Savage's eyes flicked to me, something unreadable moving behind them.
"Small world," she said, quiet.
"Too small to be an accident, and I said as much already," Namey said. "I don't like coincidences that hand me exactly what I need to hear right when I need to hear it. Real life doesn't usually arrange itself that neatly. Something arranging itself that neatly for us should worry all of us considerably more than it seems to be worrying anyone at this table besides me."
"You think somebody wants us going to Highhollow," Luxy said. "On purpose. That the rumor about Jon's father was placed there for us to find, the same way those cores got placed in Daenia and Hallowmere."
"I think it's possible," Namey said. "I also think it's possible it's just true, and ugly, and every bit as coincidental as bad luck usually is, and that I've simply spent too many years inside Genesis's walls to trust anything that lines up this cleanly anymore. I don't have a way to tell the two apart yet. I wanted all of you to at least be holding the same suspicion I am, rather than walking into that mountain range only half warned."
"Doesn't change where we're headed either way," Savage said. "Real thread or planted one, I'm not leaving that rumor sitting unpulled, and neither is he." She nodded once at me. "Might as well walk toward it with our eyes open, same as toward everything else lately."
I stepped outside the guild hall a while later, once the talk had wound down into logistics, provisions, which roads north stayed passable this time of year, and let the cool evening air do what talking hadn't quite managed. Corvane's square had emptied out some with the fall of dusk, lanterns catching along the edges of the buildings one by one as the city's lamplighters made their rounds, and I found a low stone bench near a dry fountain and sat with my elbows on my knees and my head hung low enough that my own breathing filled up most of what I could hear.
Yoshi wriggled free of my shirt collar after a minute, climbed down onto my knee, and sat there watching me with those small, unbearably attentive eyes he always had, waiting for whatever I needed him to do next, even though there was nothing at all he could actually do about any of it.
"I almost killed a man today and felt nothing," I told him, quiet enough that no one passing would have caught more than a murmur. "Not nothing bad. Just nothing. Like flipping a page."
Yoshi tilted his head, the way he did whenever a sound I made didn't map onto any of the handful of words he actually understood, and pressed himself against my knuckles instead, small and warm, which was its own kind of answer even if it wasn't the one I'd been fishing for.
Aki settled beside the bench with a soft rustle of folded wings, laid his head across my boots, and let out a low sound somewhere between a sigh and a growl, and I found myself scratching behind the ridge of his jaw without quite deciding to, the motion older and more automatic than any thought I could have put behind it.
"You two are the only things left that still look at me the exact same way you did back on the farm," I said. "Everyone else keeps noticing the difference before I do. Namey noticed it back in Daenia. Savage noticed it today. I keep being the last one in the room to see what's apparently obvious to everybody standing around me."
I thought about the goblin's small, frightened eyes, months back now, the first time I hadn't flinched away from a killing and had noticed the not-flinching with something like alarm. I thought about the mercenary in the alley today, and how far that same absence had traveled since, from alarm to something closer to convenience, a tool I'd apparently started reaching for without meaning to, the way you'd reach for a familiar knife without checking first whether the edge had dulled.
I didn't have an answer for what that meant yet. I still don't, most days, if I'm being honest about it. But I'd started to understand, sitting there in the cooling dark of a city I'd never expected to see a month ago, that not having an answer yet wasn't the same thing as being allowed to stop asking the question, and that the day I let myself stop asking it entirely was probably the exact day Savage had been warning me about back in that alley, the day she'd stop trusting her own back to mine.
A small sound made me look up, soft footsteps on stone, in no particular hurry, and for one cold second my whole body tensed toward the dagger at my belt before I recognized the shape crossing the square toward me.
It wasn't the girl in white. I want to be clear about that, because for one wild, hopeful, frightened half second I genuinely thought it might be, thought Yomi had somehow found her way loose of whatever grid she was bound to. It was only a lamplighter making his rounds, an old man with a long pole and a face that had nothing at all to do with any of the trouble following me around, and he nodded politely at me as he passed and lit the lantern above the fountain without a single word, and moved on into the dark toward the next one.
I let out a breath I hadn't fully realized I'd been holding.
It was Luxy who found me a while after that, settling onto the bench beside me without asking first whether I wanted company, which was, I was slowly learning, simply how Luxy operated in every situation that actually mattered.
"Namey's drawing up a route north," she said. "Savage is arguing with him about which pass is faster and which pass is less likely to have bandits on it, which given today, I understand her being particular about."