Kiran fumbled with a peg and the ridgepole slipped from his hands.
Canvas hissed and a breath of cold air found the seam where it shouldn't.
He cursed under it and kept working—there was a mule to not wake, a fire that must stay small, and the sharpness of a day that had not yet forgiven him.
Elias watched from the shadow of a pack, hands folded like someone counting knots.
"Lower the flap more," he said. "Orvalho carries after dark; it clings to breath and remembers sound."
Kiran shoved the pole back into place and pounded the peg.
The tent took shape with an uneven stoicism.
A line of rope threaded around a stake and he set a small weight to keep the flap closed against wind.
He did the motions as if reciting, each one a thing to be trusted when the rest of the world refused.
"You're clumsy at patience," Elias observed, voice a fold of amusement and command. "But you'll learn to be steady. Time will make you less loud."
"Can't promise the time," Kiran said, tying off a last knot.
The words were small and practical.
"Then promise the rope," Elias replied.
He held up a palm-sized coil, the leather glinting in the dull firelight.
"If you get cold, check your knots."
Kiran swallowed the retort and handed the coil back.
The fire breathed low; smoke braided into a thin gray that the canvas kept from wandering.
Night here arrived like a thing that could be bargained with—one trade, and the cold would spare them.
Elias set a small pot to boil and produced a canteen that smelled faintly of lavender and solder.
"Orvalho of echo will turn dreams into sermons," he said. "We need a tent that keeps the air flat. If you wake sweating with a remembered voice, the tent failed."
Kiran adjusted the flap and, for the first time since leaving the gate, let himself slow.
The ridgepole creaked as if acknowledging him.
He found a corner and began to sort rations—dried meat, a square of bread, the small flask Kael had given him.
Silence settled not as absence but as a tool.
Elias distributed tasks with the economy of someone who had built camps before dawn broke.
"You watch the meter tonight," he said. "If it wavers, you wake me with three stone taps."
Kiran set the meter on a flat rock inside the tent.
He checked the baseline, counted the needle's tiny tremor, and then put two stones in a pouch by the sleeping pallet.
The motion was automatic, learned to be useful.
They ate by a tiny fire Elias kept low on purpose.
The light made faces into maps; Kiran could read Elias like a map too—lines around the mouth, the way hands refused to idle.
The meal was modest; the conversation lighter.
"Tell me a story," Kiran said after a while, pushing a chunk of meat toward Elias.
He wanted a map of words tonight, something to give shape to the landscape ahead.
Elias rested the canteen between both hands and leaned back.
Smoke licked the night.
"Not about your parents," he said, and the sentence was both a shelter and a boundary. "Not tonight."
Kiran nodded.
He did not push.
There were things whose edges needed careful handling.
Elias's voice moved over the camp like a practiced instrument.
He told of the Antes-Cities—towers that had banked resonance the way harvesters bank grain.
He spoke of vaults where cities threaded the air with sound, and of how those vaults collapsed when men fed their greed into the seams.
His language did not moralize; it mapped consequence.
"They sought to make silence into a weapon," Elias said, fingers mapping a circle in the dirt.
"They learned to pull a thread of world and hold it, until the thread frayed and the city forgot itself. Ambition made them deaf to the warning notes."
From the way Elias shaped the tale, men had once believed they could own the hum beneath the skin of the world.
The lesson landed with the same weight as a ledger.
Kiran watched the sparks lift and die.
He tasted ash on his tongue, and something like memory folded into him—the smell of a platform, his parents' hands on a map, a seam of silver pressed into his childhood palm.
He did not speak of the map; he kept the moment small.
A soft wind stitched through the trees and brought the distant noise of another camp.
Elias paused and tapped the rim of his cup, a small counted rhythm.
"Questions?" he asked.
Kiran took a breath that felt like entry.
He had rehearsed this in the quiet hours—phrases to seek answers and not sound needy.
"Elias... the Court of the Mirror King. Is it true?"
Elias's face tightened.
The line of his mouth told Kiran that certain stories weighed too much to toss into the dark casually.
"Not a tale for a first night," he said. "Names have teeth, and the Court chews."
Kiran didn't want a story of courts.
He wanted a window.
He tried a different angle.
"Why did you let me carry that sword into the festival? Why pull me into the Test of Silence?"
Elias set his cup down with a motion that was not hurried but resolute.
He did not look away.
"You stopped something, Kiran. That stops being anonymous."
His voice bore the weight of ledger and friend.
"Your parents were my friends. I keep their promises the way a man keeps a ledger—scrupulously."
Kiran's mouth went dry.
He had expected answers that fit into clean boxes.
He got a hand on the ledger instead.
"You could have left it," he said.
He kept the sentence even.
"You could have stayed in the city where words make less trouble."
Elias's gaze found the flame and then the boy.
"I could have."
He paused.
"But the world is made of people who open things and people who cover them. I preferred the one that opens."
Kiran let that settle and then, because the night made permission small and clear, he tried to speak of the silence the sword had given him—the hush that had closed a crystal's pulse and stilled a lantern.
"It was quiet," he said.
"Like the world stopped arguing. It felt—"
He stopped because words blurred the edge.
Words could cheapen the shape of a thing that was mostly absence.
Elias waited.
His patience was a map in itself.
Kiran found a way without naming the sensation.
He traced a small line in the dirt with a finger.
"It felt like the world had taken one breath and then it wasn't there anymore. Safe and wrong at the same time."
Elias followed the line with his eyes and tapped the soil where Kiran had drawn.
"Silence as denial," he said finally.
"That can be a gift if it protects you from noise that eats you. It can be a curse if it erases what others need to heal."
"How do you know which it will be?" Kiran asked, because the question scratched at him like grit in a joint.
"By watching what it costs," Elias said.
"Watch the tally. Watch what it eats to do the saving. That will tell you whether you're healing or starving the world."
Kiran's fingers curled around the hilt of the sword that lay wrapped against his pack.
He felt the knot at the hilt where he'd tied the amulet and kept his hands away from the urge to test it again.
The night had no patience for experiments.
Elias told another small story—of a cartographer who mistook stubbornness for proof—and the laughter around the fire sounded like a stitch.
The camp's edges held, and the stars tilted thin and precise overhead.
Hours later, Kiran woke with his mouth like cotton.
He pushed off the tent flap and the cold air cut him clean.
The fire had dwindled to a glow; Elias lay awake, eyes open and set like lenses.
"Don't move," Elias whispered as Kiran stepped out.
His hand lifted once toward the treeline, a small semaphore.
He did not look at Kiran; he looked through the boy toward the dark.
Kiran froze as if his feet had been pegged to the soil.
He held the thought of motion in a clenched fist and obeyed.
At the line of trees, pairs of eyes that do not reflect the light of the fire watch them, unmoving and silent.