Minji is the one I don’t know how to stand in front of. She doesn’t owe me words, and she’s paying her debt in silence. Jaw set. Eyes sliding past mine like a bird avoiding a glass it can’t see. She leaves rooms a breath before I enter. When she must be near me, she packs herself into neatness—ink capped, spine straight, voice filed to a point that never slips.
I made that.
I thought I was saving her when I took the King’s bargain. Thought if I delivered one friend I could spare another. The arithmetic of cowards: divide by love, multiply by fear, call it duty.
I didn’t protect her. I authored her hurt and asked the world to sign it. So I change what I can reach.
I walk instead of shadow-stepping so the new rookies don’t see me appear from nothing and learn to flinch. I keep my wing tied close so the wind that used to make me arrogant is just air again. I leave no cups on altars, no whispers under doors, no promises that smell like smoke. I return the old dagger—the one we used for bargains—to the armory and sign my name on the ledger.No more trades made in anyone’s terror.I write it like a law and read it to myself when the night gets ideas.
I carry lists. Of supplies. Of dead. Of names I practice saying without breaking. Kaelen catches me once on the eastern wall, charcoal blacking my fingers, and pretends not to notice the places where the letters blur. He’s kind in the way soldiers are when they see a wound they won’t make you talk about.
I teach the morning drills because Taeyang asked and because Minji said the rookies looked less afraid when I was counting push-ups. I keep my voice even. I correct with hands I don’t let hover. When someone cries—quietly, like they think they’ll be graded on restraint—I sit on the ground with them until their breath remembers how.
After, I make tea and set it on the Archive steps where Minji will find it without having to watch me leave it. I don’t wait to be thanked. I don’t hover to collect proof. I just go.
Sometimes I rehearse apologies in empty rooms.
“I chose wrong,” I tell the stone. “I won’t ask you to make it cost less.” Sometimes the room believes me. Sometimes I have to say it again.
Taeyang is unraveling on the edges, the way leather does when storm and salt have an arrangement. He trains until his shoulders shake. He stares at the north wall like it insulted his mother. When Yuna walks in, his whole body goes still—animal, arrow, a bell between notes. If another man stands too close to her, the brand under his skin flares so brightIfeel it and I am not bound to him. He thinks no one sees. We do. We see everything we’re trying not to be.
I leave him warm tin on cold nights. Water, not wine. He doesn’t thank me either. Good. Some kindnesses would break if you put a name on them.
When I can’t sleep, I climb to the roof and count the ways I am not the man I was: no more whispers that make choices for other people, no more altars built from the idea that my pain buys anyone else’s peace, no morenoblelies. I say them out loud, because vows like company and I haven’t earned silence yet. I am trying to change. Not perform goodness—be it. It is not pretty work.
Minji brushes past me in the colonnade at dusk, arms full of vellum, ink smudged on the side of her hand where she rests her weight when she thinks. I step back, away from the line of her path, and lower my eyes because my gaze used to be a claim and I’m not making any. The wind lifts a loose strand of her hair. My fingers twitch with old habit. I put both hands behind my back and let the moment pass.
“Minji,” I say, because names are doors and I don’t want to be locked out by my own fear.
She stops. Doesn’t turn. Waits.
“I’m sorry,” I say. Not the scroll version. Not the heroic rewrite. The short one that fits in a body that still remembers how to lie and is choosing not to.
“There is no good reason. Only the truth: I broke something because I was afraid. I won’t do it again. I don’t want forgiveness for the apology. I want to be a man you don’t have to defend yourself from.”
There’s a long, thin quiet. I hear her breath. I hear mine.
“Don’t ask me to make it easy,” she says at last, voice steady as a blade laid on a table.
“I won’t,” I answer. “I’ll make it worth the work if you ever decide you want to try.”
She walks on. I don’t follow. I stand in the place where the air remembers she was and let my heart do the thing it was built for before kings taught it other tricks: wait without demanding. Later, Seori finds me on the training floor, sitting with my back to the wall, wing aching where the singed feathers are growing back crooked because I’m impatient. She lowers herself beside me with the deliberate grace of someone negotiating with a new center of gravity.
“You’re quieter,” she observes, dry.
“Practicing,” I say.
“For what?”
“For being worth the breath I’m taking up.”
Her mouth softens, the way it did before that night taught us all how easily love can be used as leverage.
“You’re different.”
“I’m trying to bebetter,” I correct, because different is easy and better is the point.
She nods like a queen setting a seal on a petition.
