He woke up on a table.
Not a bed — he registered that immediately, the hardness beneath him, the particular flatness of a surface designed for other purposes. A table in a side room off the magistrate's hall's main corridor, judging by the stone walls and the single high window letting in grey morning light. Someone had put a folded cloth under his head. Someone had removed his shirt.
His side was bandaged. Tightly, professionally, with the kind of wrap that came from someone who had dressed wounds before and understood the difference between comfort and function. It hurt with a steady insistent pulse that he categorized immediately as manageable and filed away.
Cinder was on the table beside him.
He put his hand on it before he did anything else. A habit already, apparently.
"You're awake."
Edric was in the corner, in a chair, with the look of someone who had been there for some time. His traveling clothes were rumpled. There were shadows under his eyes. He was holding a cup of something and watching Brennan with the careful attention of a person who had been worried and was now converting that worry into relief with some effort.
"How long," Brennan said. His voice came out rougher than he expected.
"Six hours, roughly. The physician said you lost enough blood to make the next few hours uncertain." A pause. "He seemed to feel you were being inconsiderate about it."
Brennan sat up slowly. His side protested with considerable feeling. He sat with it for a moment, breathing through his nose, waiting for the room to stop its brief experiment with movement.
"The men at the inn," he said.
"My father's guards picked up three of them. Two got away, including the one who—" Edric stopped. "The one you fought in the kitchen."
The man with the veteran's stillness. The man who had looked at Cinder and paused.
Where did you get that sword, boy.
Brennan filed it away. Said nothing.
"The guards found the inn's two horses tied behind a mill on the eastern road," Edric continued. "They were gone before anyone got there." He paused. "My father's people are looking into who sent them. He thinks it's connected to the land reclamation — local resistance, organized enough to be concerning."
"It is," Brennan said.
Edric looked at him. "You knew?"
"I saw two of them at the notice board the morning it went up. Saw one of them again watching the inn that afternoon."
A silence.
"You didn't say anything," Edric said carefully.
"I was going to. In the morning." He looked at his hands. "I miscalculated the timeline."
"You—" Edric stopped. Breathed. "Brennan. If you'd told my guards—"
"Your guards were handled before I got there. I checked." He met Edric's eyes. "Two men watching an inn from a distance means surveillance. Four horses at the rear entrance at midnight means action. The window between those two things was shorter than I thought." A pause. "I should have moved sooner. That's the mistake."
Edric stared at him. "You're describing your own tactical error."
"Yes."
"You were stabbed."
"Across the ribs. It's not deep."
"You were stabbed," Edric said again, with the emphasis of someone who felt the word wasn't receiving appropriate weight.
Brennan looked at him for a moment. "I've been hurt worse falling off things," he said, which was not entirely true but not entirely false either.
Edric made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite something else and looked at the ceiling briefly. "You are," he said, "genuinely unlike anyone I have ever met."
Brennan didn't know what to do with that so he swung his legs carefully off the table and tested his weight on the floor.
The physician came back mid-morning — a small precise man named Aldous, no relation to the Brother Aldous of Brennan's orphan house years, though the coincidence of name briefly darkened his mood. This Aldous was efficient and unsentimental, which Brennan respected. He examined the wound with the clinical interest of someone whose professional opinion of patients was that they were mostly obstacles between an injury and its treatment.
"The wrap holds," he said. "Don't use the left arm above shoulder height for a week. Don't run. Don't fight." He paused, looking at Brennan with the expression of a man who suspected his instructions were already being quietly discarded. "Try to eat something."
He left.
Edric brought food — bread, hard cheese, a bowl of something warm that turned out to be a thin vegetable broth Brennan suspected had been fetched from somewhere better than the magistrate's hall's kitchen. He ate without ceremony, sitting on the edge of the table, looking at the grey square of window.
"My father wants to speak with you," Edric said. "When you're ready."
"I'm ready now."
"You've been awake for forty minutes."
"I'm ready now," Brennan said again.
Edric looked at him with that expression he'd developed over the past three days — the one that sat somewhere between exasperation and something warmer that he didn't put a name to. Then he stood and went to find his father.
Cassian came alone.
He filled the doorway in a way that had nothing to do with his physical size — he was not a large man, built lean and precise, his dark hair shot through with grey at the temples, his face composed in the way of someone who had decided long ago that composure was a more useful tool than expression. He was dressed for the day now, lord's clothes, the sigil of House Vael on his chest — a silver compass rose on black, which Brennan thought was either ironic or fitting for a man who navigated imperial politics for a living.
He looked at Brennan on the table with the same assessing look as the night before. Then he pulled the room's single chair close and sat in it, which put them at approximately the same eye level, which Brennan noted as deliberate.
"How is the wound," Cassian said.
"Manageable."
"Good." He folded his hands. "I want to understand what happened last night. Not Edric's account — yours."
Brennan told him. Same economy as always — facts in sequence, no embellishment, no self-congratulation. He'd seen the men, miscalculated the timeline, gone in through the service door, handled the corridor, handled the kitchen. He glossed over nothing about the fight and added nothing to it.
Cassian listened without interrupting. His eyes were very still when he listened, which most people's weren't. Most people's eyes moved when they listened, processing, reacting. Cassian's watched.
When Brennan finished there was a brief silence.
"You have no formal training," Cassian said. It wasn't a question.
"No."
"Where did you learn to move like that."
Brennan looked at him. "I don't know," he said, because it was true and because he had the strong impression that lying to this man was both difficult and inadvisable.
Something moved in Cassian's expression. Brief. "The sword," he said.
"I found it."
"Where."
"Varen's Field. Near the execution post."
The silence this time was different. Cassian looked at Cinder on the table beside Brennan with an expression that was careful in the way of someone being careful on purpose. He looked at it for a moment longer than the question required.
"An interesting place to find a sword," he said finally.
"I thought so."
Cassian's eyes came back to him. "You're sixteen. No family, no name, no fixed employment. You've been surviving in this town on your own for how long?"
"Seven years."
"Seven years." He said it without pity, the same way Brennan said most things, which Brennan found he appreciated. "And last night you went alone into a building containing at least five men to retrieve my son because there wasn't time for anything else."
"Yes."
"Why."
The question landed simply and waited.
Brennan thought about it honestly, which he hadn't done yet. He thought about reaching for Cinder in the dark when he heard the horses. He thought about Edric on the garrison wall saying I thought having someone local beside me made me less of a target with that surprising honesty.
"He was useful to me," Brennan said. "I didn't want to lose a source of income."
Cassian looked at him for a long moment.
"That's part of it," he said.
Brennan said nothing.
"I'm going to make you an offer," Cassian said. "I want you to hear it fully before you respond." He paused. "I have need of someone to stay close to Edric. Not a guard — he has guards, and last night demonstrated their limitations. Someone his age. Someone who moves the way you move, sees the way you see, and has no existing allegiances that could complicate their judgment." Another pause. "Someone with nothing to lose and therefore nothing to be leveraged against."
Brennan was quiet.
"The position comes with a room, meals, a wage, and access to training — real training, with a proper arms master. You'd travel with us. Valdris eventually." Cassian held his gaze. "I don't offer this out of sentiment. You saved my son's life and I'm grateful, but gratitude isn't currency and I wouldn't insult you by pretending it is. I'm offering this because you're useful and I have use for you."
The room was quiet. Outside the high window the grey morning had gone slightly brighter, thin autumn sun finding a gap in the clouds.
Brennan thought about the loft above Petyr's workshop. The three coins in his coat lining. Winter coming with its particular indifference. He thought about Valdris on its plateau, visible for miles, impossible to siege. He thought about Cinder under the floorboard, and Cinder in the kitchen with its blue etchings faintly present, and the veteran rebel's voice saying where did you get that sword, boy with that strange careful weight.
He thought about Edric asking does it not at the river, with actual curiosity.
"The training," he said. "What kind."
"Swordsmanship, primarily. House Vael retains one of the better arms masters in Earnmere." A pause. "Given what I saw last night, I suspect you'd progress quickly."
"And my sword."
Cassian glanced at Cinder again. That careful look. "Yours. Entirely."
Brennan looked at the window. At the thin winter light coming through it.
"All right," he said.
Cassian nodded once, stood, smoothed his coat with the practiced motion of a man who was always already moving toward the next thing. He reached the door and paused with his hand on the frame.
He looked back at Brennan — just briefly, just for a moment — with an expression that had something in it Brennan couldn't categorize. Not warmth. Not calculation exactly. Something older than both.
"My son speaks well of you," he said. "He's not often wrong about people."
He left.
Brennan sat on the table in the grey morning light with Cinder beside him and the bandage tight around his ribs and the word Valdris sitting in his chest like a coal — not warm yet, just present, just waiting.
Outside, somewhere across Ashfeld, the crows were in their dead oak.
Watching, as always. Without surprise. Without pity.