Simon showed up at Corin's door first thing in the morning, muscles still sore from the day before but his mind awake and set. "Ready to move," he said, without even a good-morning as preamble.
Corin was already sitting at the small table in the inn, the scrap of dark fabric they'd recovered the night before spread out in front of her in the morning light, a tense expression on her face Simon hadn't seen her wear at this hour before.
"You need to see something first," she said, without looking up. "Sit down."
Simon obeyed, dropping into the chair across from her, his eyes following her finger as she pointed to a small embroidery, almost invisible to a careless glance, along the torn edge of the fabric — a thin spiral coiling in on itself, stitched with a thread just slightly darker than the rest of the cloth.
"I recognize this mark," Corin said, her voice flat, controlled. "It's Yvaine Thistledown's people. She deals in familiars, in Cajin. On the black market."
"What do you mean, illegal?" Simon asked, frowning. "I thought everything here was pretty... regulated. Guilds, coins, officials logging every single ship."
"There are two markets, in Cajin," Corin said. "A visible one — Corvin Ashworth's, respected, taxed, with its rules written down somewhere in an official register. And an invisible one, run by people like Silas Moroven, who moves in the folds of the legal one without ever really stepping into the light. Yvaine operates in between the two, one foot in each — she sells legitimate familiars to clients who can afford them openly, but doesn't much care where the merchandise comes from, as long as the price is right."
Simon stayed quiet for a moment, letting the information settle. "So," he said finally, "you're describing a black market. My old life had identical ones — drugs, weapons, stolen goods, people looking the other way in exchange for something. The names change, the merchandise changes, but the principle's always the same."
"More or less," Corin said, slowly rolling up the piece of fabric and tucking it into her pocket. "And that's why I say it's not worth getting involved. Yvaine is protected, has connections, probably even someone higher up than her looking the other way in exchange for a cut. We're not strong enough or important enough to make a difference against something on that scale. The sensible thing to do is report it to the guild once we get to Cajin, let them handle it, and get on with our own lives."
Simon stared at her for a long moment, something shifting inside him without yet finding a precise shape. Then, slowly, he leaned forward over the table.
"Okay," he said. "But there's something that doesn't add up to me."
"What?"
"Why didn't the village head report what happened right away?" Simon said, his eyes narrowing with the effort of piecing things together. "Familiar hunters showing up with a cart, cutting down trees, wiping out an entire colony right next to the spring the whole village drinks from — that doesn't go unnoticed. Someone must have seen them, or at least heard them. And even if no one saw them directly, the village head sent us to 'solve the mystery' as if it were some impenetrable riddle, instead of just telling us: hey, some hunters came through here a week ago, maybe they're involved. Why pretend not to know anything?"
Corin stayed silent for a moment, her jaw tightening slightly. "I thought about that too," she admitted, quietly. "But I don't think it's worth finding out. Even if she stayed quiet for some reason, what would change? The village still needs that job solved, and we still need the official document for you. It's not worth stirring up things that don't concern us all that much."
Simon looked at her, and for an instant he saw superimposed over her an entire lifetime of people who had told him the same thing in different ways — it's not worth it, it's not your business, let it go. He'd spent years listening to that advice, every time something felt wrong to him and he didn't have the strength, or the courage, to say something. His dying father with no one coming to help, not even when he'd explicitly asked, not even when the desperation in his voice on the phone should have been enough to move anyone with a shred of a heart. His mother, alone in a hospital room for hours, while he filled out insurance forms on the phone instead of being able to sit with her. Friends who vanished behind a message with a little heart instead of a real presence, coworkers who looked away in the office hallways when he seemed about to ask for a favor.
He'd acted like a coward, so many times. Not out of malice, but because he'd never felt strong enough to change anything, and staying silent had always seemed the safer choice, the one that cost less — the one that didn't risk exposing him to one more rejection, one more disappointment, in a life that already had far too many of those.
And he'd gotten nothing, in exchange for all that silence. Nothing. No gratitude for keeping it all inside, no reward for not bothering anyone with his problems. Just one funeral after another, faced alone, and a world that kept spinning as if he'd never existed enough to deserve any help.
Here, at least, he could choose differently. He didn't have to repeat the same mistake just because it was the only one he knew.
"In my old life," he said, his voice coming out lower and harder than he expected, "I acted like a coward a lot of times. Because I wasn't strong enough, or thought I wasn't, and staying quiet always seemed like the smartest thing to do. I got nothing from that silence. No reward, no gratitude, no extra safety. Just a pile of regrets, and people who took advantage anyway, silence or not." He stood up from the chair with an abrupt motion. "I'm still not strong, now. I have no idea what's waiting for me if things go wrong. But fuck it. I'm not doing it again. Not this time."
He left the inn before Corin could answer, heading with a determined stride toward the village head's house, a building a little bigger than the other homes in the village, with a small tended garden out front that clashed vaguely with everything he'd just learned about the poisoned spring.
He knocked hard. The door opened after a moment, revealing a middle-aged man with a receding hairline and an expression that quickly shifted from surprise to poorly hidden discomfort the moment he recognized Simon.
"The guild boy," the village head said, with a smile too quick, too tight at the edges to be entirely sincere. "Do you already have news about the spring? I wasn't expecting—"
"Listen," Simon said, cutting him off, no preamble, practically forcing his way into the entrance of the house. "How much did they give you to look the other way?"
The village head visibly paled. "I... I don't know what you're talking about," he stammered, stepping back, one hand instinctively bracing against the doorframe as if searching for support.
"Of course you know," Simon said, following him inside without waiting for an invitation. "We found three Swamp Toads gutted for their glands, tracks from a heavy cart, trees cut specifically to let something big through. That's not stuff that happens overnight without someone in the village noticing. And you sent us to 'solve the mystery' as if it were some impenetrable riddle, instead of just telling us what you'd seen."
Simon closed his eyes for an instant, focusing on that now-familiar sensation — the light warmth behind his eyelids, the thin crack that crept beneath someone else's words when they weren't entirely true. He felt it immediately, clear, undeniable.
"You're lying," he said, opening his eyes again, his voice firm. "And I know it for a fact, so let's spare each other the trouble of pretending. I know there was a group hunting familiars near your spring. I know your village has been drinking poisoned water for days, and that someone, probably children or the elderly, is getting sicker and sicker while you sit here in your nice house with your tended garden. So tell me how much they gave you to keep quiet, or I swear the next place I go is the inn, to tell the whole village exactly what I just figured out."
The village head stood frozen for a long moment, his chest rising in increasingly rapid breaths, his eyes darting toward the door as if weighing an impossible escape. Then his shoulders dropped, all his resistance seeming to deflate along with the rest of his body.
"Ten Shields," he said, his voice reduced to a whisper. "They gave me ten Shields to say nothing to anyone, to let the story look like a natural mystery instead of... instead of what it really was. I thought — I thought the water would purify itself, in time, and that no one would really get hurt, just some stomachaches, and with ten Shields I could have—"
"I don't want to hear your excuses," Simon said, his voice cold, cutting in a way that almost surprised himself. "I just wanted the truth. Now I have it."
He turned and left the house without adding anything else, leaving the man still trembling on the threshold of his own home, unable to find the words to stop him or to justify himself any further.
Corin was waiting outside, leaning against a wooden fence, arms crossed and an expression Simon couldn't fully decipher — not disapproval, but not full approval either. Something in between, maybe closer to worry.
"Could you hear him shouting from here?" Simon asked, walking up to her.
"No," Corin said. "But I saw your face when you came out of that door, and it doesn't take Honest Whisper to know how it went."
"Ten Shields," Simon said, reaching her. "He sold his own village's health for ten miserable Shields. Less than what Renn charged us to get through a customs check without questions."
Corin slowly shook her head, her gaze drifting for a moment toward the village houses, each with its own little garden, its own smoke rising lazily from the chimneys, a normalcy that now, in her eyes, seemed suddenly more fragile than it had the night before.
"It happens more often than you'd want to know," she said, in a tone that betrayed an old exhaustion, not tied only to this specific moment. "This isn't the first time I've seen someone sell their silence for a few coins, and I doubt it'll be the last. The world, in this respect, has never been kind to those who have little and desperately need a bit more."
She didn't add anything else for a moment, her gaze lost toward the horizon, toward the fields stretching beyond the last houses of the village. Then, quietly, almost more to himself than to her, Simon said: "I imagined a new world might be different. Fairer, maybe, or at least simpler. But no. It's full of people ready to sell out anyone else for a fistful of coins, exactly like the world I left behind. Only the names of the currencies change."
Corin said nothing right away, leaving him that moment of bitter silence without trying to fill it with comforting words that, right then, would have sounded hollow to both of them. Only after a long moment, as they started walking side by side back toward the inn, did she add, quietly: "For what it's worth, you did the right thing. I don't know if it'll really change anything for this village, but at least they know the truth now. And you didn't stay silent, this time."
Simon didn't answer right away, but something in those words settled inside him with a different weight than what he was used to — not the usual emptiness left by someone who promises without following through, but something that resembled, however small, a real acknowledgment.
They gathered their things from the inn quickly, without exchanging many more words, the innkeeper seeing them off with a distracted nod, too busy with other customers to notice the tension still visible on both their faces. Outside, the morning sun had fully risen by now, lighting the road leading out of the village with an almost cruel light in its ordinariness, as if nothing that had just happened truly mattered to the rest of the world.
"Let's go," Simon said finally, shaking his head as if to shrug off that thought. "Cajin, then. The guild job can be turned in at any office, right? No need to come back here."
"Right," Corin confirmed.
"Then when we get there," Simon said, starting to walk again toward the inn to gather his things, "I want you to order a crate of purifying mucus, or whatever it takes to fix this mess, and have it shipped here to the village. I don't even know how much something like that costs — I only have forty Pennies on me, so I guess you'll have to front it, if possible, and sooner or later I'll find a way to pay you back."
Corin looked at him, surprised by the request, but raised no objection. She just nodded, a small gesture that was worth more than any speech.
Simon paused for a moment, looking once more toward the village houses, toward that apparent normalcy hiding such a small and petty betrayal.
"I haven't even been to Cajin yet," he said, starting to walk again, "but I've already learned one thing. There are absolute pieces of shit everywhere, in any world. Let's see how many we find there."