The last morning in Harrowick arrived like a promise they'd made to themselves and almost managed to forget.
Light slanted through the crooked shutters of the loft, warm and clean, and turned the dust into soft constellations. The little room had the smell of oiled leather and last night's bread and the apothecary two floors down who boiled lavender into everything whether it wanted to be lavender or not. Kaelen had already folded his blanket into a careful square at the end of the narrow bed. Two packs leaned against the wall—his, neat and balanced, Miro's, apparently packed by a particularly optimistic raccoon.
On the table beside the window, Kaelen's forearm crossbow lay in its familiar disassembled puzzle: bow arm, trigger cage, spring, string, three bolts in a bundle of cloth. He turned the trigger assembly over in his hands and watched a sliver of sunlight slide across the brass teeth.
"Morning," Miro announced to the ceiling from the doorway, hair a bright kingdom in open rebellion. He took three steps in, tripped on nothing, righted himself with the dignity of a cat, and gave the packs a critical look. "We're leaving today, right? So you packed my pack wrong."
"I packed your pack exactly right," Kaelen said without looking up. He fit the tiny coil-spring into its cradle and tested the tension with his thumb. "The problem is your sense of what 'right' is."
"My sense is immaculate." Miro crossed to the table and leaned on his forearms. "Are you taking that thing apart to convince it to be better, or are you going to threaten it into innovation?"
"Neither," Kaelen said. "I'm considering giving it a sibling."
Miro's face did something complicated, then settled on delight. "A second one? So you can clap and fire? Kaelen. Please."
"Not a second crossbow." Kaelen set the trigger down and picked up the bow arm. "A second limb on the same brace, opposite the first. Two-shot system. Fire one, cock the other while you move, then swap. Or a quick-change head, something that hooks."
"Hooks," Miro repeated reverently. "For what, exactly?"
"Mobility. Pull a crate out from under someone. Yank a shield. Climb. Or if someone taller than sense tries to run—" He mimed a little flick of the wrist. "—trip him."
Miro pressed a hand to his heart. "I knew you kept me around for my bad influence."
"For your ability to ask the wrong question until it becomes useful." Kaelen fitted the bow arm back into place and began to wind the string. "Also for your habit of making friends with oxen."
"They like my face." Miro sauntered to his pack and began pulling items out and putting them back in exactly where they'd been. "Do we have food?"
"Old Lysa sent us off with two loaves yesterday," Kaelen said. "And three little tarts she pretended we didn't see her tuck in."
"I saw," Miro said solemnly. "I was too moved to mention it."
Kaelen's mouth tugged up. He slid the mini-crossbow's brace over his forearm and locked it. The weight comforted him the way the sword along the wall did: not because steel solved problems on its own, but because steel remembered how to help.
"Ready?" he asked.
Miro looked around the room like it was trying to hide a secret he wanted to be sure to miss. "I think so."
Kaelen checked the window latch one last time—some habits refused to let a room go gently—then shouldered his pack. "Let's say goodbye to our city."
"Our?" Miro said as they clattered down the stairs.
"For now." Kaelen pushed the door with his shoulder and stepped into morning.
Harrowick was already busy being itself. The market was a spill of color and noise: red onions in nets, copper kettles catching light, cloth bright as birds. The farrier's hammer set a steady rhythm somewhere down Copper Street. The clocktower cleared its throat and decided it was not yet time to say anything important.
They started with Old Lysa because starting with bread always made sense.
"There you are," she said, as if they'd been hiding from her under her own counter. Flour had found her cheek and refused to leave. "I put a loaf aside, and don't argue, you look like boys who would try and argue bread away from a woman with flour on her hands."
"We wouldn't dare," Miro said, taking the warm bundle like receiving a royal decree.
"And little tarts," Lysa added, dropping her voice as if the tarts were contraband. "For the moments the road tastes like old boot."
"It often does," Kaelen said. "Thank you."
Lysa's eyes softened. "You come back through, you come hungry," she said. "I like seeing you eat."
"We like you watching," Miro said gravely, and blew her a kiss. Lysa swatted the air with her cloth and pretended not to be pleased.
At Maerin's Leatherworks, the door creaked because it always had, and the same strip of dyed hide hung from a ceiling beam to test whether a breeze had remembered to visit. Maerin stood behind the counter with a bridle in pieces like a puzzle she'd already solved and was taking apart again for fun.
"You," she said, squinting at Kaelen's forearm. "That contraption still bolted together?"
"For now," Kaelen said. "I'm thinking of making it worse."
Maerin snorted, which was how she showed affection. "I've got a cousin in Bellsford," she said, "who thinks in springs and curses. He makes devices for people who don't like being told no by gravity. If you want him to look at that—" she flicked a finger toward the crossbow "—I'll write you a note that says you pay."
"I do pay," Kaelen said.
"You pay eventually," Maerin corrected. She began to rummage for paper and a stub of charcoal with the air of a woman who enjoyed writing letters that would start fights. "Tell him Maerin sent you, so he'll know which of his mistakes to remember."
Miro wandered along the wall of belts and looped one over his head like a sash until it tried to strangle him, at which point he removed it and bowed to it as to a worthy opponent. "Maerin," he said, "it pains me to say this, but we will miss you."
"Liar," she said fondly, and pushed the folded note into Kaelen's palm. "Don't die stupid."
"We were planning to die interesting," Miro said. "But not today."
They cut across the square, dodging a broom duel between two boys and the broom they were both sure was magical. The fletcher lifted a hand from his stall, and Kaelen lifted one back. "Safe flight," the old man called.
"Safe shot," Miro answered, and the fletcher laughed in that dry way that meant he'd liked the attempt whether it had landed or not.
Garron was at the South Gate with his helm under his arm and the expression of a man considering either philosophy or the price of onions. He brightened when he saw them and tried not to.
"You two," he said. "If you leave, the city will be ten percent less handsome."
"Fifteen," Miro said. "We did the math."
"Arguable," Garron said, which was as generous as a guard got. He hooked his thumb toward the road. "Watch for puddles that are pretending to be holes, and for holes pretending to be roads. And if you see my cousin's dog, tell him I said to stop eating mail."
"We'll put it in a letter," Kaelen said.
Garron hesitated a fraction. "Darrin's about," he said. "Been asking after you. It's not my business, but when a man with that beard asks after anyone, I worry for the safety of all involved."
As if conjured by his own reputation, Darrin stepped into view around the gate's stone—boots dusty, beard doing the complicated work of aging without giving up, eyes the amused sort that weighed your choices without asking for permission.
"Well, well," he said. "The city's favorite wanderers. Going to leave without saying goodbye to your elders?"
"We said it in the guild," Miro protested.
"That doesn't count," Darrin said. "You can't hear 'goodbye' in there over the sound of ledgers crying." He glanced at their packs. "On your way?"
"We are," Kaelen said. "Until the road says stop and then we'll ignore it and keep going."
"Reasonable," Darrin said. He rocked on his heels a fraction, as if easing into the next thing. "There's a contract you should hear about before you decide you love freedom too much to be paid."
"We do love being paid," Miro said.
"Three people gone missing," Darrin said. "Two scholars and a merchant. No drama in the city. No knife in an alley. Just gone. Last seen near the docks. Guild's got coin on it and Farlan's got a vein in his forehead about to pop."
Kaelen felt the ease in his shoulders slow, not tense exactly, but listening. They had said goodbye. They had meant it. The road had felt open, clean. But there it was—work that was more than coin and more than a story to shout over ale later. Three people in the world, thin as strangers and as heavy as anyone, missing.
Miro looked at Kaelen. He didn't have to say it. He said it anyway, because some rituals were good to keep. "Final job?"
Kaelen held his gaze a heartbeat. The road would still be the road tomorrow. The sky would still be there to test the size of his chest against. "Final job," he said.
Darrin grinned the grin of a man who'd dangled a hook just long enough to feel the tug. "Good. I was going to frown very meaningfully if you said no. It wrinkles my forehead. Bad for my brand."
"Terrifying," Miro said.
"Guild first," Darrin said. "Then docks. Then you remember to eat something."
"We'll try," Kaelen said, and they turned back toward the square like men who had wanted to go one way and found a better way to go instead.
Inside, the hall was a lived-in chaos. Someone was beating chalk dust out of a tapestry. Someone else was teaching a new recruit how to read a map upside down because that was how you always found yourself holding one in the rain at night. Coins clinked. Quills scraped. The hearth emitted the exact same snap it always did at this hour, as if someone had trained it.
Farlan was exactly where he always was: part of the counter by now, hair thinner, ink thicker, eyes doing the math of a ledger that refused to stop growing new columns.
"Tell me you can take a contract," he said without preamble, shoving a parchment across the counter.
"Hello to you too," Miro said.
"Hello, goodbye, good riddance—whatever gets you to sign," Farlan muttered. "The missing-persons bit. Two scholars—names Kesh and Aline—and a merchant called Torvid. All three were seen together two nights ago at the docks. Then nothing. No word, no bodies, no note asking politely for ransom. And before you ask—yes, the city watch is 'looking into it.' " He made the finger-quotes with such bitter dexterity that Kaelen wondered if he practiced them at home.
Kaelen scanned the parchment. The script was neat and unhelpful. "Connections?"
"Scholars came in with a caravan from the east last week. Kesh has a university seal, Aline does not—so either private research or the kind that doesn't like seals. The merchant deals in curios, bits of old stone, potsherds, shiny things travelers with more coin than sense like to put on shelves."
"Rumors?" Miro asked hopefully.
Farlan rubbed the side of his nose with ink-stained knuckles. "Fine. Rumors. Someone said they were asking about 'mana stones.'"
Kaelen's head lifted a fraction. "Mana stones?"
Farlan lifted both palms, irritated at the world for making him repeat tavern talk. "Crystallized mana. Formed in places the stuff runs thick or after a storm rattles the weave. They're a new discovery—new as in I hadn't heard of them last winter and now everyone who drinks with scholars thinks they're an expert. Supposedly you can power things with them. Supposedly they make a good paperweight. Supposedly if you lick one you see through time." He stared at them. "Don't lick anything."
"Good advice," Miro said gravely. "Always."
"Point is," Farlan continued, tapping the parchment, "these three were asking questions at the docks. Two nights later—gone. If they went upriver, no boat captain will admit it. If they went downriver, same. If they walked, the cobbles forgot to tell anyone. I don't like that." He shoved a small disc across the counter. "Watch token. If the guards get precious about letting you into anything, show them that and say my name like a curse."
Kaelen slid the token into his pouch. "We'll take it."
Farlan's mouth twitched, which on him was a smile trying not to embarrass itself. "Try not to break anything expensive at the docks," he said. "Everything at the docks is expensive."
"Even the water?" Miro asked.
"Especially the water," Farlan said.
Harbor air had its own logic. It tasted like wet wood and tar, like rope that had learned a dozen knots, like fish when fish decided to wear their perfume offensively. The river curved around the southern edge of Harrowick like a patient animal; the docks rode its back—piers and slips, cranes and pulleys, barges with names painted in letters that flaked in the exact way paint always flaked.
By afternoon, Kaelen and Miro had walked the length of it twice and divided their time equally between hearing nothing and hearing lies. Dockhands shrugged in the international language of "don't know, don't care, not my job." A tavern owner wiped the same circle on the bar until the wood went glossy and insisted no one had been there two nights ago, but also described their hair in detail. A boy tried to sell them a map to the docks they were already standing in, and when Miro bought it anyway, he threw in an invisible compass for free.
They asked, and were asked, and learned all the details that weren't useful and a few that probably would be later. At one point, Kaelen noticed a knot of men across the way in dark cloaks despite the heat. They were doing an admirable impression of harbor pilings. Miro followed his gaze and raised his brows. Kaelen gave the smallest shake of the head. Men in cloaks at docks were like gulls—ubiquitous, loud if you bothered them, and largely irrelevant unless they stole your food.
They ate Lysa's loaf on a bench that had not decided whether it wanted to collapse. They watched a crane haul a crate out of a hold with the careful slowness of a man removing a splinter. They listened to the river speak the language of current and eddy. The day went from bright to thoughtful without asking for their opinion on the matter.
"You ever think," Miro said around a mouthful of bread, "that if you were a scholar with an expensive question, you would maybe not ask that question loudly at a dock?"
"I think scholars think in lines," Kaelen said. He had his elbows on his knees and his attention on the pattern of foot traffic. "They write down what they want and then they walk to it the shortest way. The docks are where things come from and go to. If their line said 'mana stones,' their feet said 'docks.'"
Miro considered this and nodded as if Kaelen had said something important about life. "We need a line that says 'the useful place,'" he said. "Because we are currently in the useless place."
"Not useless," Kaelen said mildly, and pointed with his chin toward the far end of the harbor where the official piers gave way to older wood and stubborn warehouses that had refused to die when the new ones arrived. "People doing expensive things don't like to be seen. People doing dangerous things don't like to pay rent."
Miro followed his gaze and made a face of eager agreement. "Ah," he said. "The part of the docks where the docks wish they weren't."
They rose and let their feet carry them past tidy painted signs that said things like LUTEM & SONS IMPORTS and HARBOR WARES in cheerful letters, and into a curve of river with fewer letters and more rust. The boards here were old enough to remember when being a board had been an honor. Ropes sagged like old men resting on stairs. A building with a roof that had made its peace with sagging leaned against a friend and stayed up out of affection.
"Smell that?" Miro said.
"I'm trying not to," Kaelen said. But he did: tar, fish, old water, newer water, and a whisper of iron that did not belong to ships.
A small warehouse stood at the far end, away from the main rows, hunkered down between a set of pilings and a slip that might once have been a boat house. Its door was a plank set in a frame that had not been crafted so much as nailed into submission. Light came through a seam by the eaves in a thin, tired line.
"Hello there," Miro murmured, as if greeting an animal that preferred to be left alone.
Kaelen stepped to the side of the door and pressed his palm against the wood. Warm from the day. The grain rough. He put his ear to it. A trick his body had learned from sleeping outdoors: you could hear more with your cheek on wood than with both eyes open. Nothing on the other side but emptiness and someone else's air.
He nodded once. Miro took the latch, tested it with a thief's gentleness, and eased it up. The door moved grudgingly, the way doors move when they believe their job is to stay closed. Kaelen's hand rested on his sword without drawing it and the crossbow on his forearm hung light as a second thought.
They slipped inside. The light came with them, then faltered.
The smell hit first—thick, wrong, intimate. Metal and burned hair, something sweet turned cruel, the coin-sharp smell of blood that had been air too long and learned to be offensive about it. The place was a rectangle of old wood and shadows. A table stood in the middle: planks on trestles, stained the way all tables at docks are stained, except those stains usually told stories about fish.
This one told other stories.
Drag marks scuffed the floor in wide, ugly arcs, dark where wet had been, glossy where it had gone to lacquer. On the table's near edge, a smear of something that had been wiped and failed to be wiped hovered between brown and black. There were lengths of rope on the floor in a coil that didn't mean coiled—knot marks stiff with something that was not salt.
Miro made a small sound in his throat, the sound any human makes when the body notices a thing before the mind is ready to admit it. He didn't move forward. He didn't move back. He stood where a foot had set down and refused to lift.
"Stay by the door," Kaelen said softly, not as a command but as an invitation.
He moved around the right side, a step at a time, putting his boot down carefully as if the floor might contradict him. The light from the eaves line made a narrow stripe along the wall. In that stripe, five finger marks. At first they were just handprints, the way people leave them when the world spins too fast. Then he saw how the grain had changed. The wood there was darker, as if the prints had scorched into it without heat, as if the oil and salt of those hands had been a solvent and the wall had not recovered. The fingers were splayed. They were pressed so hard the joints had flattened for a breath.
Kaelen's stomach did that weightless thing it did at the start of a fall. He stood very still and counted to seven, not for luck, but because sometimes numbers kept blood where it was supposed to be.
On the table, near the far edge, a line of fingernails lay in a patient row. Four, then a gap, then one set off a little apart as if not sure whether it belonged with the others. They were crescent moons, keratin and little half-moons of dirt, and where they had been torn free the root ends were ragged, ringed with a little fur of dried flesh. The sight of them brought a prickle across Kaelen's scalp, the same phantom discomfort he'd felt when he'd chipped a nail as a child and his body had decided to inform him at length how much it valued all of his parts.
There were clumps in the corners: skin, thin as parchment, curled like leaves after frost. One had the pale ghost of a knuckle crease. Another was a small island with the suggestion of a freckle. Kaelen did not look too long. The body recognized its own even when the mind said it was evidence.
"You seeing this?" Miro asked softly, as if the room might answer if he was rude.
"I'm seeing it." Kaelen crouched by the end of the table. Rope had been tied here. The fibers had a gloss to them that rope did not earn by being wet; it was the gloss of fat, forced into it and left there to remind the rope what it had held. He touched the edge of the table with two fingers. It was sticky where the wood had taken more than oil. He wiped his fingers on his trousers, knowing it would not feel like clean for a while.
There were boot marks—a scuffle heavier than a man's weight, a set of prints that didn't match any shoe Kaelen had seen because they were not proper prints at all, just heavy suggestions. He followed them to the back where a smaller door stood crooked on its hinges. It had been forced open and forced closed and forced open again until the hinge had given up the discipline of sitting straight. From there, drag lines out into the dark where the dock fell away to river.
He came back along the opposite wall, the one that had not bothered to be interesting, and nearly kicked a crate he hadn't seen. It had been turned over, no markings on the bottom, a split along one corner. Something under it caught the little bit of light left in the day and corrected it into a color that did not belong to wood.
Kaelen nudged the crate aside with his boot. On the boards beneath, tucked into the angle where wall met floor, lay a small crystal the size of a thumb segment. It had the milk-blue of ice with a sky behind it, and inside it a suggestion of threads like cobwebs in heavy air. He did not pick it up with his fingers. He used the corner of a scrap of sackcloth and lifted it onto his palm. It was cool, neither cold nor warm, and it seemed—he ignored the seeming—to soften the light around it rather than emit any of its own.
Miro drifted closer without stepping in the gore. "Is that…?"
"Maybe," Kaelen said.
"Is it a lick-a-thing?" Miro asked with a reflexive reach for humor, because otherwise there was only the smell.
"It's a not-touch-a-thing," Kaelen said, and wrapped the cloth a little tighter.
They did one more slow circuit because leaving a room like this without knowing where all its shadows were felt like a mistake that would want interest later. There were no bodies. There was no hidden note tucked into a crack. There was only the room, and the signs of what had happened in it, and the river out the back through a door that did not wish to tell anyone anything about where anything had gone.
"Guild," Kaelen said at last. His voice sounded steady. He had learned how to cultivate steady when steady was all a situation deserved. "We'll bring what we've seen and what we think and let Farlan take a headache for it. And then—"
"And then we eat," Miro said faintly, because rituals were stubborn.
"And then we eat," Kaelen agreed.
They backed out into the night the way men back away from a cliff they hadn't seen until their toes found air—carefully, eyes on the place that had pretended to be harmless and had been nothing of the kind.
The door eased shut. The latch settled. The smell stayed behind. The river's air, cold and honest, met them like a cousin they hadn't realized they missed.
There was only Miro saying something about telling Farlan that his watch token had worked like a charm on a door and—
Kaelen screamed.
Not a word. Not a name. Not a sound a man makes when he means to be understood. It tore out of him like something had reached up through the boards and wrenched it, and he went sideways with it, slamming shoulder-first into the wall and rebounding, hands flying over his chest, his arms, his hair, slapping, clawing, patting out flames that were not there.
Miro was on him in a heartbeat. "Kaelen! Kael—hey—hey!" He grabbed his brother's wrists and got his own hands smacked for his trouble. "What—what—"
Kaelen's eyes were wide and wrong, the way eyes go when they are somewhere else entirely. His breath sawed in and out, a pant with the edge of a sob on it. He thrashed once, tore free, and swatted savagely at his sleeve, his throat, the front of his tunic. The sound he made was the cracked end of a scream, the part of a cry men don't let out in front of anyone unless something fundamental has stopped pretending to be fine.
The world did not change. The dock boards did not tilt. Miro hauled Kaelen in and tried to hold him very still like you hold someone who has suddenly remembered that being a body is not always kind.
Just as abruptly as it had come, it went. Kaelen shuddered once, hard enough to knock a breath out of himself, and then he was still. Not calm—still. His face looked like he'd come back from a distance and was pretending he hadn't gone.
Miro's hands were on his shoulders. "What was that? Kaelen, what—"
Kaelen made a small, violent motion, and the cloth-wrapped crystal in Miro's hand was simply not there anymore. Kaelen had it. He didn't look at it. He didn't measure it or consider. He drew his arm back and hurled it, hard and flat, in a long white arc. It caught a strip of reflected lantern-light and flicked it aside and then struck the river with a sound like a knife touching water. The ripples ran out in a widening ring and then were ordinary again.
Miro stared at him. Kaelen kept his eyes fixed on the place the stone had vanished, as if it had whispered something only he could hear—and he was still trying to decide whether it had been a warning or a promise.
"Kael," Miro said, quieter now and all the more afraid for it, "What was all of that?."
Kaelen swallowed. His mouth tasted of ash that wasn't there. He reached out and set a hand on Miro's shoulder, fingers curling just enough to feel the solid weight of him. He didn't look up right away, letting the silence stretch between them until his breath steadied. Only then did he squeeze once—firm, grounding—
"I… I'm just tired," he said. The words came out small and not convincing. He tried again. "I'm just tired."
"Tired?" Miro repeated, halfway to a laugh and halfway to breaking it, because in the long list of things Kaelen had looked like in the last ten seconds, "tired" was not on it. "Tired of—what do you—what does that even mean?"
Kaelen pulled back, enough to see his face in the shadow between the buildings, enough for Miro to see that whatever had just happened had put something behind Kaelen's eyes that hadn't been there before. It wasn't a shine. It wasn't an absence. It was weight.
"I don't know," Kaelen said, which was a lie in the way some truths are lies because there are no words yet. He scrubbed his hands over his face once, hard enough to sting, and let them fall. "I just—" He looked past Miro, at the dark cut of river, at the line where night and water agreed to pretend to be the same thing. "If you knew—if you knew that no matter what you did, you would lose people you care about. And you couldn't find a way around it. Would you—" He lifted one hand, turning it palm-up as though weighing something invisible, then let it fall open, fingers splaying loosely. "Would you let it go? Run?"
Miro's mouth opened. Closed. His eyes did something that would have been humor on a better night. "I'm not sure," he said, slowly, honestly. "But I know you. You don't give up. You complain. Loudly, sometimes, about my choices. But you don't quit. You keep… moving. Until something gives. And it does. In the end. Because you made it." He grimaced. "Possibly through stubbornness. Or trickery. Or my charm."
"Your charm is a blunt instrument," Kaelen said. It should have come out playful and did not. He exhaled like he had been holding his breath for longer than a man could live, and then he let a small laugh out, a real one, the kind that comes up by accident when the body insists on not being as noble as grief wants. "Thank you."
Miro huffed a little, relief finding its way into noise. "For what? Being right? It happens."
"For being here," Kaelen said simply. He rolled his shoulders as if dropping a pack. Something inside him had shifted, silent as a door sliding into a different frame. The part that was tired would not stop being tired tonight. The part that knew what needed doing was awake.
"I feel a little better," he said, surprised at the truth of it. "Not a lot. Enough."
"Enough for what?" Miro asked.
"For the next step," Kaelen said. He looked back toward the city. The docks had gotten quieter while they were busy being two men who were not okay in a place that didn't care. "We need to report this to the guild."
"And then?" Miro said.
"And then we find Serenya," Kaelen said. "Fast."
They took one step away from the building and its smell and its bad memory and then another. The night lifted a degree. The river made its constant argument with the pilings. Somewhere far away, a bell sounded the hour like a rumor you didn't need but appreciated. The city was the city again, and the road—that perennial road—had, by the look of it, decided to wait one more day.