~ KAEL ~
Nyxara narrowed it down to a narrow house on a narrow street behind the temple district — the kind of house that existed to be overlooked, with a faded door and a small, neat herb garden in a window box that someone clearly tended with more care than the rest of the building deserved.
"This is it," Kael said quietly. "She goes by Mira. Sells remedies and tonics, mostly to people in the temple district. Keeps to herself."
Aldric stood in front of the door for a long moment without knocking. Kael had walked beside him the whole way and hadn't said much — there wasn't much to say that would help, and he'd learned, this past week, that sometimes the most useful thing he could offer was simply not making someone perform composure they didn't have.
"What if she doesn't —" Aldric started, then stopped. "What if she's built a whole life here, and I'm about to walk into it and — ruin it. Drag thirty years of careful hiding back into the open because I couldn't leave well enough alone."
"Then that's a conversation you have with her," Kael said. "But I don't think she'd want thirty more years of it, if she had a choice. People don't usually want to be safe more than they want to be known."
Aldric looked at him for a moment — really looked, the way he did when he was filing something away — and then knocked.
— ✶ —
~ NYXARA ~
The woman who opened the door was older than her portrait by thirty years, her sharp face softened by time but not erased — the same watchful eyes, the same set to her jaw that Nyxara recognized, with some private amusement, as identical to Aldric's when he was being stubborn.
She looked at Aldric. For one long moment, nothing happened at all — just two people standing in a doorway, the herb garden between them releasing its smell of rosemary into the afternoon air.
Then her hand came up to her mouth, and the basket she'd been carrying tipped and spilled dried lavender across the step, and she said, in a voice that cracked clean down the middle:
"Little bird?"
Nyxara had heard a great many names in seventeen thousand years. Titles, true names, names spoken in fear and names spoken in worship. She had never heard one land quite like that — small, private, thirty years overdue, and utterly devastating in its smallness.
Aldric made a sound that wasn't quite a word.
"Aunt Vesna."
— ✶ —
~ KAEL ~
Kael stepped back — not far, just enough to give them room, just enough to not be standing in the middle of it — and watched a thirty-year-old grief come apart in real time on a narrow street that smelled like rosemary.
Vesna didn't ask questions. Didn't demand explanations. She just pulled Aldric into the house with the particular fierce efficiency of someone who had spent three decades being careful and had run entirely out of patience for it in the space of one afternoon, and Kael heard her say, muffled, into his shoulder: "You're too tall. You were nine. You're not allowed to be this tall."
"I grew up," Aldric said, and it came out half a laugh and half something else entirely.
"I can see that. I don't approve."
The inside of the house was small and warm and smelled like dried herbs and old paper. Vesna sat Aldric down at a worn kitchen table, made tea with hands that were visibly shaking, and didn't let go of his sleeve the entire time, as though letting go might prove this wasn't real.
"They told me you were sent to relatives in the south," she said finally, sitting across from him. "After—" her voice caught. "After everything. I thought— I told myself you were safe somewhere, growing up somewhere far away from all of this, and that was supposed to be enough. I made it be enough. For thirty years."
"They told me you died," Aldric said quietly. "I lit candles for you. I talked to your portrait."
Vesna closed her eyes. "Of course they did. Of course —" she shook her head, and when she opened her eyes again there was something harder in them, something that Kael recognized from Pale, from Mott, from everyone in this city who had survived Olen's particular brand of quiet cruelty. "They separated us. Told each of us the other was gone. Made sure neither of us had a reason to ever come looking."
"So we'd never compare notes," Kael said quietly, from where he stood near the door. "So neither of you would ever learn what the other one knew."
Vesna looked at him properly for the first time — taking in the journal under his arm, the careful way he held himself, the patience he'd been radiating since they'd arrived.
"And who are you?"
"Kael. I'm —" he glanced at Aldric, who nodded, "—a friend of Aldric's. I found part of what your family left behind. A ledger. Margin notes in red ink."
Something shifted in Vesna's face — recognition, and underneath it, thirty years of carefully buried fear finally finding somewhere to go.
"The ledger," she breathed. "That survived?"
"It survived. And we think — we hoped — there might be more. Something you kept. Something that could finish what your brother started."
Vesna was quiet for a long moment. Then she stood, walked to a small cabinet in the corner, and opened a drawer that Kael would have sworn, a moment before, didn't exist — a shallow false bottom, the kind of hiding place built by someone who'd had thirty years to make sure it was perfect.
She drew out a thin, oilcloth-wrapped bundle and held it for a moment before setting it on the table between them — between herself and the nephew she'd thought was lost, and the stranger who'd brought him back to her.
"I've been waiting thirty years," she said, "for someone worth giving this to."
She looked between Aldric and Kael, and something in her expression — tired, fierce, finally unburdened — made Kael think, unexpectedly, of Nyxara.
"I think," Nyxara said softly, just for him, "this is going to be a very long afternoon."
"Yeah," Kael agreed quietly, watching Aldric take his aunt's hand across the table, both of them crying without any pretense of not crying. "But a good one."