He held her back, tightly enough to feel her shoulders shaking, and let one tear escape before he wiped it away and made himself stand up straight. Whatever else this new life had handed him, it had handed him people worth grieving in advance, and he intended to be worthy of that grief someday, not merely the cause of it.
He took his father's hand-drawn map, folded soft at the creases from being redrawn and refolded a dozen times over the past week, and set out down the long, empty road toward the capital.
He had walked perhaps half a day, lost enough in his own thoughts that the road's silence had started to feel companionable rather than lonely, when a presence at his back prickled the hair on his neck. He turned, expecting nothing, and found nothing behind him at all: only open road, empty fields, and the specific, unnerving sensation of being watched by someone who wasn't actually there.
The sensation resolved itself a moment later into a very real, very large boy stepping out from behind a stand of trees ahead of him, muscles visible even through a sleeveless tunic clearly chosen to show them off.
"Hello, stranger," the boy said, planting himself squarely in the middle of the road with the easy confidence of someone who had never once considered that a stranger might not want to be stopped. "My name is Baris. You look far too small to be traveling alone. As an aspiring knight and future student of the Fyre Academy, I am honor bound to see you safely to your destination."
Corren studied him for a beat, weighing amusement against irritation and landing somewhere comfortably between the two. "I'm also heading to the Academy," he said. "And being big doesn't automatically make you faster or stronger than someone smaller."
Baris laughed, a booming, unbothered sound. "You'll want to know, little friend, that I hail from Clan Fangmoor. We've mastered a technique that lets us alter our own weight: heavier for strength, lighter for speed, whichever the moment calls for."
"An oaf like you, wielding something that sophisticated?" Corren let a grin slip through, testing the boy's temper the way one tests ice before stepping onto it. "Surely you're exaggerating."
The insult landed exactly where Corren aimed it. Baris's easy grin sharpened into something more determined. "You've just made yourself my rival," he declared. "We'll settle this properly. Race me to the next town, and we'll see whose legs deserve the bragging rights."
He dropped into a sprinter's stance before Corren could argue and began chanting, the words tumbling out of him in an accent so heavily garbled that Corren, listening past the mangled vowels to the bones of the grammar underneath, recognized the source almost instantly: a language structurally close to certain Indigenous North American tongues he'd spent one particularly grueling summer of fieldwork attempting to document before funding dried up. The chant, as Baris delivered it, roughly translated to make my limbs heavy, let me run like a stone, which struck Corren as a spectacularly poor choice of words for a boy about to challenge him to a footrace.
He almost laughed out loud at the irony of it. Instead, seeing an opportunity too good to pass up, he offered a correction. "You want the opposite," he said. "Make my limbs lighter, let me run like the wind. That's what actually gets you the speed you're bragging about."
Baris, predictably, refused the help on pure principle, accusing Corren of trying to sabotage him before the race had even begun. Corren shrugged and recited the corrected chant himself, feeling the familiar warm hollowness settle into his legs as the words took hold, lighter this time than after the fire ceremony, but present all the same, the same well being drawn from, only shallower.
"On your marks," Baris called out, still committed to his own broken version. "Get set. Go!"
Corren surged forward on legs that felt half their normal weight, the road blurring beneath him, wind dragging tears sideways off his cheeks from the sheer speed of it. Baris, weighted down by his own mistranslation, still somehow kept pace through sheer stubborn muscle, arriving at the finish line only a half-step behind and glowering at the unfairness of a universe that had let him lose by so little.
He collapsed to the ground the moment he crossed the line, not from exhaustion so much as from principle, and began an aggressive, wordless set of one thousand push-ups as though sheer physical punishment might retroactively win him the race. Corren watched, genuinely impressed despite himself, at a persistence that had absolutely nothing productive to attach itself to.
When Baris finally finished, red-faced and dripping sweat, Corren extended a hand. "We're rivals," he said. "Doesn't mean we can't also be friends."
Baris took the hand without hesitation, any lingering sourness burned off entirely by the push-ups, and their stomachs growled in unison a moment later, loud enough that both of them laughed.
They found the source of every good smell in the nearby town gathered around a single food stall, and discovered, with the misery of travelers who had budgeted for everything except food, that neither of them carried a single coin between them.
"Excuse me," Corren tried, polite as he could manage on an empty stomach. "Could you spare us anything at all?"
The vendor's scowl answered before his words did. "Filthy beggars," he spat, brandishing his spatula like a weapon. "Get lost before I call the guards."
They retreated, dejected, the smell of roasting meat trailing them like an insult. It was a young woman who found them a few minutes later, walking their way with a bag of leftovers and an expression far warmer than anything the town had shown them so far: brown-haired, gentle-featured, carrying herself with the softness of someone unused to being noticed and slightly uncomfortable now that she was.
"You two look like you could use this," she said, holding the bag out with a small, genuine smile. "It's not much. But it's better than nothing."