Chapter 6
KAEDRIN
The night air outside the bakery is cool and I can smell a river nearby.
I walk without direction for a while, letting the town settle around me. Brindle Hollow goes quiet fast after dark — shutters drawn, lamps dimming one by one, the market square empty except for a cat picking its way along the fountain edge. A town that minds itself. That trusts its walls.
Elin's face surfaces without invitation. The way she held her hair back from her ears to show me, utterly without self-consciousness. The careful touch of one small finger against the tip of my ear.
I know what I am to this town already. An outsider.
A dark elf in a community that has likely never seen more than one or two in passing.
Whatever wariness they've shown me today will compound the moment any connection between myself and Maris becomes visible.
And a connection between myself and her daughter — a child who is visibly half dark elf — would give the more suspicious residents exactly the kind of story they'd want.
Maris has built something careful. A routine, a reputation, a life that functions precisely because she keeps her head down and manages what people see.
I watched her do it today without even trying — the easy manner with customers, the practiced normalcy of a woman who has learned to take up the right amount of space.
Whatever I feel about Elin, about the fact of her existence, about the three years I didn't know — none of that gives me the right to destabilize what Maris has worked to protect.
I'm in no position to offer them anything better.
I have a commission, a horse, and a travel kit.
I go where the courts send me. That is not a life I can ask a woman and a small child to fold themselves into, and it's not one I can abandon on a week's notice because I've discovered I have a daughter.
I turn these thoughts over until they stop producing new angles, then I find the edge of town and make myself useful.
Fenwood's caravan is dark and still at the outskirts.
Three wagons pulled off the road into the flat ground beside an old grain barn, the horses unhitched and moved to a temporary line nearby.
No fire. No voices. Two lanterns hanging from the lead wagon's frame, burning low, casting just enough light to see by.
I take a position in the shadow of the barn and watch.
For a long while, nothing moves. The horses shift and breathe.
Somewhere beyond the tree line, something small moves through dry leaves.
I've done enough night work to be comfortable in the waiting — the body learns to go still, to separate necessary attention from the noise that fills every dark hour.
Then I see the crates.
They're pushed back behind the rearmost wagon, half-tucked into the gap between the wagon bed and the barn wall.
Covered loosely with a length of canvas that doesn't quite reach the ground.
The placement isn't accidental — they're not stored there for convenience.
They're stored there to avoid being stored with the rest.
I move closer along the barn wall, staying low. The canvas is unlashed, held in place only by its own weight and the angle of the wagon. I crouch beside the nearest crate and go still, listening. The caravan camp stays quiet.
The same dry metallic quality I found in the abandoned building reaches me before I touch anything.
Faint but present, clinging to the wood of the crate itself.
I draw the short knife from my belt and work the lid.
The nails are loose — this crate has been opened recently, multiple times. The lid comes free without resistance.
Inside, wrapped in dark cloth and packed in layers of dried moss, are three objects.
A disc of dark stone marked with etchings I recognize from confiscated materials in previous commissions.
Two smaller pieces, rod-shaped, the same stone, the same etchings.
Drain artifacts, designed to pull ambient life energy from a surrounding area over time.
Slow, undetectable if you didn't know what to look for.
Absolutely illegal under the courts' contraband classification.
I've found what I came for.
I'm reaching to re-secure the lid when the footsteps come around the corner of the wagon.
The man stops. He's carrying a water skin walking casually, whistling under his breath, not expecting to find anything. For one flat second we stare at each other across the dark.
Then he opens his mouth and I'm already moving.
He shouts before I can close the distance.
The sound cuts through the quiet and I abandon any pretense of stealth, sprinting after him as he bolts around the far side of the wagon. He's fast — panicked men often are — and he has a head start on the open ground between the caravan and the first buildings of the town proper.
I follow him into the streets.
Brindle Hollow at this hour is dark and empty, which works against him more than me. He's running blind, taking turns that feel like escape routes but aren't. I track the sound of his boots on cobblestone and cut through a narrow gap between two buildings, gaining ground.
He runs toward the eastern edge of town where the road thins and the buildings spread apart and the tree line begins. Not a smart choice, but fear doesn't consult a map. By the time he realizes he's running out of town and into forest, I'm close enough to hear him breathing.
I take him down just inside the tree line.
We go into the leaf litter hard, and I have him face-down with his arm torqued behind him before he gets his next breath. He struggles for a few seconds, then stops when it becomes clear struggling costs him more than it costs me.
"Don't," I say. "It's not worth it."
He goes still. His breathing is ragged and loud in the quiet woods.
I pull him up enough to get a look at his face.
He's young — younger than I expected, somewhere in his mid-twenties, with the kind of lean, rough-edged look that comes from years of moving between places and not staying long anywhere.
I didn't see him near Fenwood's wagons today.
Either he arrived after dark or he keeps himself off the caravan's visible operation intentionally.
"Who else is working this route?" I ask.
"Don't know what you're talking about." His voice is steady enough, but his pulse is hammering at his throat.
"You were checking artifacts behind a wagon in the middle of the night. Try again."
He says nothing.
I adjust his arm. He lets out a grunt and his face contorts.
"Fenwood," he says.
"I know Fenwood. Who else?"
"Fenwood runs it. I just — I move things when I'm told to."
"Move things to where?"
"Wherever the next drop point is. They don't tell me more than I need to know for the next leg." He's not lying. His eyes have the flat, careful look of someone who knows exactly how much ignorance is worth cultivating. "I get a location, a description. I move the cargo. That's all."
"How many people are running cargo between drop points?"
A pause. "More than you think."
"Give me a number."
"I don't have one." He shifts under my grip and I hold him steady. "I told you. I only know my leg. But I've handed off to three different people in the last two months. They don't double up. So."
So the network is deeper than two men. The original commission was built on bad intelligence or deliberately narrow parameters — either the courts didn't know the full scope, or they knew and chose not to say. Neither possibility improves my situation.
"Who receives the artifacts once they leave Brindle Hollow?"
"I don't know that either."
"You have a guess?"
"It’s not my job to think about those things," he says. "And guessing gets people killed in this line of work."
I'm considering my next question when a branch snaps somewhere behind me and to the left. Not an animal — the rhythm is wrong, too deliberate, too placed. I turn my head without releasing the man's arm.
Another snap. Closer.
Someone is in these woods. Someone who knows where we are.
The man takes advantage of my shift. He drops his weight suddenly and twists in a direction I'm not fully set against, and the angle works for him. He wrenches free, scrambles to his feet, and runs deeper into the dark before I can reestablish my hold.
I take two steps after him and stop.
The second set of footsteps is moving away now too, parallel to his, converging. They were waiting. Someone was positioned out here. Were they watching or were they waiting? Either the caravan runs more security than I accounted for, or someone knew I was watching tonight.
I stand on the outskirts of the forest and listen until both sets of footsteps fade.
Three different handoff contacts in two months.
A lookout positioned in the woods during a routine cargo check.
Fenwood at the center, but not the whole of it.
The original bounty named two men and a shipment.
What's sitting behind that wagon represents a network with moving parts I haven't counted yet, and at least one layer of organization I haven't identified.
I turn and walk back toward the town lights.
The commission just got considerably more complicated.