He considered this carefully, the way he considered most things, slowly and with great seriousness. "...Can it have a garden?"
Her eyes lit up immediately. "Of course. What should we grow?"
"Everything," he answered without hesitation.
She laughed, delighted. "Greedy."
"You said we'd never go hungry."
"...Fair," she conceded, and they both laughed together at that, the sound strange and unfamiliar in the cold air.
Then she extended her smallest finger toward him with sudden solemnity. "Pinky promise?"
He looked at her hand, uncertain. "What's that?"
"It means," she said, searching for the right words, "you absolutely cannot break it."
"What if I do?"
"I'll haunt you," she said, entirely too seriously for the words to be a joke.
His eyes widened with genuine alarm. "You can become a ghost?"
She burst into laughter loud enough that it echoed slightly against the nearby wall. "I don't know. But don't risk it."
Slowly, carefully, he hooked his small finger around hers, their tiny hands barely managing to fit together properly. "I promise," he said.
"I promise too," she echoed, and they shook their joined hands once, then twice, before she declared, with great finality, "Done."
He believed it completely, without a shadow of doubt.
That night, back in their little hut, they had drawn their imagined future home into the dirt floor using the ends of broken sticks. Hazia had insisted on two separate bedrooms, a detail Kazu couldn't understand at all.
"We can share," he had said, confused.
She shook her head firmly. "What if you get married?"
He frowned deeply at the very suggestion. "I don't want to."
She laughed at his expression. "Too bad. I'll probably marry someday."
He had frozen entirely at that. "...You'll leave?"
She looked genuinely surprised by the question. "No. My husband comes to our house."
"...Why?"
"Because it's my house," she said simply, as though the logic were self-evident, and he had accepted the explanation immediately, without further question, because it was Hazia who said it, and Hazia's word had already become, in his young mind, something closer to law than mere opinion.
Then she had drawn another room into the dirt, larger than any of the others. "A kitchen," she declared. "A big one. The biggest."
He had smiled at that, unable to help himself. It was, after all, exactly like her. Somehow, no matter where their plans began, everything eventually circled back to food.
Now, sitting quietly inside the small room Lady Aleel had granted them, Kazu watched Hazia sleeping peacefully beneath her thick quilt, the charcoal brazier crackling softly nearby while thin flurries drifted past the paper windows outside. She hugged the blanket tightly with both hands, a faint smile resting on her face even in sleep, and he found himself wondering, not for the first time, what she might be dreaming about. Food, probably. It usually was. He allowed himself a small, private smile at the thought.
Quietly, so quietly that not even the walls could have heard him, he whispered into the dark, "I'll build it. The house. The garden. The kitchen. I'll make sure no one can ever chase us away." His small hands tightened into fists beneath his own blanket. "I promise."
He did not know how he would manage it. He did not know when it might finally become possible. He was only five years old, powerless in every practical sense, hungry more often than not, and for most of his short life, entirely forgotten by everyone who might have been expected to care for him. But promises, he had come to believe, were meant to be kept, especially the ones sealed with something as small and as certain as a single hooked finger.
Outside their small room, flurries continued drifting quietly across the palace grounds, and far beyond its towering walls stood countless ordinary homes, each filled with warm hearths and families gathered together over simple, unremarkable meals. Kazu had never once lived in a home like that. And yet, for the first time in his life, he found himself believing, with something close to certainty, that he someday would. Not because fate would suddenly turn kind toward him. Not because Heaven would take pity on two forgotten children. But because Hazia had looked him directly in the eye, given him a name that had never belonged to anyone else, and made him a promise she clearly intended to keep. And Kazu, in the quiet privacy of his own heart, had already decided something Hazia did not yet know. If anyone ever tried to take that promised home away from her, he would take the entire world from them first.
That same private vow was still settled somewhere deep in his chest, unspoken and unshaken, in the evening the brazier had nearly burned itself out. Only a few stubborn embers remained glowing beneath the charcoal by then, filling their small room with a faint warmth that barely managed to keep the season's lingering chill from creeping in through the gaps around the door. Kazu sat quietly beside the dying fire while Hazia knelt nearby, kneading dough for the next morning's buns, humming softly to herself the way she so often did whenever her hands were busy with cooking. He liked listening to that sound more than he could easily put into words. It reminded him, in some small but essential way, that everything around them was still, for the moment, alright.
The room Aleel had given them was simple by any noble standard, containing little more than a narrow bed just large enough for the two of them to share, a modest wooden table, a single stool, and an old cupboard with one door that no longer sat quite flush against its frame. Outside stood an ancient stone well beside a crooked persimmon tree whose bare branches still bore traces of frost each morning. It wasn't much, not by the standards of the grand courtyards they occasionally glimpsed elsewhere in the palace, but to Kazu it felt like something closer to a palace than anything he had ever known before, because no one screamed within its walls, no one beat them there, and no one locked them inside against their will.