Breakfast, on the last morning, was quieter than any breakfast Ragna could remember sharing with this family.
Sabrina didn't announce her circle count. She didn't complain about the porridge, or needle him about his footwork, or do any of the dozen small, familiar, irritating things that had made up the background noise of nearly every morning of his life since he'd been old enough to sit at this table properly.
She simply ate in silence, glancing up at him every so often as though checking he hadn't already vanished, and Ragna found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he missed the noise before it had even fully stopped.
Sentel said little as well, though her silence carried a different weight than Sabrina's — steady, composed, the practiced stillness of a woman who had decided, sometime overnight, exactly how she intended to hold herself through this particular morning and was holding to that decision with the same discipline she'd once used to hold an entire council of elders in check.
Chavilon, for his part, was absent from the table entirely, a fact nobody remarked on, and Ragna decided, privately, that he wasn't especially bothered by the omission.
He ate less than usual. His stomach, it turned out, had opinions about departures that his appetite hadn't consulted him on.
He asked to visit the training yard one last time before noon, and Hale — who had clearly been informed of the departure already, by whatever quiet channel information traveled through that yard faster than any announcement could officially catch up to it — simply nodded and called a halt to the morning's drills without further comment.
The twenty of them gathered loosely around him, sweat-streaked and out of breath from a morning's laps that had, for once, been cut mercifully short, and Ragna found himself considerably less prepared for the moment than he'd expected to be, given how many times he'd rehearsed some version of this farewell on the walk over.
"Two hundred miles," Ronan said, arms crossed, in a tone that was clearly aiming for casual and mostly succeeding. "You'll be back before we've even finished missing you."
"I'm coming back every year," Ragna said. "Not just to visit. To train with you all again, if you'll still have me by then."
"We'll have gotten considerably better by then," Iris pointed out. "You'll be rusty. I fully intend to beat you the moment you walk back through that gate."
"I'd expect nothing less."
Devren said little, as was his habit, but gripped Ragna's forearm in the firm, wordless way that had become, over five years, its own kind of language between them, and Ragna understood the whole of what wasn't being said in it well enough not to need it spoken aloud.
It was Kelly, quiet as ever, who spoke last — and Ragna, turning to him, felt something catch unexpectedly in his chest, because in five full years of sparring, of drills, of watching Kelly ascend through skill tiers the rest of them simply weren't competing in, Ragna had never once, not a single time, managed to win a match against him. Not a draw. Not a near miss. A clean, complete, uninterrupted record of losses that had become, over the years, less a source of shame and more a quiet, standing joke between them — the one measuring stick Ragna had never managed to move an inch against.
"Take care of yourself," Kelly said simply.
Four words, offered without ceremony, in the same flat, understated tone he offered everything.
But Ragna understood, hearing them, that Kelly had never once in five years offered him — offered anyone, so far as Ragna had witnessed — anything close to an unprompted sentiment like that, and the plainness of it landed considerably harder than a more elaborate farewell from anyone else could have managed.
"You too," Ragna managed, and found his voice thinner than he'd intended it to sound.
He left the yard without looking back a second time, mostly because he suspected, correctly, that looking back would make the walk to the manor considerably harder than it needed to be.
He said his goodbyes to the manor itself in the quiet, unglamorous way most real goodbyes actually happen — not in a single dramatic scene, but scattered across an hour, in small pieces, each one costing more than he expected.
Sabrina found him at the gate before he could leave without her noticing, hair still damp from where she'd apparently run straight from wherever she'd been hiding to avoid this exact moment, and threw her arms around him with a fierceness that had nothing left in it of the composed young lady she'd been practicing to become and everything in it of the four-year-old who'd once named him from across a crib rail on his very first night in that house.
"Every year," she said into his shoulder, her voice thick. "You promised Mother. I'm holding you to it too."
"Every year," he agreed. "I promise."
"You'd better come back stronger. I refuse to still be ahead of you in anything by the time you're done being mysterious and important at some tower full of old men."
He laughed, wetly, despite himself, and held on a moment longer before he finally let go.
Sentel walked with him as far as the manor's outer gate, saying little, her composure holding — barely, visibly, held together by the same discipline she'd shown at breakfast — right up until the final moment, when she pressed a plain, well-balanced sword into his hands, the only thing he'd asked her for, and closed his fingers around the hilt with both of her own hands over his.
"Once a year," she said again, quieter this time, just for him.
"Once a year," he confirmed, and bowed to her one final time before he made himself turn and walk, before either of them could find a reason to make the moment last any longer than it already had.
He left the manor in tears he didn't bother hiding, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he didn't much mind who saw them.
The walk to the city gates took the better part of an hour, long enough for the tears to dry and something steadier to settle into their place — not resolve exactly, but the plain, forward-facing determination of someone who had already made the decision and simply needed his body to catch up with it.
At the gate, the city guard on duty — an older man Ragna vaguely recognized from years of passing through on errands — held out a hand for the small brass plaque every resident of Manachy carried, the mark that identified him as a citizen of the neutral region and granted him safe passage through its borders.
Ragna hesitated only a moment before handing it over.
"Leaving for good, son?" the guard asked, turning the plaque over once in his weathered hand.
"Leaving to find out what 'for good' actually means," Ragna said, which wasn't much of an answer, and the guard, to his credit, didn't press for a better one.
He walked out through the gate with a sword at his hip, a small bag of dried meat and travel bread slung over one shoulder, and nothing else at all — no coin, no escort, no plaque to mark him as belonging anywhere in particular anymore.
It was, he reflected, not unlike the way he'd arrived in this world fifteen years earlier, wrapped in a stolen curtain in a stranger's vegetable basket, though this time, at least, he was the one who'd chosen the leaving.
From the highest floor of the magic tower, Lady Sentel watched a small, steadily shrinking figure make his way down the long southern road until the curve of the hills finally swallowed him from view entirely.
She let herself cry for exactly as long as it took him to disappear, one single tear tracing a clean path down her cheek before she wiped it away with the same brisk, practiced efficiency she applied to most things that threatened to unmake her composure in front of a room that wasn't there to see it.
"Fifteen years old," she murmured, to the empty study, to the boy who could no longer hear her. "Seven circles. A Will that hasn't finished waking up yet. Swordsmanship that's already made grown instructors stop underestimating him." She allowed herself a small, wet smile. "What more could you possibly need, that you don't already carry with you?"
She could not protect him on that road, not with her own hands, not anymore. She had known that the moment he'd stood up from the dinner table two nights ago and bowed to her like a man rather than a boy.
But she trusted, with the same fierce certainty she'd once shown an entire council of elders, that whatever she could no longer shield him from personally, the power she'd spent ten careful years cultivating in him would be more than sufficient to shield him instead.
She stood at that window a long while after the road had gone entirely empty, before finally, reluctantly, turning back to the letters waiting on her desk.
***
Lord Chavilon received his spy in the privacy of his own chambers that same evening, the man delivering his report in the low, efficient murmur of someone well-practiced in conversations that officially never happened.
"He's gone, my lord. Left through the southern gate at noon, alone, unescorted. No coin beyond travel food. He'll be exposed the entire route north — bandits, wildlife, weather. An accident on that road would raise no questions at all."
Chavilon said nothing for a long moment, standing at his window with his back to the man, looking out over the town below — Manachy's rooftops gold and orange in the fading evening light, peaceful and unbothered, exactly the way seven years of careful, patient work had kept it.
"You could arrange it," the spy added, when the silence stretched long enough to seem like an invitation rather than a dismissal. "Discreetly. Nothing that traces back to this house. A simple accident, and the boy's inconvenient presence resolves itself permanently, rather than merely — postponing itself, the way his leaving has."
Chavilon considered it. He genuinely considered it, turning the offer over with the same careful, patient arithmetic he'd applied to nearly every decision of the past seven years, weighing the clean permanence of it against everything it would cost him if it ever came to light.
But Sentel's face rose in his mind, unbidden — the nine circles blazing up her arms in that council room years ago, the fourteen candles guttering sideways in a room with no wind, the plain, absolute certainty in her voice when she'd told six elders exactly how little their unanimous vote actually mattered against her will.
Sentel missed nothing that happened within a hundred miles of anything she genuinely cared about. If Ragna died on that road, by accident or otherwise, she would know. Not suspect. Know — the way she seemed to know everything eventually, sooner or later, however carefully a thing had been hidden from her.
"That," Chavilon said finally, "is worth considering."
He gave no further answer. The spy waited a moment longer, correctly reading the silence as neither a yes nor a genuine no, and eventually excused himself without pressing further, leaving Chavilon alone at the window, still watching his town settle into evening, already turning the arithmetic over again from the beginning, the way he always did when a sum refused to resolve itself cleanly on the first attempt.
He did not sleep particularly well that night. He told himself it had nothing to do with the boy on the southern road, and mostly, almost, believed it.