It would not have been a terrible thing to have stayed in the Holy City. A fine place, Karelin was, all whitewashed walls and soaring towers and tiled roofs. There had been such people there as a man could never see in the whole of Narr, and the food. Gods below, the food!

But there was nothing like coming home. Being home, that could chafe after a time, but coming home was a feeling like none other: sweet, nostalgic, and true.

"I've just had the strangest thought," Diarmán said. He stood on a hilltop overlooking a glorious green meadow. In the distance stood his ancestral home, solid and timeless against the gray haze of a charred forest.

Maybe it was the forest that was his ancestral home, in truth. Diarmán was a man full-grown and still did not rightly know.

"What is it?" Uachi did not look at him when he spoke. He sat astride his horse next to Diarmán's and gazed over the meadow. The line of his mouth was, as usual, grim, and his burn scar stood out clearly in the daylight, the skin rough and mottled, pale in places and pink or bruise-purple in others. Farra was not with them; she had wandered afield, perhaps in search of lunch, but she would catch up before long.

"I feel," said Diarmán, "like we've been here before."

Uachi snorted. "Do you."

Diarmán grinned. "Shall we, Captain? Oh. Wait."

Rolling his eyes, Uachi tapped his heels against his horse's flanks. "Will you never tire of this foolishness?"

"I can't call you Captain any more, can I?" Diarmán lightly flicked his reins, and his own horse trotted forward, following Uachi's down the gentle slope of the hill. "What with you being sent away from the Holy City in disgrace, and all. I keep forgetting."

"You don't forget it for a bloody second."

It was true. Diarmán would never forget the series of events that had led to Uachi's dismissal from his service as Captain of the Imperial Army and one of Emperor Matei and Empress Mhera's most trusted advisors. It had been after their world-wandering adventures when, safe and sound at last in the Imperial Palace itself, Uachi had up and murdered his arch-nemesis and nearly gotten himself killed in the process.

The fact that said arch-nemesis had been a prisoner at the time was what had relieved Uachi of the embroidered pantalettes of his lofty station.

"Well, it's your own fault that you're reminded of your disgrace every two minutes," said Diarmán. "You didn't have to come with me if you wanted to hang about with people who would mollycoddle your ego."

"My ego?" Uachi said. "I didn't even bring it. There's not room enough in Narr for an ego aside from yours."

Diarmán threw his head back, laughing. Yes, Karelin had been wonderful, but Karelin had not offered him this: companionship, unfettered by the distractions of court life and Uachi's myriad other entanglements. And if watching Uachi's shoulders underneath his linen shirt was a distraction, well, Diarmán could cope with that. If the brush of Uachi's fingers against his when they passed a water skin sent a bolt of heat through his body, he could ignore it. He didn't know why Uachi had chosen to come with him to Narr, and he did not plan to ask. He was afraid to know the answer, afraid to hear the truth, because he was certain that Uachi u Rora had some honorable rationale for following a wayward, bastard lordling back to his crumbling home, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with hearts.

Debts to repay, and all.

"You might have told them we were coming," said Uachi, breaking a silence that had gone on for too long. "I am certain they will be glad of your return, but would they not wish to prepare?"

"Prepare what?" Diarmán chuckled. "Run our two maids ragged finding the best of the moldering bedsheets? Beat the threadbare rugs? Air the moth-eaten curtains? I grew to manhood in this old castle, Uachi of the North. I love it, moss and spiders and all. It would hardly look the same to me, spruced up for my return."

"So there is humility in him after all." Uachi looked at Diarmán, his dark eyes glittering with amusement.

They were nearing the keep. When they had nearly crossed the distance between their grassy vantage point and the old castle, Uachi pulled the hood of his cowl up and drew a fold up over his chin, mouth, and nose.

"I wish you wouldn't," said Diarmán.

Uachi didn't answer for a moment. Their horses' hooves thudded gently against the soft earth beneath them. The motion of Uachi's horse carried through the man's body, that easy rock, as natural as if they were one creature. "You'd have me scare the wits out of your mother, and that boy-brother of yours? Emón, was it not?"

"Aye, Emón. Named after my delightful grandfather." Diarmán clenched his jaw. As happy as he was to be coming home, that was a reunion he would not relish. "But you'll not scare anyone, Uachi. I swear to you: you look more foreboding with that mask on. 'Tis just a scar."

Uachi was not a soft man, and he was seldom a gentle man, and he was vulnerable oh, so rarely. Diarmán had caught only a few glimpses of what lay beneath Uachi's gruff demeanor in all the long days and nights they had traveled together, when his deep love and the grief that had become indistinguishable from it—for his wife, and for his brother—had been impossible to contain.

This, though: this was a vulnerability that was Uachi's own. And while he might insist that he wore that cowl to "protect" others from the sight of his burned face, he wasn't vain or foolish.

He was simply a man growing used to a new and unfamiliar face. It would take him some time.

Diarmán held Uachi's gaze; he would not be the first to look away. When Uachi broke eye contact, Diarmán did not push the matter. It was not his decision.

Their horses' hooves rang off the stone walls of the courtyard of Eldran's Keep as they crossed into the place. Diarmán swung out of his saddle and slid down to the ground. He stretched with a groan, raising his arms above his head and arching his back. Nearby, Uachi did the same. No one had come to greet them; there were no grooms standing ready to take their horses, no pretty serving maids come to offer them a fresh dipper of cool water, no finely-clad line of noble family ready to bestow air kisses and smiles.

"Home," Diarmán sighed. That sweet feeling of anticipation, of returning, was already fading.