"I'll bet."
"You alright?" she asked, and there wasn't a single ounce of performance in the question, none of the polite reflex people usually put behind that exact phrase.
"I don't know how to answer that honestly without it sounding worse than I mean it to," I said.
"Try anyway," she said. "I promise not to flinch. I've had worse things said to me by considerably less deserving people than you."
I told her, then, the whole of it, the mercenary's calm eyes and my own colder ones, the goblin months back, the slow accumulating weight of every small moment where the part of me that used to look away had simply stopped bothering to. She listened the way Namey had listened earlier, without interrupting, and when I finally ran out of words she sat quiet a moment longer before answering, turning something over behind her own calm the way I'd started to notice she always did before she let herself speak on anything that mattered.
"I killed a fairy for this ring," she said, holding up her hand so the little band caught what lantern light reached us. "You already know that part. What you don't know is that it wasn't really about the comment on my armor. It said something about my sister first. Something true and small and cruel in exactly the way only something that's watched you a long while could manage, and I put my blade through it before I'd even finished deciding to, and I felt something in myself go quiet and satisfied about it in a way I still haven't fully forgiven myself for feeling." She turned the ring slowly on her finger. "I'm not telling you that to make what happened to you today feel smaller. I'm telling you because I think the version of this that actually helps you isn't someone promising it'll go back to how it used to be. I think it's someone telling you plainly that it might not, and that the work now isn't getting back to who you were. It's deciding, on purpose, who you're willing to let yourself become instead, while there's still a real choice left in it."
"That's not much comfort," I said.
"I know," she said. "I didn't say it to comfort you. I said it because I think you'd rather have it true than gentle. You said as much to Namey yourself, not two hours ago."
I laughed, short and without much humor in it, but real all the same. "Fair."
We sat a while longer in the cooling dark, Aki's steady breathing under my boots, Yoshi curled warm in my lap, the city settling slowly around us into whatever late-evening rhythm a place this size settled into once the day's business finally wound down. It was, for a stretch of minutes I hadn't earned and didn't fully trust, almost peaceful.
The peace didn't last long enough to matter.
A guild runner found us there, a boy of maybe twelve breathless from crossing half the city at a dead sprint, and he skidded to a stop in front of the bench with a folded scrap of parchment held out in both hands like it might bite him if he held onto it a second longer than necessary.
"Message," he managed, between gulps of air. "For the one they said carries a bow with blue glass in it. Man left it at the hall desk not ten minutes back. Paid me double to run it out here fast, on account of you'd apparently already left before he could hand it over himself."
"What did he look like," Luxy asked, already on her feet, one hand drifting toward the blade at her hip.
"Ordinary," the boy said, shrugging with the particular unhelpfulness of someone who genuinely hadn't thought to look closer. "Tall. Quiet voice. Didn't stick around long enough to answer questions, and honestly, miss, for double coin I wasn't about to ask him any."
He thrust the parchment into my hands and was gone before either of us could stop him, already sprinting back the way he'd come, clearly more interested in spending his coin than in whatever trouble it had come wrapped around.
I unfolded it slowly, my own hands steadier than I expected them to be, and Luxy leaned in close enough to read it over my shoulder, her breath gone quiet and careful beside me.
There was no greeting on it, and no signature either, just a single line of neat, unhurried handwriting, and below it, pressed into the wax that had sealed it shut before I'd broken the seal without noticing, a small stamped mark: an ash-grey circle with a jagged crack running through its center, the exact mark Namey had traced with his finger not two hours earlier across a manifest that had shipped disaster to my grandfather's town three weeks before it burned.
I know where you are, Jon Marrow. I have known for longer than you'd find comfortable. Enjoy Corvane while it lasts you. Highhollow is expecting company, and I would very much like to be the one to greet you when you finally arrive.
Luxy read it twice, the same as I had, and when she finally looked up from the page, her usual calm had gone thin and careful around the edges in a way I hadn't seen on her before that moment.
"He knows where we're going before we've even left," she said. "He knew before Namey even said the word Highhollow out loud in that hall."
"Or he's just guessing the same thing Namey guessed," I said, though I didn't believe it any more than she looked like she did. "Following the same manifest, reading the same map."
"Do you actually believe that."
I looked down at the little ash-grey seal again, cracked clean through the middle, and thought of a name that had haunted two nights running in a Fenholt hayloft long before I'd ever had a face or a reason to put behind it, and a blindfolded girl who vanished mid-sentence in a burial chamber to warn me my friends were in danger before anyone else in the world could have known to.