The day turned, and Vas's words stayed with him.
He was lucky — he knew that, even if he had never put the word to it before. He had lost his parents before he could remember their faces, and yet somehow he had not lost everything. He had a family. A real one. And he had been spending the last two days buried in books and training grounds while they were somewhere out in the capital without him.
I guess spending time with the old man wouldn't hurt, he thought — carefully, so as not to fully admit that Vas had been right.
He found Leom after breakfast, settled into an armchair with a book open across his knee. The man's hair, once a deep and consistent blue, had begun to show threads of grey at the roots — small ones, but there. Time had been moving quietly while Ivel wasn't looking. He was still the same man in every way that mattered, still upright and steady in the way that had always made him feel like something permanent, but the grey was there. Ivel noticed it in the way you notice something you aren't quite ready to think about directly.
He lingered in the doorway for a moment, feeling, for no reason he could entirely explain, the same low nervousness he'd felt the morning he had asked to go hunting for the first time.
"Father."
Leom looked up from his book.
"Yes? What is it, my son."
Ivel scratched the back of his head.
"I was wondering if you could show me around the capital. And if Elia and Aniya could come as well."
Leom's expression opened with quiet pleasure at the request. Then he glanced toward the hallway.
"I'd be glad to. Though your sisters have already headed out, I'm afraid."
Leom sighed then said
"Guess it's just the two of us, then. Boys' day out."
Leom smiled broadly.
"Dad. Don't say it like that. You're not young, you know."
"I'm young on the inside," Leom said. "That's all that matters."
Ivel laughed despite himself, and the nervousness dissolved.
Leom closed his book and stood.
"Are you ready to head out?"
Ivel nodded.
"Good. First order of business — we are trimming your hair."
Ivel went still.
He didn't like haircuts. He had never liked haircuts. But he looked at the curtain of black hair falling across his face and could not, in good conscience, mount a defense against the suggestion.
He said nothing and followed.
They made their way into the capital — the manor was close enough that the walk was short — and Leom led him to a shop Ivel had never seen before. It smelled strangely of something between leather and something bright and sharp that he didn't have a name for. They stepped inside, and the woman at the counter looked at Ivel, looked at his hair, and turned to the other workers with the gravity of someone who had just identified a problem.
"Oh. We have a situation here."
Ivel was slightly confused and more than slightly insulted. Leom was smiling.
They moved with impressive efficiency, steering the boy into a chair before he had properly processed what was happening. Scissors worked. Time passed. And then it was done.
He looked in the mirror.
The person looking back at him did not look like someone who had been getting lost in manor hallways. The hair fell cleanly across his forehead now, framing his face properly, and his purple eyes — without the curtain of overgrown black obscuring them — were striking in a way that surprised even him.
When Leom went to pay, the workers wore the quiet, relieved expressions of people who felt they had done something meaningful with their afternoon.
Ivel pretended not to notice.
He noticed.
From there, Leom led him to a pastry shop.
"Are they any good, father?"
Leom stopped walking and turned to look at him with an expression of genuine offense.
"Are they any good, you say."
They bought some.
Ivel took a bite and sat with it for a moment.
"What in the gods' name is in this."
Leom laughed.
"It's like being blessed," Ivel said, not entirely joking.
He had eaten sweets before. He had eaten pastries before. They had not tasted like this. There was something about the capital — its kitchens, its ingredients, its cooks who had presumably spent their entire lives within reach of the best of everything — that produced a different quality of result entirely. He filed the information away and ate another.
The afternoon unfolded from there at its own pace. They moved through the capital the way people move when they have nowhere specific to be — drifting in and out of shops, sampling things, doubling back when something caught their attention. Ivel tried on more clothes than he would later admit to. They ate more food than was strictly reasonable. The city bloomed around them, full and warm and entirely removed from anything as grim as the histories he had been reading about the day before.
Eventually they found a bench and sat.
The capital spread out before them — busy, bright, the kind of place that seemed to exist in permanent celebration of its own existence. It was hard, sitting here, to believe that wars were being fought somewhere beyond its edges. Hard to believe they had ever been fought anywhere near it.
"Father — when does the ball begin?"
"In about a week."
Ivel frowned.
"Why did we come so early, then?"
Leom considered this for a moment with what appeared to be complete sincerity.
"To put it simply — I missed my friends."
Ivel looked at him.
"Until now I didn't know you had friends."
Leom placed a hand over his heart.
"Ouch."
"Well. At least I've met them now." Ivel paused. "I also met Vas of Night."
"Ah."
Ivel then added on.
"He drinks a great deal of wine."
Leom chuckled softly.
"Yes, that's Vas. He wasn't always like that." A beat. "But he's a good person. That part hasn't changed."
"It seems so." Ivel looked out at the street. "I was thinking of entering the tournament."
Leom turned toward him.
"Vas told you about it, I assume."
Ivel looked at him sharply.
"How did you know that?"
"He takes an interest in powerful young people," Leom said, without particular surprise. "My guess is he wanted to see more of what you're capable of. That isn't a bad thing — it's actually quite good. I think you could benefit from being exposed to different styles."
Ivel considered that.
"Are you saying that old man wants to teach me?"
"Knowing him — most likely, yes."
"You sell yourself short, father. Whatever he could teach me, your training got me through a nightcrawler already, and I bet I could wipe the floor with those royal's."
Leom smiled at that — genuinely, though he shook his head.
"Don't underestimate the other competitors. Some of them will be formidable. The royal families train their children seriously."
"I know," Ivel said.
He didn't sound particularly concerned.
The afternoon light had gone gold around them, the capital beginning its slow exhale toward evening, and they sat together on the bench a while longer without needing to say anything more.