He came out the other side standing close enough to Autumnshade's own gates that for one disoriented second he thought the Maelstrom had thrown him back to exactly where he'd started. Then he actually looked at what was in front of him, and the second understanding landed a great deal harder than the first: the outer wall had been patched in three different kinds of stone, none of them matching, the training yard he remembered was half given over to raised vegetable beds planted in the kind of hurried, uneven rows nobody plants unless they've stopped expecting help to arrive from anywhere else, and a hand-lettered sign nailed crooked to the gatepost rationed water by the household rather than by the person. Nothing here had been built by people expecting him back within a season.
Andrea reached him first, crossing the room at a run he'd never once seen from her before, and the hug she pulled him into knocked the breath clean out of him. Her hair had grown past her shoulders, longer than he'd ever seen it, and a thin, pale scar now ran along her jaw that hadn't been there the last time he'd looked at her closely enough to notice.
"Remus. You're alive."
"I never doubted it for a second," Annabelle said, though the wet shine in her eyes told a different story than her voice did, and the ledger still clutched in one hand was a book Remus didn't recognize, its spine already cracked soft from use.
"What's happened," Remus asked, taking in the rest of the room properly for the first time: King Belsarius, older than the boy he remembered by a good deal more than a season should have allowed, standing rather than seated; Pompey, grey with worry in a way Remus had never once seen from him; Tacitus, armored, tense, a healed-over wound scarred crooked along one forearm that Remus didn't remember him carrying, watching the door behind Remus more than he was watching Remus himself.
"You've been gone a full year," King Belsarius said, and something in the flat weight of the sentence told Remus the boy had rehearsed saying it, dreading the moment he'd actually have to. "The Northlands fell first. Oldtown has fallen since. I don't know how much longer we have before they come looking for me here, and I owe you an apology for every way I mistreated you before any of this started."
The floor didn't move, but something behind Remus's own sternum did, a lurch he felt in his hands before his mind had finished the arithmetic. A year. Three hundred and some mornings he hadn't been present for, each one apparently spent by the people standing in this room learning to live without him rather than waiting on him to come back. He looked at Andrea's longer hair and her new scar and understood, all at once and far too late to do anything useful with the understanding, that both had been grown and earned on some night he hadn't been there to stand beside her for. He looked at the cracked spine of Annabelle's unfamiliar ledger and understood the same thing about the Ember Works, about however many decisions she'd had to make alone that she'd have rather argued through with him first, given any choice in the matter at all. He looked at the crooked scar on Tacitus's forearm and understood it about whatever fight had left it there.
"A year," he said out loud, mostly to test whether saying it made it feel any more real than simply thinking it had. It didn't. "Say that again. Slower."
"A year," Belsarius said again, quieter this time, and looked, for just that one moment, exactly as young as he actually was.
A guard burst through the far door before he could answer, breathless. "They're here. The Nightforged."
"Search," Remus said, already moving.
Skill Activated: Search.
Skill Upgraded: Search, Level 2. Now: Detection.
Nightforged Marauders Detected.
Through the compound's outer windows he could see them crossing the training yard in a loose, unhurried line, tall, grey-skinned, moving with a fluid, dancer's grace that made every one of their strides look rehearsed, dark blades already drawn.
"There are too many," Remus said. "We can't hold this room."
"They're watching the main gate," King Belsarius said, voice tight. "Wherever we go, they'll follow."
"I have a plan," Tacitus said, and something in the flat, settled certainty of it cut through the room's rising panic all at once.
He laid it out fast: a hidden escape tunnel beneath the workshop floor, wide enough for the group to reach the treeline unseen, bought only if something loud enough held the Nightforged's attention at the front of the compound for as long as it took everyone else to disappear.
"I'll need the constructs," Tacitus said, and something in the way he said it told Remus, before the man finished the sentence, exactly which three he meant.
Remus hesitated, the old itch flaring worse than it ever had before. "Take all of them. Every construct in my inventory, not just the three."
"The others aren't built for this," Tacitus said. "These three are. Let them do the job you built them for, and get everyone else out through that tunnel while there's still time to use it."
Item Retrieved from inventory: Stone Guardian.
Item Retrieved from inventory: Wind Archer.
Item Retrieved from inventory: Scorch Swordsman.
Tacitus armed himself at the door, and something in the old, upright set of his shoulders made him look, for one unguarded second, twenty years younger than the tired officer who'd once told Remus, in a cold hearth's dying light, that this kingdom needed a different bloodline on its throne.
"Go," he said. "All of you. Now."
He didn't wait to see whether they obeyed. He'd already turned to face the door, shoulders set the exact way Remus remembered him setting them once at a border fortress years earlier, and for the half-second before Andrea's grip pulled Remus around the tunnel's first bend, that was the last real look at him anyone would get: weight balanced, blade low, not a man waiting to die so much as a man about to become a serious inconvenience to whoever was coming through that door next. Some small, disciplined part of him, running through the same checklist it had run through before every fight of his career, noted with plain, private satisfaction that the last of them were already clear before the first blade ever reached him.
They went. Remus felt Andrea's hand close hard around his wrist, dragging him toward the tunnel entrance, and it took every ounce of self-control he had left not to plant his feet and refuse to move another step.
The sounds started before they'd gone twenty feet down the tunnel: Scorch Swordsman's blade meeting steel with a shriek of metal on metal, Wind Archer's bowstring loosing in a rapid, unbroken rhythm, Stone Guardian's fists landing with a sound like a building coming down one floor at a time. Then, underneath all of it, Tacitus's own voice, shouting orders, alive, fighting, holding the line exactly as promised.
Remus stopped halfway down the tunnel.
"Remus, keep moving," Annabelle said, urgent, from somewhere ahead of him in the dark.
"I can go back," he said, already turning, charcoal already half out from behind his ear. "I can retrieve every remaining construct in my inventory and hold the door from the other side. Buy him more time."
"You can't," Andrea said, grabbing his shoulder hard enough to spin him fully around. "Listen to yourself. You'd be running back into a fight you can't personally survive, to save a man who told you, to your face, to keep everyone else moving instead. That's not bravery, Remus. That's you refusing to let anyone else carry a risk you didn't personally sign off on first."
He knew, some cold, clear part of his own mind knew, that she was entirely right, and knowing it did nothing at all to loosen the grip his own legs had on the idea of turning around anyway.
"He's out there dying because of a plan I let him make," Remus said, voice cracking in a way he hadn't heard from himself since the night on Earth he'd watched his own blood on a factory floor go the wrong color under bad lighting.
"He's out there dying because he chose to be," Annabelle said, softer now, one hand finding his other shoulder. "The same way you'd choose it, if the roles were reversed and somebody tried to stop you. Don't take that choice away from him now just because it's unbearable to stand here and let it happen."
The sounds behind them changed, thinned, one voice fewer shouting orders than there had been a moment before, and then, all at once, silence, heavier and more total than any of the noise that had come before it.
Remus didn't move for a long moment after that. Nobody in the tunnel tried to make him.
"He's gone," Remus said, finally, and something in his own chest cracked open in a way he hadn't let it crack in either of his two lives, not for his real father, not for Gregory's leaving, not even for the bullet that had ended the first one. He didn't cry, exactly. He simply stood there, in the dark, letting the weight of it move through him without immediately reaching for a plan to manage it, for the first time in longer than he could easily remember.
"He knew what he was choosing," Pompey said, quietly, from further up the tunnel. "Better than most men ever get the chance to know it. That's worth something, even now."
"It doesn't feel like it's worth anything right now," Remus said.
"No," Pompey agreed. "It rarely does, on the day itself."
They emerged into the tree line an hour later, into the last grey light before full dark, and found, waiting at the edge of the clearing with an expression that suggested she'd already talked herself out of leaving twice, a hooded figure Remus hadn't expected to see again.
Rhaeya lowered her hood the moment she recognized him, and something in her wary, guarded face cracked open by a visible fraction.
"You're alive," she said. "I wasn't sure you would be."
"You weren't sure, but you came anyway," Remus said.
"I came for the blade," she said, and then, seeing his face, added, more honestly, "and then I heard what was happening here, and I couldn't make myself leave before I knew which way it went." She held his gaze a moment longer than strictly necessary. "My father's territory fell before yours did. I don't have anywhere else left to go looking useful right now."
Before Remus could answer that properly, a ragged column of travelers broke from the treeline further along the ridge, exhausted, several visibly wounded, moving with the particular stagger of people who'd been running for longer than their bodies wanted to allow. At the front of them, blood dried along one temple, a familiar face resolved out of the dusk.
"Gregory," Remus said, and felt something in his chest lift and twist at once.
His brother crossed the last of the distance between them at something close to a run, pulling Remus into a hard, one-armed embrace that nearly knocked them both off their feet.
"We got cut off from the main column three days ago," Gregory said, breathless, letting go just far enough to look Remus properly in the face. "The Blue Angels scattered when Oldtown fell. I've been leading whoever I could gather since, trying to find anywhere south of the fighting that wasn't already burning."
"You found it," Remus said. "Barely."
"I need you to actually hear this next part instead of just nodding along the way you used to," Gregory said, something raw slipping through the exhaustion in his voice. "I left because I needed to prove I could survive something without you standing behind me solving it first. I still believe that was the right call for me. But I've spent this whole year hearing your name from every refugee column I crossed, and not one word of it from you directly, and I want you to know that stung a great deal more than I expected it to. You could have written. You never once did."
Remus felt the old, practiced deflection rise automatically to the back of his throat, the same one he'd used on this exact subject a hundred times in his own head, and made himself, deliberately, not reach for it.
"You're right," he said instead. "I told myself I was giving you space because you asked for it. Some of that was true. The rest of it was easier than admitting I didn't know what to say to you that wasn't either an apology or a complaint, so I said nothing at all instead, the same way I've said nothing at all to half the people who've ever mattered to me. I'm sorry. That's not something I say often enough to have gotten any better at saying it."
Gregory studied him a long moment, some of the old wariness between them easing by a visible fraction. "That's the most honest thing you've ever said to me," he said. "Try to make a habit of it. We're not finished having this conversation. But it's a start."
"It's a start," Remus agreed, and found, underneath the grief still sitting raw in his chest, a small, unfamiliar warmth that had nothing to do with victory and everything to do with simply being told the truth by someone who'd earned the right to say it to his face.
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