this moment, heavy in a way it normally isn't; it's very hard to make up a story, it seems, and easy to recall as best as possible what brought him here - though as Ophelia actually looks at the spinning fragments of clockwork machines within this child's mind, she only gives herself more questions.

Oh, and he explicitly can talk now.  Can't forget that.

He's not currently very shielded against Empathy because reinforcing his shielding would be a deliberate action. He will calm down, some. 

He is still notsafenotsafenotsafe and it's easy to recall what brought him here but also to slam down the notsafetothinkabout mental habit - he can't tell if his shields against Thoughtsensing are holding and this is secret and important they can't know can'tcan'tcan't - 

He's calmer but his thoughts are still not especially coherent. He maybe relies a lot on - not narratives, exactly, but plans, in a way that is thoroughly disrupted by whatever she just did on top of the fact that it wasn't fully reestablished in the first place.

He whimpers and does not say anything. 

(To her Sight, his mind is incredibly bizarre. There's far more complexity than there should be, for a child as young as his apparent age, which can't be more than six or seven, and there's an - incredibly solid base, there, something dense and immutable and not at all characteristic of how most minds work, but even more surprising in a young child. There are also some startlingly rich layers of procedural memory, like what she might expect to see in a highly trained elite combat mage. 

...but it's also a little as though it's only half there? As though some new pattern was hastily imposed on a much more unformed substrate, and it's missing a lot of key components and not entirely linking up.) 

...What, as her sister might say, the fuck.

She undoes her blocks, carefully avoiding touching her sister's compulsions.  The restrictions on planning aren't helping; she'll probably gain more from just seeing the reactions as they propagate.

"Does it have something to do with how you have the approximate reflexes and depth of knowledge of a highly-trained combat mage, which I am unfortunately all too capable of recognizing so don't lie to me about it, plus a mental - cornerstone - of the sort I expect more from my sister, that is nonetheless only half-present?"

....Honestly the state of sheer disarray this mind is in is positively offensive to her.  "I am a Mind-healer, and I would greatly prefer to fix whatever problem you are presently having, because to have a mind left in such abject disarray is positively offensive to me - do not pretend you are not having problems, I am a Mind-healer - but I cannot do this, nor can I commit to doing this at some future point, without more information than I have right now."

THIS IS EVEN WORSE THAN HE THOUGHT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

He’s taking small shallow breaths and quietly half-crying. “I - intend no harm - to either of you - please let me go - I will leave I will not interfere with - anything—”

He really does not talk like a small child. He also seems somewhat nonplussed about the crying, as though he’s unaccustomed to this being his reaction to stress. 

(It’s pretty clear from the clockwork of his mind that it shouldn’t be his reaction, and is one of the elements of his mind’s current disarray.)

"...I am not intending to actively stop you from leaving, given that I saw you mean that.  But I think it would not be wise to go, in your position.  Metis, get the boy something to eat, something warm, and then take his compulsions off.  He's a patient."

And the sound of footsteps vanishes into another room!  A short while later they return; one of a set of fraternal twins, given their apparent similarity in appearance, hands him what feels like a fresh-from-the-oven roll, which - he can take, now, apparently!  And do whatever he wants with it!

"...Metis, something that isn't just bread.  He's half-starved, yes, but you remember the scurvy incident."

"...Eh?  I put some preserves in there, what do you take me for?"

"Dear sister, for all your brilliance you would surely lose your head if it was not screwed on."

The banter is confusing.

He…is apparently not standing up right now, whether or not he’s technically allowed to, his legs are not cooperating. It’s cold out there and inside is warm.…

…He peers very suspiciously at the bread without eating it - he’s so incredibly confused about what’s even happening right now, and kind of stuck, between the screaming feeling of notsafehere and the fact that he is apparently not successfully going to go anywhere else.

"Hey."  The Mindhealer crouches down on his level.  "...I know things are pretty scary right now.  I know you have secrets you want to keep, and I'm not going to go prying for them like this, but - well, if you're this scared of anyone knowing even what I do, because I bet that isn't the whole of it - I wouldn't trust me further than I could throw me on that claim.  I don't blame you if you aren't.  But - can you trust that if we actually wanted to hurt you, you would still be under compulsions, and eat your food, please?  Or - if it's not that, tell us why?  ...Metis, get him a blanket.  And maybe a warming rock.  Poor kid's shaking like a leaf."

The other sister can make a blanket show up, sure, plus a quartz that uses some of the spellwork seen in weather-barriers to heat its surface to average human body temperature and no further when activated.

Some part of him wants to feel reassured by that, to feel small and safe and maybe have a hug, and that's not a him-native thought process at all, it just - takes longer than two weeks to retrain all of the habits and procedural memory inherited with a body. 

He does not ask for a hug. He wraps the blanket tightly around himself, though, and eats the roll. It's the first full-size meal he's had in weeks, and much richer than gnawing on raw potatoes. He has to repeatedly remind himself to eat slowly rather than cramming it all into his mouth at once. (He is very disciplined about this, for a tiny child.) 

He's trying very hard to stay alert and on guard, but his eyelids are drooping by the time he finishes the bread. 

Ophelia does not do anything to disabuse him of the notion that there is nothing of him that would appreciate being comforted, though she rather dearly desires to give him a hug.

She is a professional, and he did not ask for a hug, so she will not intrude.

Very much.

"We do not normally have visitors here, but - we can probably arrange for you to have something more comfortable than the floor for sleeping."

...The floor would have been fine and a massive step up from sleeping under hedges or, on the one occasion he was lucky enough to find one, in the hollow left by a storm-uprooted tree. (His clothing is exactly as filthy and stained and questionably-smelling as one would expect from two weeks of sleeping rough without bathing, unless you count the times he had to wade or swim across rivers. It's a good thing he at least remembers how to swim, he thinks that didn't come with the body.) 

He nods. If she seems to want to show him somewhere, he will even push through the exhaustion and stand up to follow her.