Chapter 44: Nothing To Lose
The shadow at the edge of Osmund’s garden didn’t wait for Milo to draw a weapon he didn’t currently have on him, which was, in retrospect, a small mercy he hadn’t earned.
It simply stepped into the thin morning light, resolving out of the hedge line into a broad, weathered man in traveling leathers, arms crossed, jaw set in the specific, put-upon expression of someone who has spent several days doing something he considers deeply beneath him and fully intends for everyone in earshot to know it.
"There you are," the man said, in a voice like a cart wheel dragging over gravel. "Do you have any idea how many gods-forsaken villages I’ve walked through looking for your sorry hide? Six. I counted. Six villages, two rivers, and a innkeeper who tried to charge me double once he heard whose name I was asking after."
Milo — Loof, some old, tired part of him corrected automatically, though the correction meant less to him with every passing layer — held very still, cataloguing the man the way he catalogued everything that mattered before he decided how to respond to it. Big through the shoulders in the specific way of a man who’d earned that size doing actual work rather than posing for it. A scar through one eyebrow, old and pale. A sword at his hip worn smooth at the grip from years of the same hand closing around it in the same practiced way.
"Garrick," Loof’s memory supplied, unbidden, warm and familiar in a way that had nothing to do with Milo’s own experience of the man standing in front of him.
"Your mother," Garrick said, before Milo could decide how to open this particular conversation, "has not slept properly in nine days. Your father’s stopped eating anything that isn’t broth, on account of his stomach won’t hold down anything heavier while he’s this sick with worry. And I have spent the better part of a week hearing, from every tavern and toll-gate between here and your father’s front door, exactly what that scheming little viper Corenne did to get you thrown in a cell, and exactly what the King did once he found out about it, and I am going to be extremely honest with you, Loof, because your mother asked me to be gentle about this and gentleness has never once in my life been a skill I actually possessed."
He took a step closer, close enough that Milo could smell horse and old leather and the specific exhaustion of a man who had genuinely not stopped moving in longer than he wanted to admit.
"You’re a grown man," Garrick said, "who made his mother cry. That’s the whole of it. That’s the entire report I’ve got for you. Now get your things, because we’re going home, and you’re going to look your parents in the eye and explain yourself, and I don’t want to hear one single word of argument about it."
He said the last part with the specific, braced posture of a man expecting a fight — shoulders squared, jaw already tightening, the exact readiness of someone who had clearly delivered some version of this exact lecture to some version of this exact stubborn young lord more times than either of them had bothered counting.
"Fine," Milo said. "As you wish."
Garrick blinked.
Whatever he’d been braced for — the eye-roll, the deflection, the smooth, half-charming excuse Milo suspected the real Loof had always reached for first, the specific practiced dishonesty of a man who’d learned young that a soft enough lie could usually buy him another hour of doing exactly what he wanted — none of it came. Just two flat, simple words, offered without argument, without even the small theater of reluctance a man his age was supposed to put up before finally giving in.
"...Fine," Garrick repeated, slower now, some of the readiness draining visibly out of his stance. He studied Milo’s face for a long moment, the way you study a wound to guess how deep it actually runs, and Milo watched the man’s whole read on the situation shift in real time — from stubborn boy needs handling to something gentler, more worried, entirely wrong and entirely understandable all at once.
"...Right," Garrick said, quieter. "Come on, then. Horses are two streets over. We’ll get you home before nightfall, and your mother can fuss over you properly, and whatever that woman did to you, whatever that King’s men put you through — you don’t have to talk about it until you’re ready. I’ve seen men come back from bad postings looking exactly like you’re looking right now. Quiet. Too quiet. It passes, in time."
He clapped a broad hand onto Milo’s shoulder, rough and careful in equal measure, and turned to lead the way, and Milo let himself be led, because arguing would have cost more than the silence did, and because some small, uncomfortable part of him — a part that belonged more to Loof than to himself, he suspected, though the line between the two of them had gotten harder to find with every layer he’d fallen through — didn’t actually want to argue at all.
---
They rode for the better part of the day, and Milo spent most of it doing the one thing he always did with silence he hadn’t chosen: he thought, carefully, methodically, the way a man reaches for solid ground when the actual ground under him has stopped being trustworthy.
Loof’s parents. The knowledge arrived the way it always did in this borrowed skin — not remembered so much as simply, suddenly, known, the specific unearned intimacy of a story he’d never lived but somehow already understood down to its bones. A mother who still called him by the pet name she’d used since he was small enough to need one. A father who’d never once raised his voice in anger, only in worry. A house that had been warm and loud and entirely, uncomplicatedly loving, the exact kind of home Milo himself had never once been permitted to have, growing up in a world that burned the very concept of one down whenever it looked too much like happiness.
And Garrick — steady, gruff, endlessly loyal Garrick, who had, in the story Milo already half-knew the shape of without ever having asked to know it, died defending that same warm house from the King’s wrath, several Chapters further down a road Milo hadn’t walked yet and desperately hoped never to.
That was the piece that finally clicked into place, riding in silence beside a man who had no idea he was talking to a ghost of a story he was destined to die inside of.
That’s why he hesitated. Every time Milo had felt Loof’s own instincts drag at him — that small, cold reluctance underneath every moment he’d needed to defy the King, the flinch that had nearly cost Wick his life before Milo forced his own hand past it — it hadn’t been cowardice. It had been love, plain and simple, the specific, unglamorous love of a man who had something real to lose and knew, somewhere in his bones, exactly how efficiently a King like this one collected debts from people who dared to want things he hadn’t personally approved of.
Loof had a home. Loof had a mother who cried over him, and a father too sick with worry to eat, and a gruff, loyal bodyguard who’d walked six villages just to bring him back safely — and every single one of those people was, Milo understood now with a cold, sinking clarity, exactly the kind of collateral a tyrant reached for first, precisely because they were soft enough to actually hurt.
Good people always go first, Milo thought, watching the back of Garrick’s broad shoulders sway easily with his horse’s gait, utterly unaware of the fate his own loyalty was apparently steering him toward. Not the soldiers. Not the rivals with armies of their own. The parents. The bodyguards. The people who love you plainly enough to make themselves an easy target for whoever wants to make you suffer without laying a single hand on you directly.
He thought of Osmund’s ruined bedroom, and a single untouched glass of wine sitting perfect in the center of the wreckage. He thought of Reeve, sent to a garrison nobody survived, and told himself, again, that he’d feel worse about that later. He thought of Wick, running for a border in the dark with a modest lord’s modest purse clutched in one small fist, and hoped, more fiercely than he let himself examine too closely, that the boy had actually made it somewhere safe.
And underneath all of it, quiet and cold and entirely his own, a thought arrived that Milo didn’t particularly like the shape of, even as he recognized, with total certainty, that it was true.
Loof had a family to protect, and that love made him hesitate. But a man with a warm home is easy to break. A man with nothing to lose? He’s just waiting for a reason to burn it all down.
He didn’t have a home here to protect. He had a sister, a month and a lifetime away on a bad day, on a clock he no longer trusted himself to count properly. He had two friends somewhere inside an Archive he hadn’t seen in what felt like forever. He had a fugitive’s price on a name that wasn’t even the one currently riding beside Garrick toward a house full of people who were going to look at him with love he hadn’t earned and worry he couldn’t fully explain.
He had, in this particular borrowed life, exactly nothing left that a King could threaten to take from him that would actually work.
Milo watched the road unspool ahead of them, the late sun throwing long gold light across fields he’d never walked before this life and would likely never walk again after it, and understood, with the specific, unhurried clarity of a man finally seeing the whole shape of a plan settle into place, that this — precisely this, an empty ledger with nothing left on it worth threatening — was going to be the single most dangerous thing he carried into whatever came next.