The city was louder than Sylva had expected.
She had seen Eldenheim from the wagon on the way in — the black walls, the crimson banners, the smoke rising from a dozen chimneys — but that had been the outside of the thing. This was the inside, and the inside was entirely different. The moment they passed through the inner gates the world seemed to double in size and volume simultaneously. Merchants shouted over one another across narrow streets. Forge fires roared behind open workshop doors. The air tasted of iron and coal and something underneath both that she couldn't name, hot and alive and faintly electric.
Sparks drifted between the buildings like the city was shedding light.
Sylva walked close to Nasu's side, her eyes going everywhere at once. "This place is—"
"Loud," he offered.
"I was going to say alive."
He smiled slightly. "Same thing, here."
People moved aside as they passed — some bowing, others simply stepping back, all of them aware. Nasu moved through it the way he moved through everything, unhurried and unbothered. He didn't acknowledge it. Sylva wasn't sure if that was practiced or simply how he was.
They stopped in front of a large stone workshop near the middle of the district. The hammering from inside was loud enough to feel in her chest.
Nasu pushed the door open.
The heat hit her like a wall. The forge at the center of the room burned white at its core, and the man standing over the anvil was built to match it — massive across the shoulders, his beard thick with ash, one forearm so heavily muscled it looked less like flesh than something that had been worked and cooled and worked again over many years. He brought the hammer down three more times before he stopped. The sound rang off the stone walls and slowly faded.
He turned.
"Prince," he said. Not a greeting exactly. More like a notation.
"Garrick." Nasu lifted a hand. "She needs a rapier."
The blacksmith's eyes moved to Sylva. He looked at her the way Kaelen had that morning — not unkind, but careful. He walked over, and she held very still as he took her wrist and turned her hand, testing the grip, feeling the resistance. Then he crossed to the rack along the wall and pulled down a practice rapier.
"Hold it," he said. "Thrust when you're ready."
Sylva took a breath, set her feet, and lunged.
The blade moved cleanly. No wobble, no overcorrection. Garrick watched the line of it from tip to shoulder and said nothing for a moment.
Then: "Interesting."
"Told you," Nasu said, from where he'd settled against the wall.
Garrick handed the practice rapier back to its hook and stood looking at the forge for a moment, thinking. "You want something light," he said, half to himself. "Flexible. Balanced to the grip rather than the blade." He glanced back at Sylva. "Do you plan to fight with it?"
"Yes."
He held her gaze for a moment, as if verifying something. Then he nodded once and reached for a thin bar of steel.
"Then sit down," he said. "This takes time."
―――
It did.
Sylva sat on a low bench near the wall and watched Garrick work. The bar went into the forge and came out glowing, and the hammer came down in long rhythmic strikes. The blade emerged slowly from the raw stock, thinning and lengthening with each pass. He returned it to the fire three times. He quenched it once, and the hiss of steam filled the room. He ground the edge by hand with a patience that suggested he had never once done anything quickly that deserved to be done well.
Nasu had stopped leaning against the wall at some point and drifted closer, watching with the same quiet attention he gave to most things.
When Garrick finally lifted the finished rapier, the forge light caught it and ran the length of the blade in a single clean line. The guard curved forward at both ends, protective without being heavy, shaped almost like a half-opened hand. He held it out to Sylva without ceremony.
She took it.
The weight settled into her grip like it belonged there. She stood without thinking about it, stepped forward, and thrust — and the blade went exactly where she meant it to, no correction, no delay.
"Oh," she said quietly.
Garrick laughed — a short, gruff sound, but genuine. "Of course."
Nasu walked over and looked at the blade, then at her face. Something in his expression was satisfied in a way he didn't bother to hide. "So?"
Sylva looked up at him. She didn't quite have the words for it, so she said the simpler thing. "Thank you."
"You earned it."
"Prince." Garrick crossed his arms.
Nasu glanced at him.
"You're paying for that."
A pause. "…Right."
―――
They left the forge as the sun began its descent, the sky going amber over the mountains. Sylva carried the rapier at her side and kept finding excuses to look at it.
Nasu stopped at a street stall without warning, and the smell reached her before she'd fully registered what it was — warm bread, grilled meat, something spiced and dark that she had no name for. He was already negotiating with the vendor by the time she caught up. They sat on a low bench outside with two plates and the city moving around them.
Sylva looked at her plate for a moment.
"Is this alright?" she said.
Nasu had already started eating. "Why wouldn't it be?"
"It costs money."
"Not much."
She took a careful bite. The flavor hit her immediately — rich and warm and entirely unlike anything she'd had at the orphanage, where food had been fuel and nothing more. Her eyes went wide before she could stop them.
Nasu noticed. "You've never had street food."
"No."
"Hm." He said it like he was filing something away.
They ate quietly for a while. The city settled around them as the light changed. Sylva watched a group of children chase something through the street and felt the strangeness of the day sitting in her chest — the training yard that morning, the rapier, this bench, all of it.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"You're going to anyway."
"Why are you doing all of this?"
Nasu glanced at her. "All of what?"
"The training. The rapier." She paused. "Any of it."
"You needed training. You needed a weapon." He shrugged. "It's not complicated."
"It is, though. You didn't have to."
"I didn't have to save you from the flux beast either."
"That's what I mean."
He was quiet for a moment, turning his cup in his hands. The torch above the stall caught the edge of his profile — the slight point of his ear, the line of his jaw, the particular stillness that was just how he looked when he was actually thinking.
"You made a vow," he said finally. "That means something. I'm not going to ignore it."
Sylva looked at him. "Is that all?"
He considered this with more seriousness than she expected. "You stood in front of me and said I will stand beside you like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Like it had already happened and you were just informing me." The edge of a smile. "That was kind of hard to ignore."
Sylva looked down at the rapier leaning against the bench beside her.
"I meant it," she said.
"I know." He stood, collecting his plate. "That's why I'm taking it seriously."
The sun finished setting behind the mountains. The city lights came up one by one, torches and lanterns and the distant glow of forges that never went cold. Sylva sat with her rapier and her full stomach and the unfamiliar weight of a day that had gone well, and tried to remember the last time she'd felt something like this.
She couldn't find it. Which meant this might be the first time.
She decided that was alright.