"I want information. That's considerably cheaper than most things people usually want from you, I'd imagine."
"You'd be surprised." Emeric straightened, folding his hands behind his back with the studied stillness of a much larger man, and Corren understood, watching him do it, that this was a performance the man had practiced for years, borrowing the postures of size the same way Corren had once, in a very different life, borrowed the confident cadence of professors twice his age to make a thin argument sound thick. "I don't hand out information for free to men who arrive at my tent uninvited and unannounced. Tell me why the Duke of Blackmere cares about a girl who abandoned a noble house to go live in a monastery, and perhaps I'll consider it."
"I don't answer to you for my reasons," Corren said, and swept his arm across the map table in one deliberate motion, sending pins and painted wooden markers scattering across the churned canvas floor of the tent. Aurelle's sharp intake of breath beside him told him she hadn't expected the theatrics, though she said nothing to stop it. "Now I have your attention. Tell me about Nyla."
For half a heartbeat Emeric's composure slipped into something like real fear, and then, just as quickly, into a high, delighted laugh that had nothing warm in it at all. "A threat," he said. "How refreshing. Guards, escort this fool out and send the Duke his lifeless body as a reply to whatever letter he thinks entitles him to my time."
Nobody in the tent moved. The two mercenaries flanking the entrance exchanged a glance instead, and one of them, a broad woman with a bronze phoenix scar still faintly visible beneath a newer tattoo on her forearm, spoke before Emeric could repeat the order. "We serve under your banner for coin, my lord, not out of loyalty. This man wears the mark of the Order we once served under honestly. We're not killing one of our own on your word."
Emeric's laughter died in his throat with a small, undignified cough. "I see," he said, in a voice that had gone considerably more careful in the space of two seconds. "Perhaps I spoke too quickly. What exactly is it you need, friend?"
Corren felt the specific vertigo of watching a man rebuild an entire relationship from the studs in real time, and understood, filing the whole exchange away next to everything else he was learning to file, that Emeric's genuine talent lay less in cruelty than in the speed of his recovery from being caught being cruel. "Nyla," he said again. "Everything you know."
"She was part of House Aravel," Emeric said. "Lady Iliana's household. Bring her to me and I'll trade you the rest of what I know for her."
House Aravel's villa sat on a rise above the harbor with a domed roof that caught the pale northern light like something built to be admired first and defended second, gardens blooming out of season under a working Corren recognized on sight as a variant of the Duskveil tribe's growth chant, and Lady Iliana met them in a receiving hall lined with carved sea creatures the moment they crossed the threshold, her first words a shrieked order to her guards rather than a greeting.
"You're working with Emeric," she said, finger already pointed, voice climbing past reason into something closer to panic. "Kill them!"
Four guards came at Corren with more confidence than skill, and he put them down inside a dozen seconds with the same economical patience Doss's Patience Form had built into his hands over months of aching practice, no chant needed for men this outmatched, and turned to find Lady Iliana already backing toward the wall with her hands raised, the fear in her face considerably more honest than the accusation that had preceded it.
"Please," she said. "I'm sorry. Emeric's been hunting me for months. He wants my lands and he's decided marrying me is the tidiest way to take them. I said no. He doesn't accept no from women who own things he wants."
"I don't care about your dispute with Emeric," Corren said, though the rawness of her fear had already softened the flat edge he'd meant to keep in his own voice. "Tell me about Nyla."
"I've heard the name. I never met her." Iliana's breathing steadied by degrees as the immediate threat of violence receded, the relief of someone recalculating the shape of a room that had just stopped being deadly. "The girl the cult took, the one your Order's spies keep asking after, she was never mine. She belonged to House Arathor. Emeric lied to you. He wanted me delivered into his hands, and a false lead was the cheapest way to arrange it."
Aurelle's voice cut in from the doorway, precise and already several steps ahead of the conversation the way her voice usually was. "Where is House Arathor's head currently."
"Isabel. Lady Isabel Arathor. She commands a camp on the far side of the current battle line, opposite Emeric's men." Iliana's gaze moved between the two of them, something calculating starting to surface beneath the fear now that the fear itself had mostly burned off. "If you're going there, you should know she'll assume you're one of Emeric's, arriving from this direction. She won't listen before she tries to kill you."
"Most people in this Kingdom seem to try killing me before they try talking to me," Corren said. "I've started to consider it a regional custom rather than a personal insult."
"Stay here," he told Aurelle, once the words had left him, surprising himself slightly with how naturally the instruction came out, the same reflex Rooke's warehouse warning had triggered in him weeks earlier. "Watch the villa. I'll bring Isabel back to you rather than have both of us walk into a battlefield that isn't ours."
"I don't need protecting," Aurelle said, the old, clipped precision returning to her voice for exactly as long as it took her to finish the sentence, and then, more quietly, in a register Corren hadn't heard from her before, "but I understand why you'd rather not risk both of us at once on unfamiliar ground. That's tactics, not condescension. I'll allow the distinction."