Then they had met Her Highness, and everything shifted again, more dramatically than he had thought possible. Their room was warm now. Their blankets were thick. There was enough food that Hazia had stopped secretly pushing her own portion toward him, and instead, for the first time he could remember, she actually ate properly, without hesitation, without guilt visible in every bite. He liked watching that even more than he liked her humming, because whenever she forgot herself long enough to simply enjoy a meal, she looked exactly like what she was supposed to be: a child. Sometimes now, she even smiled in her sleep, only occasionally, but it happened, and each time it did, Kazu found himself wondering whether this strange, warm feeling settling into their little room was what happiness was supposed to look like.
He still remembered, with a clarity that surprised even him, the first day they had truly met, the day she had become his sister in every way that mattered. Before that day, he had no name of his own. People called him many things over the years, most of which he had long since stopped reacting to. Monster. Ghost. That boy. Sometimes, more often than any of the cruel names, nothing at all, because no one had ever cared enough to bother giving him one. Not Faman. Certainly not Lady Ifka. He had come to believe, over the years, that names belonged only to people, and that he, whatever he was, did not quite qualify.
Then, one day, a little girl had marched directly into the abandoned shed where he usually hid from the world, carrying half of a stale bun in one dirty hand, her face bruised and her clothes filthy, and she had looked straight into his eyes as though he were the most ordinary thing in the world to find there. "You're eating with me," she had told him, not as a question but as a statement of fact that left no room for argument. He had simply stared at her, too startled to respond, as she broke the bun into two uneven pieces and, quite naturally, handed him the larger half. When he tried to push it back toward her, she frowned at him with a seriousness that seemed far too large for her small face. "I'm the older sister. So listen." He hadn't understood why he obeyed her, only that he did, immediately and completely, as though some part of him had been waiting his whole life for someone to tell him what to do with such absolute certainty.
After they finished eating, she had asked him what his name was, and he shook his head and told her he didn't have one. She looked at him with genuine confusion, as though the very idea of a person without a name made no sense to her at all. "Everyone has a name," she insisted, and when he said nothing in response, she thought about it for a long moment before suddenly smiling, a decision settling visibly into her expression. "Then I'll give you one," she declared, looking surprisingly serious for someone so small. "As long as we're together, you'll be Kazu."
He had blinked at her, testing the sound of it silently in his own head. "Kazu?"
She nodded proudly, as though she had just handed him something enormously valuable, which, in a way, she had. "It means harmony," she explained.
He didn't understand the word at all. "What's harmony?"
She thought about it again, her small brow furrowing with the effort of finding the right words for a concept she barely understood herself. "When people protect each other," she said finally. "When no one eats alone. When everyone has a home. That's harmony." Then, with a small, satisfied poke to his forehead, she finished, "So you're Kazu."
No one had ever given him anything before that moment. Not food freely offered, not kindness without some cost attached, and certainly never a name. He had repeated it quietly to himself that night, alone in the dark, testing the shape of it against his tongue. Kazu. It sounded warm, somehow, in a way he couldn't fully articulate even to himself.
"And what's your name?" he had asked her in return.
She had puffed out her chest with obvious pride. "Hazia." He would later learn, though not for a long while, that it wasn't the name she had actually been born with either, but somehow, whatever the truth of it was, the name suited her completely. Because whenever she smiled, even the coldest, most broken corners of their world seemed to grow a little warmer for it.
Several weeks after that day, the two of them had gone out together to gather firewood, their small feet crunching through the thin layer of snow that clung stubbornly to the ground even as the days slowly began to lengthen. Hazia had stopped walking abruptly, pointing toward a small cottage visible far beyond the palace walls, smoke curling gently from its chimney into the pale sky. A woman was hanging laundry outside to dry. Several children chased one another around the small yard, shrieking with laughter that carried faintly across the distance. An old man knelt beside a fence, methodically repairing whatever had broken in it. None of them looked particularly wealthy. None of them looked important in any way that mattered to the palace's rigid hierarchies. And yet every single one of them looked happy, in a way that struck Kazu as almost unbearably foreign.
Hazia had watched them for a long time in silence before finally speaking. "Kazu." He looked up at her. "One day, we'll have a home too."
He tilted his head, uncertain. "A home?"
She nodded firmly. "A real one. Not borrowed. Not stolen. Ours."
He glanced back toward the distant cottage. "It doesn't have to be big."
She smiled at that, something soft and certain settling into her expression. "It just needs to be warm." Then, lowering her voice as though sharing some great secret, she added, "And we'll never go hungry again."