Simon woke up with his back aching in spots he didn't even know existed, the thin rug having fused with the floor into one hard, inhospitable surface. He opened his eyes to the gray light of dawn filtering through the half-shut window shutter, and for an instant — just an instant, before memory hit him full in the chest the way it did every morning since he'd arrived — he forgot where he was. Then it all came flooding back, as always: the hospital, the sun in place of the evening, the harbor, the half-orc, the seal, the room with the one bed. An entire lifetime of new things packed into little more than a day, and his body seemed determined to make him pay for it every single morning, joint by joint.
Corin was already awake, sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on her boots with quick, efficient movements, as if the time spent sleeping was already a luxury she could no longer afford.
"Morning, dead man walking," she said, without even looking up.
"Morning to you too," Simon mumbled, pulling himself up to sit with a groan he made no effort to hide. "I slept on a rug I wouldn't even call a 'rug' in court. I suspect it's actually a wooden plank in disguise."
"You'll get used to it," she said, standing up and strapping a small knife to her belt with a gesture so automatic Simon wondered if she did it in her sleep too. "Or maybe not, and then you'll buy yourself a real mattress the moment you've got two Pennies to rub together. But for now, move it. Renn sets sail in an hour, and if we're late we can forget about that ship."
They left shortly after, the sun still low on the horizon, casting long shadows between the irregular houses of the City. The quarter was slowly waking up around them — a woman throwing open the wooden shutters of a small shop, a boy running barefoot with a bucket of water bigger than he was, the smell of freshly baked bread drifting out of some half-open door. Simon took it all in with a mix of exhaustion and that stubborn curiosity that, despite everything else, kept pushing its way through.
It was right at the midpoint, at a crossing between two narrow alleys, that they saw Renn.
He was walking the opposite way, with the look of someone who'd slept even less than Simon, a heavy bag slung over one shoulder pulling it down, and a tense expression that eased — just barely, for a fraction of a second — into a mix of surprise and discomfort the moment he recognized them.
"You two," he said, slowing to a full stop. "I was hoping I wouldn't run into you again, honestly, at least not until things at the harbor cooled down a bit."
"Change of plan," he added right after, without giving Corin time to answer, lowering his voice as if the very walls had ears. "I can't take him."
Corin stopped dead, her arms crossing over her chest with a motion so sharp it looked like a snap. "What do you mean you can't take him?"
"I mean," Renn said, glancing quickly past Simon's shoulder, toward the far end of the street, "that there's that half-orc from the harbor guard leaning against a post twenty yards from here, and he hasn't stopped staring at your friend since you two came down this street. To him he's still suspect number one in the crate business, whatever story you fed him that night. If he sees me loading him onto my ship along with all the cargo I've got aboard, he won't need any other excuse to stop us both, and this time an Honest Whisper and a good lie might not be enough to get us out of it."
Simon turned instinctively, searching for the figure Renn had mentioned, and found him: the same massive silhouette from the night before, leaning with calculated indifference against a wooden post, arms crossed, eyes — those, unmistakably — fixed right on them.
"Great discovery," Corin snapped, her voice rising enough to make a couple of passing sailors with baskets of fish balanced on their heads turn to look. "And it's a problem that only exists because you, on the night of that mess, nearly let them frame him in your place. So now find a solution, Renn. I don't care what, but find one, and find it fast, because in forty-five minutes your ship sails with or without us aboard."
Renn clenched his jaw, his eyes darting back to the half-orc, then back to Simon, studying him head to toe with the same cold, appraising speed as their first, disastrous meeting on the pier.
"Fine," he said finally, with a long sigh that dropped his shoulders a couple of inches. "I have an idea. But you won't like it, and I don't particularly like having to suggest it either."
Ten minutes later, in a cramped little room behind a warehouse full of ropes and fishing nets, Simon was pulling on a rough tunic that smelled of salt and someone else's sweat, sleeves too short that left his wrists bare, a pair of baggy pants held up by a rope belt tied hastily.
"Seriously?" he asked, tugging at the hem, which came to mid-calf. "I have to dress up as a sailor?"
"You have to look like a sailor," Renn corrected, handing him a shapeless gray hood. "I'm not asking you to know how to raise a sail. Just walk with your head down, carry something heavy on your shoulders, and don't look anyone in the face. The guards don't stop every single dockhand who boards — if they did, no ship would ever leave on time."
Corin pulled the hood down over his head with an almost motherly gesture, adjusting it so it covered half his face, leaving only his chin and mouth visible. "Hold still," she said, fixing a fold of fabric. "There. Now you look exactly like the kind of person nobody looks at twice."
"Reassuring," Simon muttered.
Renn shoved an empty wooden crate into his arms, big enough to force him to hunch his back slightly to carry it, and bulky enough to hide part of his face even better than the hood. "Walk straight toward the gangway," he said. "Don't run. Don't slow down. If anyone talks to you, just grunt."
"I grunt."
"Man of few words this morning, congratulations, you've already passed the interview."
The walk from the warehouse to the ship couldn't have been more than fifty yards, but to Simon it felt like an eternity. Every step echoed in his ears louder than it should have, his heart hammering against his ribs with a violence he feared could be heard from a distance. He saw, from the corner of his eye still exposed by the hood, the half-orc's shape shifting against his post, though not actually moving — still leaning there, still waiting, but for the moment uninterested in some random dockhand dragging an empty crate toward a departing ship.
He passed right by him, head down, eyes fixed on his own shoes, counting his steps just to give himself something to think about besides his own racing heartbeat. One. Two. Three. The wooden gangway creaked under his weight. Four. Five. And then the deck, solid, under his feet, and Corin's voice — arriving from who knew where, low but close — whispering that he could finally relax.
Simon dropped the empty crate harder than necessary and pulled off the hood, breathing as if he'd just come up from underwater.
"Ridiculous," he said, his voice trembling slightly. "I felt like an idiot the whole way."
"You're alive, you're aboard, and nobody stopped you," Corin said, a smile tugging faintly at the corner of her mouth. "Call it a victory, however inelegant."
The ship was smaller than Simon had imagined — a dark wooden hull, sails furled waiting for wind, the smell of tar and salt soaked into every single plank of the deck, mixed with a faint scent of dried fish coming from some hold belowdecks. He sat on a crate near the bow — a full one this time, judging by the weight it held under him — while Renn barked crisp orders at a couple of sailors moving among the ropes with the ease of people who'd done it their whole lives, and Corin disappeared belowdecks for a few minutes, coming back with two cups of something hot that vaguely tasted of tea, though it wasn't tea at all.
The harbor slowly fell away behind them, the City shrinking on its hill until it was just a jumbled mass of irregular roofs against the morning sky, and then, little by little, nothing more than a dark smudge on the horizon.
Simon took a sip of the hot drink, letting the warmth slide down his throat and loosen some of the tension still knotted in his shoulders. For the first time in days, no one was watching him with suspicion, no half-orc was ready to point a finger at him, no crate threatened to burst open at any moment. Just the slow roll of the ship, the sound of water against the hull, and the sky stretching above them without any visible edge.
It was when open sea surrounded them on every side, with no land visible on the horizon, that Corin pulled out a small pouch of coins and called Renn with a sharp whistle, the way you'd call a dog, or maybe an old acquaintance who doesn't need too much formality.
"A map," she said, when he came over, wiping his hands on a rag hanging from his belt. "Of the central continent. How much?"
"Five Shields," Renn said, already digging through a leather bag hanging at his side. He pulled out a sheet of parchment folded over several times, smaller and less elaborate than Simon had imagined from movies or games that now felt like memories of another life — not a leather-bound atlas, just a piece of thick paper, marked with faded ink in a few spots.
Corin handed him the coins without even haggling, a gesture that, to Simon — by now used to her negotiating style at the Hearth — seemed almost suspicious for how direct and unceremonious it was.
She unrolled the sheet on her knees, holding the corners down with two fingers. It was a simple map — a few cities marked with small symbols, coastlines barely sketched in, nothing that really resembled a proper, complete atlas.
"We'll dock at Tidecrest Haven tomorrow evening," she said, pointing at a spot on the coast with her thumbnail. "From there we can head down toward Cajin. It'd do you good to see it, at least once — it's the commercial heart of the whole continent, the city of humans. Maybe you'll feel a little less out of place there, for a while."
Simon nodded slowly, his eyes scanning the map without finding much to latch onto — a few isolated icons, none of the other regions Corin had mentioned in passing over the previous days, as if the sheet deliberately stopped at the edges of what he needed to know, and nothing more.
"And the other races?" he asked, pointing a finger at the empty space at the margins of the sheet. "The elves, the dwarves, all the rest — where are they, on this thing?"
There was no answer from Corin. It was Renn, still nearby putting the coin pouch back in his bag, who answered first, in the flat, mechanical tone of someone who's repeated the same line so many times it's been drained of all meaning.
"For maps of individual territories, five Shields each," he said, without even looking up from his work. "For the complete one, twenty-five."
Corin rolled her eyes with an expression worth more than any speech. "Go fuck yourself, Renn," she said, without even turning toward him, and went back to folding the map on Simon's knees with a sharp, almost final gesture, as if that answer were enough to close the subject once and for all.
Simon couldn't hold back a short, dry laugh, the first in hours. "I guess I'll learn the rest as I go," he said.
"That's usually how it works," Corin replied, a half smile returning to her lips. "For better or worse."
The afternoon slipped by slowly, marked only by the roll of the ship and the low voices of the working sailors. Simon spent most of the time leaning on the railing, watching the dark water rippled by the wind, his mind wandering without any real destination — toward the hospital, toward Giulia, toward a job that no longer existed for him in any practical sense, and then back to the present, to that ship, that too-different sky, that woman who kept, for reasons he didn't fully understand, not abandoning him.
At some point Corin joined him at the railing, resting both elbows on the worn wood beside his, saying nothing for a long moment. It was Simon, in the end, who broke the silence.
"Yesterday you said you'd have liked to bind me with a bond, like the demonic ones," he said, without looking at her, his eyes fixed on the horizon. "You never really explained what you meant. Is that a serious thing, or was it just a figure of speech?"
Corin was quiet for a few moments, as if deciding how much it was worth actually answering. "Fairly serious," she said finally. "But it doesn't matter right now. Maybe I'll explain it better someday, when we've got time and aren't running around disguised as dockhands."
"Great," Simon said, with a tired half smile. "Another mystery to add to the list. I'm starting to lose count."
"You'll get used to it," she said, repeating the same phrase from that morning, but this time in a lighter tone, almost fond. "Or maybe not. But at least you're not carrying that list alone anymore."
Simon didn't answer right away. He kept watching the water, letting that sentence — simple, almost tossed off — settle somewhere inside him, in a place he still didn't quite know how to name.
It was only later, when the sun had almost completely vanished below the waterline, painting the sky a deep orange that reflected on the waves like embers, that Renn came running toward them, his face suddenly tense, his eyes fixed on a distant point on the horizon where a thin column of black smoke rose straight into the sky, exactly in the direction they were heading.
"That," he said, his voice low and heavy with a worry he hadn't shown until that moment, not even when he'd risked getting into trouble at the harbor, "shouldn't be there."
Corin shot up from the railing, her eyes narrowing at that dark column of smoke, motionless against the now nearly dark sky. Simon saw her stiffen, her hand sliding instinctively toward the knife at her belt, and understood, without needing any Honest Whisper to confirm it, that whatever had happened out there, it was no good news for any of them.