The crooked signboard of The Silver Stag creaked above the doorway, its faded stag head catching drops of rain like tiny jeweled wounds. Lanternlight spilled through warped windows in wavering bands, painting the wet cobbles with gold. After hours of trudging through Ebonreach's alleys and avoiding eyes that watched too long, the inn looked like a promise: warmth, food, rooms that shut against the world.
When Kael pushed through the door, the heat—a sudden, blunt wall of it—laid across his shoulders. The place smelled of woodsmoke, old stew, and spilled ale, an odor so ordinary it felt almost like a prayer. Voices knitted into a tangled chorus: merchants bragging, soldiers trading insults, a pair of old men arguing over a card game. Near the hearth a bard plucked a tune idly, his song thin and watery under the thunder of conversation.
Elara tugged down her hood with a laugh that wasn't quite light; the sound carried the exhaustion of long travel and the relief of being indoors. Strands of auburn hair escaped her braid and clung to the sides of her face, darkened by rain. "Charming," she muttered, scanning the room with quick, hungry eyes. "If you enjoy the company of men who bathe only when the rumor of plague reaches them."
Kael's mouth twitched in the ghost of a grin. "You'll fit right in."
She elbowed him, brief and fast. Small touches like that—her elbow, the way she adjusted her satchel strap absentmindedly—kept him tethered to the present. They were banal, human things, and after nights of blood and fog, he found they steadied him more than he expected.
The common room was a maze of bodies and tables. Shadows pooled in the corners, swallowing figures that refused to meet the hearth's glow. Kael's eyes moved from face to face, not idle but trained—cataloguing, measuring risk. The Rival Mercenary might be anywhere: a hooded patron, a man quietly drinking in the far corner, a soldier who watched too closely. The sense that they were not alone clung to him like damp cloth.
Elara noticed the tightening in his shoulders and lowered her voice. "You're scanning the room again. You really should try to enjoy soup like a normal person."
"I'm scanning the room," Kael said. His voice was flat and steady. "If he's here, he'll not be obvious."
She followed his gaze and frowned. "Who?"
"The man who's been stalking us." He was careful not to say his name the way others did—the mercenary—as if naming such things made them truer. Saying it aloud gave the hunter power.
Elara's expression sharpened. "You mean the one you keep glowering at like a weathered statue? He's not here."
Kael's mouth tightened. He kept his silence instead, because to speak was to admit how much the thought of that smile had unhinged him. Even now, the cursed blade at his hip gave a faint, impatient hum—its own heartbeat that never truly quieted.
They moved to the counter. The innkeeper was a broad-shouldered woman named Marga, with a laugh that could snap ropes and a way of looking a traveler up like she read their coin pouch by the line of their jaw. Her hands were scarred, not from blows but from lifts, forks, knives and pots; she handled a ladle as if it were a dagger. Elara was brisk and practical with her request: one room, hot stew, and privacy if possible.
Marga counted the coins Kael offered with a grunt and handed them a damp key. "Be tidy," she warned, voice rough but honest. "This place takes in more grief than coin."
They took a corner table near the hearth. For a while they ate in the ordinary silence of people who had been hungry too long. The stew was thick with root vegetables and small meat scraps; the bread was torn and shared. Elara watched Kael as he ate, studying the way he set his jaw and the slow, economical way he stirred his spoon in the bowl. Curiosity was an instinct for her; where others noted coin, she noted the way a scar bent at the jaw when a man smiled, the tiny habit by which someone revealed his truth.
"You look like a man who has a story," she said suddenly, not unkind but probing. "Everyone here has one."
Kael's spoon paused halfway to his mouth. Around them, conversation hummed like bees. He had told fewer truths than lies in the last year; companionship had been a currency he no longer trusted to spend. "I've had a blade and roads," he said, careful to keep his voice as dry as the bread in his hand.
"You bury things," Elara accused softly. "Not even a name?"
His expression closed. "Not for you."
Her face, lit by the hearth, softened for a moment. There was something tender in her willingness to poke at the edges of the armor he wore without demanding to break it. "We don't have to trade the heavy things right away," she said. "I'll wait."
Kael's chest felt unexpectedly tight at the word wait. He had learned how to survive by moving—to leave before attachments could be used by the world against him. Yet sitting here, watching Elara with the fire between them, he felt, absurdly, that the world might allow a pause. The cursed sword at his hip throbbed as if in dissent.
After supper, the common room thinned. The bard's tune faded as men spilled out into the night, and those who remained settled into a murmuring hush. Kael and Elara climbed the creaky staircase to the rooms above; the inn smelled of old wood and a faint perfume of lavender someone had left in a drawer long ago.
Their room was narrow, but the bed had clean sheets and the shutters shut tight. Elara dropped her cloak and sat on the bed, tugging off her boots with an almost juvenile relief. She hummed under her breath, a small tune of her own, the kind that might make an old woman beside a hearth smile.
Kael moved to the window. He opened the shutters a sliver and looked out. The street was calm. Lanterns burned like small planets, and the river beyond swallowed the city's farther lights in slow darkness. Yet even in this domestic quiet, Kael's nerves did not yield. He felt the hunt continue—little signs, the scrape of a shoe in the lane, a shadow slipping between two buildings. He pressed his hand against the sill, feeling the faint vibration of the sword at his side like a second pulse.
"Elara?" he asked, softer than before. She stared up at him from the bed, hair falling around her face like a wild curtain.
"You don't have to carry it alone," she said simply.
The words were ordinary, but they struck like a bell. Kael's throat constricted. There were things a blade didn't allow: trust, rest, long-term thought. The sword had been his company for so long its whisper had braided itself through his thoughts. Trust is a weakness. Give your blade the feast.
He swallowed that old voice down and answered, "I'll keep watch."
She smiled—small, brief, and full of complicated understanding. "I'll pretend to sleep, then, so you feel you've won something."
They shared a half-laugh that resembled something like peace.
Night pressed on. The inn slowed to quiet breathing. Kael sat in the window, blade across his knees. He watched the lane with a soldier's careful patience, heartbeat like a metronome. Time stretched thin; the mind finds small snares when it waits—memories that were threads to other men, faces of those lost along the road, the soft weight of a friend's hand once placed on his shoulder.
The sword whispering was a low, constant tide: He is here. He circles. Kill or be killed. Kael pressed his palms into his knees and forced himself to catalog the noises outside instead: the rustle of a cat, a distant wagon's rattle, the breathing of someone hard at sleep in a nearby room. Anchor oneself to the simple senses, he told himself. Do not feed the hunger.
Hours thinned. The moon pulled at the puddles to make them silver. Then, like a small star being twinkled out, a flash: the faint reflection of metal across from the inn, set into the wood of the shuttering. A dagger, its hilt embedded in the face of the building, and at its haft a strip of black cloth with a crude eye painted in red.
Kael's breath shortened. The mark was unmistakable—the mercenary's sign. It was not a simple threat. It was sport. They'd been invited to a game in which someone else knew their steps and placed pieces on the board.
He moved like a man who had been taught to act before emotion. Downstairs, Marga was sweeping at the hearth, her silhouette a blunt shape of domestic order; a serving girl stacked bowls and hummed tunelessly. Kael did not speak with them. He instead passed into the alley and crossed to the other side. The dagger was set like a watchman's letter, glossy with rain. There was no blood on it—this time—but its presence in the face of the inn was intimate and intended to get under the skin.
When he returned, he carried a small brass token between his fingers—an old coin from a far-off city—slid into the palm of his boot as a reminder that not every challenge needed to be answered with violence. He stepped back into the dim room and closed the shutters with a deliberate movement. Elara was awake, risen to her knees, watchful and silent.
"You saw it." Her whisper was not surprised. She had always been quicker at reading the city's motives than he had thought.
He sat and for a moment they simply shared the room's quiet. It was intimate in the way that silence between two traveling people often became: comfortable, truthful, a hard-earned truce with the world. Kael felt the blade's hum like a caged thing beneath his skin, twitching for blood. He stared at the hands he had used too many times to steady a dying man and wondered when they had grown so accustomed to that job.
Elara reached out then, unexpectedly, and placed her hand over his. It was not theatrical—no dramatic confession, no tearful promise. Her palm was warm and real and small. "You do not have to be the monster they fear," she said. "Not unless you choose to."
For a second he wanted to tell her everything: the dreams the sword gave him, the faces that bled from memory, the bitter satisfaction the blade offered when it drank. He wanted to tell her about the night he had watched a boy slip between a gap in armor and die because he had not moved quickly enough. But the words choked him. The sword hissed: That story will serve me. Give it, and feed me.
He squeezed her hand gently instead and let silence answer for him. The touch anchored him, lessening the blade's call by the breadth of a heartbeat. It was foolish, perhaps dangerous, to rely on a mortal touch when forces coiled in steel and shadow. Yet for the first time in months, Kael felt a frayed thread of something that might grow into trust.
They slept in turns. Elara pretended first; Kael kept watch, his eyes moving like a hawk's. When he drifted for a blink, a rustle below woke him. He slid from the bed and opened the shutters to see the alley empty, moonlight slicing silver across the wet stone. But pinned to the inn's outer beam, just beneath the signboard, a new mark had been placed—a small coin, hammered flat and stamped with the same crude eye. Someone had left it there within the last hour, a direct reply to his movement.
He felt a cold amusement and a prickle of anger. The Rival Mercenary liked games. So did Kael, but his rules were simpler. The clock started, and both sides were counting rounds.
He did not sleep after that. He sat by the window until dawn, until light paled the sky to gray and the city resumed its breath. The coin glinted in the weak sun like a promise of a wound. He slid it into his pocket below his coin pouch—a small token of ownership, a reminder that someone had not only seen them but had wanted them watched.
When the morning came, the inn smelled of bread and of a world not yet devoured. Elara stretched and watched him with eyes that had lost the sleep but not the humor. "You look worse for the watch," she teased, though the line of worry at her brow betrayed her.
Kael only grunted. He felt worse in ways that could not be soothed by bread.
They left with the day's bustle, and Kael carried with him the new knowledge that he was being hunted by a man patient enough to turn stalking into art. The Rival Mercenary was dangerous because he was methodical and he had time. But Kael also had something else: a companion who could anchor him when the blade tried to unmake him. The coin in Kael's pocket was cold against his palm as they walked the narrow streets toward the Archivum, toward answers that felt farther away than ever.
And somewhere in the city, a shadow watched the pair go by and smiled like a man who loved being the only one with the map.
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It is lowkey really demotivating getting rejected in my first book, that one I really had planned and knew how the story would go and I was invested in it, so I'll probably rewrite again sometime:)