"Rhys. Rhys, stay with me, look at me, not at him, look at me!..."
Mira Calloway's voice cut through the gray fog before her face did, and when the world finally swam back into focus, she was kneeling in front of him with both hands locked around his, gripping hard enough to hurt. Someone's coat had been thrown over his shoulders, he didn't remember whose, didn't remember anyone putting it there.
Behind her, two of the village elders stood over Ren's body with the particular stillness of people who'd run out of anything useful to do and hadn't yet found the nerve to leave.
"He's dead." Rhys's own voice came out cracked, hoarse, like it had been left out in the cold overnight. "Ren's dead, Mira."
"I know." Her grip tightened further, her hazel eyes wide with a fear he'd never once seen on her in seventeen years of scraped knees and small, ordinary disasters. "I know, I'm so sorry, I know. But Rhys, listen, there's something else, and I need you to hear it from me before you hear it from anyone else in this village."
"What."
She hesitated, and the hesitation alone told him something else was about to fall out from under him, one more piece of ground he wasn't ready to lose.
"Your hands." Her voice dropped lower, like she didn't want the elders to catch it. "Rhys, look at your hands."
He looked down, and for a moment couldn't make sense of what he was seeing, the way you can't make sense of a familiar word repeated too many times in a row. The tremor from the night before hadn't faded. If anything it had settled into something steadier and worse, a constant, fine shiver running through both hands that had nothing to do with cold or grief. And along his forearms, faint but unmistakable now in the gray morning light, the marks he'd half convinced himself he'd imagined were still there. Silver-white, branching like frost across glass, like something had been carved into him and then almost, but not quite, erased.
"It happened when you screamed," Mira said quietly. "Right before you went down. The whole yard, it just, it went wrong for a second. Like the world flinched and forgot to flinch back all the way. I've never seen anything like it in my life, and neither has anyone else here. And Rhys, they're already talking. I heard them on my way over. They're already asking what you are."
What you are. Not who. What.
Rhys stared down at the marks on his own skin, at the dried blood still crusted dark under his fingernails, at the shape of Ren's body under the elders' borrowed blanket a few feet away, and felt something in him go very cold and very still, the same stillness he'd watched Ren wear a thousand times without ever once understanding it.
You are the last of it, Rhys. The very last.
He didn't know yet what that meant, not really. He didn't know about the Twelve Houses, or the treaty that carved up half a continent between them, or the bloodline that had been erased so thoroughly it had become a rumor even to the people who'd erased it. He knew only that Ren was dead, that something in him had broken open and hadn't closed back up, and that Hollowmere, the one place small and forgettable enough to have kept him safe for seventeen years, wasn't safe anymore. Not for him. And maybe, if he stayed, not for anyone standing too close to him either.
"Rhys." One of the elders had finally found his voice, an old man named Callum who'd known Rhys since before he could walk, and even now there was something careful in the way he said it, something that hadn't been there yesterday. "We need to talk about what happens now. About what's safe. For the village."
"For the village," Rhys repeated. "Not for me."
Callum didn't answer that, and the silence answered it for him.
Mira's hand tightened around his again, fierce and immediate, like she could hold the moment together through sheer refusal to let go. "He didn't do anything. Whatever that was, whoever that man was, Ren protected him, and you all watched him do it, and now you want to talk about what's safe—"
"Mira." Rhys said her name softly, and she stopped, chest heaving, furious on his behalf in a way he didn't fully deserve and would never forget. "It's alright."
"It is not alright."
"No." He looked past her, at Ren's still form, at the blood soaked into ground he'd played on as a child, at Callum's careful, frightened eyes, and felt the last of the previous night's shock finally burn away, leaving something harder and clearer underneath. "It isn't. But it will be my problem to fix, not theirs."
He got to his feet slowly, legs unsteady, the marks along his arms aching faintly with the movement, and looked at the small, familiar crowd that had gathered at the edge of the yard, faces he'd known his whole life, all of them keeping a careful, new kind of distance.
"I'll bury him," Rhys said, and his voice, to his own surprise, came out steady. "And then I'll leave. You won't have to talk about what's safe. I'll make the decision easy for you."
Nobody argued.
That, more than anything else that terrible morning, was the moment it truly sank in, standing in his own yard surrounded by people who'd known him his entire life and watching every one of them, even Mira, even Callum, take one small, careful step back.