Uncle Ren burned the porridge again.
Rhys stood over the pot with a wooden spoon, scraping at a black crust that used to be breakfast, and did not bother hiding his disgust. "Four days running. Nobody does that by accident."
"I like the crunch." Ren didn't look up. He sat at the table threading a needle through the sole of an old boot, hands slow and sure, the same steady rhythm he used for everything. "Character building."
"It's building something. Not sure it's character."
That earned him the closest thing to a smile Ren allowed before noon, a small tug at the corner of his mouth that vanished as fast as it came. He was a tall man even seated, silver hair cropped close, a face that had been handsome once before something had rearranged it. A scar cut through his left eyebrow. Rhys had asked about it exactly once, years ago, and gotten three days of silence in return. He hadn't asked again.
That was the shape of them. Rhys asked easy questions and got easy answers. He asked the hard ones rarely, and got nothing at all, and had long since stopped expecting different.
He scraped the last of the porridge into two bowls anyway, because burned or not, food was food, and carried them to the table. Ren set the boot aside and ate without complaint, the way he ate everything, like a man who'd once gone a long time without the option to complain about food at all.
"I'm going into the square after," Rhys said, around a mouthful he immediately regretted. "Mira's got the ledgers from the last trade run. Says her father's cheating the miller again and wants a second set of eyes."
"Her father's always cheating the miller."
"That's what I said. She wants proof this time. Something she can wave at him."
Ren huffed something that might have been amusement. "Take the long way round. Through the orchard, not the main road."
"The main road's faster."
"The orchard's prettier." Ren didn't look up from his bowl. "Humor an old man."
Rhys let it go, the way he let most of Ren's small, specific instructions go, filed under the same unspoken category as always sit facing the door and never leave a blade unaccounted for in this house. He'd learned years ago that questioning them got him nowhere and ignoring them got him a headache, so mostly he just did as he was told and saved his stubbornness for things that mattered.
He was halfway through his second bowl when he noticed Ren had gone still.
Not resting-still. The other kind. The kind Rhys had catalogued without ever fully naming it, the specific stillness that came over Ren whenever a stranger passed through Hollowmere's one real road, hands going quiet, eyes tracking something without ever seeming to look at it directly.
"Ren."
"Finish your breakfast."
"Ren, what—"
"Finish your breakfast, Rhys."
He didn't. He was already moving to the window by the time Ren said it, some old instinct in him faster than obedience, and what he saw outside made the rest of the sentence die in his throat.
A cart had stopped outside their gate. Not unusual, on its own. Carts came through Hollowmere constantly, farmers and traders moving between the handful of overlooked villages that made up this whole stretch of borderland nobody important wanted. What made his stomach drop was the silence that followed the cart stopping. No greeting called out. No creak of boots climbing down to stretch. Just a horse breathing, and footsteps on packed dirt, unhurried in a way that made the hair on his arms rise before his mind caught up to why.
The man walking toward their gate wasn't from Hollowmere. Rhys knew that before he could have said how he knew it, the same way you know a stone doesn't belong in a bowl of rice. He wore a coat the color of ash, cut clean and precise, the kind of clean nobody in a patched-twice village could afford. He was neither young nor old in any way Rhys could pin down, ageless in a manner that unsettled rather than impressed. He carried no visible weapon. Somehow that was worse than if he had.
Behind him, Ren was already on his feet.
The stranger stopped at the gate and looked toward the house, not at Rhys in the window, straight past him, and when he spoke his voice carried easily, pitched to reach through the walls.
"Elric Voss." He said it like a name he'd been carrying a long time, turning it over, tasting how it fit. "You've been difficult to find."
Rhys turned to Ren, half expecting a laugh, a shrug, the wrong-house, wrong-village dismissal that would send the stranger back the way he came. Ren wasn't laughing. Ren's face had gone somewhere Rhys had never once seen it go in seventeen years, not distant, not the careful blankness he wore when a hard question landed. Still. Prepared.
"Stay inside," Ren said, low, already moving for the door.
"Ren—"
"I mean it, Rhys. Whatever happens. Stay inside."
He stepped out onto the porch before Rhys could argue further, and through the window Rhys watched him set his teacup down on the rail without spilling a single drop, hands steady in a way that should have been reassuring and instead felt like the worst sign yet.
"You have the wrong house," Ren said.
"I have the right boy."
The stranger's gaze slid past Ren, through the open door, and landed on Rhys standing frozen at the window, and something about being seen by him, really seen, for the first time, made the room feel suddenly, unbearably small.
"Thirteen years is a long time to keep a secret buried, old friend," the stranger went on, almost gentle, as if delivering good news. "Long enough that you almost believed you'd gotten away with it."
Thirteen years. Rhys had been four, thirteen years ago. He had no memories from before Hollowmere, before Ren, before mornings like this one, and had always assumed that was simply how early childhood worked, a haze that thinned to nothing before some arbitrary age. It had never once occurred to him that the haze might have an edge to it. A place where memory had been cut clean off, deliberately, by someone with a reason.
"Let him stay," the stranger said, before Ren could answer. "It seems only fair he understands what he is, before the House decides what to do about it."
Rhys was already moving for the door.
"Rhys, no..."
He didn't listen. Not this time. He crossed the kitchen and stepped out onto the porch in time to see Ren's whole body shift, weight dropping low, balanced on the balls of his feet in a stance Rhys had never once seen him use, not in seventeen years of yard drills with a wooden stick, and to see a knife appear in Ren's hand from somewhere Rhys hadn't even known he kept one.
The stranger didn't reach for a weapon of his own.
He simply smiled, small and unhurried, and raised one hand.