Jerry pulled his knees up onto the bed and hugged them, and for a moment he looked eight years old again.
"Royal Guards came through," he said.
"The day after the ceremony. I’m talking actual Royal Guards, not the watch. They were in the low district, going door to door on our lane like it was a parade route. Everyone came out to gawk."
Nathan remained still, crouched in the dark by the bed.
"They said..." Jerry cleared his throat. "They said the Death Knight class did something to you. That it’s the class of the dead, and a living mind can’t carry it, and that it– it cracked you. The same night. They said you went home and you..."
Jerry shut his eyes tight.
He couldn’t say it.
But when he opened his eyes and looked at Nathan, there were tears swimming in them. He forced himself to say it.
"They said you killed your mum, Nathan. That you lost your mind and killed her in your own house, ran for the deep woods, and the beasts finished you. They called it... mercy. That’s the word the officer used. A mercy, that the wilderness took care of what the class ruined."
The room was completely silent.
"Aunt Liora," Jerry whispered. "They stood in our street and said you did that to Auntie Liora. And people believed it, Nathan. Not me, I swear," he shook his head. "Not me and not my mum. She threw a jug at the second lot who came around. But the neighbors, the district, they– you know how people are. There are kids who won’t walk past your house now. They say it’s cursed ground."
Nathan didn’t move.
Somewhere inside him, at the bottom, the last warm thing he’d been protecting since the hallway quietly froze over.
He’d thought he understood what the crown had taken away from him. His mother. His life. His body, twice.
Now he realized that he had, in fact, not understood. Not until this exact moment. That they’d also taken his name and handed it back to the district as a monster’s.
That his mother’s neighbors, the women she’d done washing for, the lanes she’d walked her whole small decent life, all of it now held her son’s name like a curse. That she’d been murdered by her king and then, for tidiness, her murder had been pinned on the only person who’d loved her.
The room seemed to tremble, and the shadows brewing at the corners deepened.
"Nathan." Jerry had gone still, watching him. "Your face is doing something scary, man..."
"They killed her," Nathan said quietly, his voice level. "The crown did. There were assassins that same night. They came to our house on the king’s order. They cut her throat in front of me and then cut mine, and they dumped us both in the deep wood for the beasts." He paused. "And they stood in your street and told everyone I did it."
Jerry’s mouth opened for a moment, but then closed.
"The class didn’t crack me, Jerry," Nathan almost laughed at the absurdity. "The king got scared of it and decided a low-district boy’s life was a fair price for feeling certain." He looked down at his own hands. "Dying didn’t take me. It doesn’t seem to take me." Nathan stared at Jerry. "That’s the part you can’t tell anyone, ever, as long as you live."
And then he told him the rest. Not all of it, though. Not about Kira, nor the storeroom. But he did reveal the shape of it, the forest, the surviving, the coming back.
Jerry sat through it all, white-faced and silent, gripping the blessed charm so hard that it left grooves in his palm. And when Nathan finally finished, his friend let out one long shaking breath.
"Okay," Jerry said slowly, steadying his breath. "Okay. So we– right. We go to Elder Morran. He argued for you, everyone says so, he’ll—"
"No."
"Then we get you out. The far provinces, my dad’s cousin runs a freight, we can—"
"Jerry."
"You can’t just do nothing, Nathan. The whole city thinks—"
"I’m not going to do nothing." Something in how he said it stopped Jerry cold. "But you’re going to. That’s why I came. You get the truth, because you’re my best friend and you deserve it, and then you get to stay out of the rest."
"Out of the—" Jerry let out a wild, disbelieving laugh. "You... you climbed through my window from the grave and you want me to stay out of it? Yeah, right. Whatever you’re doing, I’m coming. That’s how it works with us, that’s how it’s always worked—"
"You have a class." Nathan’s voice was flat. "You have a mark, a god, a mother who throws jugs for me, a whole life that starts now. I’m already dead to this world, Jerry. The crown wrote it down. The only strength I have left is that nobody’s looking for a dead boy."
Nathan held his friend’s gaze.
"If you’re seen with me, you die too. It’s not a maybe." He breathed in deeply. "Keep your class, Jerry. Live your life. That’s what I came to ask you for."
Jerry stared at him for a long, long moment, jaw tight, eyes wet, and Nathan saw him understand and hate it in the same breath.
"That’s not fair," Jerry said thickly.
"I know."
"You’ll come back, though." It wasn’t a question, but it wobbled anyway. "Now and again." Jerry forced a small smile. "The window still doesn’t latch, remember?"
Nathan nodded.
"Now and again," he smiled. "But one thing first. You used to vanish up to the middle district every market week and come back with those honey pastries, and there’s no gate guard alive who’d have let you through. How?"
Jerry wiped his eyes and, despite everything, his smile widened.
"Culvert," he said. "Old storm drain, back of the tannery row, behind the bramble stand. It runs under the wall and comes up in a dry ditch past the cooper’s yard on the middle side. Grate’s rusted loose on both ends. Has been for years. You’d never find it if you didn’t know." The grin faded. "Nathan," he said. "What’s in the middle district?"
Nathan stood, pulled the hood back up, and eased the window open onto the night.
"A man who owes me."
"Owes you what?"
Nathan paused, one foot on the sill.
In his chest, cold and steady, the beacon pulled, north and up, toward a warm room and a corner table and a man who’d be there, same night, next week, spending his coin.
"Everything."
It was the last thing Nathan said, before he dropped into the dark.
He crossed the sleeping lanes with his hood low and did not turn toward the tannery row.
Not tonight. Tonight had given him everything he’d come for: the truth of what the crown had told the city, and a rusted grate behind a bramble stand that would put him under the wall whenever he chose.
The bar night was still days out, and Kira was alone in a ruined house on the far edge of the district, wedged in behind a loose board, waiting to see if he was a liar like everyone else.
’I keep coming back,’ he’d told her. ’It’s the one thing I’m good at.’
And so he went back.
He walked the long way, letting the anger cool and set into something colder and more useful. And when he finally knocked the pattern on the loose board twice and soft, he heard the small scrape of it being unwedged from inside almost at once.
She’d waited up.
Nathan slipped in, and Kira looked him over head to foot in the dark, checking.
And when she was done, she went back to her corner without a word, and something in her shoulders came down an inch.
He settled against his wall.
’A few days,’ he thought, watching the gap where the shutter used to be. ’Then the culvert, and the bar.’
He gazed at Kira.
’And I’m not leaving her here for it. Wherever I go, she goes.’
In his chest, patient as a held breath, the beacon pulled north.
Nolan had a week left of the same table. The same night.
Yes. Nathan could wait.