The bell tower had long since gone quiet again, and still neither of them moved to fill the silence. No spears hung along the fence today, no early-morning sparring to interrupt anything. Just the two of them, the low wall, and an hour neither of them particularly wanted to spend thinking about what Yara might say.
"An hour’s a long time to just sit," Toma said eventually, dropping his voice slightly, as if the empty yard itself might be listening in.
"You don’t have to stay."
"I know I don’t have to." Toma stretched his legs out in front of him, watching the empty yard like it might do something interesting if he waited long enough. "I want to."
They sat in silence a while longer, the kind that had stopped feeling like it needed filling somewhere around the second week Cassian had lived here. A hawk circled once overhead, riding some current neither of them could feel from the ground, and disappeared past the ridge.
"Everyone in there looked at you like you had answers," Toma said eventually. "Back at the fence, when you asked Yara if this was the same thing."
"I don’t have answers. I have a feeling, and it scares me more than most things have in a long time."
"That’s still more than the rest of us have." Toma glanced sideways at him. "You’ve had that same look since the clearing. Like you’re carrying something you don’t know how to put down."
Cassian didn’t answer right away.
"You said you’d tell me," Toma said eventually. "About the mark. Whenever you understood it."
"I still don’t understand it."
"Then tell me the part you do understand."
Cassian looked down at his own hands, turning the request over. He’d carried the shape of this story alone for months now, told in careful, incomplete pieces to people who’d earned only fragments of it. Toma had earned more than a fragment by now. Some part of Cassian had known that for a while and simply hadn’t found the right moment to admit it.
"My village burned," he said finally. "In a single night. My father was the chief. He wasn’t just a chief, though. He used to be someone else entirely, before I was born, someone people were afraid of for reasons I still don’t fully understand." He paused. "He died protecting me. I watched it happen. I couldn’t do anything."
Toma didn’t interrupt. He just listened, the way he always did, patient in a manner Cassian had never quite gotten used to.
"For three months after that I was alone in a forest a lot like this one, except nobody was looking for me. I taught myself to hunt because I would have starved otherwise. I stopped expecting anyone to come find me at all, which is probably why it took me so long to trust that you and your father actually meant it when you said I could stay."
"We meant it."
"I know that now." Cassian’s voice tightened. "I didn’t, then."
"My teacher betrayed us," Cassian went on. "Someone I trusted more than almost anyone alive. He took my friends. I don’t know if they’re still alive. I don’t know what happened to them, and some days that’s worse than knowing they’re dead would be." His voice had gone low and rough. "The mark in that clearing looked exactly like my own eyes. Like my father’s eyes. Like the eyes of the person who killed him. I don’t know what that means here, in this forest, with a missing child. I just know it terrified me in a way I haven’t felt since that night, and I didn’t want to say that out loud until I was sure I could say it without falling apart in front of everyone."
Toma was quiet for a long moment. "You’re not falling apart."
"I feel like I might."
"You’re not," Toma said again, firmer this time. "I’ve watched you fight things that should have killed you outright, and you never once fell apart in front of me. Telling me this isn’t the thing that breaks you. It’s the thing that stops you from breaking alone."
Cassian let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. "That’s very wise for someone who won’t tell me why he hasn’t taken his own mark yet."
Toma huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. "Fair."
"So tell me."
Toma was quiet long enough that Cassian thought he might simply let the request go unanswered, the same way Cassian had let so many questions go unanswered these past weeks. He watched the empty yard instead of looking over, the way people do when a thing costs more to say than it should.
"My mother was a hunter," he said finally, and something in his voice had gone thin in a way Cassian had never once heard from him, not even facing down a Mystical-ranked boar with a torn arm and blood soaking his sleeve. "One of the best this village ever had, if half the stories are true. She died the day I was born."
Cassian felt something in his chest crack open at that, sudden and complete, grief he hadn’t expected reaching for grief he already carried every day.
"Toma-"
"I never knew her. Not one memory, not her voice, nothing." Toma’s jaw worked once before he kept going, like he had to force the words out before they could talk him out of leaving. "My father doesn’t say her name much. I used to think it was because he didn’t want to. I understand now it’s because it still costs him something, every single time, and he never once let me see how much."
Cassian didn’t trust his voice enough to speak right away. He thought of his own father’s face in the last seconds before the light in his chest went out, of a promise made with his last breath that had never once stopped echoing. "At least you have him," he said finally, quiet, not meaning it as anything close to cruel. "I don’t even have that anymore."
Toma turned to look at him properly for the first time since he’d started talking, something raw and unguarded finally breaking through the flatness he wore like armor most days. "I know," he said. "I think that’s part of why I never told anyone this before. It felt small, next to what happened to you."
"It’s not small." Cassian’s voice cracked slightly on the words, and he let it, too tired to hide it anymore. "Losing someone you never even got to meet isn’t small. It’s just a different kind of missing."
Neither of them said anything for a moment. Toma reached over, almost hesitant, and gripped Cassian’s shoulder the way Doran sometimes did, firm and steady, an anchor rather than a comfort meant to fix anything.
"My uncle disappeared before I was born too," Toma went on eventually, his voice steadier now that the hardest part was already out. "Stronger than anyone who’s ever lived here, according to every story anyone tells about him. My father talks about him like he was something between a hero and a ghost. Half the village still expects him to walk out of the trees someday like nothing happened." He picked at a loose thread on his sleeve, not quite looking at Cassian anymore. "I grew up hearing his name before I ever really understood what a compliment meant, and by the time I did understand, every compliment anyone paid me came with him attached to it somehow. You fight like he might have. You’ve got his patience. Small things, most days, but they added up."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It is, some days." Toma exhaled slowly. "So I told myself I was waiting for something special. Something big enough that nobody could measure it against him and find me lacking. I don’t know if that’s wisdom or just fear wearing a patient face."
"Maybe both."
"Maybe both," Toma agreed, something almost relieved in his voice, like saying it out loud had already lightened something he’d been carrying a long time. "You’re the first person I’ve told that to. My father doesn’t know. Not really. He’d probably just tell me I don’t need to be anyone but myself, and he’d mean it, and it still wouldn’t make the feeling go away."
Cassian looked at him, at the careful, guarded weight Toma usually kept behind his flat expression, and felt something shift between them, some final piece of distance closing that neither of them had bothered naming until now.
"For what it’s worth," Cassian said, "I’ve never once thought of you as smaller than anyone’s story about your uncle. I only ever met you. Not him."
Toma huffed out something that was almost a laugh, rougher around the edges than usual. "That’s the first time anyone’s said it that plainly."
"Someone should have said it sooner, then."
"We’re not so different," Cassian said.
"No," Toma agreed. "I don’t think we are."
They sat with that a while longer, the hawk making another slow pass overhead, the yard around them still and unhurried in a way the rest of the village hadn’t managed to be in days. For a little while, at least, neither of them had to carry anything alone.
Doran found them there when the hour finally ran out, standing at the edge of the yard with his usual half-smile worn thinner than it had been a week ago. "Council’s ready," he said. "Both of you, now."
Cassian and Toma rose together, and for the first time since the alarm bell had rung out over the valley, Cassian felt like he was walking toward whatever came next with someone standing beside him instead of simply following behind. Whatever Yara was about to say in that meeting, he thought, at least he wouldn’t be hearing it alone anymore, and somehow that mattered more than he’d expected it to.