Chapter 21 Know your place

The house they gave the Drakhars was smaller than the stable Julius had grown up next to.

It sat at the far edge of the kingdom, in the border districts, where the crown swept its broken soldiers and its fallen names so it would not have to look at them. The mountains here were lower and meaner. The walls were stone and packed mud, the roof patched in three places, one window cracked and stuffed with rag.

They had ridden 1 day to reach it in a plain cart, no banners, no guards, just the three of them and the little the crown had let them keep. Nobody on the road bowed. A month ago every head would have dropped. Now men looked, the white hair, remembered who he was, and looked away, the way you look away from something you are glad is not happening to you but few people still greeted with smile cause they still believed in valen.

Elysia did not cry where the children could see. Lyra cried for both of them, because Lyra still did not understand why Daddy had not come, only that he had not, and that asking made Mama's face do a thing she hated.

Julius did not cry at all. He carried the boxes in.

Aurelius had ridden the whole way with them, which he had no orders to do and did anyway. He could not stay. There was trouble on the eastern border, beasts pushing out of the wild in numbers that did not happen by accident, and the Shield of Titania did not get to pick grief over duty. He had stretched the leaving as long as he could. Now the cart was empty and there was nothing left to carry and no more reasons to stand around.

He came close to julius and
Never forget who you are boy , whose son you are you are a DARKHAR. That gave Julius a wakeup call and he needed it .
"I'll be back when I can," he said. "Could be a season. Could be longer. Beasts don't keep a calendar." His hand closed on Julius's shoulder, gentle for him, which was still enough to feel in the bone. "Look after them till I'm back. And look after yourself, boy. Out here, nobody else is going to."

Then he mounted up, and the orange of his hair was the last bright thing on that grey road for a long while, and then it was gone too, and the house was very quiet.

* * *

A month passed.

You learn a place by what it takes from you, and the border district took a little every day. The rations the Warden's men handed out were short, and getting shorter. The well water tasted of iron. Elysia, who had once planted gardens that lords rode out to see, now stood in the cold market haggling with a one-eyed trader over the price of dried beans, and she won, because she was still Elysia, but Julius saw what it cost her to do it.

He found work where a strong eleven-year-old could. Hauling, stacking, mending fences against animals the fences would not really stop. He kept his head down and his eyes open. He learned which men to avoid and which guards took coin where the tame edge of the district blurred into the wild. He was just observing everything cause he wanted to survive and fullfill his promise to his father .

But the nights were his.

Every night, once the house was asleep, he sat on the cold floor and reached inside himself the way he had a thousand times before, The wall was not the same anymore and now his aspect core is taking aura and circulating it slowly from the hole .
When the first he sat alone after the trial incident and his aur reached his aspect core he felt the burning sensation again and it was like it was commanding him and eating him.
In last one month Julius got use to this burning feeling , he was now able to move while circulating thin aura .
Today he felt now finally he can do things he wanted.
. He had taught himself not to look at that. He just trained. One small circle, then another, building the thing his whole life had told him he would never have. It was almost nothing. To a boy who had had nothing, it felt like he have everything . He have the hope.
* * *

The Warden came on the thirty-first day.

Julius heard the cane before he saw the man, a hard, fussy tapping on the dirt path, like someone knocking on a door that was already open. Then Garren Holt came around the fence, and Julius understood most of him in one look.

He was fat, his belly leading him like a herald, stuffed into a fine embroidered coat a size too tight, thin legs underneath, rings on his fingers and a gold chain looped across his front. He was bald from the forehead back, with a fussy little mustache and a little bug nose, and he carried an ornate gold-handled cane that had plainly never once helped him walk. Two of his men loitered behind him, bored and armed.

"House Drakhar," he said, and made the name sound like a joke he was kind enough to share. "Or what's left of it." He looked the little house up and down, slow, savoring it. "I am Warden Holt. This march is mine, which means, in the way the crown measures such things, that you are mine too."

He had come for a settlement tax. There was no settlement tax. There did not need to be. He named a figure, and when Elysia said quietly that they did not have it, he smiled and brought the figure down to the exact small heap of coin she did have, as though he were being generous, and his men scooped it off the table.

Julius stood in the doorway and watched a Stage Two nobody rob his mother. He was eleven, and he had a candle's worth of aura that he had only just learned to move. He could not beat this man. Not yet, not close. And even if he could have, it would not have mattered, because Garren did not stand on his own strength. He stood on the rules and rules means KING .

So Julius did nothing just calculating how and when he can take this fatty out.

Garren caught the look anyway, the way small cruel men have a nose for it. He stepped closer, close enough that Julius could smell the oil in his mustache, and tapped the gold head of the cane once against the boy's chest.

"You have your father's eyes," he said, pleased with himself, not knowing that another man had said those exact words in a far grander room. "Learn to point them at the floor. Out here you are not the son of anybody. Know your place, boy."

Then he left, cane tapping, men trailing, off to be the biggest thing in someone else's small day.

Lyra crept out from behind the door once the path was empty. "I don't like him," she said.

"No," said Julius.

"Are you going to make him sorry?"

He looked at his sister, then at the cracked window, then at the spot on his chest where the cane had touched. "Not today," he said.

That night he sat on the cold floor again, reached inside, and ran the aura through one more slow circle than he had managed the night before.