The cart rattled on, and Ragna sat inside his own head for a long while, turning the last twenty minutes over the way he'd once turned over Sentel's lecture on Wills — piece by piece, testing each part for the weight it actually carried rather than the weight it merely appeared to.
He started with the books, because the books were the easiest thread to pull.
She had wanted him to find them. Not stumbled upon them by careless accident, not left them behind through simple oversight — placed them, deliberately, in a library she knew belonged to a woman meticulous enough that any genuine disorder would have stood out like a scar.
Orchest had wanted him to already understand something about the Crows and the war and the God Eyes before she ever climbed onto that cart, so that the moment she finally revealed herself, he wouldn't waste her time with the kind of blank, uncomprehending panic a completely unprepared boy might have offered instead.
She had built the conversation's foundation weeks in advance, brick by patient brick, the same way, he now understood with a chill, that the book itself had described her orchestrating wars — not through force, but through the quiet, careful arrangement of circumstances until the outcome she wanted arrived looking almost inevitable.
That much he could accept, uncomfortable as it was. What refused to settle quietly was the rest of it.
Migardians.
Why had she brought them up at all? The battle, the sacrifice, his assumed father's survival — all of that connected cleanly enough to explain itself. But she had lingered on the Migardians specifically, their desperation, their final choice, the weight of what they'd traded away to erase an army that outnumbered them. And then, almost carelessly, she had asked him to entertain her with his people's suffering — a phrase that had slid past him in the moment, buried under the larger shock of his father's name, but that sat now, replayed calmly in his memory, considerably heavier than it had felt the first time.
His people.
He was Hizosshian, wasn't he? His father a general, now a duke, of Hizosshu itself. If that was true, the Migardians were not his people at all — they were, by every account he'd ever overheard, the captives, the buffer, the ones Hizosshu used and discarded along its southern coast.
Why would Orchest speak as though his suffering and theirs were the same suffering, unless she knew something about his blood that he did not yet know himself?
He turned the question sideways, approaching it from a different angle, the way Andell had once taught him to approach an opponent's guard when the direct route refused to yield anything useful.
If his father was Hizosshian — a decorated general, eventually a duke — why had he, Ragna, been delivered to Manachy at all? Not raised in Herinhon, not acknowledged by a father with a title and a household capable of caring for him properly, but abandoned in a basket, wrapped in a stolen curtain, on the doorstep of a small neutral queen two hundred miles from his father's own lands.
A general's son, discarded like an inconvenience, in a region that owed Hizosshu nothing and had no particular reason to protect him beyond Sentel's own private, inexplicable choice to love a stranger's child on sight.
He considered, briefly, whether it might have been political — a general's bastard hidden away to avoid some scandal, some inconvenient complication to a marriage or a succession.
But the timing refused to fit that theory as cleanly as he wanted it to. Laiman had been a general before the battle, not yet a duke, not yet burdened with whatever political weight a dukedom eventually demanded of a man's private affairs.
A general's illegitimate son was rarely worth two hundred miles of careful concealment. A duke's, perhaps. A general's, considerably less so.
Which meant the timing itself was the piece he was missing.
"Matan," he said, breaking his own silence at last, his voice steadier than he expected it to sound. "How long has Laiman Kuri been Duke of Herinhon?"
Matan glanced over, mildly surprised by the sudden question after what had clearly looked, from the outside, like a long stretch of dust-eyed staring at nothing. "Eighteen years now, give or take. I remember it well enough — my father used to talk about the old duke before him, and the transition. Big to-do about it at the time. Eighteen years, yes. I'd stake my cart on it."
Ragna went very still.
Eighteen years.
He was fifteen.
The gap sat between those two numbers like a wound freshly reopened, and Ragna felt something cold settle through his chest as the arithmetic finished assembling itself whether he wanted it to or not.
If Laiman had already been Duke of Herinhon for three full years before Ragna was even born, then the story he'd been quietly building in his head — general survives battle, general's power passes to unborn son, general somehow loses track of that son in the chaos of a new dukedom — didn't fit the timeline at all. The dukedom had come first.
Whatever had happened to Ragna, whatever choice had placed him in a basket at Manachy's gate instead of a nursery in Herinhon, had happened years into his father already holding a title, a household, presumably a life stable enough to have raised a son properly within it, had he chosen to.
Someone had chosen not to. Or something had made that choice impossible in a way Ragna didn't yet understand.
And underneath all of it, stubborn and unresolved, sat the question he'd been circling since the moment Orchest first climbed onto that cart bench beside him.
Who was his mother?
Nobody had ever spoken the word to him — not Sentel, not Chavilon, not even the vague, half-overheard fragments of council-room gossip he'd absorbed over ten years of growing up under a roof that clearly knew more than it had ever chosen to tell him.
A father who was Hizosshian, decorated, eventually titled. A birth that had, somehow, ended two hundred miles away in a neutral region with no obvious connection to either warring kingdom at all. If he had been born in Hizosshu, there was no reasonable path that ended with him in a Manachy basket.
Someone had carried him there, deliberately, across a considerable distance, and left him specifically at the one door in the entire region least likely to hand him back to whatever danger he'd apparently been running from.
Political crisis, he considered again, and dismissed it again just as quickly. Laiman had been only a general before the battle — not yet powerful enough, not yet visible enough, to have generated the kind of political storm that required a child smuggled two hundred miles to survive it.
Whatever had happened, it had happened after the dukedom, after the power, after Laiman had already become someone worth watching closely enough that hiding a son from public view might genuinely have mattered.
Ragna sat with the shape of it, unfinished and frustrating, and understood — with a clarity that settled uncomfortably alongside the anger still simmering under his ribs — that Orchest had known exactly how much of this puzzle she was leaving him to solve on his own. She had handed him the corner pieces and withheld the center of the picture entirely, and he suspected, with growing certainty, that this had been deliberate too, the same careful, patient architecture as the misfiled books.
He thought of the pendant. The number three. The crow etched faintly into her sword hilt.
He thought of Igniter, a man who had apparently become fire rather than merely commanded it, and of Units, a name attached to nothing but rumor and absence. If a single conversation with the third-ranked Crow had left him this shaken, this thoroughly outmatched simply by the weight of what she chose to reveal or withhold, he did not want to imagine what a conversation with either of the two names ranked above her might cost a fifteen-year-old boy with seven circles and five years of swordsmanship behind him.
She was too powerful to challenge. He understood that plainly, without any wounded pride attached to the admission. Whatever answers he wanted — his mother's name, the true reason for the basket, the missing years between his father's dukedom and his own birth — he would have to find them another way, patiently, the way Sentel had taught him to approach everything worth actually understanding.
He was still turning the pieces over, arranging and rearranging them without managing to complete the picture, when Matan's voice broke through the silence at last, warm and welcoming, gesturing toward something ahead on the road that Ragna hadn't noticed approaching at all.
"There she is," Matan said, some of the earlier tension gone entirely from his voice, as though the strange gap in his memory had simply folded itself away and been forgotten. "Ruddafoth. Welcome to it, son — tucked right up against the mountains and the tick forest both, been a waypoint on this road longer than either of us has been alive. We'll rest here tonight. You look like you could use it, and frankly, so could I."
Ragna looked up, pulled at last out of the tangled arithmetic of fathers and dukedoms and missing years, and saw the city rising ahead of them — stone walls climbing the lower slope of a mountain range that hadn't been visible an hour ago, dense dark forest crowding close against its eastern edge, smoke curling lazily from a hundred chimneys catching the last of the day's light.
He set the unfinished puzzle aside, carefully, the way he'd learned to set aside an opening in a spar that wasn't ready to be taken yet, and let himself, for the moment, simply be tired.
There would be time enough, he told himself, to finish the arithmetic later.