Liam looked at Ollie for a long moment, taking in the way the fabric pulled across Ollie's shoulders and the way the seams strained where a scrawny kitchen boy's frame had been replaced by the lean, hard muscle of a well-trained knight.
It was easy to forget, Liam realized, that it hadn't been that long since Cypress Knight had been a common kitchen boy. The events that had reforged the young man had been nothing less than extraordinary, and, for a portion of those events, Ollie and Liam had been enemies on opposite sides of a battlefield.
They might never have met each other in battle, but much of the refugee crisis that Ollie had spent his summer struggling against had been the result of Liam's campaign against the outlying Eldritch villages. Ollie's strength came, in part, from refusing to succumb to the weight of the tragedies Liam had created over the summer.
