Kael dangled upside down three stories above the cobbles, watching a guard take a piss in the alley where he was supposed to land.
The rope creaked in the damp night air. Rain clung to the stone like sweat. Somewhere below, the guard hummed a marching song from the Scythe War, badly off-key, and Kael's arms were starting to burn.
Perfect, he thought. First line of the night: if you fall, you die in piss.
The window in front of him was dark. No light, no silhouette. Just his own reflection staring back at him in warped glass: a lean face, mess of dark hair tied back, a strip of cloth masking the bottom half. One sword at his hip, short and practical. The other—a longer bundle, wrapped tight in grey cloth and black cord—strapped along his back, the hilt buried under the wraps. To most eyes it looked like a staff or a wrapped tool.
To Kael, it felt like a promise pressed between his shoulder blades.
He shifted his weight, letting his knees and ankles do more of the work, hanging like a bat from the gutter. The wrapped blade dragged at his spine with every tiny sway. A dull, familiar wrongness crawled under his skin where it touched him, like the echo of a cold hand he'd never actually felt.
Don't think about it.
He pulled the roll of tools from his sleeve one-handed. The leather was slick with rain, the metal inside cool against his fingers. He picked the right pick by feel; he'd done this enough times that his hands didn't need his eyes.
Below, the guard finished, shook, and shuffled away, muttering about "war pensions" and "bloody nobles." His boots splashed through a puddle and faded into the city's night noise: tavern songs, a distant wagon, some drunk shouting in a language Kael didn't know.
Kael counted three slow breaths after the guard turned the corner.
Then he went to work.
The window latch was old but not stupid. He could feel that in the lock's heartbeat: sloppy work had a certain loose rattle; good metal had layers. This one sat somewhere in the middle. Merchant money. The kind sold with too much confidence and not enough reality.
He smiled behind the cloth mask.
"Petty job," Overseer had called it.
In and out, middle-tier mark. No noble crest, no military seals. A "soft start" after a month of running messages and chasing rumours instead of proper jobs. Something to remind the lower wards that the Guild still had hands.
Nothing that should need the boy everyone whispered about as the Two-Bladed Thief.
He'd volunteered anyway.
The pick whispered in the mechanism. Tumblers shifted, small clicks lost under the rain. A familiar tension crawled up the back of his neck, settling between his shoulders where the wrapped sword lay. His fingers tightened on the pick, breath going shallow.
The letter's words brushed the edge of his memory, as if he could feel ink instead of rain.
Only when there is no road back. Only when death is certain.
His father's handwriting. The only piece of the man he had.
Kael curled his toes in his boots, letting the sting in his calves drag him away from the thought.
Not tonight.
One last twist. The latch sighed open.
He eased the window outward a thumb's breadth and listened. No scrape of hidden wire, no soft chime of glass beads on a string. Just the hush of rain and the faint smell of ink and old paper from within.
He swung forward, caught the sill with one hand, and cut the rope with the other. Gravity tugged; his boots slid along cold stone. Then he was inside, a shadow spilling into the dark study.
He stayed where he landed, half-crouched beside the window, letting his eyes adjust.
The room smelled of rich things: beeswax polish, imported pipe smoke, the heavy spice of some foreign incense that tried and failed to cover ink and dust. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, crammed with ledgers and scrolls. A wide desk dominated the middle of the room, piled with papers, quills, an inkwell, and a half-finished glass of red wine resting on a coaster shaped like a tiny shield.
Opposite the desk, a painting of the royal crest of Crownmarch—lion rearing above a stylised tide—hung in pride of place. The artist had tried to make the lion look noble.
To Kael, it just looked tired.
They'd hung it to hide the safe, of course. Men like Garin Tolvar—the "respectable" loan-broker whose house this was—did everything by the book, even their secrets. They bought the same locks, the same safes, the same paintings pretending they still believed in kings and crowns.
The war had burned half the banners in Tidecrown, but the paperwork survived. It always did.
Kael counted his steps from window to desk. One, two, three and a half. He felt the boards under his boots: no give, no hollow spots, no suspicious creak. No rugs on the floor—fewer things to trip over, fewer places for dust to hide. Efficient. The man ran numbers, not salons. Good. Fewer guests meant fewer surprises.
In the far corner, a single narrow door led deeper into the house. No light seeped under it. No sound.
He exhaled slowly.
All right. No screaming yet. No footsteps. Just him, the ink, and a safe behind that painted lie.
Petty heist.
He moved, quiet as fog, slipping behind the desk. The papers were a small country of their own, ruled by columns of ink.
Verrakai tannery – overdue, collateral seized.
Widow Henslow – reduced terms (war pension).
Harbor-master, West Docks – paid in full.
The last line had a tiny crown doodled next to it. That told Kael more truth than all the numbers. Corruption wrote itself in ink long before it stained the streets.
He turned to the painting.
"Apologies," he murmured, because talking to things kept him calm, and lifted it off its hook.
The safe behind sat exactly where it ought to: medium-sized, two-dial, imported make. Its metal face carried a maker's sigil—two crossed keys, one chipped where someone had slammed the door too hard.
He rolled his shoulders, feeling the wrapped blade shift against his back. The familiar unease crawled along his spine, a slow, steady itch. Not magic; he didn't know enough about magic for that. Just the knowledge of what lay under the cloth, and what the letter said it would cost him.
Not tonight, he told the weight of it.
It wasn't that he thought the thing would save him. He didn't even know if it was sharp. He'd never seen the steel, never broken the seal on the scabbard. He'd trained with every other kind of blade the Guild could throw at him, but not that one. He refused.
The last thing his father had given him came with a single rule. It was the only real request he could honour.
It turned that wrongness into something like stubbornness.
He set his ear to the cool metal of the safe.
Numbers again. Not the kind broken veterans argued about in taverns—casualties, rations, reparations—but the cleaner kind hidden in gears and tumblers. They had their own language: the soft lift of a notch, the drag of misaligned teeth. His fingertips read it better than his eyes read a page.
Wrong number, nothing. Right number, door opens. He liked numbers like that.
Overseer had beaten that particular literacy into him. "Steel doesn't lie," she'd said once, rapping her knuckles on a lockbox as he fumbled the picks. "People do. Learn to listen to the one that isn't trying to cheat you."
He spun the dials, slow and steady, listening. The rain outside became background, the city a distant murmur. His world narrowed to the faint clicks and the tiny shifts in resistance.
The first dial surrendered quickly. The second sulked, gummy with old grease. He adjusted his pressure, breathing with the motion, until—
There.
He turned the handle.
The weight of the safe door swung away, air inside a touch cooler than the room, smelling faintly of oiled leather and old coin.
Stacks of gold and silver turned the faint window light into dull glints. On the top shelf, a small iron lockbox sat beside a thick ledger, its spine reinforced in leather gone glossy with years of use. No title, just four numbers stamped in faded ink.
16–10.
Kael frowned.
Sixteen-ten. Sixteenth year, tenth month. The war had ended sixteen years ago, in the tenth month. Even gutter kids knew that date; you could feel it in the way the whole city went quiet every year when the bells rang.
He didn't remember the bells. He didn't remember anything before waking up half-starving in a strange bed with a stranger's boots by the door and a letter he was too young to read tucked under his pillow. But he knew the date the way he knew his own scars. The streets made sure of it.
A war ledger, then.
He reached for the book.
Footsteps thudded on the floorboards overhead.
He froze, hand hovering above the spine.
The job brief had been clear. Tolvar spent every Moonday night at a gaming house in the north ward, bleeding credit until dawn. Skeleton staff, two rotating guards, a maid who snored loud enough for the neighbours to complain. Easy pickings.
Someone was home.
The footsteps crossed the ceiling, then hit the stairs. More than one set now. The vibrations came down through the beams and into the wood under Kael's boots.
He shut the safe door, leaving it unlocked, and swung the painting back into place in one smooth motion. The ledger glared at him from memory. 16–10. War numbers.
He looked around, fast.
The window was too far. Even if he dove, he'd only get halfway before the door opened and a shout pinned him between glass and street. The underside of the desk was solid panel, no gap. No curtains. The shelves were full, but he was not that small.
He looked up.
Thick beams ran across the ceiling, dark with age and smoke. The nearest one sat directly above the door, where anyone walking in would be least likely to look.
The footsteps hit the landing outside the study. Voices now, low and irritated. Two men.
Kael didn't think. He moved.
He jumped, fingers catching the beam's edge. His shoulders screamed protest as he hauled himself up, the wrapped sword shifting at his back, threatening to pull him off-balance. He hooked a knee over the beam and flattened himself along its length, chest pressed to rough wood, face turned toward the door.
The blade's weight dug into his spine like disapproving fingers. For a moment, hanging there, he had the ridiculous urge to apologise to it for the awkward angle.
The door opened beneath him.
Light spilled in, bright and sudden. Lantern glow splashed over desk and shelves and painting. Kael squinted, slowing his breathing until it thinned to a careful, steady thread.
"—telling you, Master Tolvar, the streets aren't the same," said a man's voice, nervous, with that scraped-raw edge of someone who'd seen too much and liked none of it. "Since the armistice, every cutpurse and deserter thinks they're owed the city—"
"And I'm telling you," another voice cut in, sharper, "that my ledgers are worth more than your opinion, Jarun."
Kael's jaw tightened.
He'd heard that second voice once before in a market square, carrying over the crack of a whip. The same smooth contempt then as now. Rich man's anger: loud, but never afraid.
Garin Tolvar stepped into view beneath him.
From above, Kael saw thinning hair oiled and combed to hide it, wool-clad shoulders straining a coat a little too tight, heavy gold rings biting into pale fingers. A small badge gleamed on his breast: the Tidecrown city sigil, a broken crown pinned back together with a nail.
Beside him, Jarun the guard wore a private house's blue-and-brown, the colours dulled by use. A cudgel hung at his belt, a short sword beside it. The way his eyes slid across corners and shadows marked him as someone who had walked patrols in worse places than this quiet house.
Brilliant, Kael thought. The "petty" mark had come home early with extra muscle.
Tolvar crossed to the desk and set his lantern down with a clink. "Look at this," he said, jabbing a finger at the papers across the surface. "Do you see? These numbers?" His rings flashed with each tap. "Default. Default. Reduced terms. The war may be over, but my generosity is not infinite."
Jarun shifted his weight. "Yes, Master. But the lower wards are… hungry, these days. Men missing arms, legs. Beastkin thrown out of troop contracts. They blame men like you. Like us."
"Then they can bite steel," Tolvar snapped. "Credit is an agreement, not a charity. The Crown wants its share, and the Crown will have its share. Indemnities are not optional."
Kael lay as still as rotten beam-dust, anger smouldering behind his ribs. He recognised the words—indemnities, reparations, interest—from street talk, from mutters over bitter ale. People cursed them the way they used to curse invading armies. Numbers that kept bleeding you long after the swords stopped.
Tolvar sighed, the sound theatrically weary. "Fetch the war ledger, would you? I want to look again at the Harbor-master's column before I sleep."
Kael's hand clenched on the beam.
Jarun turned toward the painting.
The safe is unlocked.
Kael's mind ran ahead of his body, laying out paths and slamming them shut as quickly.
If Jarun moved the painting and opened the door, he would see the ledger missing instantly. Tolvar would shout. The bell rope would ring. More guards. Maybe city watch. The Guild would hear. The Guild would ask why the boy with the strange wrapped sword had brought a storm down on them his first night back on proper work.
He couldn't let them touch that safe.
The wrapped blade pressed into his back more insistently, the cloth scabbard cutting into his ribs. His fingers twitched, an old habit: checking for the hilt that was never meant to be drawn.
All he had to do was reach behind him, tear the wrappings, and he'd have another length of steel in his hands. Longer, heavier. In a cramped room like this, two blades meant twice as many ways to carve his way out.
And then what?
Then you've spit on the only thing he ever asked of you.
Kael ground his teeth.
No.
Jarun reached for the painting's frame.
Kael dropped.
He let go of the beam and fell in silence, a controlled spill. Months on rooftops had taught his body the difference between falling and landing. He twisted as he fell, turning the drop into a step that put him behind Jarun when his boots touched floor.
Tolvar's eyes went wide. His mouth opened.
Kael moved before sound could get out.
His short sword slid from its sheath in a muted hiss, the blade catching a smear of lanternlight. His other arm snaked around Jarun's throat, hauling the guard back against his chest. Flesh and leather became his shield.
"Shut up," Kael hissed.
Tolvar shut up.
Jarun, to his credit, reacted fast. He drove his elbow back toward Kael's ribs. Kael twisted, letting the blow glance off his hip instead of shattering bone. Jarun's hand grabbed for the cudgel at his belt.
Kael slammed Jarun's wrist against the edge of the desk. Something crunched. The guard swore through his teeth, his body going rigid with pain, but Kael could feel the stubborn fight still in him. This wasn't some ornamental house guard; this was someone who'd stood shoulder to shoulder in the mud somewhere, once.
"Hands away from the steel," Kael said, voice low in Jarun's ear. "I only brought one blade I'm willing to use tonight."
Jarun stilled, breathing hard.
Tolvar stared at the bead of blood forming where Kael's sword kissed Jarun's throat. Sweat shone on his upper lip. "If this is about your payments," he began, voice wobbling into wheedle, "I can adjust terms. We're all reasonable men here—"
"This isn't about my payments," Kael said. "It's about your ledger."
Tolvar's gaze flicked, betrayingly, to the painting and back. "I—I have many ledgers. All of them utterly legitimate in the eyes of the Crown—"
"Wrong answer."
Kael nudged his sword a fraction deeper into Jarun's skin. A thin line of red crept along the edge.
On his back, the wrapped bundle seemed to drag heavier, a cold patch through his shirt where rain had soaked in. It felt like the memory of an accusation. His hand wanting to reach back wasn't the sword's fault. That was him. His nerves. His promise.
"You're… the Two-Bladed Thief," Jarun managed, voice rasping against Kael's forearm.
Kael hated hearing it out loud. It made him sound like something from the cheap stories sailors told to impress each other.
"Just a man who wants to go home with a book," he said. "Here's how this plays out. You"—he nodded toward Tolvar, keeping Jarun between them—"take three steps back from the desk. Then you both stand very, very still while I collect what I came for. You don't shout, you don't lunge, and you don't touch that pretty bell rope by your hand."
Tolvar's fingers froze a hair's breadth from the cord hanging beside the desk.
"There's nothing in that safe you would find useful," the loan-broker said quickly. "Old records, war contracts, boring things. I could give you coin instead. More than whatever gutter guild is paying you."
Kael met his eyes, and for a heartbeat the study shrank down to just the distance between them.
He didn't know who his father had been before the letter. Didn't know what uniform he might have worn, what rooms he might have argued in about troop numbers and treaty lines. All Kael knew of him was that single page of ink and a sword wrapped in a way that said more than any crest.
Tolvar looked like the kind of man who'd have sat across tables from officers and argued about how much a life was worth in crowns and grain.
"Step back," Kael repeated.
Tolvar did, rings flashing as his hands rose.
Jarun went very still in Kael's hold, muscles coiled. Waiting. Good. Better a coiled threat he could feel than a flailing one he couldn't see.
Keeping his blade at Jarun's throat, Kael edged sideways toward the painting. The wrapped sword shifted with him, the strap dragging against his shoulder like an insistent hand.
Don't look at it. Don't think of it.
When he reached the crest, he flicked his wrist. The point of his short sword caught the lower edge of the frame, lifting it enough for his elbow to nudge it aside. The painting swung, exposing the safe.
Unlocked.
He cursed himself, silently. Too much time listening to tumblers, not enough time thinking what came after.
"Here's what happens next," Kael said. "I open this, I take one book, and that's the end of the evening. You get to keep all your blood on the inside. In the morning you wail about dangerous streets and 'these lawless times', and you raise your rates on half the city to feel better. We all get what we want. Yes?"
Tolvar's eyes narrowed. "You… you speak well for a thief."
"War makes teachers of strange men," Kael said dryly.
He turned the handle with his free hand and pulled the door open.
Coin. The lockbox. The ledger marked 16–10, its leather spine catching the lanternlight.
He grabbed the book and jammed it under his arm.
Somewhere deeper in the house, a door banged.
Jarun's body tensed. "We're not alone," he grated.
Of course not.
"Who?" Kael asked.
Tolvar licked his lips. "My… nephew. I told him to stay in the east wing, but he's just back from the front, he—"
"Uncle?" a voice shouted from the hallway, closer than Kael liked. "I heard something. Are you all right?"
Bootsteps, fast and sure.
Kael's options shrank.
He couldn't drag two grown men and a heavy ledger out the window and onto the rope before those boots reached the study. He couldn't turn his back on them both and trust they wouldn't grab for steel the first moment his blade left Jarun's throat.
Unless he made sure at least one of them wouldn't be grabbing anything for a while.
The thought of the wrapped sword pressed against his mind again, as if his own skull were echoing its shape. It wasn't a voice. Just a shape his fear tried to curl around.
No.
He moved.
In one brutal motion, he shifted his grip and brought the pommel of his short sword down against the side of Jarun's head. The guard jerked, eyes rolling back, then sagged. Kael caught him for a heartbeat—dead weight and honest sweat—and shoved him sideways behind the desk where he'd be less visible at a glance.
Tolvar gasped. "You—"
"Breathe wrong and you're next," Kael snapped.
He stepped in close to Tolvar, fingers closing around the man's wrist, the ledger still wedged under his arm. He dragged Tolvar toward the window.
"What are you—?"
"Smile," Kael hissed. "If he sees you standing and shrieking, he'll cut through you to get to me. Stand straight and look like you're scolding a servant."
The nephew hit the doorway as Kael pulled Tolvar between him and the window.
He was younger than Kael had expected. Mid-twenties, maybe. Lean in the way of men who'd lived on campaign rations for too long. A faded regimental cloak hung from his shoulders, its hem still stained an ugly brown-green from old mud. He wore a standard sword at his hip, its hilt worn smooth.
His gaze swept the room in a soldier's quick, trained flick: Tolvar's twisted posture, the open safe, the ledger under Kael's arm, the lantern skewed on the desk.
"Hands off my uncle," he said, drawing steel.
Kael met his eyes over Tolvar's shoulder and saw the war there. Not banners or trumpets; just the same tired anger that never quite went away in the men who'd come back alive.
"This ledger yours?" Kael asked.
The nephew's jaw clenched. "Put it back."
"Thought so."
The nephew lunged.
Kael shoved Tolvar sideways. The loan-broker stumbled, flailing, into his nephew's path. The younger man checked his swing at the last instant, blade shaving cloth instead of ribs.
Kael used that heartbeat.
He dropped into a roll, spinning across the floor past them both. The ledger thumped against his chest; his sword stayed in his hand. He came up in a crouch near the side of the desk.
The nephew pivoted cleanly, quicker than some city watchmen Kael had danced with. His blade came down in a hard, practised arc.
Kael met it with his own.
Steel rang against steel, the shock biting up his arm. He grunted, sliding his blade along the other man's, turning the cut aside.
"Oaths," he muttered between his teeth. "Of course you actually know how to use that thing."
"Seventh Crown Infantry," the nephew said, teeth bared. "We don't forget just because you rats prefer shadows."
Their blades locked, faces inches apart. For a heartbeat, Kael saw the different life he might have had if he'd woken under a barracks roof instead of a Guild one. Same city, same war hanging over it, just a different uniform.
The wrapped sword thudded between his shoulder blades with every movement, reminding him of promises and letters and a road he wasn't on.
He shoved off, breaking the lock, and kicked the lantern.
The lamp toppled, oil sloshing, flame flaring wildly. For a moment, the room became bright chaos; then the wick sputtered as oil spread across cold stone, choking the fire down to a struggling glow.
Darkness surged in, broken by one weak, scattered patch of light.
Kael knew that kind of dark.
He dropped low, using the desk as a shield, moving where he remembered the space to be instead of where he could see. The nephew's sword sang through the air where Kael's head had been.
"I don't want to kill you," Kael said softly.
"Then lay down the blade," the nephew snarled.
"Terrible bargain," Kael replied, and slid for the window.
Tolvar's outline stumbled in front of him, one hand groping blindly for the door. Kael flowed past him, snatched the lantern up before Tolvar's heel could crush it fully, and slammed it onto the windowsill.
The flame flared in protest, then steadied into a shaky, guttering light. It painted the study in jagged angles: toppled chair, open safe, Jarun's boots sticking out from behind the desk.
The nephew lunged toward that light, pupils narrowed against the glare.
Kael had already thrown the window open.
Cold rain slapped his face as he grabbed the rope dangling from above and vaulted out. The ledger dug into his ribs under one arm. His sword stayed in the other.
"Stop!" someone shouted behind him, voice whipping away in the wind.
Kael planted his feet against the outer wall and pushed off. The rope swung, carrying him in a long arc away from Tolvar's house toward the neighbour's roof.
For a heartbeat, he hung between stone and sky, Tidecrown spread below in smears of wet shadow and scattered lanterns. Rooftops lurched under the rain. A bombed-out church clawed at the horizon, its steeple shattered years ago and never rebuilt. The harbour beyond was just a darker line where water sucked at the shore.
Then his boots hit slate.
He rolled with the landing, shoulder flaring pain up into his neck, and came up in a crouch as the rope snapped back, swinging empty toward Tolvar's window.
The nephew's face appeared there, pale with fury, hand gripping the frame.
Kael straightened enough to sketch a little bow with the tip of his sword.
"Tell your uncle to invest in quieter locks," he called.
The nephew's answer was wordless and inventive.
Kael grinned behind his mask and turned away, sprinting across the rooftop. The tiles slicked underfoot, each step a quiet war with gravity. He moved like someone who'd grown up on roofs instead of roads, instinctively finding the lines where water ran slowest, where moss didn't hide treachery.
The ledger thumped against his chest in time with his heartbeat. The wrapped blade lay a solid line between his shoulders, humming with his breath and footfalls. Now that no one was actively trying to stab him, the urge to reach for it fell away, leaving just the ache of muscles and the ghost of that old ink in his memory.
"See?" he muttered, more to the night than to the steel. "Didn't need you."
The only answer was rain in his hair and the ragged pull of his lungs.
He put distance between himself and Tolvar's house: up over a crumbling chimney, down onto a lower roof, across a narrow gap over a street choked with runoff. Voices floated up: someone singing badly in Lythari, a beastkin vendor hawking stale bread to workers on the early shift, a pair of human veterans arguing about whether the Crown would raise the indemnity again this year.
Here and there, the war showed where it had bitten Tidecrown and not let go. A blackened lot where houses had burned and never been rebuilt. A shrine to the fallen, its offerings turned to soggy paste by the rain. A man with one sleeve pinned up, smoking in a doorway and watching the world go by with eyes that hadn't quite come back yet.
Petty heist, Kael thought. One ledger from one man in a city full of wounds. It shouldn't have felt like much.
He ran until the shouting behind him was just another part of the city's distant growl. Then he dropped down into a narrow reeking alley three districts away, landing light between two barrels that had long ago given up on the idea of not smelling like guts.
Fish and rot burned his nose. The houses here leaned together like old drunks, roofs almost touching. The sky was a thin grey vein overhead.
He slipped under a sagging rope of laundry, past a doorway where three kids played a game that involved chalk squares and bits of broken glass, and headed for the dead-end that wasn't.
The brick wall at the end was damp, green at the seams. One brick, near the bottom, was cleaner than the rest, its mortar chipped.
Kael knelt, nudged it loose with the tip of his sword, and set it aside. A small cavity waited behind, holding a folded scrap of oilskin. He unwrapped it to reveal a key.
He'd gotten that key the day Overseer decided he was worth more than errands. "You want routes no one else knows, you find your own," she'd said. "But I'll start you with one."
He used it on the iron grate half-hidden in the muck at his feet. The lock clicked soft under the rain. He lifted the grate enough to slide through, turned sideways, and drop-slid down the short stone chute beyond.
He landed on packed dirt. The air was cooler down here, still wet but free of fish. A faint lantern-glow painted the end of a low tunnel.
He straightened, rolling his shoulders. The tension in his muscles from the rooftop swing complained and then settled. His hand stayed on the ledger anyway. Even away from Tolvar's house, it felt… heavy. Not in weight. He'd carried worse. Heavy in the way a door felt heavy when you knew something waited on the other side.
Sixteen-ten.
He walked.
The tunnel opened into a cramped chamber carved out under the street, held up by old timber beams that creaked in argument with time. A scarred table and two stools sat in the middle. A single lantern hung from a hook, its flame turned down low. The walls showed the history of bored thieves: knife-gouges, chalk tallies, a few crude drawings that made Kael snort under his breath.
He set the ledger on the table and tugged his mask down around his neck. The cloth was damp, clinging to his jaw. His face felt oddly bare without it.
He should take the ledger straight to the Guild. That was the job. In before dawn, as Overseer had said. No unnecessary noise. Information, not coin.
"What is it?" he'd asked when she'd tapped the map over Tolvar's house.
"None of your concern, boy," she'd answered. "Your concern is that your feet are quiet and your hands come back full."
He ran his thumb along the book's spine, over the stamped numbers. 16–10. The date everyone rang bells for while pretending it had solved anything.
He knew better than to pry. The Guild encouraged curiosity only in directions that paid. There was a long list of questions that ended in correction. At best, a cuff. At worst, a shovelful of dirt.
And yet.
Something about the way Tolvar had stiffened when he saw the safe open. Something about the way Jarun had said "You're dead either way" once the ledger left the shelf. Something about that date.
"Just a peek," Kael muttered. "So I don't walk a blind thing through our front door."
He flipped the ledger open.
Neat, cramped handwriting marched across the pages in black and red. Columns of figures, names, tiny notes. At the top of the first page, in red ink that had bled slightly into the paper:
War Indemnity Schedule – Crownmarch Sector, Tolvar & Associates.
He skimmed, eyes jumping.
Villages he'd never heard of. Cities he had. Harbour tithes. Border tariffs. Penalties stacked on penalties. Column after column showing the Crown's share, the lender's share, the little notes where Tolvar had clearly found an extra twist to wring.
Late. Extend at new rate.
Collateral seized.
Recommend eviction.
His jaw tightened.
Halfway down the page, a line snagged his eye.
House Darkenfell – Estates (Provisional). Seized assets pending claimants. Interest accruing.
The words sat there, perfectly ordinary ink, but the name was anything but ordinary.
Darkenfell.
Kael had heard it hissed at tavern tables and muttered in watch sermons. The traitor House. The curse you didn't write down if you valued your neck. Men had supposedly swung on less than having that name in their mouths.
Seeing it calmly written in a neat hand on Tolvar's private war-book was… interesting.
Not familiar. Not personal. Just dangerous.
This isn't just debt, he thought. This is treason bait.
If the Crown ever decided to make an example of "war profiteers," a line like that would be a noose. If the Guild wanted leverage on Tolvar—or anyone he did business with—it didn't get much louder than "secretly holding outlawed estates on your books."
"Idiot," Kael murmured, not sure whether he meant Tolvar or himself for staring at the ink too long.
He read the line again, slower. House Darkenfell. The script on that name was just a little tighter than the rest, as if the hand that wrote it had been very aware of exactly what it was doing.
Every kid in Tidecrown knew that anything tied to Darkenfell, written or whispered, could put you on the wrong side of a treason hearing. Even gutter-rats knew to spit on the floor and change the subject when someone got brave enough to tell old war stories with that name in them.
And here he was, holding a ledger that treated it like just another debtor.
He shut the ledger a little too fast.
If Overseer knew this line was in here and still called it petty, then the Guild was playing at something that went higher than he'd thought. That wasn't new. They always were. He'd grown up in the cracks between their games.
He rolled his shoulders. The wrapped blade shifted with the motion, the strap biting into old lines of scar across his back. He didn't remember getting those scars. Overseer said they'd been there when he arrived. The letter said nothing about them. He'd built his own stories in the gaps over the years—most of them miserable, some of them grand, all of them probably wrong.
The wrongness of the blade's weight flared, then settled again into its usual dull presence. If he let himself, he could imagine it reacting to the ledger, to the date, to that one forbidden name. But that would mean treating it like something more than steel and ink and fear.
He'd promised he wouldn't do that. Promised a man he couldn't remember, in writing he'd long since worn soft from rereading.
"Don't," he whispered, not sure if he was talking to the part of himself that wanted to pry deeper, or to the weight along his spine. "Not for a ledger. Not for a line of ink."
He let out a slow breath.
This job was supposed to be practice. A way to get his hands back after weeks of errands. Steal a book, make the Guild happy, remind the city that some locks still opened when Tidecrown thought they were shut.
Instead, he'd walked into a house of debt and come out carrying something tied directly to the war and a name people still treated like a hanging offence.
He slid the ledger into his satchel, the leather creaking as it swallowed the bulk. The strap settled across his chest. The wrapped blade lay where it always did, a straight line of weight between his shoulders.
He rolled his neck until it cracked.
"I'm not drawing you," he said quietly as he reached for the tunnel that would take him deeper under the city, toward the hidden ways that eventually surfaced near the guildhall. "You don't get a say just because the past is waving paper at me."
The sword didn't answer. It never did.
But as he stepped into the darker stretch of passage, the tiny hairs on the back of his neck lifted, the way they did on nights when he was being watched.
Above, in a house that smelled of ink and incense, Garin Tolvar was probably screaming himself hoarse at questions no hired guard could answer.
Somewhere in Tidecrown's higher, cleaner rooms, men who read numbers like other men read prayers would wake to find one of their ledgers gone and a new line of fear scribbling itself down their spines.
Kael didn't know that. All he knew was that what had started as a simple job now had a date branded into it that the whole city bled around.
Petty, Overseer had called it.
As the tunnel swallowed him and the city's rumble turned to a dull, distant heartbeat, the ledger's weight against his ribs said otherwise.