The seal tugged.
It felt like a small, angry animal at her wrist. A cold iron circle. A chain hidden beneath her sleeve hummed once and then settled. Nysa hated it the way someone hates a familiar bruise.
They moved fast. The palace spat her out into the ash-wind and shut the gates behind them. The first hour outside the stone felt like falling. People watched. Mercers spat. The city smelled of smoke and old fish.
The guard at her side kept his eyes low. Plain clothes. A badge on his cuff. He walked like someone who avoided notice. That suited Nysa. She kept her hands on the scroll against her ribs. The living page trembled faintly under her palm.
"Take your hood up," the guard said. He offered a scarf. Nysa wrapped it tight. His hand brushed her wrist. The seal was cold against his palm.
"Why are you kind?" she asked. She didn't want company. She didn't want kindness that might be a net.
He shrugged. "Orders say keep you moving. Keep you whole. Don't die on the road."
They passed a lane of hawkers where men sold braziers and rope and memory-flakes wrapped in wax. The hawkers eyed them. A child pointed. A woman mouthed the King's name and spat. The guard moved like he belonged. He opened a small ledger, wrote something quick, and slid it back into his coat. She had seen that ledger in his hand before. The same hand, same tilt. It was the same ink curl she'd found in the scroll margin. Her chest tightened without meaning.
A pickpocket tried for a coin at the bend. The guard stepped faster. His fingers were sudden. Quick. He snatched the thief's wrist, flipped him, and the thief hit the ground hard. The guard's training showed in the small flash of movement that should have been invisible.
Nysa watched him move. The roll of cloth at his hip shifted. A small knife. A thief's ease. She was careful not to let her eyes show that she noticed. The King had said to trust no one.
They found an inn with rooms that smelled clean from a kiln. She paid with a coin the archive allowed her. The guard took a corner table and watched the door. He didn't eat much. He polished the seal on his cuff like a ritual.
"You could be a real guard," Nysa said. "Not all of you are hired to be kind."
He paused. Then he smiled, small, half-ashamed. "Some of us are paid better to be kind."
His hands were steady when they unrolled the scroll. She set it on the table between them. The leather shivered. Idran stared out from the page like a face in shallow water.
"You're nervous," he said flat. "You won't keep it together if you put too much weight in the scroll."
"Easy for you to say." She pinched the edge. Her voice came out thin. "You're not the one who might be displayed."
He folded his hands and looked at her as if weighing a debt. "I'm not going to let them hang you."
The words should have sounded like comfort. They didn't. They sounded like a promise that might be paid in coin or blood. She learned to take both as nearly the same.
They left town that night under a thin moon. The ash wind picked up. It tugged at the scarf over her mouth. The guard kept a steady pace. They moved through alleys that smelled of rust and stale bread. Every now and then a shadow moved at the side of the road and watched them like a judge.
At a crossroads, two men stepped out from a door. One was wide and scarred. The other had a face that wanted to smile and failed. They blocked the road.
"Where are you bound?" the scarred one asked. Teeth like a bad fence.
"Business," the guard said.
The scarred man stepped closer and reached for the scroll. Fast. His fingers, hungry. Nysa's hand shot in front of the leather, but the man was already on top of them. A blade flashed. The guard moved.
He didn't shout. He moved like a hand stealing heat from a fire. His wrist caught the man's forearm. He twisted. The scarred one went down with a broken breath. The other man tried to bolt. The guard leapt and pinned him. The kind hands were not empty of violence.
Nysa's mouth fell open. She had not expected a guard to be this good. She had not expected him to be a thief with the thief's reflexes.
The pinned man spat blood and something else. "You," he hissed. "You're working with the rebels."
The guard's expression did not change. He pulled something from the pinned man's coat—a burned scrap of paper. It had been folded and folded again until it was almost only ash. He brushed the ash away with his thumb.
Nysa saw it then. A small sigil. A looped y. A curl she knew like a bite on the tongue. Her mark. Her childhood mark. The scrap melted into light in the guard's palm and for a second he looked as if he'd been hit.
"You recognize this?" she said. Her voice was a thin wire.
His throat made a sound. He swallowed. He did not hand the scrap back to the pinned man. He held it like a thing dangerous to touch.
"This mark," he said, very low, "I saw it once before. On a ledger we stole from a house that burned out past the eastern docks. It was a child's scribble. We burned the rest. I kept this."
His fingers trembled. The tremor was small, human. He sounded like someone waking from a long sleep.
"You kept a child's scribble?" Nysa asked. The words came out sharper than she meant.
He looked at her then, proper eyes. For the first time his face showed ownership of something bigger than a job. The guard dropped the pretense like a suit he no longer wanted to wear.
"My name is not Guard," he said. The words were straightforward and too loud in the alley. "I'm Ilias." He said it like a confession. "I was hired by rebels to bring you—" He stopped. The sound in his throat made him swallow hard. "We were paid to get close. To see what you would do. To take the archive if we could."
Nysa didn't move for a beat. The seal pressed cold to her skin. She tried to find the King's face in her head. The image wouldn't stay. The scroll leaned under her palm like a heart trying to remember.
"You were hired?" she asked. The sentence was flat. She asked because the facts mattered more than drama.
He looked ashamed. "Yes. Coin and promise. But when I saw this scrap—" He held the burned paper up as if it burned him, "—I thought I'd seen that mark in a child's palm. I thought I'd seen your face. I left the ledger for years. I watched you at the archive before I was assigned. You didn't belong on the lists. I thought you were the kind who stole things back from people who could not keep them."
Nysa wanted to deny it. She wanted to yell at him. She wanted to run back to the palace and demand an explanation from Serene and the King. Instead she listened. The seals hummed silent under the cloth.
"You could be lying," she said. "You could be a spy planted to make me trust."
He went very still. "You're right." He said it like a man giving a verdict against himself. "But I'm not. I was paid to get you into a crowd where we could snuff you out, or take you somewhere and ransom the scrolls. I'm telling you now because I kept this." He tapped the scrap. "And because the face I thought I'd known rose in my head when you touched the living pages. I think—" He closed his eyes for a second and his voice softened. "I think they stole your name. I think you were written out."
Nysa's breath left her in a small, non-dramatic sound. The sentence was a match. It lit everything. She thought of the handwriting in the scroll margin. The curl. Her hand in ink that was not hers. A stitch they had made without telling her.
"And if I am erased?" she asked. "If I have no record? What then?"
"We keep moving," Ilias said. "We'll find Idran. We do it quietly. The rebels want the archive. The rebels also don't want you made into a lesson. Some of us will see the King fall and think that's the end. I don't know which I want more."
"You can be pulled back," she said. "If the King tugs the chain."
He nodded. "I know." He set his hand on the seal and didn't move it. "If he pulls, we go. If he does not, we keep walking. You have a month. We start tonight."
They collected the pinned men and let them go with bruises and warnings. Ilias left a coin on the inn table as payment and they walked into a sky that tasted like ash. He kept the scrap folded in his hand.
Ilias watched her with eyes that had decided something messy and final. "We stop at the market," he said. "There's a man who trades burned things. He might know Idran."
She didn't ask how he knew. She only tightened the shawl.
They stepped into the dark. The seal at her wrist laid low and even like a heartbeat. The scrap in Ilias' pocket whispered ashes against his palm. He walked beside her—neither guard nor enemy—more like a bad promise.
She wanted to ask him one thing and she didn't. She wanted to ask if he knew the name she'd been written over. But the words sat heavy. Instead she said, "Lead on."
He nodded. He led. The city watched. The month began.