The council began before sunrise and nearly tore the family apart.
Nathan sat at the far end of the great hall, where the shattered crystal's pedestal still stood empty, and listened to adults argue about whether he should live.
Not in those words, of course. They said *containment* and *risk* and *the safety of the valley.* A great-uncle named Berrin, with a face like cracked leather, pounded the table and demanded the boy be sealed in the west chamber until the Guild could be negotiated with. Another cousin suggested giving Nathan to the examiner outright. "One life against three hundred," he said, and no one told him he was wrong quickly enough.
Aldric did not raise his voice. He simply stood, laid his sword across the table, and said, "He is my son."
The hall fell quiet.
"He is also what destroyed Hollow Sky," Berrin said bitterly. "Or his blood did."
"Then the blood is mine as well, and yours." Aldric's gaze swept the room. "If you want to hand a child to the people who hunted us for three hundred years, you will do it over my body."
"Aldric—"
"Enough." Orla's cane struck the stone once. "Seren Vael said the Great Houses will come. They are not weeks away. We must decide what we are, here and now. Do we hide again, or do we stand?"
Nobody answered. The silence stretched on, heavy and miserable, and Nathan understood something he had not before: his family was not strong enough to protect him from this. They were brave, and they loved him, and they were not strong enough.
He stood up.
"I'll leave."
Every head turned. His mother made a small broken sound.
"I'll go before they arrive," Nathan said. His voice shook, but he kept going. "If I'm here when the Great Houses come, they'll burn the valley to find me. If I'm gone, there's nothing for them to burn."
"Nathan, no," his mother whispered.
"Where would you go?" Aldric demanded. "You don't know the world. You don't know a single road."
"Then I'll learn." He met his father's eyes. "You said the blood doesn't skip. Maybe it was never supposed to hide, either."
No one spoke after that. Orla closed her eyes for a long moment, and when she opened them, there was something in them that looked almost like pride. She nodded once.
By dawn, the decision was made.
---
Nathan found Mira on the eastern wall, where they used to sit.
She didn't look at him when he sat beside her. Her braid was loose, her eyes red-rimmed. For a while they watched the mist burn off the cliffs in long gold ribbons.
"You forgot something," she said at last. "When you used it. I saw your face."
He hesitated. "Yes."
"What?"
"I don't know exactly. Something about you. A cliff, a summer." He tried to smile. "I'm sorry. It's gone."
Mira was quiet. Then, very softly, she began to speak.
"I was nine. You were eight. You said you could climb the east cliff faster than me, and I said you couldn't, and we raced." Her voice cracked on a laugh. "You got stuck halfway up and screamed for twenty minutes. I climbed up to get you and we both got stuck. Uncle Aldric had to fetch us down with a rope. We got no dessert for a week."
Nathan listened. The words sounded like a story about two strangers, sweet and distant, and he knew without being told that the feeling they described was lost. Something inside him ached anyway.
"We sat up there after," Mira said, "and you told me you'd never be scared again if I was with you." She wiped her eyes angrily. "You were an idiot."
"I was eight."
"You were an *idiot*." She turned and punched his arm, not hard. "Don't forget me, Nathan. Promise."
"I'll try."
"Not *try*."
"I promise."
She nodded, jaw clenched, and said nothing more.
---
His mother found him last, in the corridor outside his room, with a travel pack already in her arms.
She packed everything herself: dried meat, a waterskin, two spare shirts, a knife with a worn handle that had been Aldric's first blade. Her hands moved fast, as if stopping would be unbearable.
"Orla gave you something," she said. "Don't lose it."
Nathan touched the slim leather book in his coat. Orla had pressed it into his hands without explanation. *The only record the family kept,* she'd said. *Read it when you are far enough away not to be afraid.*
"Mother."
She turned and caught his face in both hands. Her eyes were bright with tears she refused to spill.
"There was a song," she said softly. "I used to hum it when you were small. You've forgotten it, haven't you? I saw it in the hall."
Nathan couldn't answer.
She began to hum, low and slow, a thread of melody that rose and fell like breath. He didn't know it. It slid past him like a stranger's voice. But something deep in his chest leaned toward it anyway, the way a plant leans toward light.
"I will hum it," she said, "every night, until you come home to hear it. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
She kissed his forehead and held him until the bell rang.
---
At the eastern pass, where the cliffs finally broke open onto the world beyond the mist, Nathan stopped and drew his first full breath of outside air.
It smelled of cold stone and distant rain. He had never smelled anything so large.
Then he heard boots on gravel behind him, quick and determined.
Mira stood in the pass with a pack slung over one shoulder and her wind blade at her hip, chin lifted.
"Don't argue," she said. "I already left a note."