~ KAEL ~
Aldric Voss owned a townhouse near the top of the Merchant's Quarter, which was the kind of address that said my family had money before I was born and I intend to keep it that way. The door was opened by a servant who looked at Kael's coat, made a decision, and showed him to a side parlour rather than the main one.
Kael didn't mind. Side parlours were for conversations you didn't want witnessed, which suited him fine.
Aldric arrived two minutes later, still in his Nyxaran robes, which Kael was beginning to suspect he wore around the house. He looked at Kael the way he always did — appraising, slightly aggrieved — and sat down without offering tea.
"You said you had something."
"I do." Kael folded his hands on the table. "Before I tell you what it is, I need to establish the price."
"You're negotiating blind? I don't know what I'm buying."
"You know it concerns your family. You know I wouldn't be here if it wasn't worth your time." He paused. "And you know I could be selling it to someone else instead."
Aldric's jaw tightened. "Fifteen silver."
"Forty."
A silence of pure offense. "Forty silver for information I haven't verified from a man I met four days ago."
"Forty silver," Kael said pleasantly, "for information that will tell you exactly who had your family removed from this city's upper register, documented in their own hand, cross-referenced against thirty years of payments."
Aldric went very still.
It was a different kind of still from Davan's — not the professional stillness of a man controlling himself, but the rigid stillness of someone who had just heard a word they'd been waiting years to hear and didn't trust it yet.
"Proof," he said. "I want to see proof before I agree to anything."
Under the table, Kael pressed two fingers to his wrist.
"The third page. The notation in red at the bottom margin — that's the Voss family seal rendered in shorthand. Show him that. Don't show him the name on page seven yet."
Kael drew the ledger from his coat — wrapped in oilcloth, tied with string, the most important prop he owned — and opened it to the third page. He placed it on the table and turned it to face Aldric, one finger covering page seven.
Aldric leaned forward. His eyes moved across the page, tracking the cramped handwriting, finding the margin notation. Something shifted in his face — subtle, but Kael was watching for it. Recognition. Grief, maybe, the old compressed kind. And underneath both of those, something colder and more focused.
"Where did you get this?"
"Estate clearance. The previous owner hid it well."
"And you read it."
"I'm good at reading things."
Aldric sat back. His hands, Kael noticed, were flat on the table — a deliberate choice, the choice of a man making sure they didn't do anything unplanned.
"Forty silver," Aldric said. "For the ledger and everything in it."
"Forty silver for a full transcription of the relevant pages, with annotation. The original stays with me."
"That's not what I offered."
"The original is the only leverage either of us has," Kael said. "If I give it to you outright, you have everything and I have nothing. If it stays with me, we both have a reason to keep each other healthy."
A long pause. Aldric looked at him with an expression that had moved past aggrieved into something closer to reluctant respect.
"You've done this before."
"Not exactly this," Kael said. "But I've worked with numbers and people who didn't want numbers found. The principles translate."
Aldric drummed two fingers on the table once, twice. "Fourty-five silvers. And I want the name on page seven."
"Take it," Nyxara said quietly. "Fourty-five clears your debt. And Aldric knowing the name on page seven serves our purposes."
Our purposes. Kael filed that away — the our, the easy way she'd said it, like it had always been true.
"Thirty-five," he agreed. "Plus you stop trying to reverse-engineer my devotional practice."
Aldric blinked. Then, unexpectedly, the corner of his mouth moved. It wasn't quite a smile. It was the shape a smile left behind.
"Done," he said.
— ✶ —
~ NYXARA ~
Serath Olen knew about the ledger by nightfall.
Nyxara knew this because she knew everything that moved through this city's dark and quiet places, and the information had moved quickly — Aldric's household had a loose thread, a servant who supplemented his income with small reports to small people who reported to larger ones. It was the kind of mundane treachery that kept cities running, and ordinarily she observed it with complete disinterest.
Ordinarily.
She watched the chain: the servant to a courier, the courier to a clerk, the clerk to a man whose only job was to carry certain kinds of news to Serath Olen's unremarkable office in the city's administrative quarter. She watched Olen read the report. She watched his face do nothing at all, which was more alarming than any expression would have been.
Then she watched him write a single name on a slip of paper and hand it to someone else.
The name was not Aldric's.
Kael was still at Aldric's townhouse, working through the transcription with the focused efficiency of a man who had spent years making sure numbers said exactly what he wanted them to say. He'd pushed his sleeves up. He was chewing the pen cap again.
Nyxara watched him and thought about threads and tapestries and the particular way this man had of walking straight into the centre of things without meaning to.
She thought about telling him. About Olen's slip of paper, and his name on it, and the particular kind of person who got handed slips of paper like that.
She would tell him. Soon. Tonight, when he was back at the tavern and the transcription was done and he was safe behind a locked door.
For now she let him work, in the warm light of Aldric's parlour lamp, pen moving steadily across the page. There was something in it that she couldn't name — the specific, quiet pleasure of watching him be competent, be purposeful, be entirely himself in a world that hadn't been built for him.
She had waited seventeen thousand years for stranger things.
She could wait another hour.