I
Tal watched the stranger — Nivlac, according to the registration form the clerk was now hastily filling out — walk away toward the noticeboard to look over commission postings, and allowed herself, for the first time since this entire conversation started, to stop performing certainty for an audience.
She wasn’t actually sure she’d made the right call.
If anything, every instinct she’d developed over the past several months was screaming that she’d just done the exact thing she’d sworn never to do again: hand a stranger the power to get someone killed, purely because a bureaucratic clerk had run out of other options to offer her.
She thought, briefly and unwillingly, of the exact sound her old support’s voice had made the moment he’d frozen — not a scream, which might have at least prompted someone to react faster, but a small, strangled silence that had somehow been worse.
II
But the alternative had been worse, and that was really the whole calculation.
Continue getting stonewalled at every commission above her current tier, or take a calculated risk on someone who — and she made herself admit this honestly, if only to herself — hadn’t actually done anything wrong yet.
He hadn’t overpromised.
He hadn’t tried to talk his way past her skepticism with false confidence.
If anything, the flat, unbothered way he’d owned his own uselessness against anything living had been almost more unsettling than if he’d tried to sell her on hidden potential.
Confidence, she’d learned the hard way, was cheap and often actively dangerous.
Honesty about your own limitations, at least, gave you something real to plan around.
III
“You okay?” Rowan asked quietly, drifting closer now that the clerk had moved off to process paperwork.
Rowan backed off, but the broad-shouldered man — less easily deterred, or perhaps simply less concerned with whether Tal wanted to talk about it — spoke up anyway.
“You didn’t have to say yes.”
“I know.”
“So why’d you?”
Tal considered several answers, discarded most of them as either too honest or not honest enough, and settled on the version closest to true.
“Because if I keep saying no to every support who walks through that door, we’re going to spend the rest of our careers stuck two ranks below where we should be.
And because,” she added, lower, “he didn’t flinch when I told him what I actually thought of his class.
That’s…
not nothing.”
The broad-shouldered man considered this, nodding slowly, apparently satisfied enough with the answer not to push further.
That, too, was unlike him — he rarely let a conversation go until he’d fully worked through whatever was bothering him about it, which meant, Tal suspected, that some part of him had already reached the same conclusion on his own.
It wasn’t trust.
She wanted to be very clear with herself about that.
Trust was something you built slowly, over dozens of successful runs, through repeated proof rather than a single conversation in a noisy guild hall.
What she felt right now was something much smaller and more provisional — a willingness to collect one data point, nothing more, exactly the kind of controlled, low-stakes experiment that wouldn’t cost her much if it failed and might, if she was being honest with herself, actually tell her something useful if it didn’t.
She glanced toward Nivlac, currently reading through commission postings with the same unhurried, methodical attention he’d brought to the entire conversation at the counter — no visible nerves, no obvious eagerness to prove himself, just a quiet, patient thoroughness that, despite everything, she found herself grudgingly noting as at least not actively alarming.
V
“One commission,” she said again, mostly to remind herself.
“The easiest one on the board.
If he freezes, if he does anything even close to what happened last time, that’s it.
We go back to managing without one.”
“And if he doesn’t freeze?” Rowan asked.
Tal didn’t have a ready answer for that, and found, somewhat uncomfortably, that the absence of one bothered her more than she wanted to admit.
She’d built her entire operating strategy around the assumption that this would fail, quickly and predictably, in a way that confirmed everything she already believed.
She hadn’t actually prepared herself for the possibility that it might not.