Chapter 47: I Don’t Like You
The wax cracked cleanly under his thumb, and Milo unfolded the letter with the specific, careful reverence of a man handling something he still couldn’t quite believe was allowed to exist.
Loof, it read, in a hand Milo recognized instantly, quick and slanted and entirely too pleased with itself,
I confess myself astonished. When I sent you off after that ridiculous map, I fully expected you’d spend a month wandering in circles before giving up and coming home to sulk at my fire again. Instead here I am, barely a fortnight later, hearing rumors from three separate directions that you’ve already returned. Either you’re considerably more capable than you let on, or that Vault of yours has a very different relationship with time than the rest of us do — and knowing what little I know about you, I suspect it’s the second.
My own errand, I’m sorry to say, went rather more sideways than I’d hoped. I won’t bore you with the details in ink — some things are better said across a fire, with wine, where a careless servant can’t read them over my shoulder — but I did, in the end, secure the Skill Book we discussed. I also came away with something else. Something I wasn’t looking for, and am rather delighted about regardless. I’ll bring it with me when I arrive tomorrow, and I intend to make you guess what it is for at least the first hour of dinner, because watching you attempt to reason your way to an answer with insufficient information has become one of my genuine pleasures in life.
Rest well tonight. I suspect you’ll need it.
— O.
Milo read it twice, and then a third time, not because the meaning was unclear but because he simply wanted to keep holding it a little longer.
A letter. An actual, private, uncensored letter, carried by a man who worked for coin instead of the Crown, delivered directly into his hands without a single official stamp declaring it approved for his eyes. He’d grown up in a world where the mere act of writing something down and sending it to someone you loved carried real risk — where a message got read by whoever the King decided should read it first, if it arrived at all — and here he was, holding proof that an entire kingdom had simply decided, at some point, that letting people talk to each other privately wasn’t worth being afraid of.
He wanted to write back immediately. He wanted, more specifically, to understand exactly how the miracle worked before he trusted his own words to it.
He found the courier still lingering near the front gate, chatting idly with one of the household guards, and crossed the courtyard fast enough that the man barely had time to register his approach before Milo had both hands locked around his shoulders.
"How does it work," Milo said, entirely too intently for a man who had, moments ago, been handed a simple letter and nothing more. "The parchment. The message. Does it need to be spelled a certain way, does it require a specific ink, is there a limit to distance, does the recipient need their own matched parchment to receive it, I need to understand the mechanism before I—"
"Whoa — hey — easy," the courier said, leaning back as far as Milo’s grip allowed, alarm and confusion warring openly across his face. "Relax, kid! I’ll teach you how the magic parchment works, just — stop shaking me, gods, you’re stronger than you look—"
Milo let go, abruptly aware of himself, and had the good grace to look faintly embarrassed about it. "Sorry. It’s — this isn’t common where I’m from. At all."
The courier gave him a long, strange look, the specific look of a man who had delivered mail to a great many odd nobles over the years and was quietly re-filing this one under a new and unusual category, but he explained it anyway — matched parchment sets, bound at the point of sale by a licensed scribe, a modest fee, a short delay depending on distance — plain, practical, unglamorous magic that Milo listened to with the rapt, disbelieving attention of a man being handed the secret to something he’d assumed, his whole life, simply couldn’t exist.
He was still turning it over, still half-composing a reply in his head, by the time he climbed the stairs to his own room and pushed the door open.
The lightness left him the instant he saw who was waiting inside it.
Garrick stood near the window, arms crossed, silhouetted against the last gray light of evening, and there was nothing gruff or put-upon in his posture now — just a heaviness Milo hadn’t seen on him even during the long, silent ride home, the specific stillness of a man who has spent the whole day building up to a sentence he doesn’t want to say.
"We need to talk," Garrick said.
Milo felt his shoulders drop, the good mood of the letter still clinging stubbornly to him even as the room’s temperature seemed to change around it. "Can’t I just enjoy one good day? Please?"
Garrick didn’t smile.
"No," he said. "Good days are for those who deserve them. Not you. Not tonight."
Milo closed the door behind him, quietly, and waited.
"I’m going to be honest with you," Garrick said, and something in his voice had gone rough in a way that had nothing to do with the road dust still on his coat. "To be honest, Loof — I don’t like you. I haven’t, not really, not for years. You’ve been an embarrassment more times than I care to count, and I’ve cleaned up more of your messes than any man should have to clean up for another man’s grown son." He paused, and something underneath the bluntness cracked, just slightly. "But I love you anyway. Ironically. I practically raised you, whatever your father likes to say about it, and a man doesn’t spend that many years hauling a boy out of trouble without something taking root he can’t just prune back out again."
"I sense a but coming," Milo said, quiet.
"You’re acting strange," Garrick said, ignoring him entirely, pressing on like the sentence had been sitting loaded in his chest all day and needed to come out whole or not at all. "Stranger than a bad week explains. You stood in front of your own parents tonight and gave a speech about stories like you’d rehearsed it your whole life. You held your mother’s hug like a starving man instead of pulling away the way you always do. And now you’re up here about to write letters to a man twenty years your senior about skill books and Vaults, like you’ve been planning something for a very long time." He turned, finally, to face Milo directly, and his eyes were hard in a way Milo hadn’t seen from him even once all day. "It’s like you’re on the brink of pretending to be one of those fictional heroes you’re always burying your nose in. The good guy. The one who fixes everything, if he just wants it badly enough."
Milo laughed. It came out short, and genuinely amused, and entirely without the warmth the sound usually carried.
"Don’t worry," he said, and felt his own tone shift under him, easy and casual sliding away into something colder, more deliberate, the specific register he reserved for truths he needed someone to actually hear. "Just because I’ve faced something evil — and yes, that did make me decide to fight it — doesn’t mean I want to play the noble hero out of one of those stories. Facing evil doesn’t make a man good, Garrick. It just makes him someone who’s finally looked at it properly." He took a step closer, and watched Garrick’s hand twitch, almost imperceptibly, toward the sword at his hip, an old soldier’s instinct answering something in the air before his mind had fully caught up to naming it. "And sometimes good is completely helpless against evil. Too timid. Too kind. Too honorable to do what actually needs doing when the moment finally arrives."
"Loof—"
"To kill something evil," Milo said, quiet now, colder, closing the last of the distance between them, "you have to be dangerous. And dangerous things are rarely good, Garrick. That’s not a threat. It’s just the truest thing I know."
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.
Garrick stared at him, and Milo watched, with the specific, clinical attention of a man cataloguing a reaction he’d caused on purpose, as something in the older man’s face shifted — not fear, not exactly, but the wary, recalculating stillness of a soldier realizing, mid-conversation, that the boy he’d spent years hauling out of taverns and bad decisions had somehow, in the space of one terrible week, become something considerably harder to read.
He had spent years watching Loof throw tantrums over spilled wine and slighted pride. The eyes looking back at him now didn’t belong to that boy at all.
"...Fine," Garrick said finally, low, rough, and reached into his coat.
"I still don’t like you," he said, pressing something small and heavy into Milo’s open palm, his fingers closing over Milo’s own for one long, deliberate second before he let go. "And I think, whatever you’ve decided you’re about to become, you’re going to bring this whole house down around everyone in it who loves you." His jaw tightened, and something in his voice cracked, just once, right at the very end. "But you’ll need this. So take it, and don’t you dare tell your mother I gave it to you."
He was gone before Milo could ask what it was, boots heavy on the stairs, leaving Milo alone in the darkening room with his fist closed tight around something cold, and small, and entirely unexplained.