Huddled together on Anaya’s back, the two of them raced back the way they’d come. The clouds were glowing blacker still, Osmund noted grimly, and it looked like the rain would catch up with him this time. With no monster on their heels, he had time to study the swath of destruction that the wyrm had carved into the landscape.

How did a cave-dwelling dragon end up in a place like this?! Of course, he had no answer to give himself.

It was to Osmund’s boundless relief that they found Banu anxiously pacing by the creek not far from where they left her; she was really such a good horse. Osmund moved to dismount, but then noticed for the first time how heavily Cemil was leaning on him. That…was concerning.

He was unable to ask again if he was alright before Cemil was urging him off Anaya’s back. Maybe it was an attempt to head off the question. “Let’s go,” Cemil ordered when Osmund had barely gotten a foot in the stirrups. Without further delay, they turned for home.

The journey back was nothing like the exultant morning. The clouds had opened up and the rain was turning the hills to mud. It was a long, hard, wet ride. Osmund kept sneaking worried glimpses at the Meskato prince. He was sitting upright in the saddle and hadn’t uttered a single complaint, but something felt deeply off about him all the same.

Finally seeing the lights of the mansion in the distance was a bone-deep relief. Cemil was out of the saddle almost as soon as they’d entered the grounds, landing heavily on both feet. A servant scuttled out of the house to help them out of the rain, and Cemil thanked him courteously as if all were well. Osmund said a silent apology to Banu as he saw both horses being secured in their pens; they’d just had a terrible time of it. But he’d wouldn’t get a chance to do more for them until later.

Side-by-side they entered the house, where they were accosted by Cemil’s men wanting to know how to handle a particularly stubborn petitioner from town. To Osmund’s dismay, Cemil stopped for a few moments to give the matter his attention, as if he wasn’t on the verge of collapse. In fact, everyone was treating him normally, apparently blind to what Osmund felt was so obvious. The rain had washed the worst of the blood and gore from Cemil’s dark riding clothes, and so everyone simply saw a normal, if damp, imperial prince.

They’d only just broken free of the man when another pair of figures appeared in the hallway, and a single glance stopped Osmund in his tracks. One was Lala Muharrem. And as for the other, he didn’t need an introduction to know exactly who this was.

“Cemil!” the woman called, her voice raised with fright. Her hanging robes swung as she fled to his side, and her ringed hands went to his face, inspecting him. She spoke to him in a language Osmund didn’t understand. Cemil replied in Meskato blended with some other tongue.

The prince’s mother looked to be in her forties or fifties, and her beauty was striking. She stood graceful and tall, her features effortlessly refined even as they worried for her son. The family resemblance was extremely apparent.

Osmund should have averted his eyes, for politeness’s sake. But he didn’t. So this is what it’s like, he thought distantly, to come back from some misadventure and have a parent worried for you. His own mother’s face was nothing in his mind but a painted portrait on the walls of Valcrest Castle, mouth neutral, eyes serene. Perhaps even that was now gone.

Cemil and his mother cast a glance behind in his direction. More unknown words passed between them. Osmund colored; it felt like they were talking about him.

Then the Meskato prince stepped away. Head high, he flagged down a passing woman in soldier’s garb. “I’d like you to carry a message to the soldiers.” This time, the strain was starting to color his voice, even with all his effort. “A wyrm was spotted near the village of Torel. It now lies dead.” (It was Osmund’s first time hearing the Meskato word for wyrm, though the context helped.) “When the rain clears, we ████ the area. We must figure out how such a creature got there.”

The servants had started to gather. Cemil addressed them next. “We’ll make every effort to keep Şebyan and your families safe. I swear it.” He put his hands on Osmund’s shoulders and urged him forward before them. “Now treat your companion Osmund well. He saved my life today.”

A small outburst of surprised noises greeted this announcement. One such wordless yelp came from Osmund himself. Me?! He was pretty sure his contribution to the entire effort could be considered to be less than one percent. Before he got a chance to protest, he was swarmed by the other servants. Cemil had vanished down the hall.

“Osmund! You saw a wyrm!?” Nuray all but shouted in his face. “How big was it? How did you escape?!”

“Um, very big,” Osmund managed with his limited Meskato, raising one hand as high as he could in a failed effort to approximate its height for her. “And, scary. Cemil killed it.”

“I don’t understand,” one of the laundresses was saying. “How could there be a monster attacking people so close to Şebyan?!”

Everyone knew there were all breeds of terrifying creature in wild places, but no one in civilized society expected to encounter one close to home. Monsters were something that came to city-dwellers in the safety of stories, and in merchants hawking exotic animal parts for elixirs, and in menageries. For his part, Osmund had never seen one outside the bars of a cage.

The servants sat him down and battered him with questions. How had Cemil killed the creature on his own? Had they been out hunting? Was he a friend of the prince’s now? Dazedly he answered to the best of his ability, and gulped down the food they’d begun sliding towards him. One of the older women brushing out his hopelessly rain-tangled hair. They were caring for him, he realized. As if he were one of their own.

“You’re shocked,” Nuray observed, looking into his eyes. She had taken a seat beside him, giving him something solid to focus on. “You should relax. It’s okay now. And—” Her entire nose suddenly wrinkled in a rabbitlike gesture. “Why do you smell so bad?”

“Nuray!”

Neither of them paid attention to the scolding aunt. “The wyrm,” he answered numbly. “It had a terrible smell. Like—I don’t know. Like something that’s been…rotting.”

“Well, take a bath,” she advised, clearly less interested in the particulars. “You don’t want the şehzade to be unable to get close to you!” Osmund didn’t tell her that of the two of them, Cemil was the one who’d gotten soaked in the creature’s horrible fluids. He wanted to be entirely done thinking about it.

“That woman before,” he said instead, hesitant. “Cemil’s mother…”

Her eyes widened. “That’s right, you haven’t met Lady Danvarra before,” she remembered. “Don’t worry, she doesn’t interact with us much unless she wants something. Maybe it’s her people’s culture; she obviously doesn’t think highly of us Meskato. I don’t know how she’s going to run the imperial palace when her son becomes the emperor.”

There was more he wanted to ask, but the restlessness in his bones hadn’t dissipated with the shock. I need to see him, Osmund thought to himself with heightening clarity. I’m the only one who saw what state he’s in.

“I-I have to go,” he yelped, interrupting someone mid-question. “Excuse me please!”

Heedless of appearances, Osmund sprinted down the corridors to Cemil’s room and rapped on the door. “Cemil, are you alright?” he called, loudly enough, he hoped, to carry through the wood. He’d switched to Tolmish, which they always used to communicate. “It’s me! Do you need more nightroot?!”

“Do you have some business with my son?”

Osmund looked up sharply. Cemil’s mother—Lady Danvarra—was standing at the end of the hall. He stepped back anxiously, shrinking under her gaze, which was a flawless mask of indifference. Osmund had learned to fear important people with careful faces. “I, I, um,” he stammered, returning to Meskato to match the language in which she’d spoken. “I was… I wanted to…”

The door creaked open. Cemil stood with one hand braced against the doorframe, but otherwise upright. “Mother,” he said. “Osmund is my new horseman. I told you he can be trusted.”

Trusted. Trusted. Trusted.

Cemil’s mother stepped closer. She asked her son some question in that unknown language from before; Cemil responded in kind. It was alienating, but most of all, Osmund was curious to know how this woman—an outsider like himself—had wound up giving birth to an imperial prince.

At length, they turned to him. Cemil spoke. “Come in, Osmund,” he bade, using Tolmish. Then to his mother, in Meskato: “We can talk later.”

The woman inclined her head at her princely son. Her eyes passed only briefly over Osmund, and then she was gone. He was a little grateful for it, and a little sad too. Maybe he’d harbored a secret hope that he would make a good first impression after all.