The ground under the old oak was hard enough that Rhys's hands blistered before he was even a foot down, and he kept digging anyway, because asking anyone in Hollowmere for a shovel felt like asking them for something they no longer wanted to give him.
Nobody stopped him. Nobody came to help, either, and he understood both, in a distant, aching way that didn't yet have room to turn into anger. Fear made people careful. He'd have been careful too, in their place. That didn't make the silence behind him, all those closed doors and drawn curtains along the one road he'd walked his whole life, hurt any less.
He worked through the morning and into the afternoon, and somewhere in the rhythm of it, the tearing dirt and the ache spreading through his shoulders, a memory surfaced he hadn't thought about in years.
He'd been maybe nine years old, small for his age, furious after losing a scrap with one of the older village boys, and Ren had found him sitting behind the woodpile with a split lip and a wounded, ferocious pride he refused to let anyone see cracking.
"You're doing it wrong," Ren had said, crouching down to his level, no pity in his voice at all, which was somehow the only reason Rhys had let him stay.
"I know how to make a fist."
"That's not what you're doing wrong." Ren had taken his chin, turned his face gently side to side, checking the damage with the same careful precision he checked everything. "You're fighting like the fight is the whole of you. Like if you lose it, there's nothing left over. That's how boys get hurt worse than they need to."
"Then how am I supposed to fight?"
"Like there's a version of you standing behind the one throwing the punch. One that isn't afraid, because it isn't the one taking the risk." Ren had tapped two fingers against Rhys's chest, right over his heart, the closest thing to open affection the man ever showed. "Protect that one. Let the other one take the hits."
At the time, Rhys had assumed it was just something adults said to make children feel braver than they were. Kneeling in the dirt beside the grave he was digging with his own hands, he understood it differently now. Ren hadn't been teaching him how to survive a schoolyard scrap. He'd been teaching him how to survive being someone with something worth protecting, someone who would, eventually, have to fight for it.
He'd known, even then. He must have known this day was coming for years.
Rhys finished as the light was going gold and long across the yard, and lowered Ren into the ground himself, and said nothing over the grave, because nothing he could think to say felt anywhere close to large enough.
He was still standing there when Mira found him.
She didn't say anything at first either, just came and stood beside him, shoulder almost touching his, the two of them looking down at freshly turned earth together the way they'd looked at a hundred smaller, stupider things over the years, skipped stones and half-finished games and the wreckage of arguments neither of them remembered starting.
"I brought you something," she said eventually, and pressed a small cloth bundle into his hands. Inside, when he unwrapped it, was travel food wrapped tight, a handful of coin that was probably more than she could easily spare, and, resting on top, a small carved wooden falcon, no bigger than his thumb, its wings worked in careful, patient detail.
"My mother carved these," Mira said, a little too fast, like she needed to get the explanation out before she lost her nerve. "Before she passed. She used to give them to traders heading out past the border, so that if any of them ever came through a town that knew our family's mark, someone would know to help them. I don't know if that's even true anymore, if anyone out there still remembers what it means. But it's the only thing I have that might be worth something to you out there, and I want you to have it."
Rhys turned the little falcon over in his fingers, its wings smooth from years of handling, and felt something in his chest tighten that had nothing to do with grief.
"Mira—"
"Don't." Her voice cracked, just slightly, and she blinked hard against it. "Don't make this a whole thing. Just take it, and if you ever end up somewhere so far from home you don't know a single face, show it to someone and see what happens. And come back, when you can. Whenever that is."
He closed his fingers around it, the wood already warm from her hand, and nodded, because he didn't trust his own voice yet to do better than she'd managed.
He left Hollowmere an hour before full dark, one bag over his shoulder, the falcon tucked safe in an inner pocket close to his chest, and didn't look back at the village until the road curved and the low stone roofs disappeared behind the treeline for good.
He didn't know yet where House Thane's nearest territory lay, only that it was the one name he had, the one thread pulled loose from everything that had happened, and that following it was the only decision that felt like moving forward instead of simply running.
He was three miles down the road, the last of the light nearly gone, when the feeling settled over him that he wasn't walking alone.
He stopped. Listened. Heard nothing but wind through the trees, and his own too-loud heartbeat, and told himself it was grief playing tricks, exhaustion wearing the shape of danger.
He kept walking anyway, faster than before, and didn't look back to check whether he was right.