William and Vincent worked in silence at first, gathering what the wind had spared: a curl of birch bark, a fist of pine duff, a fallen limb with its heartwood still stubbornly dry. Vincent coaxed a flame out of a spark and breath, and soon a small fire hunched at the roots of a crooked oak, throwing a weak, stubborn light into the dusk.
They sat facing it, boots to the heat. William unbuckled his gauntlets and set them aside, flexing his fingers like a man remembering they were still there. His hair hung in wet twists over his brow; the smoke caught the shine of water clinging to those curls and put a copper edge on them. Vincent leaned back against the trunk, one knee up, his scarred hands held out to the meagre blaze as if bargaining with it.
For a time, the only conversation was the forest itself—the drip of boughs, the rasp of a cricket who hadn't yet learned the world was on fire, the low mutter of the river somewhere beyond the ferns. When the wood settled and the first good coal caved in, William spoke, as if the sound had given him permission.
"My father wasn't… everywhere," he said, measuring each word. "He filled the halls when he was near them. But he was not often near."
Vincent's eyes lifted without moving his head. The fire showed the barest quirk at the corner of his mouth: not a smile, just the shape a man's face takes when he recognizes the beginning of a story.
"I had Thalia," William went on. "The court had Thalia, really. She never stayed where they put her. She would slip the cordon of nurses and tutors and find me in places I was not meant to be." He breathed a laugh that died too quickly. "Miniatures. That was my rebellion. Not swords. Not the hunt." He touched two fingers to the dirt and drew a small circle, a habit his hand remembered. "I liked the very small things. Ants that farmed mushrooms in their dark rooms. The way a beetle's wing is a door. The hinge of it—the… engineering. Scales on a moth that look like tiles. You would not believe how many kingdoms exist in a span of moss."
Vincent's knee bounced once, once only, as if the image had touched some rhythm he fought to keep still. "Kingdoms that don't burn as easily," he said.
William's eyes flickered toward him. "Some burn faster. A single breath and the whole city is ash. I learned to dissect—delicately. To open without destroying. To see the anatomy and put it back together."
"And did you?" Vincent asked. "Put them back?"
"When I could." William's mouth made a thin line. "It mattered that I tried. Thalia said it was a mercy to know a thing completely, even if it was dying. She'd kneel beside me in the workroom, chin on the table, and ask questions no tutor would tolerate. She wanted to name everything. Names make a shape in your head you can hold."
He stared into the trees beyond the fire. The darkness there was not empty; it stacked itself into uncertain furniture—logs, a stump, the idea of a path that didn't exist. William's face slackened while he looked, as if the muscles had finally tired of holding the order a prince's face should have.
"My father's voice," he said softly, and something in his tone made Vincent not interrupt. "It was always larger in my memory than in the rooms. Do you know what I mean? You carry a man about the size of a bell inside you, and when he speaks, walls go further away. He'd come back from tour and fill those halls, the teeth of the court suddenly polished, the servants moving wrong because the air had changed. He would stand behind me at the table and say—" William's voice changed, unthinking; it grew thicker, tilted by an older authority— "'Your eye is a gift, boy. Use it where men will not bother to bend.'"
Silence gnawed the end of the sentence and then swallowed it. William's throat moved. His lashes blinked, slow once, and the wet at their root found the lower lid and stayed there.
He didn't wipe it away.
The forest listened harder. In that listening, he heard another voice, thinner and higher and sharp with mischief—*Will, you're looking with the wrong eye; look with the one that sees the story, not the skin—*and then it wasn't a voice but a sensation, the way Thalia's presence always bent a room toward its edges and lit the corners. He let that ghost lean on him for a heartbeat. Then another.
"Is she gone, too?" he asked the trees, not the man at his side. His eyes didn't leave the dark. "Has she grown wings and joined the gods? Or did she do what she always does and climb out a window no one thought to lock?" A crooked breath. "What of the other noble sons? The cousins they groomed like hawks. Are they ash? Does the crown have no next? If my father is—" He swallowed the word. "—then the war-chief would have taken command, but he's gone, too. So it's—"
He stopped before the word me could step into the light and change the air. He sat straighter instead, as if posture could deny loneliness its teeth.
Across the fire, Vincent snorted.
The sound was small and irreverent and precisely timed. William's head turned, full of raw edges, and found the other man's half grin, lopsided and unapologetic.
"What," William said, because something had to be said.
"I'm a thief," Vincent replied, as if confessing an appetite. He held up his hands and wiggled his fingers. "Sticky."
The word hung. William blinked. The tears in his eyes thickened the scene, gave the fire three flames instead of one. He let a breath out through his nose that might have been a laugh if the day had earned one. "That's your contribution."
"For now." Vincent tipped his head, a conspirator telling secrets to an audience of one. "I grew up in Solaria. Cabins near the God's Eye."
"I'm sorry to—" William began, searching for the right court-polished words, the ones people use when they must walk on another's grief without leaving footprints.
"Don't be," Vincent said before he could find any. "Or, if you must, be bad at it quickly."
The fire popped. A tiny ember kicked and died near William's boot.
"My parents," Vincent went on, voice flattening into the kind of calm a man wears when the world he remembers has too much noise in it, "were killed when I was eighty-seven moons old. Give or take a moon. I wasn't there when it happened. They told me not to go out that day. I went. We were children; there were rules, and the rules were there to find out how they broke."
He rubbed the scar at the base of his thumb with his other hand, a thoughtless, circular motion. "A few of us went down to the lake. You know what they call it—God's Eye. Clear as judgment. You can see the fish thinking you're a stupid god who calls the sky down with a pebble." His mouth did the ghost of a smile, then excused itself. "We heard someone coming. Everyone scattered. I ran along the bank because it felt faster to be near the water than the woods. I slipped. My feet left me. I went in."
William leaned forward despite himself. The fire put color in his cheeks again.
"It turned black," Vincent said, and the change in him was a tightening you could miss if you didn't know to look: the set of his jaw, the way he looked just past the flame instead of at it. "The lake. It's not supposed to. They tell you it doesn't. But it did. Like someone had turned the world off. No color. No bottom. Just… noise."
He let the word breathe. The forest seemed to contract.
"Screams," he said quietly. "Not mine. I don't remember if I screamed. These weren't me. And not close. As if the lake was a bowl and under the bowl another bowl, and in that one people were running with their throats open." His fingers flexed once, then stilled. "Then hands had me, and I was on the bank coughing enough water to fill a cup. I sat up and said thank you to the person who had just put my life back in my mouth."
He lifted his eyes and there was a peculiar emptiness behind them, the kind that comes when you have told a part of a thing so many times the edges have worn smooth and you can touch them without bleeding. "No one was there."
The fire shrank for a moment, then took breath and stood again. William watched the flame make and unmake Vincent's face, saw the orphan and the thief and the man who had thrown himself into danger three times already today without asking what debt he would be paid.
"I thought," Vincent said, words slower now, "a god had come down, found me, and then left before I could ask its name. It felt like that."
He shifted, shoulder skimming the bark. "I went home wet. I can see the path even now if I close my eyes—the way the reeds made little bows when I touched them. The door was open from a distance. That was wrong. We didn't leave the door open. I stopped. I watched the dark inside the door do nothing."
He rubbed his thumb-scar again. Once. Twice.
"Then a beast came into the doorway," he said.
He didn't have to describe much. In the pared-down words were the rest: the thick fur matted darker around the mouth; the paws splayed with the weight of a full belly; the mouth blood-wet and blackening at the edges.
"I went down on my belly like I'd been taught," Vincent said. "Not to breathe. To be the coat the earth puts on to look decent. The beast came out, looked left, looked right, went over the hill on the left as if it had always meant to go that way."
He put his palms to his knees. The gesture said enough without saying it.
"You don't have to finish," William said, the words coming rougher than he intended. "If you can't. If you shouldn't. No one should live that twice."
Vincent looked up at him with eyes that were suddenly bright—not wet, not exactly, just fierce with something that turned out not to be anger. "For a noble," he said, "you are quite the idiot." He let the pause hang just long enough for William's mouth to open and close. "And kind. I suppose your idiocy cancels out your hereditary obnoxiousness."
"Excuse me?" William managed, offended because that was easier to carry than helplessness. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"See?" Vincent gestured with two fingers at William's whole person, a magician completing a flourish. "Idiocy. Diagnosed. But I won't complain."
William opened his mouth to argue and found there was a laugh in it where no laugh had any right to be. It muffled itself, came out as a huff. He wiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand as if smoke had found them. "You're unbearable."
"True." Vincent leaned forward, spit into the fire, and watched the spark hiss out like a small enemy. "But I'm useful. And I have an idea before you drown yourself in your own head."
William dragged the back of his wrist across his cheek, finished pretending about the smoke, and set his elbows on his knees. "What."
"We head downriver to Solaria," Vincent said. "Cabins near the God's Eye, if they still stand. Farther west, a village that mind their own business until yours becomes interesting. I know a few people. A man who listens well and talks less. A woman who can take a roomful of rumors and weave a sail out of them. Another with a boat and no fear of the dark—he will ask for coin, or a promise, but not a title."
"This is if I intend to go back," William said, tasting the words like steel on his tongue. "To the kingdom."
Vincent watched the flames move in William's eyes. "This is if you intend to do anything that isn't dying at noon," he said. "But yes. If you intend to go back, we will need more than two swords, one fine surname, and a bag of grief. We will need ears. We will need routes. We will need to know which men with good posture have already decided to bend."
William listened to the forest decide nothing. He let the idea of Solaria sit in him: cabins by a lake where gods looked at themselves; a path that held an orphan's first bad day; a boat that didn't mind the dark. He saw Thalia kneeling on a workroom stool again, chin to wood, asking him the name of a wing he was too clumsy to fix. He heard his father behind that, telling him to bend where others would not.
"When you were in the lake," he said, because the mind is a thief that steals the thing it needs from a story for its own uses, "and it turned black—why do you think it did?"
Vincent's mouth tilted like a compass needle catching an old magnet. "I've had a long time to consider answers," he said. "None of them help me sleep. The least useless is: some places are what they are until they decide to be what they also are. The lake is clear. Sometimes it is also a hole. Sometimes it looks at a boy and shows him a door so he'll learn not to run toward every sound."
"A door to what?"
Vincent shrugged. "The next thing."
William breathed out through his teeth. "Downriver, then," he said. "To your people who don't ask questions until the answers are already seated at their table."
"There he is," Vincent said, as if a shy animal had shown its face from the brush. "The man who can decide and keep the deciding."
William reached for a fallen stick and pushed the fire's edge inward, consolidating. Sparks rose, hurried upward, and died without finding anything to light. "You called me an idiot," he said.
"And kind," Vincent reminded him. "Don't lose half the compliment."
"I don't take compliments from thieves."
"You will," Vincent said mildly, "if you plan to steal back a kingdom." He pushed himself to his feet with a grunt that didn't belong to a man his age, brushed damp leaf-mold from his trousers, and offered a hand. "Come on, Your Excellency-of-Ants. Before the wet comes back mean."
William eyed the hand as if it were a trick. He took it anyway. Vincent hauled him up, then didn't let go right away, anchoring him through a brief sway the body makes when it leaves ground. When he did let go, the absence felt like a small wind.
They stamped the fire flat together, grinding coals into safe black. The forest accepted the dark again around them, rearranging its furniture back into the indistinct shapes of not-quite-threats. They checked straps, tightened buckles, listened once more to what the trees were not telling.
"Vincent," William said, as they turned toward the river-path.
"Mm?"
"You can finish the story when you want," William said without looking at him. "Or never. I won't… ask."
Vincent's breath came out in something not unlike relief, not unlike weariness. "For a noble," he said quietly, "you learn at a tolerable speed."
They moved through the dripping understory, two shadows stitched together by necessity and something gentler that didn't yet have a name. Their boots found the old deer-track, then the slick clay lip where the ground fell toward the sound of water traveling. The river showed itself, pewter and patient. It turned its broad back to them as if to say climb on, then; I'm going that way whether you come or not.
"Downriver to Solaria," Vincent said, as if repeating an oath to the river itself. "We'll eat fish that lie about their size and bread that doesn't, and we'll listen where no one thinks we are listening."
"And then?" William asked.
"Then we gather the small things," Vincent said, and glanced at him with a grin sharp enough to be kind. "Ant by ant. Wing by wing. Every hinge that still turns. And when we've got enough pieces, we'll make a thing that bites back."