Gregory found him well after dark, sitting alone on the half-finished planking of what would eventually become the settlement's second granary, and didn't say anything at first, only settled down beside him with his boots hanging off the edge over dark water, the two of them watching the barrier's light pulse steady along the horizon the way other men might have watched a fire burn down.
"You've been quiet since the boat went out," Gregory said, finally.
"I've been thinking about the council tomorrow," Remus said, which was true, though not the whole of it.
"Pompey's going to ask who takes Tacitus's place, and I already know how that question's going to land the moment it's asked.
Half the room's going to look at you before Pompey's even finished the sentence."
"I know," Gregory said.
"I've been thinking about it too.
Longer than you'd probably guess."
"And?"
Gregory was quiet a moment, turning something invisible over in his own hands the way Remus turned charcoal, an old habit of thought neither of them had ever named out loud between them.
"I keep coming back to the night I told you I was leaving for the Blue Angels," he said.
"You said it was alright.
You put your hand on my shoulder and told me we were still family, and I believed every word of it, because you meant every word of it, and it still took me most of a year on the road to work out that you'd swallowed something ugly whole in that exact moment just so I wouldn't have to watch you do it. I only found that out because you finally told me yourself, in the dark, on the road out of Autumnshade, after Tacitus was already gone.
Do you remember what you said."
"I remember," Remus said.
"I told you I'd wanted to grab you by the collar and ask how many more people you meant to leave standing in a doorway before you were done."
"That's the one," Gregory said.
"I've thought about that sentence probably every day since you said it.
Not because it hurt, though it did. Because it was true, and you'd carried it silently for a year rather than say it to my face, and I understood, hearing it, that I'd built half my own courage on the back of never once finding out what leaving actually cost the people I left behind. I don't want to do that again.
Not to you, not to this family, not to whatever's left of the Southlands that's still standing in this swamp. If I take a General's rank tomorrow because I'm the Duke's son and I happen to be standing in the right room at the right moment, I'm doing the exact same thing all over again in a different shape.
I'd be taking something because it was offered easily, instead of earning it the way Tacitus earned his twice over, the hard way, out loud, in front of people who could have said no and chose not to."
"You'd be good at it," Remus said, quiet.
"I want you to hear me say that plainly, since I don't say it to you often enough.
You've got Father's stubbornness and none of his patience for sitting still, and that's exactly the kind of temperament this settlement needs standing at the front of a line right now. I'm not saying it to talk you into taking the job.
I'm saying it because it's true, and I don't want you walking into tomorrow's meeting thinking I doubt you."
"I know you don't doubt me," Gregory said.
"That's not what's stopping me.
What's stopping me is that I doubt whether I'd know, afterward, if I'd earned it or simply been handed it wearing earning's clothes. I'd rather serve under Aulus for a year, prove it to men who have no reason at all to go easy on me, and take the rank later if it's actually offered by people who watched me deserve it. That's a slower road.
I think it's the only one that ends anywhere honest."
Remus felt something in his chest ease, listening to it, a small, private relief that had nothing to do with the settlement's chain of command and everything to do with the plain fact that his brother had grown, in the space of a hard year, into exactly the kind of man who could say a sentence like that out loud and mean every word of it.
"Then I'll back you on it tomorrow," Remus said.
"Whatever Aulus and Pompey decide around you, I'll make sure nobody mistakes your standing aside for you not caring enough to stand up.
That's not the same thing, and I won't let the room treat it like it is."
"There's one more thing," Gregory said, and something in the careful way he said it told Remus this second thing had been sitting underneath the first the whole time.
"I want the next dangerous job that comes across this council's table.
Not because I need to prove anything to Father, or to you.
Because Tacitus bought us the time to still be standing here at all, and I don't intend to spend that time comfortable while somebody else does the parts that scare me."
"I'll make sure Aulus hears that offer plainly," Remus said.
"I imagine he'll take you up on it faster than either of us expects."
They sat a while longer in the dark, saying nothing else, the barrier's light shivering steady along the horizon, and Remus found, walking back toward the longhouse an hour later, that some old, unspoken debt between the two of them had finally, quietly, settled itself flat.
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