Four days had passed since they first laid eyes on Ressan’s ledgers.

  Outside, the Kentar fog hung low and grey against the Crescent’s windows, dulling the red-glass panes to a tired rust. Somewhere in the distance, bells chimed midday—but inside Ludmilla’s study, time felt as thick and unmoving as molasses. No one had slept properly in two nights. Meals came late or not at all. The fire was down to embers.

  Gale sat hunched over the lowest table, surrounded by an uneven fortress of scrolls, books, loose parchment, and a cracked leather ledger whose pages gave off a faint metallic scent. His left hand kept twitching toward a page half-singed by a misfired ward; his right still held a quill long dried out. Ink-stained fingers hovered mid-air, as if still scribbling.

  His hair, longer than it had been in years, was tied back in a haphazard knot that kept slipping loose. The robes he wore were creased, one sleeve slightly burned at the cuff.

  Daimon sat cross-legged on the rug, head bowed, one arm curled around his knees. His eyes were open but unfocused, lips moving without sound as he traced one of Ressan’s marginal symbols into the air. He had stopped casting real spells after the last backlash — a sharp pulse that numbed three fingers and left a burn along his palm — but still he tried, as if intent alone could make the pages yield.

  On the chaise by the window, Patzì snored softly, a lump of black fur curled on a faded cushion. Her oversized ears twitched at every shifting sound, but she didn’t move otherwise. When Gale had stepped on a paper scrap earlier, she had only blinked once, yawned, and gone back to sleep.

  Ludmilla entered without warning, barefoot, a glass of something green and bubbling in her hand. She gave the room one long, theatrical look, then rolled her eyes toward the ceiling.

  “Of course,” she muttered. “Two brilliant men buried under dead man’s riddles. And a fleabag in chaise.”

  Patzì’s only response was a wheeze.

  “Don’t talk about her like that,” Daimon said without looking up.

  “I’ll talk however I damn please. It’s my chair.”

  Ludmilla dropped onto the divan with a sigh and stretched her legs, taking a long sip from her glass. Her black robe shimmered faintly with runes that pulsed along the cuffs — the only clean thing in the room.

  “Dekarios,” she said finally, in that low, dangerous tone of hers that meant she had let the silence grow on purpose, “you’ve read the same page for fifteen minutes.”

  “Because the page keeps changing.”

  “Maybe because it’s not meant for you.”

  He looked up at that. Not sharply, just tired. His eyes were ringed dark, the kind of exhaustion that no amount of arcane clarity could sweep away.

  “These ledgers,” he said, voice low, “list caravan routes. Quantities. Drop points. But they shift — sometimes ink, sometimes whole symbols, and there’s no regular pattern. Half of them are ciphered in a code Ressan invented and never shared. The others—” He turned a page and winced as a faint pulse sparked against his fingers “—are warded. Subtly. Old-school stuff. Varnished glyphs, heat-reactive margins, even a trace of blood-seal binding in this one.”

  Ludmilla raised a brow. “So you’re saying Ressan was smarter than you.”

  “He was careful,” Gale murmured.

  He didn’t say: smarter than me, or more desperate. He didn’t need to.

  He lifted one scroll gingerly, unfurling the top third. A faint shimmer passed over the ink. Not illusion. Concealment. Whoever had warded these pages knew someone like Gale would come looking.

  He pressed his fingertips to a corner of the parchment and muttered a minor unraveling charm. The glyphs hissed but held.

  “He was hiding something,” he added. “Not for himself. From someone. He figured it out — or got close. That’s why they killed him. And now I’m sitting here, five weeks after arriving in this gods-forsaken city, with crates of raw diamonds and no name to pin them to.”

  “Except Ressan,” Daimon said quietly, still tracing invisible lines on the rug.

  “He didn’t do this,” Gale snapped, harsher than intended. “He documented it. That’s not the same.”

  The silence that followed was long and tight.

  “Some of the symbols match what we found in the abandoned chapter,” Gale said finally. “There was a shard there—raw essence twisted wrong. Like someone tried to bottle a current from the Deep Reaches and gave up halfway.”

  Daimon stilled; the memory of the shard sent a shiver of cold down his spine.

  Ludmilla’s voice was soft. “That was Ressan?”

  “No,” Gale replied. “He found the place. But someone else left the trap. There were burned reports too—one of them mentioned Zanatheia.”

  At that, Ludmilla’s gaze narrowed, but she said nothing.

  “And that scrap we also found there,” he added, quieter now. “Charred. Coded. Only one letter survived.”

  Ludmilla glanced over, brow raised.

  “An S,” he said. “That’s all. No initials, no sender, no meaning. Just—S.”

  “I’ve half a mind to summon Ressan’s ghost and ask him myself,” Ludmilla said, her tone as dry as the parchment Gale had just set aflame an hour earlier.

  “If you could pull that off,” Gale murmured, “I’d owe you a decade’s worth of wine.”

  “You already do.” She smirked. “Don’t pretend I’m doing this out of kindness.”

  He gave her a long look. “Then why are you?”

  She didn’t answer. Just leaned back on the cushions, swirling her green concoction.

  Patzì, unimpressed by the tension, let out a long, rattling sigh.

  Gale scrubbed his face with one hand, then pulled another scroll toward him. The script was meticulous — tight, narrow lines, with glyphs too perfect to be casual. Some pages shimmered with a false hand, overlaying the real content beneath. Others bristled with barely active wards, waiting to detonate on careless inspection. A few bore illusion glyphs layered over concealment—a double veil, meant to waste time. He had tried everything: heat, light, pressure, scrying. The deeper layers remained elusive.

  “I know there’s more,” he said, quieter now. “Vos said it before they dragged him away. Avessa too. They were all involved — and still afraid. Which means someone above them. Someone more dangerous. And if Ressan got even a glimpse of that truth…”

  “Then it’s buried somewhere in this mess,” Ludmilla finished for him. Her voice, this time, had lost its sarcasm.

  Gale turned another page. It was no different from the previous one: meticulous, glyph-crowded, full of traps. He exhaled slowly through his nose, flexing his fingers before turning the page. The dull ache behind his eyes had bloomed into a full throb, and his back, half-curled over the low table, had long since begun to protest.

  Across the room, Daimon had fallen into a light doze, slumped against a rolled-up rug, his cheek pressed to his arm. The fire, long neglected, crackled low in the hearth.

  Then a knock. Followed by a voice he didn’t know.

  “A message, mistress Yperion.”

  The door opened half an inch. A young man in house livery stepped in, holding a folded envelope between two fingers. He looked around the room with mild disdain.

  “It’s unsigned,” he said, offering it toward the table. “We found it this morning and didn’t know where to bring it—”

  “Give me that,” Ludmilla cut in, snatching it from his hand with a scoff. She gave the seal one look, then turned on her heel.

  She tossed the letter toward Gale with a flick of her wrist. “I’m not your gods-damned post office, scarecrow. Tell her.”

  He looked up in time to see the envelope land across his notes. “Tell who—?”

  But the moment the words left his mouth, he knew.

  Her.

  The only her who would write to him like this — unsigned, but sealed. The only her who would send the letter not to his inn, but to the Scarlet Crescent. A warning shot wrapped in silver wax. He could hear her voice even now, sarcastic and triumphant: I found out. And I’ll never let you live it down.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The letter was light in his hands, but he held it as if it might burn.

  “I’ll be back in a moment,” he said, raising.

  “Take your time,” Ludmilla drawled, already turning back toward the divan. “And try not to weep. We’ve got enough salt staining the floors.”

  He didn’t reply. Only crossed the hallway, past a velvet curtain, and into one of the Crescent’s lesser-used side alcoves — a narrow, arched recess with a small bench and a window facing the street. The glass was warped with age and city grime, but it let in enough light to read by.

  He sat on the windowsill and broke the seal.

  My insufferable disaster,

  Seven drafts? I’m impressed you managed that many before giving up on honesty entirely. I wrote this once and nearly threw it in the fire — not from inadequacy, but from the unsettling realization that I’ve begun to sound like you.

  Your journey sounds appropriately miserable, though I suspect you’re omitting the worst of it. You always do. The goose story, however, I believe entirely. You have a talent for antagonizing creatures smaller than yourself.

  Kentar sounds exactly as I imagined: impossible, overbright, and full of its own secrets. Your mentor Ludmilla sounds like the sort of woman I’d either loathe or admire.

  As for me, I’ve just returned from Delran’s Hollow, where two idiotic lords decided to settle a pasture dispute with hired swords and fire. A man and boy died over grass, Gale. Grass. I spent a day kneeling in ash-covered dirt, bandaging wounds and listening to a widow explain how her husband burned for the sake of men too proud to count fence posts properly.

  I stripped the disputed land from both houses, placed it under ducal stewardship, and banned their mercenaries from the duchy entirely. The looks on their faces when they realized I meant every word — well, you’d have enjoyed it immensely.

  Despite the outcome, I felt oddly hollow when I returned to Vartis. Victory in governance tastes different when there’s no one waiting who understands why a boy’s bandaged leg matters more than the lords’ bruised pride.

  I’m leaving for the eastern baronies tomorrow. A proper tour this time, not a crisis intervention. The people there have been neglected too long, and I intend to remind them that the duchy remembers they exist.

  It’s a strange thing, being able to face down rebellious lords yet unable to conquer the simple matter of sleep. I know this will make you gloat, but the truth is that I sleep poorly without your infuriating habit of stealing covers and muttering spells. The silence is wrong now — not empty, but too still. Even your snoring had a rhythm. Now the nights are too long, and too still.

  Since you dared to put that final note in writing: the scratch on the wall remains as you left it. Sometimes I find myself staring at it, remembering exactly how it got there. If you think distance has made me forget the weight of your hand against stone, or the sound you made when I did that thing you pretended to protest — well. You’ll have to come home to find out what I remember.

  Come home, Gale. Come home whole, come home safe, and come home soon enough that I don’t have to choose between killing you for leaving and never letting you leave again.

  Yours, despite evidence and better judgment,

  Fran

  P.S. The Scarlet Crescent. Rhyve’s face when I asked was priceless. Next time, pick a tavern. Or at least send a warning.

  By the end of the final line, Gale’s hands were shaking.

  Not from fear. Not from cold. From something deeper — something lodged in his chest since the day he left her standing in the archway, half-lit by lantern fire and duty.

  He found himself reading that final section again, eyes catching on her deliberate words: “If you think distance has made me forget the weight of your hand against stone, or the sound you made when I did that thing you pretended to protest—”

  Heat rose unbidden. Not shame, not even desire — just the sheer, unbearable memory of it. Her weight, her mouth, the stone against his back, the loss of language when all he could do was gasp and cling and let her take. The fact that she remembered exactly — and had the audacity to put it in writing — nearly undid him.

  He folded the letter once. Then again. Held it tight in his fist, like he could force it into his skin.

  “She’ll kill me,” he muttered. And then, softer: “Gods, I hope she does.”

  Then he slowly sat down against the wall, knees bent, shoulders curling in.

  She’d written him. Not with orders, or formality, or distant authority — but with her. Her voice. Her insults. Her absence tucked between every dry, cutting word.

  He read the paragraph about the pasture dispute again, then again, eyes scanning the same few lines as if memorizing how her mind moved. How her sentences bent around grief and justice like iron through silk. The weight of a widow’s grief. The lords’ shame. The price of grass and war.

  She’d written that for him. Not because he needed to know, but because she needed to tell someone who would understand.

  And he did.

  Gods, he did.

  He brushed a knuckle against his lips and let his head fall back against the plaster. It was cold, rough. Good. He needed it.

  “Fran…” he whispered, and it came out hoarse.

  He read the postscript and choked on a laugh that never made it past his throat. Of course she’d investigated. Of course she’d found out. Of course she had asked the most unexpected person.

  He imagined her expression, the flat stare she used when utterly unimpressed. He missed that stare like a wound.

  He missed everything.

  The way she’d look up from her desk only when she smelled something burning in the kitchen. The snort she made when he tried to charm her with bad poetry. The way she’d lean into him just enough in bed, like she didn’t want to admit she needed his warmth.

  She said “come home.”

  She said “whole.”

  She said “soon.”

  He hadn’t realized how much of him had gone missing in her absence until now—until the ache turned physical and sharp and real, as if the letter had reached into his chest and crushed the space he’d carefully carved around missing her.

  Gale curled the letter against his sternum and held it there, eyes closed, lips pressed to the page for a single breath.

  He didn’t cry.

  Not quite.

  But when he finally opened his eyes, the mist outside the window looked oddly blurred.

  A shadow shifted in the archway.

  “You really miss her.”

  Daimon’s voice was softer than usual, almost apologetic. Not prying, not bold—just a gentle acknowledgment, as if he’d been waiting for the right moment. His hair stuck up at odd angles from sleep, and he’d pulled on a robe over yesterday’s shirt, looking smaller than usual. Tired, but oddly alert.

  Gale stiffened. “How do you—?”

  “You don’t hide it well.” Daimon sat beside him, cross-legged, voice gentle. “The way you look at her letter, say her name. The way you look now.”

  The accuracy of it hit harder than Gale expected. There was a long pause. Daimon looked at him, his mismatched eyes sharp with concern, but oddly certain.

  “Why don’t you go?” Daimon asked, almost a whisper. “To see her, I mean.”

  Gale tried to laugh, but it came out rough and empty. “Didn’t Ludmilla tell you? My portal licence was revoked. Permanently. Long story, involving a countess, the Society, and a palace that spent twelve hours in a desert.”

  Daimon almost smiled. “She said something about that, yes. Said you were an idiot — her words, not mine — but a very persistent one.” His eyes lit up with understanding—and something else. Determination. “But… let me. I can open one.”

  Gale shot him a sharp look. “Dai, you nearly passed out last time. And Ludmilla—if she finds out—”

  “If she finds out,” Daimon said, glancing back toward the direction of the parlor. “She’s busy with the afternoon clients. And I can handle it. Just… not inside. Not where she’ll notice.”

  “What if something goes wrong? What if you—?” Gale ran a hand through his hair, suddenly feeling the weight of five weeks’ separation like a physical ache. “I’m not a healer, Daimon. I don’t know how to help if the portal backlash—”

  “I’ll manage,” Daimon cut in, his tone almost stubborn. “Besides, you helped me. With Selina, with… everything. And I know what it’s like, missing someone.” He swallowed, glancing away. “In the market, you told me what love should be—that silence feels wrong when they’re not there, and right when they are. And now I see how missing her makes you suffer. So I want to help. Even if Master Ludmilla ties me to a chair for a month.”

  Gale’s lips twitched. “Disobeying your master twice in a week. I’m a bad influence on you, Dai.”

  Daimon shrugged, a flush rising to his cheeks. “Maybe. Or maybe you’re just the first one who treats me like I could be useful.” His voice dropped to barely a whisper. “Some things are worth the risk.”

  The silence that followed carried no discomfort, only weight. Daimon’s sincerity — his quiet, stubborn willingness to help — moved Gale more than he expected. At twenty, he would have been too wrapped in his own brilliance to even see that kind of offering, let alone accept it.

  Gale was first to break it. “If you’re sure… Give me an hour.” He stood, a little too quickly, suddenly aware of how ragged he looked—creased robes, dust-streaked sleeves, hair half-escaped its knot. “I need to collect something at the inn and make myself presentable.” A faint, self-mocking smile. “She deserves my best.”

  Daimon grinned. “You mean you’re actually going to comb your hair? This I have to see.”

  Gale rolled his eyes , but his expression softened. “Mock all you want, but when you love someone this much, every detail matters. Clean clothes, combed hair...” He paused, voice growing quieter. “And books. Good ones.”

  “What kind?”

  “A Zanatheian herbal—The Painted Garden. Not a perfect edition, but… and a Kentarian cookbook. She’ll complain, but she’ll read every page.”

  “The ones from the market,” Daimon said, nodding.

  Gale hesitated, then rested a hand lightly on the boy’s shoulder, just for a second. “Thank you, Dai. Truly.”

  Daimon looked away, suddenly interested in the faded mosaic floor. “Just—just don’t tell Ludmilla.”

  Gale laughed—quiet, grateful, almost whole. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  An hour later, they met at the mouth of a narrow lane behind the Crescent. Gale looked transformed—his hair properly washed and tied back in a neat queue, wearing a deep blue coat that actually fit his shoulders. The two books were wrapped in fresh oilcloth and tucked securely under his arm.

  Daimon glanced at him. “You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were going courting for the first time.”

  Gale shot him a look. “After five weeks? It almost feels like it.”

  They moved deeper into the lane, away from the occasional passerby and the glow of street lamps. Daimon’s earlier confidence seemed to waver slightly. He flexed his fingers, then curled them into fists.

  “There’s… something you should know,” he said, then dropped his gaze, as if embarrassed by the words. “I won’t be able to keep the portal open remotely. So I’d… I’d have to come with you. I won’t get in the way, I promise. I’ll wait outside, or in another room.” His voice cracked halfway through, and he cleared his throat quickly, cheeks coloring.

  Gale gave him a long, thoughtful look. “You’re helping me see the woman I love, and I’m supposed to make you wait outside like a servant? Absolutely not. I’m introducing you properly.” His expression softened. “Besides, the gossip makes the Duchess of Foher sound terrifying. Which, to be fair, she can be — but only when someone deserves it. The rest of the time she’s remarkable. Brilliant. Caring, too, though she’ll deny it and glare at me for saying so.”

  “What if she doesn’t like me?”

  “Then she’ll tell you so directly, and you’ll know exactly where you stand.” Gale’s smile turned sly. “But if the cats like you, you’ll be blessed.”

  Daimon blinked. “And if they don’t?”

  Gale grinned outright, mock-serious. “Then run. She’ll take their side.”

  They stopped in the space between two buildings, away from curious eyes. The city’s fog blurred every lamp and window, rendering the world dim and indistinct.

  “Last chance to change your mind, Dai.”

  Daimon took a long, steadying breath. “I’m sure.”

  Then he closed his eyes, centering himself. He lifted his hand, slashed a line through the air. Space parted, seamless and silent.

  Gale felt that now-familiar shift: air compressing, sounds muffling, goosebumps racing up his arms. The air shifted—no sound, no flash, just that familiar change like the moment after a held breath is released.

  “Come,” Daimon said, voice steadier than he felt.

  Gale drew a breath, tightened his grip on the wrapped books, and stepped forward beside him. The fog swallowed the lane behind them.