The fire in the north corridor had been burning for hours.
Gareth knew it because the wood no longer crackled. It just burned, with the calmness of things that have accepted their fate.
Xiete hadn't moved from the armchair.
"I saw it," Gareth said.
Xiete didn't take his eyes off the fire.
"And?"
Gareth took a second.
"It's not normal."
The fire burned in silence.
"Explain."
"The Torrens didn't fall alone."
Gareth leaned against the wall, crossing his arms.
"Kael chose the outcome he needed and built it piece by piece. Without hesitation. Without trying to save them."
Xiete nodded slowly.
"That's what we expected."
"From an adult. Not from a thirteen-year-old boy."
Silence.
Xiete put his fingertips together.
"Does that worry you?"
"I'm worried that he didn't hesitate."
"Kladis's desperation made him predictable." Xiete looked down at the embers, "Every move measured by necessity, not by actual fear."
"That's not it." Gareth shook his head. "Kladis's desperation was the board. Kael was the one who chose how to move it, and not just move it... he controlled how the board would look to others."
Xiete didn't reply immediately.
A spark flew from the fire. Neither of them followed it with their gaze.
"The problem isn't what he did," Xiete finally said.
Gareth looked at him.
"Then?"
"The fear."
"He's been under pressure since he arrived. He's held firm, even Varen would have hesitated under that weight..."
"It's not the same." Xiete shook his head slightly. "Pressure you don't choose forces you to act. But fear you don't understand stays inside."
"And when enough accumulates, it contaminates what follows."
Gareth knew what he meant. He had seen men like that. Capable of terrible things until something broke at the worst possible moment. The problem wasn't the capacity. It was the exact instant he failed. And Kael, at his age, was playing with that risk.
'If Kael survives, it could change Varen's view on the heirs. It could reopen the option of succession, so that Rylan would no longer be the only one entitled, but the others could also aspire to the position... even I could take advantage of it.'
"What do you propose?"
Xiete didn't reply immediately.
"The recruits."
Gareth exhaled slowly.
"He won't survive."
"If he doesn't survive," Xiete said, "we will have learned something cheap."
"Cheap?"
"Much cheaper than relying on him five years from now and discovering then that fear governs him. Every mistake we prevent now saves us a future disaster."
The fire threw another spark.
Gareth didn't argue. The logic was impeccable, as Xiete's logic always was: no room for what couldn't be measured.
But as he walked toward the exit corridor, he thought.
'How much longer will I have to wait? Years of training had passed, and he kept getting older. When will Kael reach his true potential... or decide that our paths finally align? Will it be before I die, or too late?'
The boy was part of that path.
Or so he had told himself.
Xos turned the corner of the corridor.
"Little friend," Xos said, without changing his pace.
Kael looked at him. Nothing else.
"Good thing you showed up," Xos continued, putting his arm over his shoulder.
"..." Kael remained silent.
"The tool,"
"You haven't forgotten, have you?"
"I'm still looking for it." Kael didn't even slow down.
"Looking?" Xos tilted his head slightly. "Curious."
"..." Kael walked without responding, adjusting his steps so his shoulder wasn't so trapped by Xos's arm.
"You used to ask me for things," Xos said, with a thread of a smile.
His fingers squeezed Kael's shoulder a little.
"Now it seems you don't."
Kael didn't respond.
He felt the arm relax slightly.
"I wonder if your conscience no longer allows you," Xos lowered his voice.
"Or if you simply decided that now everything you want, you take in another way."
"..." Kael's silence filled the corridor.
"Curious, isn't it?" Xos let out a small smile.
"People usually give themselves away. They avoid talking. They look at the floor. They over-explain. You... you don't do any of that."
"...."
Xos reached the corridor bifurcation.
"Return it," he said.
"Don't make me look for it myself. We both know how that ends."
"I'll return it," Kael finally said.
"Good." Xos nodded and turned around.
Xos reached his post with measured steps, as if everything that had happened before had been nothing more than a minor interruption and now he was returning to what really mattered.
The room was silent. Small and functional. The bed against the left wall, the table under the narrow window, and the worn chair in front of it. On the back wall was the board: rows of iron hooks with tools hanging in a precise order. Each one had its place and each place a function. Some controlled the fortress's outer doors, others the dock gates, and several activated internal locks in the main corridors. The system was not complex, but it depended on order. If a tool was not where it should be, something stopped working.
Xos placed the long knife on the table and sat down. From underneath, he took out the cloth and the small bottle of oil. The ritual always started the same way. He took the short knife from the left and calmly ran the cloth over the blade. The edge didn't need maintenance; it was perfect. But the gesture had its use. The hands were busy and the mind thought better when following something mechanical.
As he cleaned the blade, his eyes scanned the board unhurriedly, hook by hook, tool by tool. The corridor conversation was still in his head. The boy would return the tool. Or not.
Xos tilted the knife toward the lamplight. The metal reflected an orange line that trembled for an instant before disappearing. Kael had changed. Before, he talked too much, asked useless questions, observed everything as if trying to understand a game whose rules he didn't yet know. Now he didn't. Now he was silent. He walked differently, with a kind of quiet decisiveness, as if he had already reached a conclusion and the rest was simply taking time to understand it.
Xos continued cleaning the knife. Smart children always went through that phase. They thought they were discovering something great about the world. Then they grew old enough to understand that the world had no interest in being understood.
He put the first knife in its place and took the second. He spun it between his fingers before starting to clean it. Kael was not strong, nor fast, nor especially resilient. In the fortress, those things usually defined someone's destiny quite quickly. But the boy had something strange, something that didn't react as it should.
Most of the children here were afraid. Some hid it poorly, others disguised it as arrogance or silence. But fear always found a way out: in the voice, in the breathing, or in the way they looked. Not in Kael.
He finished with the second knife and hung it up. He took the third and slowly ran the cloth over the edge. The sound of the fabric against the metal filled the room for a few seconds. Then he stopped.
The fourth hook.
The tool was there.
Xos didn't react immediately. He just looked at it. Exactly in its place, as if it had never left. He remained still for a moment. That morning he had checked the board, as always, twice. And before going to the corridor, he had checked it again. The tool was gone.
Now it was there.
He put the knife on the table and stood up unhurriedly. He took the tool from the hook and examined it. The weight was correct. The metal showed no new marks. The edges had no signs of recent use. Nothing seemed out of place. He hung it up again.
The noise from the port came through the crack in the window: wood hitting wood, ropes tightening, gulls arguing in the distance. Constant, indifferent sounds. The boy hadn't returned it. He couldn't have. To enter that room, a key was needed, and there was only one.
His.
Xos checked the board again patiently, as if each tool could explain something to him if he observed it long enough. Then he stopped. The third hook from the right was empty.
Xos frowned.
The missing tool had returned, but another had disappeared. It wasn't a theft. It was an exchange.
He leaned his hand on the board. The metal was cold under his fingers. Someone had been there. Someone who knew exactly what they were doing. There was no mess, no signs of searching, no mistakes. Just a clean substitution.
That was what unsettled him.
Not the missing object.
The precision.
Xos took a deep breath while the cloth was still in his hand. His mind began to run through possibilities one after another. A mistake of his? No. He didn't confuse positions. Another guard? Unlikely. In the fortress, no one touched another's post; every mistake ended up being the responsibility of whoever occupied the chair. Xiete? Xos discarded the idea almost instantly. If Xiete wanted something, he just took it.
Then there was another possibility.
Xos looked again at the empty hook and then at the tool that had returned.
Kael.
The thought appeared on its own.
Xos let out a small laugh through his nose. No. The boy didn't have a key, nor access, much less the necessary knowledge to know which tool to exchange and which to return. Still, the idea didn't go away. It stayed there, still and uncomfortable, like a stone inside a boot.
Xos scanned the board one last time. The tool that had disappeared had returned, but another was gone. He frowned, his mind reviewing the order, each position, each function. Everything seemed correct, and yet something didn't fit. Every hook, every tool, projected the same calmness as before... but the pattern had been invisibly broken.
He rested his hand on the cold metal. There were no signs of disorder, no new marks, no hurry. No one had entered clumsily. There was only a silent, exact exchange, as if someone knew exactly what to do and what to leave intact. Xos took a deep breath and returned to scan the row of hooks, his eyes measuring every shadow, every reflection of the lamplight. Nothing. Everything was in its place... except what wasn't.
For the first time in a long time, he didn't know where to start. The board was no longer a safe pattern, but a problem that had mutated before his eyes.
A minimal, almost imperceptible gesture, had been enough to sow doubt in his methodical mind.