"Nine days," said Ramsey.
"Eight," said Willem.
"Nine. Corbin says nine."
"Corbin says nine because Corbin drives a wagon. We'll do it in eight."
"We'll do it in nine and you'll be wrong and I'll still be tired."
Sito, up on the bench beside Corbin with his boots hanging over the side, said, "How long did it take coming up?"
"From here? I'd say about twelve days, your highness," said Willem.
"So why's it eight going back?"
"Because coming up we were being careful and going back we're being homesick," said Ramsey. "Different animal entirely."
---
They did it in nine.
The country came back the other way round, and Sito watched it do it. The hill country flattened. The stubble fields turned into ploughed ones and then into fields with people in them.
On the fourth day they passed a crossroads with a gibbet on it. Sereth stopped walking and had to be talked past it.
On the sixth they came down out of the last of the high ground and the land opened up, and there were villages on it, and roofs, and smoke, and a stone bridge with a toll-keeper who took one look at eleven royal guards and waved the whole column through without opening his mouth.
"That's the Caul," said Osric. "Cross that and you're in the home counties. Three days."
"Three," said Willem.
"Four," said Ramsey.
"You said nine at the start and it's been six."
"Aye, and I'm adjusting."
---
The elves did not take it well, mostly.
The quartermaster was fine. The two overseers were fine — they had spent the whole trip reading the treaty out loud to one another and arguing about clause eleven, and they arrived in a human kingdom in the same mood they had left the forest in.
Sereth lasted until he saw the first proper town.
"They have put the houses on top of each other."
"That's two storeys, mate," said Ramsey.
"Yes. On top of each other."
"Where else would the second one go?"
Sereth did not have an answer for that and did not speak again until supper.
---
They came over the last rise on the ninth afternoon.
Sito had been waiting for it for two days and he still was not ready for it, and when he saw it he stood up on the bench without meaning to and Corbin had to grab the back of his coat.
The walls of Epiria came out of the flat ground five miles off, and they went east and west until the haze took them, and above them and behind them the hill stood up out of the middle of the city with the Royal Castle on top of it.
"There she is," said Corbin.
"It's smaller," Sito said.
Corbin laughed. "It's not smaller, lad. You've been stood next to a tree the size of a mountain for two months."
"No, I mean—" Sito sat back down. "It's still the biggest thing I've ever seen anybody build. I just didn't know that was a different thing."
"A different thing from what?"
"From the biggest thing there is."
---
The gate tunnel was forty-five feet of cold and dark and torchlight, same as it had always been, and Sito counted it out this time instead of holding his breath.
Then the city.
It was louder than he remembered and it smelled worse, and both of those things made him absurdly happy.
A woman was shouting prices at nobody in particular.
Two boys ran alongside the wagon for a hundred yards and dropped off.
Somebody had a barrow of apples and the apples were small and bad and Sito wanted one so much it was embarrassing.
Halfway up the hill road, word got ahead of them.
By the time they reached the castle gate there were people on it.
---
"MY PRINCE."
"Oh no," said Sito.
Ramsey stood up in his stirrups. "That's Damien."
"I know it's Damien."
"He's got the whole kitchen with him."
"I know he's got the whole kitchen with him."
Damien the Head Chef came down the last twenty feet of the gate road at a speed that no man of his shape had any business achieving, and got to the wagon before it had properly stopped.
"You're thin."
"Damien—"
"You are thin, and you are even tanner than usual, and what in the name of every god have they done to your hair—"
"I'm not thin."
"You are a rail! What did they feed you?"
"Mostly barley."
"Barley." Damien turned around and said it to the entire courtyard. "Barley! They sent him into a forest for two months and fed him barley—"
"Damien, it was really good barley."
"There is no such thing," said Damien, "and I am going to spend the next four days correcting this personally, so I hope you have not got anything else planned."
Yoko was behind him, laughing. "Leave the boy alone, he's only just got here."
"I will leave him alone when he has a proper meal in him and not before."
---
The guards on the gate were Willem and Ramsey's own, and they came over, and there was a lot of arm-gripping and shoulder-hitting and a great deal of noise.
Then somebody asked about Bertram.
The noise stopped.
"On a hill north of Greymarch," said Osric. "Under a cairn. He went well."
"How?"
"Hollow."
That word went round the courtyard once and came back changed.
"A hollow?!"
"Aye."
"Who took it?"
"Lord Benedictus took the head off it," said Osric. "It cost us Bertram and a horse. I'll not say more than that tonight and neither will any man who was there, and there'll be a purse going to his mother in Whitbury out of the core, and any man who wants to put something in beside it can find me in the barracks after."
Willem said, quietly, "I'll be first."
"I know you will."
---
Sito was looking for her before the wagon stopped and did not find her, and then somebody came through the crowd at the side and he did not see who it was until she had already got hold of him.
"Aunt Lia—"
"Do not."
"I can't—"
"Do not say a single word to me for a moment."
So he didn't.
She had him off his feet with her chin on the top of his head and her arms locked, and Sito, who had crossed hundreds of miles twice and stood in a room with a dragon's worth of elders and lain in the heather nine feet from a thing that ate men's cores, discovered that he was crying, and was not sure when that had started.
When she put him down she took his face in both hands and turned it left and then right.
"You have a scar."
"It's nothing."
"On your chin."
"I fell off a bridge."
"You fell off a… bridge?"
"About four feet. There were twelve more under it."
Aaliyah closed her eyes briefly.
"My sweet Sito," she said, "I am going to ask you one hundred questions and you are going to answer every single one of them, and then I am going to feed you, and then I am going to ask you the same hundred again to see if the answers change."
"They won't change."
"They always change," said Aaliyah. "That is how I know which ones were the lies."
---
Marcus came past with the wagon manifests under his arm and stopped.
"Madam."
"My lord."
"He behaved well."
"He always behaves well. That has never been the thing I worry about." Aaliyah still had one hand on Sito's shoulder and had not appeared to notice that she was doing it. "Did you bring him back the same?"
Marcus considered that for slightly too long.
"No," he said. "But I brought him back."
"Then we will get on," said Aaliyah.
---
Willem and Ramsey found him in the lower courtyard an hour later, out of their riding cloaks and back in castle green, and it was extraordinary how much it changed them.
"Right," said Ramsey. "So that's us."
"That's you what?"
"That's us. Back on the gate Thursday." He hooked a thumb at the wall. "Morning shift. Same post. Same spears. Same everything."
"Oh."
"Don't do that face."
"I'm not doing a face."
"You're doing a face," said Ramsey. "Your highness, we're not going anywhere. We're going to be stood on that gate every morning for the next fifteen years being shouted at by Osric about our posture. You'll see us so much you'll get sick of us."
"Probably tomorrow," said Willem.
"Probably tomorrow," Ramsey agreed.
Sito looked at the two of them.
"It's not going to be the same, though," he said.
"No," said Willem. "It won't."
There was a pause that Ramsey clearly found unbearable, because he filled it.
"Here's the thing, though. We've been on that gate nine years and in all that time the best thing that happened was a man tried to get a goat through it on a pass that wasn't his. And now I've been to an elf city, and had a hundred children teach me to insult a cook, and seen a Master cut a beast in half, and watched a lad of eight throw a knife I'll be talking about when I'm dead." He shrugged. "So I don't much mind going back to the gate. I've got something to think about now."
"That's the most words you've ever said in a row," said Willem.
"I'm emotional. Leave it."
Sito stuck his hand out, because that was what he had done at the bottom of a tree in Thelvarion and it had worked out.
Ramsey looked at it, said "oh, get off," and picked him up instead.
---
He went up to the room he had left in the spring.
It was exactly as he had left it, because somebody had kept it exactly as he had left it, and that was somehow the strangest part of the entire day. The bed was made. The books were in the order he had put them in. There was a cup on the table that he could remember drinking out of.
He put the belt of knives in the chest. He put the wooden horse Willem had carved on the windowsill.
He sat down on the bed with the rook across his knees and did not play anything for a while.
Then there was a knock, and Aaliyah came in with a tray, and did not ask, and simply sat down on the end of the bed the way she had been doing since he was two years old.
"Play the one you were doing on the wall," she said.
"Which one?"
"The morning you left. You were up on the cliff and I was carrying linen and I stopped and listened to about half of it and then somebody wanted me for something."
"That's ages ago."
"It is. I have been waiting."
So he played it.
And then he played the road one, and she liked that and made him do it twice, and then he played the horse one from Greymarch and did not tell her where it had come from.
"That one's new."
"Yeah."
"You've got better."
"A bit."
"Not a bit," said Aaliyah. "A great deal. Who have you been playing for?"
Sito looked at the rook.
There was an entire evening in that question. There was a table in a tavern and forty people shouting the last line, and a terrace in the sky with three hundred elves finishing a verse he did not know the words to, and a branch eighty feet up a tree with a girl on it, and there was a crystal in the chest under the window keyed to exactly one other crystal in the world.
"Just the guards mostly," he said. "On the road."
Aaliyah looked at him for a moment.
She did not say anything about it, then or for a long time afterward, and Sito never worked out whether she had known from the beginning or had simply decided to let him keep it until he was ready.
"Well," she said. "Play me another one."
---
Supper was in the small hall with the King and Queen, and it was at the same hour, at the same table, with the same places set.
Sito came in and bowed. "Father. Mother."
"Sito." Xerxes did not look up from what he was reading. "Sit."
He sat.
There was a bowl in front of him. Rice and meat curry with vegetables, the same as every night of his life, and the smell of it went through him warmly.
"You've grown," said the Queen.
"Yes, Mother."
"Considerably. Alfred will need to have everything let out." Amestris considered him across the table. "You're very tan."
"There wasn't much shade, Mother."
"Hm."
Xerxes turned a page.
"Marcus reports to me tomorrow at the fourth hour," he said. "You will be there."
"Yes, Father."
"You will not speak unless I ask you something, and if I ask you something you will answer it in full and you will not be clever about it."
"Yes, Father."
"Good." Xerxes turned another page. "Eat."
Sito ate.
It was extremely good. It had always been extremely good, and filled him with a warmth that started somewhere in his stomach and went outward.
---
The crystal lit at the usual hour, and he answered it lying on his own bed for the first time in four months.
"I'm home."
"I know. You said nine days nine days ago." A pause. "Was it good?"
"Aunt Lia cried."
"Did you cry?"
"No."
"Sito."
"A bit."
"And your mother and father?"
Sito looked at the ceiling of the room.
"Mother said I'd grown," he said. "Father said I'm to be in a meeting at the fourth hour."
Naeva was quiet.
"That is all?"
"That's all."
"Hm," said Naeva.
And then, because she was eight and had decided some weeks ago that she did not much like being told sad things she could not fix.
"Say the word for mist."
"Hlaevir."
"Again."
"Hlaevir."
"You are still doing it slightly wrong," she said, which was a lie, and they both knew it was a lie, and he said it ten more times anyway.