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For a while neither of us said anything. The water moved in slow circles around us, and somewhere above the insects kept drifting, unbothered by anything happening beneath them.

"Why are you angry?" Halver asked eventually.

"I'm not angry."

"You came home yesterday and trained in the yard for six hours."

I didn't have a ready answer for that, mostly because he wasn't wrong.

"It's not fair," I said instead. "What I'm feeling. I know it's not fair."

"Doesn't mean it isn't real."

"You all know things about me. Things I didn't choose to tell." I traced one finger through the water, watching the ripple spread and vanish. "I don't know anything like that about any of you. Not really. Yesterday I found out Corian has an entire future attached to his name that nobody thought to mention, and it made me realize how little I know about all of you past the mundane basics."

Halver was quiet for a moment, watching the steam curl above the water.

"I grew up on the palace grounds," he said. "My family did, before me. My dad is the palace's head groundskeeper and my mom is the personal secretary of Queen Ivara. Corian and Nykos were tutored privately, and my mother used to sneak me into the same lessons when nobody official was watching, until the Queen found out and just added me anyway. That's how I ended up learning beside a prince and a lord's son instead of down in the town with everyone else my birth actually matched."

"That's not something I would have guessed."

"Most people don't." He shifted slightly, water moving around the motion. "Alex came later. My parents adopted him when he was ten and he folded into our little group."

Something about that settled into me, slow and warm, the particular ease of a piece finally fitting somewhere it had always belonged.

"So you're actually brothers. Not just squad-brothers."

"Actually brothers." The corner of his mouth tilted up, showing one of his small smiles I'd come to appreciate.

"Is that where you learned to cook? The Palace?"

"The head cook, a battle-axe of women called Thessa. I used to sneak into the kitchens early in a morning when I was too small to be useful anywhere else, so she gave me something to stir and told me to stop asking questions until it was done." He looked at the water rather than at me, something soft moving behind his expression. "She'd be unbearable about all this, if she saw it. The house, the squad, you."

"Me specifically?"

"She always said I fed people I cared about before I found the words for it. Guess she wasn't wrong."

Whatever answer belonged after that hadn't arrived yet, so I let the moment sit unfinished instead, turning it over the same slow way I'd turned over everything else he'd told me.

"And Nykos and Corian? What's their story?"

Halver's expression didn't close off exactly, but something in it went careful. "That's not mine to give you. Ask them yourself, when you're ready to hear it and they're ready to say it."

"That's frustrating."

"It's respectful." He glanced at me, steady and unhurried the way he did everything. "Their history isn't a gift I get to hand you. It's theirs. You'll get it eventually. Just not from me."

I didn't push. Something about the way he said it. So I just sat and enjoyed the silence and the hot spring.

We sat like that for a long while, the water working something loose in my shoulders that had been locked tight since the tavern, since Silvaria's voice and the collar and every quiet thing I still didn't know how to ask for outright. Halver didn't fill the silence with reassurance or questions I wasn't ready for. He just stayed, solid and unbothered, letting the cave do whatever work it was doing on both of us.

Halver rose first, water sheeting off his shoulders, and crossed to where his clothes waited without any particular hurry about covering himself.

I didn't look away this time.

Water ran in slow lines down the breadth of his back, catching the moss-light until his skin looked half-lit from somewhere underneath it, every line of muscle shifting easy and unhurried as he moved. There was nothing careless about the way he was built, nothing accidental, years of training worn into him the same patient way everything about him seemed to have been earned rather than given. My eyes tracked lower than I meant to let them before I caught myself and dragged my attention back up, heat that had nothing to do with the hot spring climbing up my neck.

He wasn't even trying. That was the worst part. He simply existed, unbothered and solid and entirely comfortable in his own skin, and my body had apparently decided that was reason enough to stop cooperating with the rest of me.