[ Kael ]
The letter arrived with the supply run. Same handwriting. Same chaos. Same warmth crossing three months of road to arrive still burning.
I took it to the post. The old one. Scarred with my strikes and everyone else's. Midday heat. Empty yard. The specific privacy that the desert provided when the sun was at its worst and the only creatures foolish enough to be outside were bastard princes with letters they needed to read alone.
Not because the letters were sad. Because they were the opposite. And the opposite of sad required the wall to come down, and the wall came down easier without witnesses.
KAEL
I can RIDE. Grandfather says I ride like a "sack of happy potatoes" which Sebas says is NOT a compliment but Grandfather was LAUGHING so I think it IS.
The dukedom is HUGE. Grandfather took me to the villages and the people KNOW him — they waved and the children ran alongside us and he gave them sweets from a bag he keeps JUST for this. That is the best thing I have ever seen. I want to be the kind of person who keeps a bag of sweets for children. I told Sebas this and he made the FACE but I think he agreed.
Tell Marten the puppet show rematch is HAPPENING. The sea monster was BIASED last time. I have EVIDENCE.
Do you have friends there? I hope you have friends. I worry. Worrying is what brothers do. Sebas told me that.
I drew a horse ——>
The horse had five legs. Possibly six. The head was the same size as the body. One eye was catastrophically larger than the other.
I folded the letter. Placed it against my chest with the others. Four letters. Four windows.
Do you have friends there?
The table. The bottle. The lamp oil wine and the stolen chairs and Dren's voice and Garrett's silence. Marten in the stable, brush in hand, asking about tracks with the steady eyes of a boy who heard bad news and didn't flinch.
Yeah. I had friends.
I would write back tonight. I'd tell him about Asha and the stew and the misfits' table. I'd tell him the potato thing was a compliment. I'd tell him Sebas was right about brothers.
I would not tell him about the tracks south of the border marker. About the horses being nervous for the second week. About Aldren increasing patrols. About the look on the commander's face during debriefs — the careful look, the look that meant the words were carrying more weight than they appeared to, the look of a man who had spent his career on a quiet border and was beginning to suspect that the quiet was a lie.
Edrin was almost eleven. He was riding potatoes and drawing horses with too many legs and wanting to be the kind of person who kept sweets for children, which was, if you thought about it, the most Edrin ambition imaginable — not power, not glory, not the machinery of empire. Sweets. For children. Because kindness was its own reason.
He didn't need the south. Not yet.
I climbed off the post. Walked to the stable. Marten was there — left side of Asha, brush moving, consistent as the sunrise.
"Letter?" he asked.
"The little prince wants a puppet show rematch."
Marten grinned. Not the grin of a boy receiving news. The grin of a boy receiving a challenge. The same grin he wore in the training yard when Kess hit him and he got back up.
"Tell him I'm ready," he said. "Tell him the sea monster's still on my side."
"I'll let him know."
We worked. The stable cooled. The horses breathed.
And somewhere in my tunic, against my chest, a letter sat warm — the handwriting of a boy who drew horses with too many legs and who worried about his brother because that's what brothers did.
The south was quiet tonight. The tracks were south of the border. The patrols were out.
For now, there was a letter and a stable and a brush and the specific, precious, borrowed peace of a world that hadn't broken yet.
For now, that was enough.