They rode south a second time, retracing ground already covered on foot and by horse, and nobody filled the silence with questions about hobgoblin packs this time.
Sir Adar kept pace near the front without being asked, his short sword riding easy at his hip instead of strapped across his back the way Howard's broadsword was. Henry watched him from a few lengths behind and made himself stop watching. Two years spent trying to recreate a single memory, and here the man was again, moving like it cost him nothing, even from horseback.
The Vice Captain hadn't asked a single question since the gate. He rode, he watched the tree line the way Arnold did, and he said nothing that didn't need saying.
The ride took a day and a half. The same corporal manned the Final Outpost's gate, breath fogging past his scarf, and he only looked faintly surprised to see four riders come back through instead of three.
Arnold swung down first. "Two days before we go back into that cave."
Howard blinked. "Two days?"
"Henry's shoulder isn't tested yet, and I'm not walking him blind into whatever's still down there." Arnold didn't look at Henry when he said it, which somehow made the correction land harder than if he had. "There's a frost boar pack denned up somewhere in this stretch of the ravine. We clear it first. Good warm-up, and it'll tell us exactly where that shoulder stands before it matters."
Nobody argued with that.
The Outpost's watchtower had one room built for warmth, a narrow stove and four cots crowded too close together, and by full dark the four of them had settled into it the way soldiers do, without needing to be told where to sit. Howard ran a whetstone down his broadsword out of habit more than need. Henry worked his shoulder through slow, careful circles, testing how far it would go before the ache turned sharp.
Adar sat across the stove from Arnold, forearms on his knees, watching the fire rather than either of the brothers.
"Your sons," Adar said eventually. "What ranks are they carrying into this."
It wasn't idle. Henry recognized the shape of the question immediately, the same flat, practical tone Garrett used when he asked about troop numbers. A man about to fight beside strangers wanted to know exactly what he was standing next to.
"Howard's D-," Arnold said.
Howard's whetstone paused half a stroke before continuing, his expression not shifting from mild, pleasant focus. If the number landed anywhere in him, he didn't let it show.
"And the younger one?"
"F+."
The fire popped once in the quiet that followed.
Adar's eyes moved to Henry properly for the first time since the gate, something recalculating behind them. "F+."
"That's what I said."
"He tested C-rank aptitude." It wasn't a question. Adar said it the way a man states a fact he's checking against another fact that refuses to sit next to it. "Two years since his coming-of-age, and he's already past F, sitting at the top bracket of it. On a C-rank multiplier, that's not fast. That's not possible, not through ordinary training."
Henry kept his hands moving on his shoulder, kept his face still, and said nothing.
"What exactly did he do out there for four months," Adar said, and this time it was aimed straight at Arnold. "Because whatever training program produces that, I'd like to know about it. For the Barony's sake, if nothing else."
Arnold set his own whetstone down against the stove with a small, deliberate click.
"You don't need to know."
Four words, flat as stone, and the room went very still around them.
Adar opened his mouth to push back. Arnold spoke over him before he got a word out.
"You need to know he's F+, because that's what matters when the two of you are standing back to back in a fight," Arnold said. "You don't need to know how he got there. Neither does Howard. Neither, frankly, do I, not all of it, and I've decided that's a door I'm not walking through."
Adar held his gaze a moment longer, weighing something, then let it go with a short exhale that wasn't quite a laugh. "Understood, Baron."
He didn't ask again. But Henry caught the look Adar sent his way afterward, quick and assessing, the kind of look a man gives a locked door he intends to remember the location of.
Henry looked back down at his shoulder and said nothing, grateful in a way he couldn't put into words for a father who didn't know the truth and had still just spent his own authority shielding it.
The stove ticked as it cooled. Outside, wind found the tower's seams and worried at them until Howard finally broke the quiet by sheathing his sword with more force than necessary.
"Boars," he said, mostly to himself. "Guess that's as good a warm-up as any."
"You didn't get thrown into a wall," Henry said.
"No." Howard's grin came easy, a beat too easy. "I just got to watch Father dismantle something twice my size while holding a sword I couldn't lift one-handed. Character building, all of it."
Adar's brow lifted slightly at that, filing it away without comment, and Henry wondered, not for the first time tonight, exactly how much this man was quietly cataloguing about all three of them.
Arnold banked the fire lower and claimed the cot nearest the door, the way he always did, first between his sons and whatever the dark decided to send.
"Sleep," he said. "Both of you. We start on those boars at first light."
Henry lay back on his cot and stared at the low timber ceiling, his shoulder aching in its familiar, fading way, and let himself think, just for a moment, about the two days after these two days. About the gate at the estate, and Mia's face when she saw him come through it whole.
He fell asleep before he could finish the thought.