The figure in the doorway moved before Simon could even rise from his chair. He was enormous, with shoulders that seemed too wide for the doorframe he'd just barged through, skin a dull greenish-gray, and two short tusks jutting just past his lower lip — a half-orc, Simon realized, without even knowing how the word had come to him, as if something inside him had simply recognized it without ever having to learn it.
The man — the creature, the man, Simon no longer knew quite what to call him — reached their table in three heavy strides and slammed an enormous hand on the wood, rattling the tankards and nearly knocking over what was left of Simon's dark beer.
"You," he panted, still out of breath from running, jabbing a finger as thick as a broom handle straight at Simon's chest. "Come with me. Now. Illegal trafficking of an undeclared familiar — I saw it running from the dock with my own two eyes, and that's the same face I saw bolting while the beast was about to break loose from the crate."
The word illegal bounced across the room like a stone thrown into a pond. Conversations at nearby tables died out one after another, and several heads — pointed ears, scales, a tail that visibly stiffened under a cloak — turned toward their corner with the morbid curiosity of people who want to watch how it ends without getting involved.
Simon felt his stomach tighten. He had no idea what was happening — he'd never even seen that crate up close, didn't know what was inside it, and now here he was with a finger as thick as his own arm pointed at him by someone who seemed fully intent on dragging him off for something he hadn't done.
"I have no idea what you're—" he began, but Corin was faster, rising sharply from her chair with an expression of indignation so convincing that for a second even Simon almost believed it.
"He's family," Corin said, her voice firm, one arm stretched in front of Simon like a physical barrier as much as a verbal one. "A distant cousin, arrived today from off the island. He has nothing to do with what happened at the harbor — he was there by chance, scared out of his mind by all that chaos, and I got him out before someone could mistake him for a convenient culprit."
The half-orc narrowed his eyes, his jaw working slowly as if he were chewing the sentence to taste its truth. "Nice story," he said, in a tone that promised nothing good. "Let's see if it's true."
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again there were small golden glimmers flickering just beneath his pupils, like nearly spent embers. Simon stared, unable to look away, while a strange sensation — not painful, but undeniably present — ran across his skin, as if the very air around him had thickened for a second.
"He's family," Corin repeated, without hesitation, looking straight into his glowing eyes.
The half-orc stood motionless for what felt to Simon like an eternity. Then he grunted, a low, frustrated sound, and the glimmers in his eyes went out.
"Fine," he said, withdrawing the finger with the same brutality with which he'd pointed it. "But I've got my eye on him. If I see him hanging around the harbor again, I don't care how many family stories you feed me, half-blood." He spat that last word with a contempt he didn't bother hiding in the slightest, then turned and walked out of the inn with the same heavy stride he'd come in with, leaving the door half-open behind him.
Corin dropped back into her chair with a long sigh, running a hand through her honey-colored hair.
Simon stared at her, still shaken, his heart pounding in his throat. "What the fuck was that," he said, not so much a question as an exhalation. "With the eyes. What happened to his eyes?"
"Honest Whisper," Corin said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and maybe for her it was. "A generic magic skill, one of the simplest that exist — it senses when someone is lying in an obvious way. Guards use it a lot, suspicious merchants, anyone who needs to quickly judge whether to believe a story or not. Takes just a bit of magical sensitivity to learn it. In theory even you could do it, with the right training — it's not even tied to a specific magical bloodline, it's open to anyone."
"Me? I'm human."
"Even humans have a bit of sensitivity, from what little I know," Corin said, shrugging. "Rare, sure, they usually prefer to buy enchanted items rather than learn it themselves. But not impossible." She paused, then added, with a half smile: "Although, seeing how you got here, I doubt you're exactly 'human' the way we mean it."
Simon didn't respond to that. He didn't have the strength, not in that moment, with his head spinning from too many things at once.
"Wait," he said instead, frowning. "If that thing reveals lies... and you told him I was your cousin, which is a huge fat lie... how the hell did you not get caught?"
Corin brightened slightly, and for the first time since he'd met her, Simon saw her wear an almost pleased expression — not arrogant, but close to it, the same look of someone who's just pulled off a clever move and wants to be sure you noticed.
"Mark of Judgment," she said, with a small nod of her head as if bowing to herself. "A solar skill, not lunar or infernal — it temporarily weakens a target's magical defenses. I didn't hit him with anything visible, just a light touch while I was talking to him, just enough to dull his ability to sense things clearly for a moment. His Honest Whisper heard the lie, but blurred, weakened — not clear enough to fully trip his alarm. Let's just say you have my being a half-elf to thank, and the fact that someone in Estrella, a long time ago, decided it was worth teaching me a few solar tricks before slamming the door in my face for the rest of it."
She said it lightly, almost jokingly, but Simon noticed — or maybe he imagined it, with the exhaustion by now warping every perception he had — a harder shadow beneath those words, something that resembled an old wound told with just the right voice to make it sound like nothing more than an anecdote.
He didn't have it in him to dig deeper. Not right then.
"I don't understand a word of what you just said," he said instead, with total sincerity. "But thanks. I guess."
"Good guess," Corin said, standing up and pointing at the still half-full tankard in front of him. "Finish that, and come on. I don't want to stay here under any more eyes that might start asking too many questions."
Simon looked at the dark beer, then grabbed it and downed it in one long swallow, coughing again as the liquid burned his throat — but this time with less surprise, almost with a tired acceptance of how everything, in this world, seemed to want to burn one way or another.
He followed Corin up a creaking wooden staircase at the back of the main room, the noise of the inn fading below them. "How did you do that," he asked, one foot after the other, his head spinning a bit from the alcohol and a bit from everything else, "know which magic to use, and when, so fast? It looked like you'd done that a hundred times already."
"Because I have done it a hundred times," Corin said, without turning around. "Living between two bloods teaches you to improvise, or to get eaten alive by people who decide you don't belong to either world enough to be trusted. You learn fast which tricks work, and when to use them."
They reached a small landing with a few worn wooden doors. Corin opened one without knocking, as if it were her own home — maybe it was, or maybe she'd simply paid for the room before ever finding Simon on the beach — and waved him in with a curt gesture.
The room was small, bare, with a window shut by a wooden shutter and, in the middle, a single bed.
Simon stopped in the doorway, staring at that single bed like a math problem he couldn't solve. "There's... one bed," he said, in a tone more confused observation than actual protest.
"Yes," Corin said, as if there were nothing strange about it. She kicked off her boots with two sharp heel-thumps and dropped onto the mattress with a sigh of relief. "And you sleep there." She pointed with a lazy foot at a thin rug at the foot of the bed, little more than a thick rag laid over the wooden floor.
"On the... rug."
"On the rug," she confirmed, already closing her eyes. "Unless you'd rather have the bare floor, but I doubt after the day you've had you're in any position to be picky."
Simon opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. She had a point, in an annoyingly practical way. He had neither the strength nor, honestly, the moral standing to complain — not after that same woman had pulled him off a pier in flames of chaos and lied for him to a half-orc with eyes that lit up with magic.
He let himself slide to the floor, the thin rug offering little more than a vague illusion of comfort between him and the hard floorboards. His body, though, didn't seem to mind much — every single muscle ached now that the adrenaline was draining away, and sleep came knocking at the door of his mind with an urgency that left no room for pride or dignity.
He closed his eyes, and for a moment — just a moment, before sleep claimed him entirely — he thought of his mother, of the dark monitor, of Giulia with her keys, as if all of it belonged to a life someone else had lived, in a world that now felt incredibly, achingly far away.
It was Corin's voice, still awake, that pulled him back to the surface for an instant.
"Ah, one more thing," she said, in the dark, in a tone far too casual to actually be casual. "Tomorrow you still owe me something, for the half-orc business. Nothing complicated — I need to go to the market to haggle for some supplies, and a human ally always comes in handy for that kind of thing. You lot are considered the best negotiators on the continent, believe it or not, and my half-elf face doesn't always help close a good deal with certain suspicious merchants."
Simon, already half-asleep, mumbled something not even he understood.
"Tomorrow you're coming with me," Corin concluded, more as an established fact than a request, before silence settled fully over the room. "Sleep on it, if you can."