Chapter 16
KAEDRIN
Maris is asleep before the moon moves far across the sky.
I dress quietly in the dark, pulling my shirt on by feel.
She's turned onto her side, one hand open on the pillow beside her face, breathing slow and even.
I watch her for a moment before I go. The moonlight catches the line of her jaw, the loose braid coming apart against the pillow.
I turn away before I find reasons to stay.
The bakery is quiet and dark below. I check the front door, both windows, the lane through the glass. Nothing moving. I take my usual position near the back, where I can see anyone approach from the market side and hear the rear door if anything touches it.
The night settles around me.
I've stood watch in worse conditions — cold campaigns, border posts, open country with no cover and hostile ground in every direction.
The bakery lane in the small hours is easy work by comparison.
But tonight the quiet gives my thoughts more room than they usually get, and I don't particularly want the room.
She felt the same as I remembered. That was the first thing I noticed — not as a flattering observation but as a fact, the way a tracker notes what hasn't changed on a familiar path.
Her voice, low and blunt and precise. The way she argued with her whole body, hands moving, weight shifting, eyes holding contact even when she was furious.
The careful, way she'd admitted what she admitted.
She doesn't say things she doesn't mean.
That was true the last time I was here and it held tonight.
I stood at her door the morning I left and I didn't knock.
I've told myself the story in cleaner terms since then.
Recalled orders. No time. What would I say?
It was one night. She probably preferred not to hear from me.
Every version of it had enough truth in it to be usable, and I used it, and I kept using it for years while she raised a child alone in a town that didn't understand what that child was.
Excuses. That's the word she would use, and she'd be right.
The honest version is simpler and less flattering.
I didn't write because I was afraid of what she'd say.
That she'd moved on, that she'd tell me not to contact her again, that the night had meant considerably less to her than it had to me.
It was easier to file it away as something complete than to open it back up and find out. Cowardice dressed up as consideration.
I've lost three years with Elin because of it. A heavy weight hangs in my chest. A young girl who learned to walk and talk and name all her dolls and develop opinions about scarves and beetles and bakery management, and I was absent for all of it because I was too cautious to send a letter.
Understanding it doesn’t repair the damage.
The windows of the bakery aredark, the realization of where I went wrong and what I missed sits heavily in my stomach. I was wrong. Not in the nuanced, circumstances-complicate-things way — wrong plainly, without qualification. The time is gone. What's available now is what comes next.
Maris asked what happens now, and I told her I didn't know, which was true and also incomplete.
I don't know the logistics. I don't know whether the courts will release me from active duty or what I'd do with myself in a town this size if they did.
I don't know whether she'd want that, whether she'd trust it, whether years of absence and one night of honesty is enough to build anything on.
What I know is what I want. That's new. I've spent a long time operating on commission and duty and the next assignment, and wanting something for myself was a category I'd stopped examining. It's inconvenient to want things when your life is structured around going where you're sent.
She's worth the inconvenience. They both are.
Elin with her wooden horse and her doll who manages the bakery and her complete certainty that pointed ears are just ears. Maris with her sharp tongue and her flour-dusted hands and the way she argued her daughter's case in front of a hostile room without flinching once.
I don't know if she'll let me in. That's the honest position.
She's careful with herself and she has good reasons to be, and I've already demonstrated I'm capable of disappearing without notice.
Earning back that ground, if she'll let me try, will take more than one night of honesty and a watch post in the dark.
But I want to try.
That's the first clear thing I've thought that doesn't connect back to Fenwood or the commission or the evidence problem. It sits in my chest with a solidity that doesn't feel like wishful thinking. It feels like a direction.
A cat crosses the lane below and disappears between two buildings. The market square is empty and still. Somewhere across town, Fenwood's remaining wagons sit repositioned near the eastern road, and Cole is secured in an abandoned building, and the clock on all of it is moving.
But that's tomorrow's problem.
I settle my back against the wall and watch the lane and let myself want what I want for a little while longer before the morning makes it complicated again.
The market at dawn is a different creature than it is at midday.
Vendors in various states of setup, the smell of woodsmoke and boiling porridge from the caravan camp at the square's edge, the noise of people conducting commerce before they've fully committed to the day. I move through it slowly, reading the energy before I start asking questions.
Fenwood's section of the square tells me most of what I need before I speak to anyone.
Three stalls where there were seven. Half the display inventory gone, the remaining goods spread thin to fill the visible space.
Two workers where there were four. The wagons along the eastern lane have been reorganized — heavier loads redistributed, the camp configuration tighter and more mobile.
A caravan preparing to sell for another week doesn't look like this. A caravan preparing to move looks exactly like this.
I stop at the cloth merchant's stall two rows over, a woman with a grey braid and the permanently skeptical expression of someone who's been doing markets in all weather for thirty years.
"Fenwood pulling out?" I keep the question casual, the way you ask about weather.
She snorts. "Apparently." She shakes a bolt of linen loose and begins refolding it with sharp, irritated movements. "Three days early. No notice, no discussion. Just word that he's breaking camp before the week's end."
"Is that common for him?"
"It’s common for nobody." She sets the bolt down.
"You don't do that. You don't leave a market three days early — it pushes every caravan in the rotation.
We move together through the valley towns because the schedules work.
Pull one out early and the whole arrangement shifts.
" She glances toward Fenwood's stalls with open irritation.
"Oster's group is already talking about whether to follow or hold. "
"What happens if they follow?"
"They lose two days' profit at the next stop because they arrive too early and the locals aren't ready to buy yet.
" She picks up another bolt. "What happens if they hold is they travel the next leg alone, which nobody wants.
Road safety." She shrugs. "So now they're standing around arguing instead of selling, and I'm losing customers to the distraction. "
I thank her and move on.
The next vendor I find, a middle-aged man selling ironwork near the fountain, is less irritated and more nervous. He's watching Fenwood's stalls while he talks to me, the way you watch a fire you're not sure has been properly contained.
"He's never done this," he says. "Not in three years of crossing routes with him. Always finishes the full market run." He taps a finger against his display table. "Something spooked him."
"Any word on what?"
"Nothing specific." His eyes stay on the stalls. "But Fenwood keeps to himself at the best of times. If he's running, you won't hear about it from him directly."
I buy a small iron hook I have no use for and move on.
The pattern completes itself across two more conversations.
Fenwood is a fixture in this caravan. He runs the same valley route three or four times a year, stops at the same towns, keeps to the same schedule.
The other traveling merchants have built their own timing around his, the way you navigate by a landmark.
His early departure isn't just inconvenient — it's disorienting.
And the general consensus, unspoken but present in every exchange, is that Fenwood doesn't break pattern without a reason.
Which means he knows the net is tightening.
Cole went missing yesterday. The man I fought in the forest reported back to someone, and that someone reported to Fenwood.
The stash site was likely relocated the night Cole was taken.
And now the caravan is compressing in the way a man compresses a pack when he's decided to run — keeping only what he can move fast with, abandoning the rest.
I do the calculation as I walk the square's perimeter.
Fenwood could be on the valley road by tomorrow morning, maybe tonight if he pushes.
Once he clears the borderland territory, my commission's jurisdictional reach gets complicated.
The courts can request cooperation from other regions, but it takes time, and men like Fenwood move fast when they're motivated.
If he leaves with the accusations against Maris and Elin still standing, I have no leverage to force a resolution.
Cole's testimony implicates the rumors but doesn't exonerate them.
Without Fenwood in custody and the artifact operation formally closed, the council case stays open.
And if Fenwood makes a move against Maris before he goes — the cleaner exit I thought of last night — I need to be between him and that door before it becomes a decision he acts on.
I've been patient because patience was the right tool. It's stopped being the right tool.
I cross the square to the inn to collect what I need and send a fast report to the authority. Then I'll go back for Cole. Then I'll find Fenwood before he finds his opportunity.
The morning is still early. There's time, if I stop spending it watching.