"It’s hopeless," Osmund said, and the words came out thin and cracked, nothing at all like the composed, patient voice that had carried Milo through an evening of grief and a lifetime of stories weeks ago. "Loof — it’s hopeless. Normal geniuses have one talent. One. That’s the shape of a genius, in every story anyone’s ever told about one. He has—" his breath hitched, a raw, broken sound, "—he has over a hundred. I counted until I lost count. A hundred talents, stacked on top of each other, and that’s before his skills even start showing, and it isn’t a gap anymore, Loof, it isn’t even a wide gap. It’s a wall. It’s a wall with no top to it."
Milo slapped him.
It wasn’t hard, not really, not by the standard of anything either of them had survived in the past several weeks — but it cracked across the observatory’s cold silence like a snapped branch, sharp enough that Osmund’s head actually turned with it, sharp enough that the retching, shaking man kneeling on the stone floor blinked, once, and came back into his own eyes for the first time since he’d pulled away from the telescope.
"Look at me," Milo said, crouched in front of him, voice low and utterly without mercy. "Look at me, Osmund. Not the wall. Me."
"Loof—"
"What would Elenna say," Milo said, "if she saw you like this. Right now. On your knees on cold stone, giving up before you’ve even finished being sick over it." He watched the words land, watched something flinch behind Osmund’s eyes at the sound of her name used exactly that bluntly. "You’ve carried twenty years of hatred with nowhere to spend it. You told me that yourself, in this exact house, across this exact fire. Is this where it ends? One look through a telescope, and it’s over?"
"You don’t understand what I saw—"
"Then help me understand it," Milo said, "instead of drowning in it alone. But you do not get to give up on me right now, not tonight, not after everything it’s cost both of us to get this far."
Osmund’s breath shuddered out of him, ragged, and something in his face began, slowly, painfully, to reassemble itself — not calm, not yet, but present again, the specific effort of a man forcing his own spine to hold weight it didn’t currently want to carry.
"So what if he’s a powerhouse with a hundred talents," Milo said, standing now, voice climbing, fierce and unyielding in a way that filled the whole cold roof with something considerably warmer than the night deserved. "Then I’ll learn a thousand skills to counter him. I’ll grind until grinding stops meaning anything. I’ll write ten thousand letters if that’s what it takes to bring every angry, powerful, wronged person in this realm down on his head at once. I am risking absolutely everything I have left, Osmund, and I would rather burn every single scrap of it chasing an impossible wall than sit here quietly and let that wall stand forever because it frightened me once."
For a long moment, Osmund simply stared up at him, and something in his expression — grief, and shame, and underneath both of those, slowly, unmistakably, something that looked almost like awe — settled into place.
"You’re insane," he said, finally, and there was a wet, disbelieving laugh tangled up in the word.
"Probably," Milo agreed.
"I like it considerably better than despair," Osmund admitted, and reached up, and let Milo haul him to his feet.
---
He straightened his coat first — a small, deliberate motion, smoothing the fabric flat with both hands, the specific ritual of a man rebuilding his own composure one physical gesture at a time — and by the time he’d finished, something steadier had settled back into his shoulders, the twenty years of patient, careful trade-craft reasserting itself over the raw fear underneath.
"Your letters," Osmund said, "are chaos. Brilliant chaos, in places, but chaos all the same, and chaos gets people caught. Here’s the arrangement, if you’ll take it. You know things about this realm’s most dangerous names that I have no earthly explanation for you knowing — where their loyalties actually sit, what old wounds still haven’t healed, which grudges are real and which are merely convenient rumor. Give me that. The names, the personalities, the specific pressure points. I’ll do what I’ve spent two decades learning to do properly — write it, forge it, dress it in exactly the right hand and exactly the right seal, so that not one of these letters ever traces back to either of us."
"And if one does," Milo said.
"Then it traces to me," Osmund said, without a single second of hesitation, "and I will have spent my life exactly the way I always meant to before a King decided otherwise. You let me carry that weight, Loof. You’ve carried enough already."
Milo opened his mouth to argue, and found, watching the old, familiar stubbornness settle back over Osmund’s face, that arguing wouldn’t move him an inch. He let it go.
"There’s one more thing," Osmund said, business reasserting itself fully now, brisk and purposeful in a way that felt, after everything, almost like relief. "You need to leave. Not the letters — the writing, the plotting, all of that stays here, with me. But you, physically, need to go somewhere far from prying eyes and grind. Levels. Class experience. Baseline endurance, the kind no skill book can substitute for. There’s a stretch of borderland three days south of here — the Ashfen Marches, sparsely populated, thick with low-rank dungeons nobody important bothers monitoring closely. Weak enough that you won’t die learning your own limits. Numerous enough that you’ll never run short of something to grind against. Go there. Build the foundation properly, the boring, unglamorous way, while I hunt down every skill book in this kingdom that might actually matter against that wall of his — even if it kills me trying."
"That’s not a comforting way to phrase a promise."
"It’s an honest one," Osmund said, "which I understood, somewhere in the last several weeks, mattered rather more to you than comfort does." A faint, exhausted smile crossed his face. "Go south. Grow strong. Come back when you’re ready, and I’ll have letters waiting, and skills waiting, and whatever else this kingdom has left to give either of us."
Milo nodded, feeling something settle into place — a plan, finally, real and shared instead of frantic and alone — and turned back toward the telescope, curiosity finally catching up with him now that the worst of the fear had drained out of the room.
"Let me see it," he said, already reaching for the fitted lens. "If I’m going to fight what you saw, I should at least know what I’m—"
Osmund’s hand closed hard around his wrist before he’d finished the sentence, grip shaking, urgent, all the fresh-won composure cracking straight back open in an instant.
"Don’t," he said, and his voice had gone thin again, stripped bare, every scrap of the steady merchant’s calm burned away by the single word. "Don’t look. Not yet." His eyes, still red-rimmed, still wet, held Milo’s with a desperation that needed no further explanation at all. "Please."
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