After the heavy conversation with their aunt, both Dawnveil siblings retired to their cabin to call it a day.
Arlienne lay in her bed with her eyes open, turning the witch island over in her mind from different angles the way you turn something under a light to see what it reveals.
Her expression in the dark was the one she wore when something had caught in her like a hook and she had stopped trying to remove it.
Emerion was asleep before his head finished meeting the pillow.
He woke to the rhythmic creaking of the ship's hull and the distant cries of gulls. Sunlight filtered through the porthole, dancing on the mocha colored floorboards. He glanced toward the other bed, only to find it neatly made and empty. Arlienne was already off somewhere.
He lay there for a moment staring at the ceiling. His mind drifted back to the clash with Anathema the burns, the tears, the way the boy had stood in front of his guards with his arms spread. For a split second he considered going to check on him.
Then he thought about how that conversation would go and dismissed the idea as too risky and probably too unwelcome.
His stomach resolved the question by making its own position extremely clear.
He hadn't eaten since yesterday morning. The exhaustion had covered for it temporarily but that coverage had now expired.
He sat up, found his coin purse and weighed it in his hand. It felt solid. He had no real sense of what things cost out here he had spent his entire life in a house where other people handled that but solid seemed like enough.
He tucked it into his belt and followed the smell of baked bread and roasted meat down the corridor.
I really should thank Aunt Seraphyne properly too, he thought, walking. Yesterday was such a blur, and the conversation turned into a battlefield of its own thanks to Arlienne and Nyxelle's bickering.
He was still thinking about this when he turned the corner.
The small figure came from the opposite direction at speed. Neither of them had time to do anything useful. The impact was soft. The floor was not.
The boy sat up rubbing his head with the expression of someone who has determined that this is someone else's fault and intends to communicate that clearly.
Emerion looked down at him.
The same boy from yesterday. The one who had tried to stab him. Sitting on the floor with his hair askew and his cheeks already puffing up with the indignation of a child who has made a decision about blame.
I caused this, Emerion thought. Not the collision everything else. The mob. The father. The broken livelihood. He had gone in without understanding the full picture and called it justice.
The boy scrambled to his feet and looked up at him.
"You should look where you're going, you know," the boy huffed, puffing out his cheeks in a pout. "It seems you really like getting into other people's business."
Emerion bit the inside of his cheek.
"Hey! What are you laughing at?" the boy demanded, his face turning red.
"Nothing," Emerion said, which was not entirely true. He composed himself. "Well, at least you're okay."
He reached out just a pat on the head, the most basic gesture of reassurance and the boy recoiled instantly, eyes narrowing.
Emerion's hand hung in the air for a moment before he lowered it.
"You saved me, but that doesn't mean I've forgotten what you did," the boy said, his expression twisting into a scowl.
Emerion let out a long, weary sigh.
"I'll admit, perhaps I didn't fully understand your situation," he said, keeping his voice calm. "But it is a fact that your father was scamming people. I have nothing against you personally."
The boy's reaction was immediate and pained.
"So what if-- what if it was a scam? You've never been in our position! You don't know what we've gone through! Mommy is in a deep mana sleep, and normal jobs weren't paying enough after Father lost his position as a ship's captain!"
He looked down at the floor, his small voice shaking with the effort of holding back tears. Emerion felt a sickening mix of pity and genuine guilt settle in his chest.
"I see..." was all he could manage.
"You 'see,' huh?" the boy spat, a few tears finally escaping and tracing wet paths down his cheeks.
"You probably just see my father as a criminal. But before he lost his job, we were happy. I had toys, I had friends, we had different dishes on the table every night... but everything shattered once the wars broke out. The commercial ships started losing money, the owners fired everyone... and my father was one of them."
Emerion listened in silence. The boy couldn't have been older than eight, yet the weight of what he was saying carried a maturity that felt unnatural. Emerion compared this boy to his own eight year old self worrying about storybooks and whether he was allowed outside and found his younger self lacking by a considerable distance.
His circumstances forced him to grow up, Emerion thought, watching the boy's shoulders tremble.
"After that... Mother went into a mana sleep. No one knows when she'll wake up. Father knew it was dishonorable to lie about magic, but it was the only way to get money quickly... I thought things would be okay again... but you ruined it," the boy whispered.
He didn't shout. The quiet of it made it worse.
Emerion looked at his coin purse.
He took it out without fully deciding to. He stepped forward and pressed the heavy leather bag into the boy's small hands.
"Take it," Emerion said firmly.
The boy froze. Looked at the purse. His fingers twitched but didn't close around it.
"Don't think too much about it," Emerion added, his voice a little awkward in the unfamiliar territory of this. "Think of it as my way of saying I'm sorry."
The boy hesitantly opened the drawstrings. His eyes grew impossibly wide as the sunlight caught the glint of metal inside.
"W-what... how do you have this much money?" the boy asked, staring at Emerion as if he were a ghost.
Emerion realized he might have overdone it. He had no real concept of money's value outside the estate that had always been someone else's concern.
"Is it... a lot?" Emerion asked.
"It's more than fifty gold coins!" the boy gasped. "Are you some kind of noble?"
Emerion panicked internally and kept his face still.
"Look, just... don't go around telling people about this, okay? Take the money. It can provide decent medical care for your mother, at the very least. I just want to help you."
He placed his hands on the boy's shoulders, grounding him. The boy searched Emerion's eyes and found only a sincere, painful honesty. Slowly, he nodded.
Emerion felt a small weight lift from his conscience.
"With this... Mother can get the best healers," the boy said, his voice finally losing its edge of steel. "And it will pay for Father's medical bills here on the ship, too."
Emerion blinked. "Your father? What happened to him?"
"The day you did your 'heroic work,' he got beaten half to death by the angry mob," the boy said, with a flash of his old sarcasm. "He's been taking pain relievers ever since."
Emerion winced. "Right. I'm sorry." He paused. "Can we... can we at least be normal now? I realized I don't even know your name."
The boy looked away, feigning a lack of interest, though he didn't pull back this time.
"Shin. That's my name. What's yours?"
"Emerion. Just Emerion," he replied with a warm smile.
"I'll see you around then. Bye," Shin said, turning and scurrying away down the hall, clutching the purse to his chest like it might evaporate if he held it loosely.
Emerion watched him go.
Then the silence of the empty corridor arrived, and with it the full realization that he had just given away every single coin he owned. He was on a ship in the middle of the ocean with no money, a hungry stomach, and a sister somewhere on board who was going to find this extremely funny.
He went to find her.
Down the corridor, past two turns and a flight of stairs, the temporary medical room was small and plain a clean bed, a chair, the quiet of a space set aside for recovery. The ship's captain had given it over at Seraphyne's request and she had made it sufficient.
Anathema sat on the bed and looked at his hands.
Not at the burns or the mana cuts mapping themselves in thin jagged lines across his skin. Just at his hands the way you look at something when you're not really seeing it, when your eyes have found somewhere to rest while your mind goes somewhere else.
The door opened.
"My Lord, you have woken up," Ryuuken said, taking his position on the left side of the bed. His voice carried the particular careful quality it got when he was worried and trying not to show it.
"The healer said you need some high-nutrient food," Rui added from the right, holding a tray steak, broccoli, spinach, berries, citrus, a small bowl of mixed nuts. He set it on the side table with precise care.
Anathema looked at the tray.
Looked away.
"I don't want to eat. You can eat it if you want," he said, returning his gaze to his hands.
"But the healer said you need it," Ryuuken tried, his concern edging into his voice despite his efforts.
"I told you I don't want to eat!" Anathema's eyes flashed as he turned the glare on Ryuuken.
Ryuuken closed his mouth.
"My, my, you sure are resistant about the food. But as a healer, I can't grant your request, even if you are a noble."
The voice came from slightly to Anathema's left soft, firm, unhurried. All three of them turned.
Seraphyne sat in the chair beside the bed. Had been sitting there, apparently, for some time. She looked at Anathema with the calm attentiveness of someone who has been watching and waiting and has now decided the waiting is finished.
Anathema's eyes moved over her and then turned briefly inward.
I didn't sense her mana. She was sitting three feet away the entire time and I missed it completely. The thought landed with its own specific weight. First I lose to that peasant noble or not, that's debatable and now I can't even sense a healer sitting beside me. I need more practice. Every moment lately is a reminder of how far I still have to go.
He was still working through this when Seraphyne stood, lifted the tray from Rui's hands without asking, settled back into her chair, loaded a spoon, and delivered it to Anathema's mouth with the calm efficiency of someone who has made a decision and is executing it.
He chewed.
Registered that he was chewing.
Registered how hungry he actually was.
His face went red.
"I told you I don't want to eat, woman! You should obey nobility or lose your head," Mui said, trying to reclaim some ground despite having visibly already lost it.
Seraphyne's expression shifted a mild frown passing through on its way to something else. Then she reached over and smacked him lightly on the back of the head.
The sound it made was very small.
The effect on Ryuuken and Rui was not. Both of them went completely still with the expressions of people whose entire understanding of how the world works has just been lightly challenged.
Nobody touched their lord. Nobody moved toward their lord without permission. The concept had simply never come up because it had never been necessary to establish it as a rule.
"You are my patient right now. So if you want to recover quickly, you will have to obey my orders. Besides, I don't care if you are nobility or commoner. In my eyes, every patient is equal. You are just as stubborn as my daughter," Seraphyne sighed, loading another spoon and delivering it with the same unhurried efficiency as the first.
This time Anathema chewed without complaint.
Her words were sitting in him in a way he didn't know what to do with. She was feeding him without a trace of disgust. Without hesitation. Without the performance of tolerance that people sometimes put on when they were being watched. She was simply doing it the way you do something that doesn't require commentary.
He didn't know how to react to that.
"How... long will it take me to recover?" he asked, his voice quieter now, the sharpness gone out of it.
Seraphyne paused, running an honest calculation behind her eyes.
"You might have to live with permanent burn marks. And as for the scars on your body, they will need a week or two if you don't push yourself much," she said thoughtfully.
"That's impossible... I am the Lord of a House. I can't just rest for a week. I have a meeting with another noble house leader at Miravale Island." Anathema ran his hand through his long raven hair in frustration. He clenched his fist against the bedsheet. The burns made the motion uncomfortable and he didn't let it show. "That peasant... damn his sister too..."
The anger was pointed more inward than outward. He knew it. Being beaten by someone without a staff, someone he had assessed and dismissed within thirty seconds of seeing him that sat in him like a stone he couldn't put down.
"I am sorry on the behalf of my nephew. Dawnveil family customs and mindset have taken a toll on him," Seraphyne said gently.
The room went still.
Not the ordinary still of a quiet space. The still of three people whose bodies have registered something before their minds have finished processing it.
Ryuuken's head came up slowly.
"Y-you... you said Dawnveil?" His voice came out careful and slightly unsteady, like a man testing ice he isn't sure will hold.
"Yes," Seraphyne said simply.
Rui had started shaking. Quietly, barely visibly, but shaking.
Anathema felt cold sweat on his forehead.
I suspected by their ability and skills that they must be noble. But Dawnveil.
He looked at the woman sitting beside him. She had called the silver haired boy her nephew, which meant they were family. The same family. He looked at her face properly the bone structure, the quality of the eyes, something in the way she held herself that was different in every surface detail and recognizable underneath all of them.
He thought about the night in the valley. The silver hair. The blue flames following her like they had chosen her. The woman who had walked through a graveyard she had made and found nothing in it that required a change of expression.
He looked at the food tray.
"W-why... are you helping me then? Is this food poison?" Anathema asked, trying to find some solid ground and not entirely succeeding.
Seraphyne laughed.
It came out full and genuine warm and completely unperformative, the laugh of someone who has just heard something that genuinely surprised them. Ryuuken blinked. Rui's shaking stopped for a moment, replaced by simple confusion.
"Poison? What makes you say that? Yes, my daughter has a hobby of experimenting with poison, but this food has no poison at all. It's a healer's duty to look after the injured, it's more of a duty than a reason," Seraphyne said calmly.
A beat of silence.
Then Ryuuken and Rui looked at each other.
My daughter has a hobby of experimenting with poison sat in the air between them, unaddressed, while Seraphyne waited with the patience of someone who has said something perfectly reasonable.
Anathema wasn't listening to any of that. His mind had gone somewhere else entirely.
The silver haired boy floating in the moonlight above a cage of blue fire. The boy stepping in front of Anathema's sword to protect a child he had no obligation toward. The same boy, apparently, who was the nephew of the woman who had spent the night in this room watching over his wounds without being asked.
He thought about the valley. About Aurelith walking away and leaving Leon and Mui asleep in the snow instead of dead.
He had never understood that choice. Had turned it over many times across nine years and never found an answer that satisfied him.
He looked at Seraphyne.
He said nothing.
She looked back at him with the same calm warmth she had worn throughout not pushing, not waiting for anything in particular. Just present.
She stood and set the remaining food on the side table within reach.
"I will leave the food here. I will be nearby if you need something," she said.
She left quietly. The door clicked shut behind her.
The three boys sat in the silence she left in the room.
They didn't look at each other. Their eyes were open and their minds were somewhere far away, each of them turning the same word over and finding a different weight attached to it depending on which memories they were carrying it into.
Dawnveil.