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The ship groaned like it resented carrying them. Above, gulls wheeled in the pale morning light. Below, the sea dragged its fingers along the hull in rhythm, like something trying to remember a lullaby.
Wylan didn’t say anything at first.
He crouched a few feet away, arms folded on the rail, hair tangled by salt wind. He wasn’t looking at the horizon. He was looking at Matthias or more precisely, at what Matthias was doing with his hands.
The Fjerdan sat hunched on a crate, broad shoulders curled in, sleeves pushed up, knife to wood, carving something small and fierce with the kind of focus Wylan associated with explosives or grief. His jaw was clenched. His knuckles pale. The wood was giving way slowly, little shavings catching in his lap.
An Isenulf, Wylan realized. Rough in shape, not yet finished, but unmistakable in the arch of its back, the snarl of its mouth.
Wylan found himself getting closer before he spoke softly, like not to scare Matthias off. “Is that for someone?”
No answer. Just the rhythmic scrape of the blade again, and again. Wylan let the silence stretch. Let the sound fill the space between them. “I used to love the Isenulf,” he said.
That caught something. The knife paused mid-motion. Wylan’s voice dipped into memory, the way it sometimes did when he forgot to be nervous. “I went there once. To Fjerda. The Ice Court.” He smiled a little, a distant curl of lips. “I was seven. My father said he wanted me to see the world. Learn diplomacy. Said it was important to understand other cultures if you wanted to do business.”
Matthias glanced at him then, faintly surprised.
Wylan laughed under his breath. “He dressed me up in this ridiculous little velvet coat. I hated it. Too stiff. But I remember the snow. The gates. The way everything looked like it had been carved from glass and made to last a thousand years.” He tilted his head, eyes scanning the sky as if trying to spot a ghost. “There was a kennel on the outer ring,” he said softly. “The handler let me feed one of the pups, he put a bit of meat in my palm and said, ‘Don’t flinch, or it will think you’re prey.’” Wylan smiled, real this time. “I didn’t flinch. It licked my wrist after. I think it liked me.”
Matthias didn’t look up, but his voice was deep and distant, he grumbled, “They’re not pets.”
“I know.” Wylan’s tone didn’t shift. “They still made me feel safe. I liked that they live in packs. It seems less lonely.”
More silence. The kind that felt less empty now, like waiting for something to hatch.
Wylan sat in front of him, lowering his voice. “Did you have one?”
Matthias’s fingers stilled. This time he did look up, blue eyes pale as glacial rivers. There was something in them that wasn’t anger. Not quite. “Yes,” he said eventually. “His name was Trassel.”
The name settled between them like a stone dropped in calm water.
Wylan smiled; gentle, not wide. “Troublemaker? That’s a good name.”
Matthias said nothing for a long time. But the knife in his hands began to move again, slower now, more like remembering than destroying.
Wylan hesitated, then asked, “Will you look for him? When we’re back in Fjerda?”
Matthias’s expression didn’t change. But his throat worked once, slow. The blade in his hand pressed a little deeper into the wood. “I can’t,” he said.
Wylan blinked. “Why not?”
Matthias kept carving, voice barely above the wind. “If a Drüskelle dies… Their Isenulf is released. Sent back into the wild.”
He didn’t say the next part, he didn’t need to.
Wylan didn't answer right away. He moved a little on the wooden bench, not touching, just near enough that the wind carried their warmth across the space. Then he said, half smiling, “Maybe that makes me a little like him.”
Matthias’s eyes flicked up.
Wylan added, rushing to explain, “Released into the wild. No real pack. And definitely not a wolf.”
For the first time, something cracked across Matthias’s face like a ghost of amusement. He shook his head once, almost imperceptibly.
“No,” he said. “You’re not a wolf.” He turned back to his carving, eyes softening just a fraction. “You’re more of a lamb.”
The wind had teeth.
It bit across the deck like it was trying to make them confess something. Wylan pulled his coat tighter, nose pink from the cold, curls wild and damp from the sea spray. Matthias didn’t move. He stood at the railing like a statue carved into the ship itself, hood down, hair tied, eyes fixed on the flicker of lights just barely visible across the water.
Fjerda.
They were close now. Close enough to smell snow in the air. Close enough that Matthias hadn’t spoken in nearly an hour.
Wylan stepped up beside him. Close enough to brush. He hesitated, then leaned forward just a little, squinting at the horizon.
“Are you excited?” he asked softly. “To go back?”
For a moment, he thought Matthias hadn’t heard. Then came a whisper, barely a breath, buried in the Fjerdan wind.
“I should have died in Hellgate.”
Wylan blinked. “What?”
Matthias turned slightly, enough for Wylan to see the sharp line of his jaw, the way his mouth pressed shut like he regretted saying anything at all. “I didn’t think I’d live to see my homeland again.”
The lights across the water pulsed faintly. Lanterns. Patrols. Civilization pretending to be safe.
“How does it feel?” Wylan asked.
Matthias inhaled like it hurt. “Foreign.”
“Different?” Wylan offered, gently.
“No,” Matthias said. “I am different.”
Silence washed over them again; deep, and salt-laced, and sad.
Wylan nodded, slowly. After a moment, he quietly asked. “Are you afraid it won’t have you back?”
The answer came after a long pause. So long Wylan almost took the question back.
“I’m afraid,” Matthias said, voice low, cracked at the edge, “that’s what I deserve.”
The wind pushed Wylan’s hair into his mouth. He tucked it back slowly, eyes still on the distant lights, but something had shifted in his posture, not pity, not shock. Just quiet knowing. “I get that,” he said, barely audible over the wind. “What it’s like… to feel abandoned by a place you were supposed to belong to.”
Matthias turned his head, just slightly.
Wylan kept going. His voice like a bruise being named out loud. “My last name used to mean something in Ketterdam. A door opener. A passcode.”
He gave a dry, tired laugh. “Now it’s a locked gate.” He looked up at Matthias. There was no performance in it. Just that soft burn of sincerity that didn’t need an audience. “I’ve lived in that city my whole life. And still, there’s nowhere in it that feels like mine. Safe drowned in that canal.”
The words hung there, wind blown and raw.
And Matthias; frozen, grieving Matthias, looked at him like he was seeing something he hadn’t before. Not a tagalong lost kid. Not Kaz’s shadow. Not the scared boy with a detonator in his back pocket. But someone exiled, too.
Someone cast out by his name, not saved by it. Someone who stayed because there was nowhere else to go. He’s not here because he’s after the money, Matthias thought. He’s here because he has to be. Like me.
The waves knocked softly against the hull, rhythmic like a lullaby for the damned.
The lantern had been put out. The cabin they were forced to share was mostly dark, save for the weak moonlight bleeding through the porthole, turning the wooden floor silver.
Matthias lay stretched out on the boards, arms folded behind his head, eyes open. He had refused the bed, had grunted something about soft mattresses and Hellgate and stretched out on the floor instead, as if the idea of comfort was somehow more unbearable than the cold. He’d said, “You can have it,” like it wasn’t a kindness, just a fact. But when Wylan had thanked him, Matthias had looked away, almost embarrassed. “It’s better this way,” he’d muttered.
Now the bed creaked above him where Wylan turned for the third time, trying not to make noise and failing spectacularly.
“You’re not comfortable,” Matthias said.
“I’m fine,” Wylan whispered.
“You’ve turned over more times than the tide.”
“Sorry.”
More silence. More sea.
Then, like he was speaking to the dark itself or maybe to a ghost: “I had a sister.”
Wylan froze, breath catching. He didn’t speak, didn’t dare interrupt.
“She was small,” Matthias continued. “Hair like wheat. She used to run to me when she got scared. Not to our mother. To me.”
He exhaled slowly, like dragging up the memory cost something. “She said I smelled like wet soil and snow. And that I could make anything go away.”
Wylan blinked into the dark, throat tight.
“She used to crawl into my arms,” Matthias said, “and I would say, ‘Whatever happens, I’ll protect you.’ Every time.”
More silence.
“I think she believed me.”
The ship groaned softly. Wylan found his voice, hoarse. “What happened to her?”
Matthias didn’t answer right away. Just let the quiet stretch. After a beat, almost too soft to hear, he said, “I wasn’t there. My father promised to come back with her and my mother. Made me promise that I would stay behind that big rock we used to play. I hid there until the sunset as I listened to the screams of my people and the fire.” Another breath. Then the turn of the unthinkable shift, spoken with no ceremony but full gravity. “Whatever happens,” Matthias said, “I’ll protect you.”
Wylan’s breath caught.
“You remind me of her.”
A pause. No apology, no follow up. Just truth, laid gently in the dark. From the bed above, there was no answer. Only a sharp inhale. Then stillness. Then the quiet, stuttering breath of someone trying very hard not to cry. Wylan couldn’t say anything back. Not over the tears catching in his throat, hot and sudden and choking in the dark. But Matthias heard them anyway.
“Goodnight Wylan.”
The boat wasn’t ready.
That was the phrase Kaz repeated; quiet, clipped, firm. The boat isn’t ready. The route isn’t secure. The cargo can’t leave yet. It sounded like business. It was business. But Wylan knew, with Kaz, that didn’t mean it wasn’t also something else.
So they didn’t send Matthias away. Not yet.
Jesper and Rotty stood still, their hands hovering awkwardly over the stretcher. Nina had refused to let go of his hand. Inej was silent, her fingers white on the edge of her shawl. Wylan’s throat was closing in.
“He can stay inside tonight.” he said gently.
They all turned to him.
Wylan stepped forward, voice steadier than he felt. “My room’s too bright. There’s a lot of sun in the morning. But,” he swallowed, “My old bedroom. It’s… it’s cooler. It faces the canal.”
He didn’t mention it was where he used to hide during his father’s parties. That the windows were lined with stained glass. That the ceiling was painted with stars. He didn’t say that he hadn’t been inside since he was thrown out.
Kaz gave a nod, once. That was all it took.
They carried Matthias’s body through the halls of the mansion like something holy. The house groaned with memory as they passed shuttered windows, chandeliers still smudged with smoke, echoes of the boy Wylan had been before any of this.
He led them to the door and opened it with fingers that didn’t feel like his own. The room smelled like dust and old lavender. The bed had been stripped. The rug was faded. But it was quiet. It was cool.
Jesper helped spread a blanket over the frame. Inej placed a folded cloth beneath his head. And Nina –silently, like sleepwalking– crawled up beside him, curled her body toward his chest, and didn’t speak.
Wylan stood in the doorway for a long time. He didn’t go in. Not yet. But he left the door open.
The house had gone still.
No more footsteps. No more whispered plans. Just the low creak of the floorboards cooling for the night and the occasional sigh of the canal brushing against the windows.
Nina hadn’t moved in hours. She still lay curled beside Matthias, her hand on his chest, her lashes wet against her cheek. Her body was stiff with exhaustion, not just the physical kind, but the kind that hollowed you out and made you afraid to sleep in case the morning made it real.
Jesper crouched beside the bed, one hand on the blanket, voice soft. “Nina. Come on. Just for a little while.”
She shook her head without opening her eyes.
“Inej’s waiting on the balcony,” he said quietly. “There’s tea. And I think she stole biscuits.”
No answer.
Wylan stepped forward, hands folded tightly in front of him. He looked at her, then at Matthias, then back again.
“I’ll stay with him,” he said gently. “Please. Just go… Breathe.”
Nina blinked slowly. Her mouth trembled. “I don’t want him to be alone.”
“He won’t be,” Wylan said. “I promise.”
Jesper reached out, and after a long moment, Nina let herself be helped up. She kissed Matthias’s temple, barely a brush of lips, and let Jesper lead her away.
Wylan waited until the door clicked shut behind them. He stood there a while, hands clenched at his sides, spine rigid with everything he couldn’t name. Then a slow, shaky, uneven breath left him and he turned.
The silence in the room had changed. Something heavy, like fog, like memory sat at the edges of the room. Like something listening.
He pulled the chair closer to the bed. Sat down. Didn’t move. For a long time, he just looked at Matthias’s still face, at the way the light brushed the edge of his jaw, at the places grief had already begun to set in. Then, quietly, “You can take the bed this time.” A thin, brittle laugh. “Though there’s only a frame, and I’m still terrible at this.”
He leaned forward, elbows on knees. Let his hands dangle. Let the silence swell. “I keep thinking about that night. On the Ferolind. You told me about your sister. Said she used to come to you when she was scared.” His voice caught. “And you said I reminded you of her. That you’d protect me.” He blinked hard, looked away.
“I don’t know if I ever told you how much that meant. How much I needed someone to say that and mean it.”
Quiet.
“I used to feel that way about my mother. When I was little. Before… everything.” A breath. A laugh that didn’t reach his eyes. “She used to protect me. I remember one winter, I broke a window in the conservatory, not even on purpose, and my father started shouting, he was furious. And she stood in front of me. Put her hand on my chest and said, ‘He’s a kid, Jan. He gets to break things.’”
He looked at Matthias now, really looked. “No one ever did that for me again. Not like that. Not until you.”
His fingers trembled as he pulled something from his coat, the little wooden Isenulf. He placed it beside Matthias’s hand.
“She doesn’t even know who I am now. I think she’s afraid all the time. And now I’m the one who has to protect her. Who has to stand between her and the things she can’t face. I owe her that.” His voice wavered. “And I owe you, too.”
He waited for a moment. “I wish I could’ve done more. I wish I was there. I would’ve done something, anything.” He took a sharp breath.
He reached out, and this time, his fingers brushed Matthias’s just barely. Enough to be held by the moment. His voice softened to a whisper, trembling at the edges.
“Let me do this, okay? Just this once. Just tonight. Let me be the one who stays up. Let me be the one who keeps watch.” He slid forward, resting his arms on the edge of the frame, forehead bowing to his hands. Just staying. Holding still, like it could matter.
“Goodnight Matthias.” he breathed.