Chapter 364 - 363: The Longest Road
Location:Imperial City — Outer Rings, Borderlands, Seven Peaks
Date/Time:TC1854.03.01-03
The baby needed milk, and Kael didn’t have any.
This was the problem that nearly broke him — not the Sanctum operatives hunting him through the Second Ring’s formation-lit streets, not the cracked rib that turned every breath into a negotiation with pain, not the formation burn on his left arm that wept fluid through the torn sleeve of an Imperial shirt that had cost more than most families earned in a month. The milk. The absolute, non-negotiable biological requirement of a three-month-old human being who’d been screaming for forty minutes and was not going to stop until someone addressed the fundamental injustice of being hungry.
Kael stood in an alley between two Second Ring townhouses, blood drying on his knuckles, his son howling against his chest, and realized that he had no idea how to feed a baby.
He’d never needed to know. Amara had handled it — or the Tower healers had, or the wet nurse that the Seer Council provided. Kael had visited. Held Tianlei. Smiled at the appropriate moments. Returned to his quarters and his diplomatic correspondence and the comfortable assumption that fatherhood was something that happened during scheduled appointments.
Tianlei screamed louder. The sound echoed off stone walls and formation-lit windows. Someone would hear. Someone would investigate. And Kael’s face was known in the Second Ring — the Imperial Heir couldn’t hide in the district where his family’s palace dominated the skyline.
He moved. Not with a plan — with momentum. One street to the next. The wooden horse in his pocket hitting his thigh with each step, a ridiculous detail that his mind kept returning to because the horse was the only thing he’d done right today.
He needed somewhere safe. One night. Long enough to stop the bleeding and feed his son.
He found it in the memory of a man who’d died eleven years ago.
***
Wen Shuren had served the Xuán household for sixty years before retiring to a modest apartment in the Third Ring’s eastern quarter. He’d been Kael’s grandfather’s personal attendant — the kind of servant who knew where the bodies were buried because he’d helped dig the graves. He’d died eleven years ago. His wife, Meihua, still lived in the apartment.