The town of Mirvel was, by most accounts, unremarkable.
It sat at the base of the mountain range like something that had simply forgotten to leave — a collection of stone buildings, two muddy streets, a well in the center square that leaned slightly to the left, and approximately forty residents who all seemed to know each other's business and preferred it that way.
To Kael, it was the most extraordinary place he had ever seen.
He stood at the entrance for a long moment, taking it in.
There were *rooftops*. Multiple of them. In a row. With chimneys. He had seen rooftops before — Stonerest had rooftops — but these were *different* rooftops, lower and wider and somehow more confident about being rooftops, and there were *signs* hanging above doorways with pictures on them, and somewhere nearby something was being fried in oil and it smelled like the best decision anyone had ever made.
He counted the buildings.
Fourteen.
Fourteen entire buildings.
*This is enormous*, he thought.
A woman walking past with a basket of vegetables glanced at him standing motionless at the town entrance, staring at a row of perfectly ordinary buildings with an expression usually reserved for religious experiences.
She walked faster.
---
The inn was called The Resting Boot, which Kael found immediately logical. His boots needed resting. He needed resting. The name felt personally addressed to him.
Inside, it was warm and low-ceilinged and smelled of woodsmoke and something hearty simmering somewhere in the back. Six or seven people sat at rough wooden tables, eating and talking in the easy way of people who had nowhere urgent to be.
Kael stood in the doorway and absorbed this.
*People*, he thought. *Just. Sitting there.*
He had met people before. Stonerest had people. But these were *different* people — strangers, all of them, with different faces and different clothes and different ways of holding their spoons, and not one of them knew his name or had watched him fall out of the elm tree when he was nine.
It was deeply strange and he found he liked it enormously.
He picked a table near the wall, set down his bag — still magnificently unfolded, Soli — and had just begun to read the small chalkboard menu when the door opened behind him.
---
The boy who walked in was about his age, perhaps a year older, with sharp features, dark hair that had been aggressively styled into something that suggested effort, and the particular posture of someone who was absolutely certain they were about to make an impression.
He paused in the doorway.
He looked around the room.
Then, in a voice pitched precisely loud enough for everyone to hear, he said:
"I am Aldric Vane."
Silence.
A dog scratched itself under one of the tables.
"Of the *Vane* family," Aldric added, with the emphasis of someone producing an ace from their sleeve.
More silence.
The dog yawned.
Aldric's posture did not waver. He crossed to the bar with the measured stride of someone who had practiced it, placed both hands on the counter, and addressed the innkeeper — a broad woman with the expression of someone who had seen everything twice — with the gravity of a man conducting important negotiations.
"I require your finest room," he said. "I've had a long journey. The road from the eastern reaches is particularly unforgiving at this time of year, as I'm sure you're aware."
"We have two rooms," the innkeeper said. "One has a window. That one's twelve copper."
"I'll take—" Aldric paused. Something moved behind his eyes — a rapid, almost invisible calculation. "I'll take the other one."
"Eight copper."
Another pause.
"...Six?"
The innkeeper looked at him for a long moment.
"Eight copper," she said again, with the serene finality of someone who had not changed their price in twenty years and did not intend to start.
Aldric straightened. "Fine. Eight copper. That's—" He reached into his coin purse. Counted. His expression remained perfectly composed in the way that suggested considerable practice. "That is completely acceptable and I was simply testing your resolve. Which is admirable. You should know that."
The innkeeper took his coins without comment.
Kael, who had watched all of this with his chin resting on his hand, found that he was smiling.
---
Aldric chose the table next to his.
This was, Kael suspected, because it was the only other empty table, but Aldric sat down with the air of someone who had made a deliberate and considered selection.
For a while they ate in silence — Kael with a bowl of something thick and warm that cost four copper and was worth considerably more, Aldric with the focused intensity of someone who had not eaten since morning but was determined not to show it.
It was Kael who spoke first.
"The Vane family," he said. "Where are they from?"
Aldric looked up sharply. Then, reading nothing but genuine curiosity in Kael's expression, he settled back slightly.
"The northern reaches," he said. "Old family. Very established. You wouldn't necessarily have heard of us depending on where you're from."
"Stonerest," Kael said.
Aldric stared at him blankly.
"It's a village," Kael offered. "In the mountains. About a day's walk up from the crossroads with the broken sign."
"...I see." Aldric picked up his spoon. "Then no, you probably wouldn't have heard of us."
"What do they do? Your family?"
"They—" A beat. Small. Almost nothing. "Various things. Commerce. Influence. The usual."
Kael nodded thoughtfully. He had no reference for what *the usual* might mean in this context, but it seemed impolite to say so.
"I'm Kael," he said instead, and offered his hand across the gap between their tables.
Aldric looked at the hand. Then at Kael. Something in his expression shifted almost imperceptibly — like a door opening a crack.
He reached across and shook it.
"Aldric," he said. And then, after a moment, quieter: "Just Aldric is fine."
---
They were halfway through their meals when the other man came in.
He was large — not the friendly large of someone who worked outdoors, but the deliberate large of someone who had cultivated it as a professional asset. He wore a sword at his hip and the expression of someone who used it as punctuation. He swept the room once with flat eyes, found what he was looking for, and walked directly to a table in the corner where a nervous-looking merchant had been eating alone.
The room went carefully quiet in the way rooms do when everyone is pretending not to pay attention.
Kael watched the man lean over the merchant's table. Couldn't hear the words. Could see the merchant's knuckles go white around his cup.
He looked at Aldric.
Aldric was looking at the table.
"You see that?" Kael said quietly.
"I see it," Aldric said, equally quietly.
"Someone should—"
"Someone absolutely should," Aldric agreed, with the tone of someone who has fully assessed the situation and determined that *someone* should be literally anyone else in the room.
Kael looked around. The other patrons were finding their meals very interesting. The innkeeper had discovered urgent business in the back room.
He looked at the merchant, whose cup was now shaking.
He looked at the man with the sword.
He thought about Bren's voice saying *just in case* every morning for seventeen years.
He stood up.
"What," Aldric said, "are you doing."
"Someone should," Kael said simply.
"You just said you're from a mountain village."
"Yes."
"Do you even know how to—"
But Kael was already walking over.
---
What happened next was, by any reasonable measure, not a fight.
It was more of a conversation that went badly and then resolved itself in a way nobody had predicted, including Kael, who had approached with the vague intention of saying something reasonable and instead had found himself reflecting that Bren's morning exercises had apparently included, at some point, a sequence that was extremely effective when someone grabbed your collar.
He hadn't known that until just now.
The large man was sitting on the floor looking confused.
Kael was also somewhat confused.
The merchant was staring at him.
The room was very quiet.
"I," Kael said, to the room in general, "didn't entirely mean to do that."
From the table behind him, Aldric's voice floated over with the careful neutrality of someone reassessing multiple things simultaneously:
"Interesting."
---
Later, outside, sitting on the inn's front step because the large man's friends had arrived and the innkeeper had suggested — with great firmness — that everyone involved take their evening elsewhere, Kael looked up at the stars appearing one by one above Mirvel's unremarkable roofline.
Aldric sat beside him. He hadn't had to leave. He'd chosen to.
Kael found he didn't know what to make of that.
"Where are you going?" Aldric asked, after a while.
"I'm looking for my parents."
Aldric turned to look at him. "You don't know where they are?"
"No."
"Or what they look like?"
"I have a general idea."
"And you just— left? To look for them? With no information?"
"I have some information," Kael said, slightly defensive. "Bren said they're fighting bad people."
Aldric stared at him for a long moment.
"That," he said finally, "is the worst plan I have ever heard."
"Do you have a better one?"
"No. But I have resources. Connections. The Vane family has—" He stopped. Started again, quieter. "I know people. Or I know *of* people. I could be useful."
Kael looked at him.
"You want to come?"
"I want to go in the same direction," Aldric said, with great precision. "Whether that constitutes *coming* is a matter of interpretation."
The stars were coming out properly now. Somewhere in the darkness below the mountain, the world stretched on in every direction, enormous and complicated and full of things Kael had no names for yet.
He thought about the stone in his pack. Warm from his mother's hands once, now cool against his palm when he held it.
*You'll know when to use it*, she had apparently said.
He was starting to understand there was quite a lot he didn't know yet.
"Alright," he said.
"Alright?"
"You can come."
Aldric straightened slightly. "I said I wasn't—"
"You can come," Kael said again, and smiled at the stars.
Beside him, after a moment, Aldric made a sound that was almost — not quite, but almost — a laugh.