When Changmin is seven years old, he and his father board a ship in Southsun Cove bound for Saltshear in the far north. There are many things he doesn’t understand at the time – like why his mother and older sisters cry like it’s the last time they’ll ever see him, or what exactly ‘cold’ is (he’s never been cold in his life, having been born in the hot and arid southern territory of Coalfell). He’s told he’ll be paged in the north, that his father performed some heroic feat for the king of Starsummit and that’s why he’s returned from the war: in thanks he’d been granted the request of having his son trained by one of the king’s men.

“If he shows promise,” Yanghyun told him, “then perhaps after learning from my own guard he shall be put in a place similar for my son,” and Dongsik had eagerly agreed.

Changmin has no interest in knights or battles. He likes to stay close to home and within eyesight of his mother just in case she needs him – his father is always away at war, after all, so he’s the only man in the house. He likes playing outside and often imagines himself a prince or a king in his games. His father knows this, and so he uses it as encouragement against the forlorn attitude that grows within his son the longer they are at sea.

“If you do well at this,” he tells Changmin, kneeling before his son and pulling him close, “if you ride well and fight well for your lord, then you will meet the king of Starsummit. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” and when Changmin nods in affirmation, the pout still not leaving his face, Dongsik presses a bit harder. “Do well for the king and you may be a knight for the prince. That would make me so proud, Changmin.”

Later that evening, when his father is mingling with other passengers on the ship and Changmin is left to his own devices, he hides away in their cabin and cries. By the time Dongsik returns, however, all traces of his tears are banished.

 

 

Yunho is thirteen years old when he meets Changmin for the first time. The younger boy’s instructor has taken ill and so, in an unexpected twist, he finds himself at the training grounds wrapped in full padding and with baton in hand alongside the page for the very first time. Changmin is sullen and quiet, but every time their mock swords connect there’s a flash in the shorter boy’s eyes that Yunho can only read as fear; he glimpses at the prince for a moment, then diverts his gaze to the older’s handlers for indication that he’s pushed too far. After four binds, Yunho decides he’s had enough.

“They aren’t going to do anything,” he says quietly the next time they bind, and this time, Changmin doesn’t look away from the prince’s eyes. Yunho sees the change almost immediately: gone are the doe-like wary eyes he’d seen up to this point, and instead, the younger narrows his lids and the nervousness is replaced by determination. The older practically lights up at the transformation (this is the first time anyone’s ever dared to look at him like that before), and Changmin immediately notices how brilliant, blinding, perfect Yunho’s smile is. It’s distracting.

“Don’t go easy on me, you won’t hurt me,” the older insists – and that’s when Changmin’s grip slips, his baton dragging harshly down Yunho’s left cheek before he can correct himself. The blood that immediately drips down the prince’s cheek makes the color drain from Changmin’s face, and in blind panic, he drops his baton and hits his knees to bow so deeply his forehead touches the ground.

“I’m so sorry!” he apologizes hastily, and for the first time since his arrival in Solitude Vale four years ago, the chill has completely left his bones, replaced by something else entirely, and the fear he’d initially experienced while training with Yunho comes back in white-hot waves that make him feel sick to his stomach. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to –"

But he’s being yanked to his feet by Yunho’s handlers, and despite the older boy’s protests and insistences that it was his own fault, Changmin is promptly stripped of his padding and dragged away from the training grounds, all the way back to his shared quarters.

He gets no dinner that night, nor does he get any for three nights after.

 

 

By the time Changmin is fourteen, he and Yunho have progressed to regular sparring partners. Neither are at the castle often anymore – Changmin is a squire now and so he accompanies his attended Kingsguard, Kangta, onto the field. Yunho, too, is now taken to battle; he’s sixteen and a bit further in his training than Changmin is, and they’re both much busier now than they were when they’d first met, but that doesn’t stop them from meeting when they can.

Maybe too much, Changmin sometimes thinks, especially when they both seem to forget their stations for a moment. Changmin is bad with a bow and Yunho points it out whenever the opportunity arises, just like Changmin often throws sharp, scathing comments in the prince’s -- the prince’s – direction when the other hits him in the head just a little too hard. And Yunho can’t swim – Changmin’s dragged him out of the water at least twice now, and he’s called the older an idiot for the attempt both times.

In moments, when they both forget, it’s almost as if they’re friends – not Jung Yunho, Prince of Starsummit and Shim Changmin, squire from some lesser noble house in Firebend. He isn’t even from the capital. Yunho shouldn’t treat him so familiarly, but he’s never seemed to mind at all.

“Do you enjoy it?” Yunho asks him one evening after a particularly nasty foray, sitting away from the roaring campfires of men celebrating victory as he diligently cleans his own sword. Changmin watches him, taking note of the dried blood sitting in the fuller of the blade and something within him feels… not at all right. He thinks of Yunho’s gentle constitution and how there are moments where the older’s smile isn’t quite as bright as it once was. He wonders if anyone else has noticed, or if they would care if they did. They should.

“It’s…” Changmin begins, but his words falter; in the end he shrugs, sitting down heavily slightly behind the other. His fingers go to the laces of Yunho’s thick leather armor out of habit, stripping away the remnants and symbolically purging today’s memories for the prince as he tries to put together his thoughts. “I don’t dislike it,” he finally says, “but I don’t like it, either. It simply… is, for me.”

Yunho’s hands still as Changmin speaks and moves about him, silent for a long while after as he mulls over the younger boy’s words. For a moment, Changmin wonders if he’s answered incorrectly, but then:

“I hate it,” Yunho whispers, though he doesn’t look back up to the younger. His hands begin to move again, turning the blade on his lap. “I know why it came to be and why it continues, and I don’t understand the need for it or why my father refuses to listen to reason. It isn’t right, Chami.”

Changmin knows Yunho isn’t wrong. They both know why the wars continue: because Starsummit is stolen territory, and they’ve fought the ones with the rightful claim for untold years now. The wars don’t end, and the older the two boys get the clearer it becomes that Yunho’s father isn’t exactly the just king they’d thought him to be in their youth. But they both know they have their roles to play; this is what birth gave them, after all.

“Then do not fight,” Changmin says, quiet and yet filled with a newfound resolve of meaning and purpose. “I will do it for you.”

 

 

Changmin’s mother dies when he is fifteen years old. Dongsik sends word to him via raven requesting him to return to Firebend for a time (“Come home,” the letter says, and Changmin feels strange about the wording, because the Vale has been his home longer than Firebend ever was). Despite his apprehensions he complies, attaining permission before readying himself to visit people he has not seen for more than half his life and to say goodbye to a mother he’d only vaguely remembered he had to begin with.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Yunho tells him in the quiet of Changmin’s quarters, sitting on the younger’s bed as he packs what belongings he thinks he may need. He no longer has appropriate clothing for the heat of the south, so he at least chooses the thinner garments he wears when summer, such as it is, comes to Starsummit.

“It isn’t your fault,” Changmin reasons, because that’s what he does. “You have nothing to apologize for,” but he knows the intention behind Yunho’s words. The older is better with words and feelings, but Changmin is better with blades and his care comes out in the way he protects. A month ago, he ran a dagger upward into the throat of someone who’d thought to catch his prince unaware. It’s nothing to him, but he remembers the way Yunho had looked at him afterward and how it hadn’t been fearful, or judgmental, or negative in any way at all – it was thankful, and appreciative, and maybe something a little more to which the younger can’t quite put a name.

Yunho nods slightly in agreement, and the silence settles around them for a bit. He watches Changmin as the younger finishes one task and moves to the next, and the more his gaze lingers, the more Changmin begins to understand – and the guiltier he feels for brushing away the other’s attempt at comforting him.

“… Do you think of her often?” Changmin finally asks, because he knows, or at least assumes he does, why Yunho has come to him now: they’re the same. Almost, anyway.

“Yes,” Yunho answers easily, referencing the loss of his own mother when he was seven years old – it’s the same age Changmin was when he was sent north. “Every day I miss her.” A smile crosses his lips, but the act seems sad somehow, and Changmin can’t hide his surprise at the older boy’s words. For the younger his mother had become a distant memory, but Yunho loves harder, feels deeper.

Maybe it isn’t so surprising.

“I’m sorrier for you,” Changmin ventures then, looking for a reaction as he sits on the bed next to his prince. “I remember little about my mother. I don’t know her voice or her face. I’m going only because my father asks it of me.”

“It’s alright,” Yunho insists, and the smile he gives is no longer sad. Changmin’s eyes are drawn to the scar on the older’s left cheek; it isn’t horrible, but it’s noticeable, and the guilt has never subsided. “You’ll come back soon, won’t you?”

“I live here.”

“Well, yes, but – oh! I nearly forgot.” Yunho shuffles around, digging through pockets until he seems to have found what he’s looking for. Changmin raises an eyebrow when Yunho extends his clenched fist in his direction, taking the younger by the wrist to place something in his hand. “Bring this with you,” he says, and when Changmin opens his hand he finds a very familiar silver six-pointed star brooch lined with diamonds – a sigil of Yunho’s house. It’s an item that would be noticeably far above his station, and he shakes his head while pushing the jewelry back into Yunho’s palm.

“This is yours,” he insists, shaking his head. “I can’t take that.”

“You’ll bring it back,” Yunho counters, forcing the brooch back into Changmin’s hand. “Take it with you, Chami. I’ll never get to see those lands, but at least this would be able to.”

Changmin’s eye is caught by the contrast between their skin tones as they pass the star back and forth; his is deep and golden against Yunho’s pale white, the proof of their separate points of origin, and he knows he’s already lost this battle. Yunho is right, after all; maybe he’ll never cross the Verdant Ways and venture into the hot and broken scape of Changmin’s homeland of Coalfell. To deny Yunho this small request would be cruel and so, in the end, he concedes despite an unexplainable worry over what would happen if he were caught wearing it.

“Besides,” Yunho speaks seriously again once Changmin has accepted his charge, “if you see a dragon while you’re there and have nothing of mine to see it with you, I’ll be jealous forever.”

Changmin sighs heavily in irritation, and it’s matched with a roll of his eyes as they breach a topic they’ve had to discuss time and time again.

“Idiot. The only ‘dragons’ there now are statues, there haven’t been real dragons for ages! How many times do I have to tell you this??”

 

 

Boa is a nice girl. She’s of noble standing, the daughter of a lord of one of Starsummit’s more powerful lesser houses, and is pretty and kind and intelligent, and if they’d met under different circumstances then Yunho imagines he could be fond of her – not romantically, but they could at least have some sort of friendship. She could travel to the Vale once a year and he could travel to Deeplight some months later; they would visit for a few days and then go their separate ways. It would have been a nice friendship. A very distant, very impersonal friendship.

But Yunho is eighteen now, and he’s well aware of the only reason his father would care to introduce him to a lady of such standing. When the betrothal announcement is made it’s entirely without his consent. He isn’t consulted on his thoughts in the slightest, and while Yunho knows he doesn’t particularly have a choice in the matter and that he has responsibilities as a prince because he’ll be the king one day, after all, this –

This isn’t right. And it makes him feel panicky and sick to his stomach the more he thinks about it, because the more he goes over things in his mind the more he thinks he doesn’t like the way she looks at him. There’s something about her eyes that feel cold and unkind; they aren’t warm and golden brown or anything at all like –

“Are you alright?” Changmin asks him as the older paces back and forth outside the entrance to the Great Hall, the younger leaned against a column as he lets the cold winter air serve to clear the unexplainable heaviness in his own chest. Absently, he wonders if perhaps he’s beginning to take ill even though he felt fine this morning. Maybe it’s a plague. Maybe he’ll die.

Yunho finally comes to a stop, nodding despite the tight fists his hands are clenched into.

“I am,” he insists, “I’m just.”

“I know,” Changmin tells him, his voice lower now, just in case. “I know.”

“I know I have to,” Yunho admits, “I just –”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to.” He steps close, trying to determine when exactly Changmin grew taller than him while Changmin simultaneously tries to figure out when they became able to read one another as they can now. “Not with her, Chami.”

Yunho’s eyes have taken on a wildly desperate edge, because he’s asking for something without words, and the sight of it twists in Changmin’s stomach and chest to the point that he has to push the older away simply so he can breathe.

“Then you won’t have to.”

***

Deeplight ceases to exist after a week of hard-fought battle. Houses are razed to the ground and the streets are littered with the corpses of its townsfolk and soldiers of the Vale alike. Merchants will never again sell their wares at open market here and children will no longer play in these streets. The buildings are shells, the last remnant of having ever been occupied. In truth, the fighting was less of a fight and more a massacre, having been heavily one-sided as Deeplight had never been known for its military power. It is silent now, save for the crackling of fire that has yet to burn out, and Changmin still has blood on his face when the king calls the squire to attend him after the final battle. His hair is matted, and his face is steeled against the pain of a deep cut along his side, not wanting to show even an ounce of fragility while he’s addressed by Yunho’s father.

“You’ve proven your worth,” Yanghyun tells him, a heavy, approving hand coming down against the squire’s shoulder. “You’ve served Kangta well since your arrival and have done wonders to protect my son besides. We are lucky you intercepted the message you did, otherwise we may never have known Deeplight intended to use the marriage match between our houses for ill against us.”

Behind Yanghyun, Changmin catches Yunho’s eyes – thankful and appreciative and relieved – and in that moment, the lie is worth it. The blood on his face and hands, both literal and proverbial, is worth it. The sounds of her screams, her begging, and the sight of the light leaving her eyes because of him is worth it, all of it, all of it is worth it.

As long as it’s for Yunho, everything is worth it.

 

 

It’s customary for impending knights to be sent further north, up into the Bitter Cold, for their last year of training before knighthood. It’s a test of endurance and survival – only the hardiest of folk are able to survive so far north, and Changmin will have to persevere alongside them in order to survive the elements and natural dangers until the following spring. He is twenty now and he’ll be leaving soon; his old clothes will be left behind in favor of new thicker, heavier garments. He can’t imagine being any colder than he is during winter