Morning came on soft feet in the Golden Hart—no clatter, no bustle yet—just the low thrum of a banked hearth and the shy glow of light slipping through leaded panes. The place smelled of warm batter and steeping tea, and of something sweet the cook had hidden in a pan for later. A dusting of flour made a white fingerprint along the counter where someone had touched down in the dark.
Kaelen had the same table as last night, back to the wall out of habit, sword leaned within reach, his forearm crossbow dismantled in neat pieces on a clean napkin. He'd already wiped the oil from the trigger's teeth and tested the throw of the bow arm twice. It was smoother since the smith's apprentice had fussed over it, but the truth remained: in a scramble, one shot and then a delay to feed the groove and seat the line. Fine across an alley. Less fine beneath something with claws.
Miro arrived like a yawn in boots, hair a warring kingdom of gold strands. He slouched into the seat opposite, lifted the lid on the nearest crock as if it had personally promised him joy, and exhaled when steam kissed his face.
"Is this what heaven smells like?" he asked the room. "Batter and bad decisions?"
"Eat before you poet," Kaelen said, and slid him a plate.
Serenya came last, though she must have been awake before both of them—she had the look of someone who'd been out in the street air already, silver hair tied back in an easy knot, cheeks faintly chilled. Her bow was strung; her quiver sat on the bench beside her with the same posture as a proud dog. She took the chair beside Miro without ceremony and reached for a mug of tea with the assurance of someone who'd earned it.
"For the record," Miro announced, pointing a fork, "I would like it known that I was faster than both of you yesterday."
"Faster at getting nearly sat on," Kaelen said.
"That was a tactical feint," Miro said gravely. "You invite the Ironclaw to commit. It commits. You are not there. Genius."
Serenya's mouth quirked. "You rolled under it because you tripped on a root."
"I tripped on opportunity," Miro said, then pointed his fork at her next. "And you. You shot where it was going to be. That's cheating."
"It's listening," Serenya said, unbothered. "The land breathes before it moves. You can hear it if you shut up."
Miro opened his mouth, closed it, then raised his mug in salute. "Fair."
Kaelen turned a small brass pin between his fingers, thinking of the fight's angles as if they were still laid out on the floor in chalk. "It wanted your throat," he said to Miro. "It was reading you. You gave it a wrong story."
"See?" Miro said, delighted. "Genius."
"You also cut where the plates parted," Kaelen allowed. "That joint on the foreleg."
Miro preened, stabbed a wedge of fried dough, and yelped when it burned his tongue. Serenya lifted it off his fork with two fingers and set it on the rim to cool. "You also nearly lost a hand."
"Details," he said around a sulky drink of tea.
"And you," she added to Kaelen, tipping her jaw toward the crossbow parts. "The little arm paid for itself. But you hate it."
Kaelen didn't argue. "It saved breath," he conceded. "But once I'd spent the bolt I was holding a wooden promise. Sword does what I ask if I keep my feet; the bow isn't always listening. I want something that reloads in a thought or gives me two shots before I have to look at it."
Miro brightened. "We'll find some tinkerer mad enough to make you a miniature siege engine for your wrist. 'Hello, sir, do you happen to have a ballista the size of a loaf?'"
Serenya's eyes were amused. "Or a second arm fixed opposite the first, so you can cock one while you fire the other."
Kaelen made a note in his head—opposed limbs, mirrored catch—and set the pin back in its place. "We'll ask the bowyer's neighbor to cheat on his taxes and make me something illegal."
"Or," Miro said, "we simply don't stand in front of Ironclaws."
"Plan A for next time," Kaelen said.
For a while they ate. Someone behind the bar hummed a song without words. The innkeeper's boy came and went with plates, slipping through with the improbably precise grace of lanky adolescents. Talk drifted to yesterday's road—how Brevik's hat had tried to escape twice between Harrowick and Fairmere; how the round teamster had a sermon about axle grease; how the river had briefly decided to be a mirror.
"Brevik asked if whistling attracts wolves," Miro said, eyes absolutely serious.
Serenya nodded. "Depends on the tune."
Kaelen snorted tea into his sleeve.
When the plates were mostly empty and the light had shifted from pale to promising, Serenya wiped her fingers on a square of linen and fastened her cloak. "I'll not be walking with you this morning. There's a debt to collect at the bowyer's and an old herbmaster near the canal who owes me resin—proof-of-life required." Her mouth tilted. "Apparently my dying is an administrative burden."
"You want us to carry a body?" Miro asked helpfully.
"I want you to not speak to him," she said. "I'll meet you in Harrowick in a few days. If you've already gone, I know where you drink."
"Everywhere," Miro said, spreading his hands.
Kaelen nodded. There was nothing to say beyond Be safe, and saying it would be like scolding the river for being wet. "We'll start back. South Gate by evening if we keep our feet."
Serenya rose. For a heartbeat, she tucked a loose strand of silver behind one ear—habit, thoughtless. The point showed and disappeared like a fish. She caught Kaelen noticing and didn't flinch this time, only lifted a brow as if to say Now you're looking. She tapped the table once with two fingers, a spare farewell, and stepped into the brightening day.
"Think she really has business?" Miro asked, watching the door as though expecting it to open again.
"She said she did," Kaelen said. "That's enough."
Miro squinted. "You're very trusting for someone who counts his coins twice."
"I counted once," Kaelen said. "Brevik counted enough for both of us."
Miro grinned, slung his pack, and stood. "To the North Gate," he declared, like a general who had finally chosen lunch. "So that we may arrive at the South Gate as men of great dignity, and also hunger."
"Try not to challenge any barrels to duels," Kaelen said, and shouldered his own gear.
They stepped out into Fairmere's morning.
The city was shrugging itself awake. A fishmonger sluiced yesterday from his boards with a pail and a sigh. A woman with flour on her hands slapped dough in a practiced rhythm that made even the pigeons watch. The mist, thinning by degrees, draped the rooftops like moth-eaten lace. By the time they reached the North Gate, the guards had traded night's quiet for day's chatter; one of them lifted a hand in a salute lazy as a cat.
"Safe road," he said.
"We'll try not to anger it," Miro replied.
Beyond the wall, the land rolled out in tame folds—fields trimmed to stubble where spring wheat had given itself up, pasture where cows meditated on grass, hedgerows loud with birds uninterested in human plans. Dew turned the ditch flowers to beads. A heron lifted from the shallow bend of a stream and flapped off, all elbows and indignation.
They walked with an easy cadence, not the forced march of a job and not the idle meander of boredom. Kaelen let the road fill his muscles, the old rhythm his body trusted: left, air, right, air, breathe, look. He kept a count of trees without thinking, a mental map of where he'd plant a foot if he had to pivot, where he'd drag Miro if something leaped.
"You were thinking too hard," Miro said after a while, because he knew. "In the fight."
"I was where I needed," Kaelen said.
"You were already tomorrow," Miro insisted, "calculating two moves ahead while the first one tried to bite you."
"That's why it didn't," Kaelen pointed out.
"That's why you missed the opportunity to bask," Miro said solemnly. "You must bask."
Kaelen considered it as if it were a new technique. "I'll practice basking when we're not beneath anything with armor."
"Bask under a tree then," Miro said. "Start small. Work your way up."
A rattle of harness and a muttered oath drew their attention to a little cart listing in a stretch of soft ground. A farmer—thin as a fence post and just as stubborn—was arguing with a wheel. Kaelen and Miro veered without a word. Between the three of them and the farmer's long-suffering mule, the cart came free with a wet suck and a shudder. The man pressed apples into their hands with a gratitude that had no coin but felt heavier.
"Last of the good ones," he said, and nodded as if those words contained the season's ledger.
They ate as they walked, juice on their fingers, wind tugging hair loose from its tie. Half a mile on, a trio of pilgrims padded past in soft shoes, clothes the brown of field earth, each with a small charm carved from driftwood hanging at the throat. One of them—a man whose beard had tried to go white and then changed its mind—lifted his palm in blessing without breaking stride.
"Where to?" Miro called.
"Where from," the pilgrim answered, which felt like an adequate sermon for a road already full of answers.
The land rose and smoothed into a low ridge. From there the world opened: to the left a quilt of fields; to the right, woods gathering themselves in whispers; ahead, the road's pale thread stitching the two together. The wind changed—cooler, river-breathed. They followed it to a stream that had decided, for today, to argue with stones rather than rush.
"Hold a moment," Kaelen said, and knelt to fill their skins. The water ran cold through his fingers. He cupped his hands and drank, tasted clean rock and leaf and the faint iron of the world's bones.
Miro sprawled on his back in the grass and kicked at the sky as if it were a duvet. "I've decided I'm too handsome for labor," he announced. "From now on I will supervise your heroics from a safe, elevated position, like on a stump."
"Excellent," Kaelen said, sitting beside him. "I'll find you a royal stump with a view of danger."
They rested. The world made small sounds—wing flutter, twig tick, water fret—and larger ones if you let your hear go wide—wind muscling the higher branches, a far-off hammer counting its morning. Kaelen let the music in and then, because the road had a way of loosening old knots, he let the past in, too.
"I was eleven," he said, unprompted but not unwelcome. "When I saw you first."
Miro's eyes slid over, curious but not surprised. "On a fence."
"On a fence," Kaelen confirmed. "You were deciding whether to outstare the horizon."
"I was waiting," Miro said. "For someone who wasn't going to come." His voice held no self-pity; it was just inventory.
Kaelen nodded once. "I asked where your parents were. You said 'don't have any.' I said 'neither do I.' And that was that."
Miro drew up one knee and picked a grass blade, ribboning it between his fingers. "I thought you were older," he admitted.
"I was taller," Kaelen said. "Tall looks like older if you squint. I told the tanner you were staying with me. He said, 'All right, then,' and taught us to scrape hides until our fingers forgot their prints."
"Worst smell," Miro declared. "Worse than the time the fishmonger tried to sell that eel that died twice."
Kaelen huffed. "The first winter in Hermen hayloft," he said, tilting the memory toward a fire inside himself. "We'd share a blanket and pretend we weren't awake to keep the other from thinking he was keeping watch alone."
"I wasn't pretending," Miro said. "I was too afraid the dark was going to slip in and steal your bones."
"That's not how darkness works."
"Tell that to the eel."
Kaelen flicked a pebble at him. Miro flicked it back. The pebble had a future of heavy responsibility and left for it with dignity.
They sat until the sun moved a thumb-width along the sky. Before they rose, Miro cleared his throat with exaggerated drama. "All right," he said, "three questions. The good kind."
Kaelen glanced at him. "Go on."
"What's the farthest you can imagine walking?"
"Farther than that," Kaelen said, automatic as breath.
Miro grinned, satisfied. "What's the bravest thing you've done?"
"Kept you," Kaelen said, not looking at him when he said it.
Miro tossed the grass ribbon and sat up. "What's the luckiest thing?"
"A room that didn't leak," Kaelen said. He thought. "And a brother. In that order only because when it leaked, the brother complained."
"True," Miro said cheerfully. "Next question: why do you want to keep moving? You never answer with anything but parts of sky."
Kaelen searched for something true that wasn't poetry. "Because every time we stop, the world shrinks to the size of that room," he said. "And when we go, it gets big again. I like it big. I like not knowing what the next bird will sound like. I like new bread. I like old roads. And I like… not having to be anything but the pair of boots I'm in."
Miro listened. "Sounds like a dream," he said softly.
"It's not a dream," Kaelen said. "Dreams ask for too much. It's only a choice. And—I think—one I'll keep making."
They shouldered packs, found the road's easy middle, and let the afternoon take them.
A mile beyond the stream, the ridgeline steepened and shouldered them past a tumble of old stones that had once been a watchtower. Now it was a tooth broken at the gum, lopsided and obstinate. Someone—the kind of someone the world always had—had stacked a little cairn at its base and tucked a sprig of rosemary between the rocks. Miro set a pebble there without comment. Kaelen did, too.
Past the tower, the hedges grew thick with spindle and hawthorn. Something silver flickered in the briers—a charm on a thread, caught and moving when the wind breathed on it. It rang the smallest ring when the air shifted. Folkmaking, warding against nothing in particular. Kaelen touched it once, felt a prickle along his palm and the sense of air slightly colder immediately around it.
"Mana glint," Miro said, surprised at his own certainty.
Kaelen nodded. Since Fairmere, since Serenya had put words to her listening, he'd found himself noticing the places where the world went thinner and brighter—a place where two breezes met and made a third, the way the shade on one fern seemed too deliberate. Magic wasn't common; most days it hid like peculiar birds and you were better for thinking it was none of your concern. But the world had seams, and if you paid close enough attention you could run your thumb along them.
They met a goat herd whose animals had opinions about everything. The shepherd's dog escorted them ten paces with grave dignity, as if making sure they knew what a road was. They traded two small jokes with a peddler whose cart was colonized by bells and little carved bones and a row of stoppered vials filled with liquid the color of jealousy.
"Wards for merry feet," the peddler said, shaking a bottle so it caught the light. "Wards for dangerous dreams. Wards against losing your keys."
"We don't have keys," Miro said.
"Then you've already lost them," the peddler replied, and sold them a thread-bound packet of herbs that smelled of summer storms. Miro tucked it into his vest like a medal for bravery.
Clouds shouldered in from the west late, low and thoughtful, but no rain fell—only a darker green to the hedges and the metallic promise of weather deferred. The road, good-natured all day, began to run out of things to show them; it gave them, by way of apology, a view of the river taking a slow turn, its surface broken by fish that made circles as if signing their names.
They didn't hurry. Harrowick had been home for nearly three months now; it could wait one more hour.
"You think we'll go soon?" Miro asked, softly, some time after the bells of a far church had counted a number neither of them bothered to hold.
Kaelen shifted the strap on his shoulder. "We've stayed longer for worse reasons and shorter for better," he said. "We have coin enough for a week of careful eating and two of careless. The autumn rains will pull like a stubborn child. A week. Two. Then we move."
Miro digested it. "All right," he said, and then, after a beat: "What about Serenya?"
A crow called from the hedge. Kaelen didn't answer at once. The road was beginning its long exhale into the distance where the South Gate would be; he could almost see the stone in his head before it rose.
"What about her?" he asked, not as a deflection, but to make Miro say what he meant.
"You like her there," Miro said simply. "In the line of your sight. She makes the road different." He didn't smile when he said it. He didn't push.
Kaelen breathed in. Out. "I like her company," he admitted. "She is good work, which is rarer than people think. But I always knew this moment would come. We only ever hold people for a time. We walk; they walk; the road keeps us honest." He gave a rueful half-smile. "And it's not my right to hand someone a choice and call it love. If she asks the same road, we'll share it. If she doesn't, we won't. That's it."
Miro nodded, eyes on the line where earth met sky. "Doesn't make it easier."
"No," Kaelen said. "Nothing important is easy."
"Fried cakes are easy," Miro argued.
"Important," Kaelen agreed gravely.
They laughed then, not loudly, not at anything particular—just at the relief of saying the thing and finding it hadn't broken in the saying.
Harrowick announced itself first by smell—the good trouble of a city going about its chores: yeast and smoke, river wet and iron hot, horses and onions and the incidental perfume of a thousand lives in close company. Then by sound—the anvil's patient counting, the market's overlapping wagers, a dog insisting on his point of view. Then by sight—the South Gate stones wearing their age like a comfortable shirt; the guards in their familiar posture of watchfulness plus gossip.
Garron wasn't on this side today, but his cousin by the ears was. He raised two fingers. "The world failed to eat you, I see."
"We tasted bad," Miro called up. "Too much onion."
"Old Lysa will fix that," the guard said, and waved them in.
The street took them the way a river takes any leaf that says yes. They slipped into the square and it recognized them—someone lifted a hand, someone else tilted a chin. Familiar faces assembled out of the day like constellations you can only see when you aren't trying: Maerin of the Leatherworks with a strip of dyed hide clenched in her teeth while she compared buckles; the tinker who always pretended to disapprove of Miro's habit of testing whetstones without paying; the boy with the jangle of tin charms at his belt, now one charm richer and no wiser.
Old Lysa saw them first, because she always did—bakers and guards develop a different sense for footsteps. She leaned over her counter, flour in an explosion on her cheek, and flapped a cloth at them. "You two. Tomorrow. First light. I'm making something that will make you reconsider all your poor life choices."
"We'd need a large tray," Miro said.
She grinned. "I'll bake a tray."
At Maerin's, they paused long enough for her to pretend not to be pleased. "You rip that sheath I stitched?"
"Not yet," Miro said. "But give me the night."
"Don't," she said, and then, to Kaelen, with a glance at his forearm rig, "I've a cousin in Bellsford who thinks in springs and curses. If you want something more devilish strapped to that arm, I'll write you a note that says you're not a thief."
"Write him two," Kaelen said. "One that says I pay."
"Liar," Maerin said fondly, and shooed them because she was secretly soft.
They passed the fountain where someone had filled the basins with marigolds while no one was looking. A mage's apprentice, different from yesterday's, was doing something attentive to a pebble with a string and a frown; his friend was offering sincere, unhelpful encouragement. A stray dog made careful choices about who to follow and then followed no one.
By the time they climbed the familiar stairs to the loft, dusk had burned down to coals at the edge of the sky. The little room received them without complaint. The cot made the same small sound it had made three months ago. The shutters had that catch you had to lift with your thumbnail. The air still held the ghost of oil and bread and the faintest sweetness from the apothecary two floors down.
Miro entered like a storm deciding, dramatically, to be a cat. He fell across the bed with a groan of relief and then began, without moving, to list things they needed to do. "We need to get the boots resoled," he said to the rafters. "And sell those bad iron nails we found, and buy good ones. And see Farlan before he grows moss. And ask Garron if his cousin's dog still hates me."
"It hates everyone," Kaelen said, setting his sword on the peg and laying the crossbow pieces on the table to dry. "You should be honored."
Miro rolled onto an elbow. His voice, when it came, had lost its mischief and found something steadier. "We'll go, then. After a week. Two." He hesitated. "I like this city more than I thought I would."
"We do that sometimes," Kaelen said. "Like things we have to leave."
Miro considered that and then, because the day hadn't wrung him out yet, tried one more question. "If she doesn't come in three days?"
"She will," Kaelen said, quicker than thought, then adjusted the certainty into something honest. "She said she would."
He crossed to the window and set his forearms on the sill, letting the noise of Harrowick climb up and sit on his shoulder like a small, friendly weight. Across the square, a lute found the right string and decided to keep it. The clocktower cleared its throat and began telling the hour to anyone who cared—not because the hour needed telling, but because the tower liked to be useful.
Behind him, Miro drifted toward sleep the way he did everything: noisily at first, then with sudden commitment. "What's the bravest thing you've done?" he murmured, the words halfway to a dream.
"You've asked," Kaelen said, without turning.
"Ask it again," Miro mumbled.
"Kept you," Kaelen said, and the answer fit again, like a hand in a glove that had remembered it.
He stayed at the window a little while longer, watching the smear of late light drain from the sky until one star shouldered up and held. The road would be there in the morning. So would the work, the people they'd come to know well enough to miss, and the choices that had always been theirs to make. He felt the ache of leaving and the rightness of it in the same breath. Sky-shaped, Miro had called it. Yes.
Kaelen drew the shutters half-in, so the room would keep a piece of the city's hum, and lay down with the sword's comfort along the wall and the small, clever puzzle of his crossbow at his elbow. Outside, Harrowick turned another page. Inside, the brothers slept, the world very large and very possible, and—for one more night at least—at peace.