My hand went to my chest. The locket hung where it always did now, tucked beneath my shirt on a chain I’d bought in Ashvale the time I went rogue.
I pulled it out. Tarnished bronze, the clasp worn smooth from two hundred years of handling. The hinge protested when I opened it, then yielded.
Inside: a pressed forget-me-not flower, the petals faded to pale blue. And a piece of paper, folded twice, the edges soft from a thousand openings.
You are loved. Find your way home.
I’d read those words as a homeless child who goes from family to family, whoever pitied me, under thin blankets, tracing the letters with fingers too small to understand what they meant. I’d read them in the training yards. In my palace quarters, holding the only artifact of an origin I couldn’t remember, asking the locket who I was and getting the same six words every time.
Now I had names.
Rowson and Diera Kaelwyn.
My parents. Who discovered the same organization that was currently holding Mira and spent everything they had trying to stop it.
The tears came.
Not the kind I could redirect with a joke or deflect with a grin. These came from the place I’d spent two hundred years building walls around, the hollow space where parents should have been, where the knowledge of being wanted should have lived.
Farmon sat on his end of the log and let me cry. Didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t offer comfort. Just sat there, a man who’d lost his own home for twenty-four years, keeping quiet company with a boy who’d never had one.
The sound wasn’t dignified. Wasn’t the kind of crying you could hide behind your hands.
It was the two-hundred-year-old grief of an orphan finally learning that he hadn’t been abandoned. That the silence from his parents wasn’t neglect or indifference but sacrifice. My mother’s last act on earth had been wrapping him in a cloak and telling him he was loved.
When the tears stopped, the forest was brighter. Morning had arrived while I was breaking, the light filtering through the canopy.
I closed the locket. Held it in my fist.
“Kaelwyn,” I said. Testing the weight of it in my mouth.
“Kaelwyn,” Farmon confirmed.
I put the locket back around my neck.
Farmon and I walked back to camp in silence. Solomon was awake, sitting beside the fire, watching us return with eyes that saw everything and asked nothing. He’d know, eventually. Theyboth would. But right now the names were mine, and I needed to hold them a little longer before I shared them.
I sat down against my oak tree and pressed my back into the bark and let the two truths sit beside each other.
The Order had killed Commander Rowson and Lady Diera Kaelwyn two hundred years ago. The organization that Mira’s father now led had inherited the infrastructure built by the hunters who’d murdered my parents before I could ever know them. That was one truth.
The other truth was that Mira was inside that building. Carrying my children. Fighting a war she hadn’t started against the legacy that had destroyed my family before it destroyed hers.
I didn’t blame her. The thought didn’t form. Blaming Mira for her father’s organization made about as much sense as blaming me for being born in a forest while my mother bled out six miles from safety.
We were both products of a war older than either of us, both orphaned by the same machine.
But the grief was enormous.
And sitting beneath the oak with the locket in my pocket and the names Rowson and Diera carved fresh into my chest, I understood Solomon’s anger at the rejection in a way I hadn’t before.
The Order had taken my parents. It had taken Solomon’s father for twenty-four years. It had buried Lucian under a crown hecouldn’t set down.. It had shaped the three of us into men who carried loss.
Find your way home.
The locket burned against my thigh.
Mira was my home. Those three heartbeats were my home. My brothers were my home. And the Order had its hands around all of them.
