The walk back to Caldris took two days, and I spent most of it deliberately not thinking about the fact that Draus had started finding reasons to walk beside me instead of at the head of the column, and that I’d started deliberately not minding it.
“You’re doing the thing,” Sela said, falling into step on my other side with the specific, delighted timing of someone who’d been waiting all morning for an opening.
“Where you both pretend you’re discussing wagon logistics and actually just want an excuse to stand near each other.”
“We are discussing wagon logistics,” I said.
“Borin’s wagon has one axle and no logistics left to discuss, Rose, he fixed the last problem with it in Hollow Ferry.” Sela grinned, wide and entirely unrepentant.
“I’ve got money on this, by the way. Tamsin too. Borin’s staying out of it on principle, but I’ve seen the look on his face when neither of you’s watching.”
“There is no this,” I said, with the specific firmness of someone defending a position I did not, in fact, believe.
“Sure,” Sela said, and dropped back to walk with Borin, looking entirely too pleased with herself.
Draus, three feet ahead and clearly close enough to have heard the whole exchange, didn’t turn around, but the back of his neck went faintly, satisfyingly red, which I decided to count as a small personal victory and said nothing further about for the rest of the walk.
Caldris hadn’t changed in the two weeks we’d been gone, which felt almost insulting given how much I had.
The market square still bore a faint scorch mark where the melon cart had once stood — someone had simply built around it, a new stall pushed a few feet to the left, the crater itself left untouched, like the city had collectively decided it was easier to work around the strange mark than ask too many questions about it.
The guild hall, at least, remembered me properly.
“Back already,” said the registrar — the same one, brass badge, weary patience intact — glancing up from his desk and then doing a longer, more careful double-take at whatever the ledger-stone in front of him had just registered the moment my company filed our contract completion.
“Sit. We need to talk.”
“That’s never a good opener,” I said, sitting anyway.
“No,” he agreed, “it isn’t.” He turned the stone disc toward me, the same flat cold sinking up my arm the moment my palm touched it.
[The Ledger has updated registration for: Corwin Rose]
[Class: UNBOUND — Rarity: DIVINE]
[The Ledger notes this update has automatically flagged for
standard Imperial cross-reference, per continental
registration protocol, regardless of any prior arrangement
made to keep your file quiet.
The Ledger did not have a
choice in this.
The Ledger would like that distinction
understood clearly, because the Ledger suspects you are
about to be upset with it, and the Ledger would prefer to
have been blamed correctly.]
“It automatically flagged,” I said slowly, “to the Empire.”
“Class Awakenings above Rare rarity get cross-referenced continent-wide, automatically, no exceptions, no discretion on my end or the Ledger’s.” The registrar pinched the bridge of his nose.
“I kept the bestowal details off your public file two weeks ago because that was my discretion to use. A Divine-rarity Class Awakening isn’t a detail I can quietly sit on. It’s the kind of thing that gets cross-checked the moment it’s filed, and it was filed the second you walked through that door, because the Ledger doesn’t ask my permission to do its actual job.”I felt something cold settle low in my stomach.
“How long do we have?”
“Less than I’d like.” He hesitated, then leaned in, voice dropping.
“There’s already a man in this city asking about you under a different excuse — calling himself a buyer for an antiquities concern, very polite, very thorough, asking specifically about Driftborn arrivals and recent Class Awakenings at three different guild desks that I know of. Dust-grey traveling clothes. I’d put real money on him being the same Inquisitor your people spotted on the Hollow Ferry road.”
“Severin,” Draus said quietly, from where he’d come to stand just behind my chair.
“His real name’s Aldric Severin. I did some asking around while you were in the back getting your stat sheet checked. He’s not just any Inquisitor — he’s the one Drevmoor sends when a regional office wants to be certain before they commit real resources. He doesn’t come cheap, and he doesn’t come unless someone already thinks there’s something worth confirming.”
“How do you know that,” I said.
“Because eleven years ago, before I ran the Coinhouse, I was Imperial myself, briefly, before I decided I liked having a conscience more than I liked the pay.” Draus said it simply, no drama in it, the kind of fact a person hands over once they’ve decided the trust is worth the risk.
“I know exactly what it looks like when Severin’s been sent somewhere. It looks exactly like this.”
The registrar’s eyebrows went up slightly at that, but he didn’t comment, just slid the public copy of my now-updated file across the desk for my records and folded his hands.
“My advice, for what it’s worth, since I appear to be giving you a lot of it lately: don’t run. Running reads as confirmation to anyone trained to read it that way. Stay visible, stay legitimate, let the Coinhouse’s good reputation do some of the work for you, and figure out, fast, whether you’re strong enough yet to survive a direct conversation with him if it comes to that.”
[The Ledger has nothing further to file regarding Inquisitor Aldric Severin at this time. The Ledger would, however, like to note that its separate page has just gotten considerably longer, and that it has stopped finding this development merely “mildly remarkable” and started finding it, in its own carefully limited vocabulary, concerning.]
“That’s new,” I said quietly, reading it.
“It’s never used that word before.”
“Then maybe believe it,” Draus said, grim.
We left the guild hall together, the whole company falling into a tighter formation than we’d walked in with two weeks ago, and Caldris’s evening crowd moved around us, ordinary and unbothered, while somewhere in that same crowd — close enough, as it turned out, that I caught the edge of dust-grey traveling clothes across the square just as the man wearing them turned unhurriedly and walked the other way — Inquisitor Aldric Severin had, evidently, already decided he’d seen enough for today.
He didn’t look back.
He didn’t need to.
The unhurried certainty of his stride said, more clearly than any confrontation could have, that he already knew exactly where to find me again whenever he decided it was time.