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“Halt, why aren’t you wearing your oak leaf?”
The first time he lied it was easy, but there was no honor in that choice and he knew it.
“I took it off while traveling,” Halt replied in the most neutral voice he could manage. “So people wouldn’t be suspicious of me.”
Will blinked at him from across the room, engaged yet tired in the way he wanted to sleep but feared what would meet him on the other side. Even exhausted, he didn’t seem entirely convinced—Halt wouldn’t be convinced either.
“Okay,” Will whispered.
“Do you need anything else?”
There was hesitation then, like there always was lately. It was as if he didn’t know what he needed, much less wanted. Halt kept his expression unreadable with some effort.
“Um…no. I’m okay.”
They were both liars, then. At least it evened out the playing field.
So Halt held his tongue, still learning when to push and when to stay out of the storm in Will’s head. It seemed to be the right decision, as the boy mumbled a quick “goodnight” and left the common room quieter than ever.
He was often quiet these days, Halt had observed. It was a far cry from the kid he watched grow up in small glances in the Redmont castle courtyard.
That discomforting thought followed him to bed, burning an oakleaf shaped hole into his chest.
The second time didn’t catch Halt off guard quite as much, but it wasn’t any easier to answer.
Will’s eyes had sharpened in the following days, following the smallest twitch of Halt’s eyebrows and the taps of his fingers. Halt wished he could read the boy’s mind, and find out what he was searching for. Maybe he was just refamiliarizing himself with the sight of his mentor, making sure he was truly there and evergreen in his mannerisms.
Or maybe Halt wasn’t as good at nonchalance as he thought he was.
“Why haven’t you put your oakleaf back on?”
Halt’s hand froze where it was adjusting the front of his cloak. His fingers itched to grab what wasn’t there, to run callouses against the ridges of the symbol he loved and lost.
Instead he pried his hand away from that pocket of grief and stuck his arm to his side. It was warmer there, anyway, with the cool wind angled directly at his front. The two rangers stood outside the dining hall, where the ocean breeze couldn’t agree with the spring sunshine. Will, accustomed to the sea now, stared at Halt’s chest unflinchingly.
“It’s become a habit now, I suppose. Things have gotten busy around here. I keep forgetting.”
Another flimsy explanation, another kick of guilt in his gut. Something in his voice must’ve been guarded without him realizing it, as Will’s refute stumbled into a silent nod. There was a question there, Halt could tell—at least that habit of his apprentice was returning.
Halt’s own curiosity would need to be worded carefully. Unravelling the defense around his words and turning to Will with a softer look, he continued.
“Where’s yours?”
The flinch that splattered across Will’s face did nothing to massage the guilty conscience building up behind Halt’s temples.
He squinted at the dead grass beneath his feet, obscuring some of his expression. “Lost it. Don’t remember where…or when,” he rasped to the unfeeling earth.
Halt laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Doesn’t change anything.”
Will finally looked up, visibly unscrambling his mentor’s minimal use of spoken language. By the time he finally nodded, it was too slow to be convincing. His smile didn’t reach his eyes, but he didn’t ask about Halt’s oakleaf for another few days.
Whoever came up with ‘third times the charm’, Halt decided, had never met his apprentice before.
Will was smart. Halt knew this. It was why he chose him, why he trained him, and why he knew the lie was over the second he entered his room.
Crouched next to Abelard’s saddle bag with a furiously focused expression was Will. And even as he rooted through Halt’s stuff without permission, he still moved things delicately, placing things back exactly where they were before.
Halt stood in the doorway for thirty seconds before the young boy finally gave up and leaned back on his heels. His gaze never left the bag.
“It’s not here.”
“Will.”
“Your oakleaf isn’t here.”
Halt considered another lie, but Will’s head snapped up to meet Halt and his mind blanked. His apprentice’s face was set in a stony expression, devoid of the suspicion or confusion he had seen before.
“Don't lie to me again, Halt. I want to know,” he demanded, turning to frustration when he didn’t get an immediate response. “What won’t you tell me? Why? Am I not—”
“I don’t have it.”
“Then…then where…” Will trailed off, frustration nipped in the bud.
Halt moved to the bed and sat down, hands folded in his lap. He looked just above Will’s head, expression tight and patient.
“It was taken from me after I publicly insulted the king and got banished for a year.”
The air stilled as Will’s fingers tightened on the saddlebag’s worn material in front of him. Halt took a deep breath before the next part.
“Crowley wouldn’t give me permission to leave. I had to find a way to get here in time.”
Will, still kneeling on the ground, gaped up at his mentor. He silently mouthed the words, feeling the cut of them without the knife. It nearly cracked Halt’s careful facade, watching Will study him as a horrible realization dawned over him.
“For…me?”
Halt couldn’t answer that, so he closed his eyes. There was a scuffle of boots on wood and sliding leather, and when Halt opened his eyes again Will was standing in front of him with a furious expression. The sight was so unexpected he couldn’t speak, so Will continued.
“No! No, you couldn’t have, I’m just…I’m…” Will’s voice started to rise until he turned away and rubbed a shaking hand over his eyes. “I’m not Evanlyn. I’m just me.”
“Your safety is my responsibility. I wasn’t going to let you die,” Halt countered, his tone harder than he meant for it to be. He shook his head, faltering. “I promised.”
“But you gave up your oakleaf. You’ve had it since forever!”
With that reminder, Halt’s chest went cold. Even knowing so little about his past, about what Araluen meant to him, Will picked a word that so perfectly fit—forever. His life there, it was when he felt like he truly started to exist in a real way.
He resisted the urge to close his eyes again, feeling it unfair to his apprentice to look away. “Well, it wasn’t exactly an ideal solution.”
“So you wished you hadn’t done it!” Will sounded nearly hysterical in his relief, reaching a peak of agonized excitement that sent a chill down Halt’s spine.
“I wished the circumstances were different,” he forced patience into his voice. “That’s very different.”
“Then there must’ve been different ways to get here!”
“It wasn’t your choice to make!”
Halt immediately bit his own tongue. The last time he raised his voice even a little over his usual volume was in Crowley’s office, practically begging for an exception, running from the anxiety induced nightmares waiting for him at his empty home. Being denied made him feel so damn helpless at times like this, when getting himself banished felt like the only thing he did right in the last few months.
But that defense wasn’t worth the flinch that wracked Will’s entire body. Any hint of anger, that horribly refreshing emotion from a boy so devoid of life, had dissipated. Halt hardly heard the next word from his mouth.
“Okay.”
He stood up and tried to reach out, rest a hand on his arm or move slowly or some other tactic that would erase the fear etched into his posture. Will backed up a little, eyes wide and glued to the floor, moving as if by instinct.
Barely any louder than his whisper, Halt managed to say something. “Will, I didn’t mean to—”
Finally, Will looked up, his composure still brittle as frozen sticks. “It’s okay, I’m just—I think I’m going to walk. Outside. Maybe train.”
He left the room stiff as a board without a second glance at Halt, nor his bow and knives leaning up against the doorway. The front door closed hollowly behind his softly retreating footsteps.
Halt didn’t move for a good few minutes, his outstretched arm still hovering in the air. All he could hear was unforgiving ocean waves crashing against cold sand, and the long-gone splash of an impossibly distant ship.
The next few days were unbearable. Despite how little Halt pushed conversation, and how quietly he spoke around Will, nothing changed. He came and went without questions, and didn’t even wish him goodnight anymore. He responded with the exact number of words needed to prevent any more clarification.
And the whole time, Halt had to pretend like it wasn’t destroying him inside.
He had to play the reliable tactician and the adult with all his shit together, all while Will’s usual life and light wasn’t there to balance it out.
Halt wasn’t a stupid man—no, far from it. He saw Will confiding in Horace while they gathered arrows at the treeline. He noticed when Will and Cassandra left together and returned to the shared cabin smelling of sea salt and fish and half-eaten driftwood. It’s not like Will was devoid of support, and he trusted his apprentice to take care of himself enough until he felt ready to talk. No, it was the waiting that was the worst part.
That experimental passivity crumbled when Will had disappeared alone one night, without a word, and didn’t come back for two hours.
“It’s been too long. When’s the last time you saw him?” Halt asked the other two kids, unable to mask the urgency in his tone or the restlessness in his body language.
“At dinner, I suppose,” Cassandra answered, and Horace nodded along. “He left really quickly though, and didn’t tell us where he was going.”
“Were do you usually spend time at?”
They shared a silent understanding between each other, which offered Halt a scrap of comfort. Will’s friends knew him well, at least, while his mentor was foolishly complicating whatever poor state he was already in.
Horace leveled a determined face at Halt. “We’ll go look there while you stay here, just in case he comes back.”
Halt was about to deny the idea, until he imagined coming back to an empty cabin. He grunted under his breath begrudgingly.
“You two have more energy to be running around in the dark, anyway. Go ahead.”
that got a small smile out of Horace, and a vaguely amused look from Cassandra. If there was anything Halt could take some solace from, it was that neither of them were inserting themselves into his conflict with Will. Horace was concerned for both of them, with his big noble heart: Cassandra observed Halt analytically, yet with open understanding. It was clear they could read between the lines of what Will told them.
After they left, Halt sat down heavily on the couch in the common room and leaned forward, the hard edge of his palm pressing into his forehead. The dawn of a headache thudded so loud in his skull, he half-considered asking Erak for help. As much of a grudge he wanted to hold against the man, he did care about Will‘s safety in the end.
Whatever minutes he lost to the pounding memories in his head all vanished when the door creaked open. Outlined in silvery moonlight, Will stood in the doorway wearing a heavy coat and an exhausted expression.
“Will,” Halt gasped out in the quiet space between them, rushing to his feet and meeting him halfway across the room. “Where on earth were you?”
The boy, slightly shivering from the wind despite the now-closed door, only held his hand out. Lying in the middle of his palm was a familiar leaf, formed of bronze, with its chain curled around it. There was dirt under his nails, and a thinly angled cut along the side of his thumb, but the pendant itself was spotless.
“The snow’s gone now. I found it near the yard. It took some digging, since the soil was packed, but it was there.”
“Will.”
He ignored his mentor’s plea for reason, or comfort, or whatever he was willing to accept. He flattened out his palm even further and pushed it towards Halt.
“I–I’m sorry. About earlier. I’m really mad at myself right now, and I can’t understand why, and then you told me that and I…I hated it. I need to do something. Anything. So keep this until you get your real one back.” Will took a shaky breath, then even quieter than before, “Please.”
The oakleaf stood between them like a wall of twigs. Halt cupped his own hand below Will’s, stabilizing it and rubbing one gentle thumb along the cut skin.
“It’s yours.”
Instantly, Will’s low energy skyrocketed into panic. “But you gave yours up for me, I need—”
“You don’t need to do anything,” Halt insisted softly, nudging his hand back towards him.
Slowly yet surely, his fingers curled around the metal, tracing the subtly raised veins and smoothed out curves. The movement soothed him, and whatever freezing wind was trapped against inside his skull was blown away.
Now was the part Halt was bad at. “When did you start feeling like that?”
Will looked up at Halt now with something like disappointed hope shining in his eyes. “Since the snow started melting, right before you and Horace found us. I thought I was fine, but you’ve never lied to me before. You talk around the truth sometimes, sure, but you never lie like that. I thought…”
Halt let out a good-natured snort. “You’re not old enough to think yet.”
That got a small, but real laugh out of him. It relaxed him for a fleeting moment.
“I thought I had lost it. Your trust. That I was too weak now, too useless, and it’d just be better if I gave up on helping until—”
“Stop.”
“W…what?”
Halt fixed a sternly confident look at Will, which luckily didn’t phase him.
“Stop thinking like that. You’ve been self-training every day for hours. That sounds far from useless to me.”
Biting back an argument, the confusion trickled back in. “Then…why? Why keep this from me?”
A tightness wound around Halt’s chest, and he explained through pinched lungs. “My banishment isn’t your problem to fix. I brought it upon myself because there was no other option. That’s not your doing, nor is it your fault,” he sighed. “I promise.”
“But it affects more than just you!” he yelled, fists balled at his side.
Halt held his reaction back behind a patient, neutral expression while Will gathered himself, focusing away from the watery sheen in his eyes.
His hands clenched and unclenched around the pendant in his palm, his words bursting out like rabbits in a hunt, terrified of their own implications. “What would’ve happened if we left immediately? If we had gotten home before your banishment ended?”
“I would’ve gotten you, Horace, and the princess safely to the Araluen border, and simply waited out the rest of my time nearby.” Carefully rehearsed: reciting his responsibility, and the truth.
“No.”
Halt readily met Will’s steely gaze. It was the same steel that carved a fiery path towards the kalkara and kept his feet bolted to the ground while a wild boar plunged towards his guts. It was likely the same steel that burnt the bridge and saved countless lives of his country, all before he’d even been to a proper gathering. He looked so old, growing up every time Halt wasn’t looking.
“I wouldn’t—” He bit his lip and collected himself before glaring at Halt with muted fury. “I wouldn’t return without you.”
There was no world where Will would say anything else. It was the reality Halt considered from the very seed of his treacherous plan, when he was still confining himself to a lifelong punishment. But watching such confidence come from a broken boy at the mere idea of leaving him—he didn’t deserve such kindness, such sacrifice. Months of tortured hypotheticals couldn’t have prepared him for something so kind directed at a man like him.
But these were thoughts he kept to himself. He had said enough already.
“Halt?” Will whispered.
He deserved a reply this time. “Yes.”
“You shouldn’t have done it.”
“I know.” Another lie. A false platitude that changed nothing.
What was done was done, and even if Will couldn’t understand why, Halt would do it again ten times over. Whether Will sensed that or not, he didn’t show it. He only moved closer in that newfound quiet way of his.
“…Thank you.”
“Of course.”
Halt gently loosened the claw-tight grip Will had on the necklace in his hand, brushing dirt from his fingertips. He lifted the precious bronze symbol from his palm; the chain was broken, but salvageable. Then, he managed to tie it around the back of Will’s neck, loosely so as to not damage the metal any further. The boy stood unnaturally still the entire time.
That was, until Halt rested his hands on his shoulders with a reassuring squeeze.
Will accepted the invitation and leaned his too-small body against Halt’s chest, hands coming up to cling to the back of his clothes. After a second, he let out a shattered breath and let his head follow suit, resting face first on a steady shoulder. In turn, Halt held his other hand against the back of Will’s head, unravelling tangled curls in his slightly damp hair. Will smelled like sweat and salt and earth, but what mattered more was his warmth—fearlessly alive and blooming in his chest.
Will could keep his oakleaf. In that dimly lit cabin, this was more than enough for Halt.