After a few minutes of fussing, Lenko finally settled down, dragging his satchel--the monstrous thing--over to the fire.
It wasn't so much a bag as a traveling larder, stuffed to the brim with odds and ends that clinked and clattered like an overstocked merchant's cart.
Keiser was fairly certain he'd seen Lenko pack half the cabin they'd left behind. Spare cutlery. A polished ladle. Possibly even a candlestick, though why the boy thought they'd be hosting a formal supper in the wilds was beyond him.
Lenko fluffed the satchel against three others he'd stacked beside it--more bundles than any sane traveler should carry--and made himself a makeshift pillow.
He curled near the fire with a final grumble about 'being surrounded by beasts' and 'how could anyone sleep in this death pit?' before promptly doing the impossible and falling into snoring silence after ten heartbeats.
Keiser watched him with a grimace, shifting against the tree at his own back.
The bark was thick, knotted, and perfectly engineered to dig into the most unfortunate parts of one's spine. The ground wasn't much better, the stones under him positioned like they'd been placed there by a vengeful god of discomfort.
Still, he let Lenko be.
The boy must have been bone-tired to collapse so quickly--especially after dragging Keiser halfway across the wilds to escape the Corvuses.
And they had escaped--barely.
Beasts had been struck, cut down, burned--and one rather rudely blown apart by a rock. After that came the trouble of making sure nothing else decided to sniff around three unfortunate souls.
One fainted with bloodied and burned hands, one sporting a split chin, and one so pale and shaking.
Keiser's gaze roamed the clearing and caught on something unusual. Even in the dark, he could make out faintly carved sigils on the surrounding trees. The firelight made them blur and waver, shadows dancing over their shapes.
Lenko's handiwork, most likely. He'd probably seen Muzio do it before and decided to copy him--carving those wards during the days they hid away, when scratching into bark was as much a defense as it was a pastime.
His attention drifted back to the girl. She wasn't pretending to be asleep anymore--hadn't been for a while, in truth.
The firelight caught in her eyes, making them gleam brighter than the void-dark they usually held. She'd tied her short hair into a stub of a ponytail, stray strands falling loose around her face. It framed her wounded chin and the fresh scab across it in a way that made it stand out even more.
Keiser leaned an elbow on his knee, watching her without speaking. She noticed, of course--he'd wager she noticed everything. And yet she didn't look away, only shifted slightly, as if daring him to say something.
Keiser couldn't shake the uncanny strangeness of it all--meeting someone he'd only just seen die, by her own fiancé's hand, no less with a mere day before yesterday, and now here she was, alive, breathing, and glaring at him like he'd stolen her horse. He had not expected to see her again so soon, much less looking younger.
It made sense, he supposed--he'd been flung nearly more than a year back from the Gambit, and by his guess, the trials were still months away.
At least… he hoped so.
He wasn't entirely sure.
Time was a fickle thing, and the royal decree that Lenko mentioned that Muzio had been so eager to check would confirm it--if they ever got around to reading it.
They'd been heading to the proclamation board at the guild hall, after all, until the Princess of all people decided to help herself to Lenko's pouches. Lighten the load, as it were.
She looked different here, in this time. Not just younger, but… softer, in a way.
During the Gambit, her hair had been longer, her face sharper, her eyes tired in that particular way nobles get when they've worn too much dignity and too little sleep. Back then, she carried herself like she'd been trained to be seen, not to be heard.
But here?
If Keiser didn't know better, he'd have wagered a pouch of gold she wasn't the youngest princess of Hinode at all.
She cursed, she shouted, she bantered like a dockworker, she picked pockets with alarming skill, and she spoke without the lilt or restraint of the court. No graceful airs, no delicately measured words--just a girl with quick hands and quicker temper.
Keiser sighed and turned his gaze away, blinking against the dull throb behind his eyes. The firelight flickered, sending shadows leaping over the clearing, and the movement made his head swim.
This silent sizing-up between them wasn't going to get him anywhere. What he needed was information--and soon. He didn't know where they were, how much time he'd lost, or even how long he'd been unconscious.
Lenko had said it was past midnight, and the last thing Keiser remembered before blacking out was the Corvus attack in the afternoon. Which meant there was a gap. A big, yawning, suspicious gap.
The kind of gap he hated.
His voice came out hoarse when he finally spoke, and he winced at how it almost cracked halfway through. Wonderful--Muzio's body was still dangling between teenager and a man, which meant Keiser was apparently doomed to relive puberty. Again.
That thought alone was enough to put a sharper edge in his tone.
"Why are we still in the forest?"
The princess lifted her brows at him, her face the perfect picture of someone deciding whether to answer or to let the silence eat him alive. She chose silence.
So Keiser pressed on.
"Why didn't we head back to the village? Why stay out here instead, in a place crawling with beasts that would be thrilled to welcome us into their stomachs?"
He gestured vaguely toward the darkened treeline, where every snap of a twig might have been a passing hare… or something deciding how best to chew on them.
Keiser narrowed his eyes when she finally spoke--
"Why would I tell you, Your Highness?"
The words came with an eye-roll and a scoff.
Ah.
She knows.
The way she said it wasn't just recognition--it was deliberate. A jab.
She's testing me.
He tried to shove his annoying hair out of his face, but his hand moved stiffly. The cooling balm on his palms now felt less like relief and more like a sticky cloth wound tight around them.
If she truly knew who he was--if she dared to say it to his face then it meant she wanted something. Otherwise, she would've kept that information to herself, tucked it away to use as leverage when it best suited her.
That was how the court worked. How people like her worked. And if she wasn't asking for something, then perhaps she simply assumed Muzio was too powerless to be worth bartering with.
Keiser might have been born a commoner, a soldier forged on the battlefield, a knight who only knew how to swing steel at beasts and men alike, but he wasn't ignorant of court games.
He had been trained--painstakingly so--to maneuver in noble society. Of course, most of what he knew had been carefully shaped, curated, and controlled by Gideon.
Still, he knew enough to recognize the scent of bait when it was dangled in front of him.
"What do you want?" he asked coolly.
He paused, then decided to move his own piece forward.
"Princess Yona Hanako," he said, voice sharp enough to cut through the firelight, "of the Hinode Matriarchy…?"
The shift in her posture was subtle but telling--a flicker in her gaze, a tilt of her wounded chin. The kind of reaction that would be not visible if you weren't looking for it.
A heavy beat passed between them, weighted with something neither of them voiced.
Ah, right.
She hated it when someone used her full name. Only the First Prince could get away with that. Keiser recalled overhearing one of their infamous arguments--an exchange where they kept flinging each other's full names like insults wrapped in endearments. Sickening, really, to anyone unfortunate enough to witness those two lovebirds flirting beneath the guise of formality.
"You must already know, then," she said flatly.
She rose to her feet and wandered toward a nearby tree. From its base, she scooped up a dusty gray-green cloak--village make. The kind worn by people who needed to blend in.
Keiser frowned.
Blend in for what?
Why was she pickpocketing?
Did the First Prince know his fiancée was out here playing fugitive on the Sheol border?
The thoughts came quick and sharp. Every new piece didn't add up. But one thing was certain--she wasn't here by accident.
Keiser moved his hand slowly, subtly--as if fidgeting. But it was a distraction. He watched her eyes follow the motion, unaware that his own gaze was drifting, scanning the forest for something--anything--that could be used, or perhaps revealed more.
Then she did it--paused, brushing her fingers over a carved sigil on the tree. There was a look on her face Keiser couldn't read before she glanced back at him, eyes sharp and measuring.
"The First Prince sent me," she said carefully, "to find his missing brother… and deal with a certain… problem near Hinnom."
Her gaze shifted past him to the sleeping Lenko. "And it seems I've found not just one missing brother."
Keiser exhaled slowly through his nose.
Olga.
Of course. She must've told Princess Althea. Then the Sixth Princess brought it up with the First Prince, and the court, in their usual style, twisted and embroidered the information until something slipped.
Now the First Prince was looking for Muzio.
Wait--
Why?
Why would he care about a runaway tenth prince? What was there to gain?
Keiser's jaw tightened.
Something wasn't adding up.