WHAT THE HEALER CARRIES

I waited until that night to bring up the crest, mostly because I didn't want an audience for it and partly because I figured Ren needed a few hours to decide whether he trusted me with it.

We ended up in the courtyard outside his quarters, the two of us sitting on the low stone wall that bordered the garden path, the air cool enough that I'd stolen one of his spare cloaks without asking.

"Can I bring something up," I said. "And you can tell me to drop it if you want."

"That's an ominous way to start a conversation."

"The crest on your satchel. The one that isn't Arcadia's."

His hands stilled where they'd been fidgeting with a loose thread on his sleeve, and for a second I thought he might actually shut the conversation down before it started. But then he exhaled, slow, like he was deciding something.

"It's my family's mark," he said. "Healing's been our trade for generations. Every healer in my bloodline carried that crest on something, a satchel, a cloak pin, whatever they had on hand."

"It's a nice mark."

"It's a stubborn one. My grandmother used to say it was easier to remove a limb than that stitching."

I huffed a laugh, and he almost smiled, but it didn't quite reach all the way.

"Where's your family now," I asked, careful, watching for the moment he wanted me to back off.

"Gone," he said simply. "Not dead, as far as I know. Just gone. Scattered, or vanished, sometime back before I came here. I never got a clear answer on what happened, and nobody I've asked since has had one either."

"That's not the same as gone, though. Gone gone."

"No. It's worse, honestly. Dead, you grieve and you're done eventually. Gone like this, you just keep looking, every market, every traveling healer, every name on a list, hoping one of them turns into someone you recognize." He glanced at me sideways. "I still do it. Between duties. Quietly."

I understood that particular flavor of loss better than I wanted to admit, the kind where the people are technically still breathing somewhere but might as well not be, because you can't reach them and you don't know if they're even looking back. I didn't say any of that out loud, though. Didn't think it would help him to hear it dressed up as a shared wound.

Instead I bumped his shoulder with mine. "So what you're telling me is you're secretly a detective."

That got the smile all the way to his eyes. "I wouldn't go that far."

"You would. You've got a whole filing system in that satchel, don't you."

"It's organized, not a filing system."

"Organized how someone with a filing system would describe it."

He laughed properly that time, and the heaviness that had settled over both of us eased back enough to breathe around, which was the whole point of the joke in the first place.

We sat quiet for a minute after that, comfortable in the kind of silence that doesn't need filling, before he spoke again, almost offhand, like it had just occurred to him.

"I wasn't even in Arcadia three years ago. During the Shadow Blight."

I turned to look at him properly. "What do you mean."

"I mean I wasn't here. I arrived after, already being considered as a Lykora candidate by then. Everything I know about what happened, I know secondhand, same as anyone outside the inner circle. The official version, the one everyone tells."

That got my full attention, fast.

If Ren hadn't been here, then he wasn't protecting anyone's version of events, wasn't carrying loyalty to a story he'd witnessed himself, which meant he didn't have a reason to flinch if the official account turned out to have holes in it. Everyone else around me, Zayen included, had been there in some capacity, which meant everyone else had a stake in the story staying exactly as it was told.

Ren didn't.

"So you only know what the elders say happened," I said slowly.

"That's right."

"Doesn't that bother you. Not knowing the real version."

He shrugged, but it wasn't a dismissive shrug, more like he'd thought about it before and never had anywhere to put the thought. "I figured it wasn't my place to question it. I wasn't here, so what would I even be questioning."

"What if I wanted to question it."

He went very still, looking at me with something between caution and interest. "What do you mean."

"I mean the official story doesn't sit right with me, and I think there's more to it than what the elders have let anyone say out loud, and I don't currently have anyone in my corner who wasn't standing in that battlefield three years ago with a personal reason to keep the story tidy." I tilted my head at him. "You, on the other hand, have no reason to protect a version of events you didn't even witness. Want to help me accidentally find out what actually happened."

For a second he just stared at me, and I thought maybe I'd pushed too far, asked something too big too fast. Then something shifted in his face, nerves and excitement tangled together in a way that made him look younger than he usually did.

"Accidentally," he repeated.

"Very accidentally. Completely by chance. We just happen to come across information while doing something else entirely."

"That's a flimsy plan."

"It's the best kind of plan. Nobody can be mad about something that just happened to fall into our laps."

He huffed, but he was already nodding, something settling into his posture that hadn't been there a minute ago, like being trusted with this mattered more to him than he wanted to let on. "Alright. Where do we start."

"I don't know yet. Somewhere boring enough that nobody questions why we're looking at it."

That was how we ended up, less than an hour later, hunched over a stack of old supply requisition logs in the records room nobody bothered to guard because nobody bothered to read them, looking for an unrelated detail about herb shipments that I'd used as our cover excuse in case anyone asked.

"This is genuinely the most boring document I've ever read," Ren muttered, flipping a page.

"That's the point. Nobody questions boring."

"I think I've learned more about turnip storage in the last twenty minutes than I have in my entire life."

"See, already educational."

He huffed and kept reading, and I kept scanning my half of the stack, mostly skimming until a name on one page caught and held, three years back, dated the same week as the Shadow Blight, listed under a section for healers dispatched to the site.

I went still.

"Ren."

"What."

"Does this name mean anything to you." I turned the page toward him, tapping the line.

He leaned in, read it once, then again, his brow furrowing the same way it had earlier in his healing room. "No. I've never heard that name before. Not from the official accounts, not from anyone."

"Neither have I." I looked up at him, something cold and sharp settling under my ribs. "And I've read every official account there is."