Part Sixteen — Learning to Walk Again

　Nobody talked much for the first few days after the clearing.

　That wasn't unusual, given what had happened, but I noticed it settling into something heavier than shock — the particular quiet of people who didn't quite know how to be around each other after seeing something they couldn't take back.

　Doran healed slower than either of us expected, the wound deeper than it had first looked, and I spent those days doing the only useful thing I could think to do: sitting with him, changing bandages, saying very little, because I didn't trust myself yet to say the right things.

I don't remember what I did to them. I remember what it felt like right before, and right after, and nothing at all in between. I don't know how to talk about that. I'm not sure I want to yet.

　Fenrik, for his part, didn't ask again. He just started doing small things — gathering extra firewood without being told, taking the first watch every night without complaint, the kind of quiet care that doesn't announce itself as care at all.

I think we're all just handling it the only way we know how. Doing something with our hands instead of talking about the thing we can't stop thinking about.

　It took the better part of two weeks before something like normal conversation crept back in, and even then it started small — a joke about Doran's cooking, a complaint about the weather, nothing that touched the clearing directly.

　I didn't push it. None of us did.

　Some things need the slow route back.

　By the time Doran could hold a sword properly again, we'd more or less settled into an understanding, unspoken but real: whatever had happened out there, it wasn't going to be the thing that defined the three of us.

　It would sit with us.

　It wouldn't run the show.

　"You're overthinking your guard again," Doran told me, first real sparring session back, tapping my ribs lightly with the flat of his blade to make the point. "Same mistake as always."

Good. Good, this is good. This is normal. I'll take normal.

　"Some things never change," I said, resetting my stance.

　"Lucky for you. I'd hate to run out of things to correct."

　The next stretch of time is hard to describe as any one thing, because it wasn't.

　It was years, in the end — I want to be honest about that, because it would be easy to make it sound like a single season, and it wasn't. It was years of ordinary life stacked on top of each other until I looked up one day and realized how much distance had actually passed.

　We settled, eventually, into a rough circuit — a handful of towns we returned to on a loose rotation, work when we needed coin, training when we didn't, Fenrik picking up odd jobs that suited a man good with his hands and better with a blade, Doran teaching me increasingly less like a drill instructor and increasingly like an actual friend correcting an actual friend.

　My control got better.

　Not fast — nothing about my progress ever felt fast — but steady, the kind of improvement you only notice in hindsight, comparing who you are now to who you were a year back.

　I could hold a sustained anti-mana working for longer. I could shape it more precisely. I still had no real idea what my ceiling looked like, and some nights that uncertainty kept me up longer than it should have.

I got lucky in that clearing. Whatever came out of me killed the right people, this time. I don't actually know that it always will. I don't know what happens if I lose that thread again and there isn't a clean line between "the people trying to hurt us" and everyone else nearby.

I don't like not knowing that. I don't know how to find out safely, either.

　I never said that thought out loud.

　Some worries, I decided, were mine to carry quietly.

　Fenrik's fighting style sharpened up considerably over those years — less scrappy survival instinct, more actual technique, courtesy of Doran's patient, unglamorous drilling.

　He took to teasing me about my own slow progress with a straight face that never quite hid how proud he actually was watching me improve.

　"You're getting better," he told me once, watching me finish a control exercise that hadn't singed anything nearby for the first time in a week. "Still terrible. But better."

　"High praise."

　"I contain multitudes," he said, deadpan, throwing my own line back at me, and I laughed harder at that than the joke probably deserved.

Yeah. This is what I wanted, back in that town with the second bowl of stew. Not the mountain back. Just — this. People who tease you because they actually care whether you improve.

　There were quiet chapters in those years too — stretches where nothing happened worth telling anyone about.

　A whole month once, spent doing nothing more dramatic than helping a village repair storm damage to its grain stores in exchange for a warm bed and better food than we'd had in weeks.

　Doran taught me to properly cook something that wasn't burned.

　Fenrik won, and then immediately lost, an embarrassing amount of coin gambling with the local guardsmen.

　Nothing about those weeks moved any plot forward, if you'll forgive the strange way of putting it.

　They were just good.

　I've come to think, since, that the good stretches matter exactly as much as the dangerous ones — maybe more, in the end, because they're the ones you actually miss.

　By the time I turned fourteen — a fact I only really registered because Doran mentioned it, offhand, over a fire one evening, having apparently kept better track of the date than I had — the three of us had become something I didn't have a clean word for.

　Not blood family.

　Not exactly friends either, not in the small, casual sense that word usually means.

　Something steadier than both.

Whatever this is, I'd fight to keep it. I already have, once. I think some part of me already knows I'd do it again, without hesitating, if it ever came to that.

　I didn't know yet how soon I'd be tested on that thought.

Filing that one away too, I suppose. Wish I didn't have to.