“Are you finished?” I asked Hector when, nearly an hour later, every time we finished talking to someone, he would immediately launch directly back into teasing or questioning me about Ms. Norel.

“Never. Leon, how long have I known you?”

I sighed deeply. “Four years, two months, and seventeen days.”

“Right. And when, in all that time, have you ever shown romantic interest in a female?”

“I’m not showing romantic interest in a female!”

“You were flirting.”

“I flirt all the time!”

“Yeah, but you walked her home and kissed her hand, Leon.”

I gave up. “I– okay. Sure. Yes, apparently I have been smitten with love at first sight. Are you happy now?”

Hector beamed at me. “Yes.”

I rubbed my forehead in exasperation. “Can we move on with our lives?”

“I’m going to start planning the wedding.”

“Hector!”

He laughed loudly and clapped me on the back, pausing for a beat before asking, “How do you feel about June?”

I groaned.

“Excuse me, you wouldn’t happen to be Elyon Kazere, would you?”

I turned very slowly. He had just said my name perfectly. That was extraordinarily odd. The man speaking was clearly a Northerner, and he spoke with a harsher accent than most, meaning he was from either further north than Ildanach and likely from a very old family; he didn’t even speak like the people from Morrigan that I had met.

“That depends on who’s asking,” I said slowly.

He smiled. “Of course. My name is Ilyes Shogail. You may have heard of me as well?”

I had. The man was a former general– of which house, no one seemed quite sure. He was renowned as one of the best military strategists of the century and longer. I didn’t know anything specific about his exploits, or supposed exploits, due to him remaining in the North and my origins in the West, but I had definitely heard of him.

“I have. It’s nice to meet you, General.” I held out my hand.

He took it, smiling. He was in his late forties, perhaps early fifties, but he still had a strong grip and a solid stance. His hair and beard were entirely gray and white, but he still had a thick head of hair and it wasn’t a bad look on him. He wore traditional studded leather armor rather than anything enhanced and had a massive, two handed greatsword strapped to his back with no other weapons in sight. “It’s a pleasure to meet you as well. I hate to interrupt in the middle of something, but I have an offer for you.”

I exchanged brief looks with Hector. “An offer?”

“Yes. May I buy you both a drink?”

I looked at Hector again, who shrugged. I turned back to him. “Sure, although I’ll just take water.”

Shogail arched an eyebrow at me briefly but didn’t comment as we walked to the nearest tavern, at this point just a hole in the wall with a leaky roof and some of the cheapest ale money could buy. We took a corner table, and the former general bought Hector and himself a mug, grabbing me a water.

“So, what is it we can do for you, General?”

“I’m not a general any more, Captain,” Shogail returned. “Please, call me Ilyes.”

“Ilyes,” I said, not offering him the same courtesy. He was wasting my time, and I wasn’t particularly fond of that.

His brown eyes flickered over my gray ones, and he seemed to get the point. “As you’ve heard of me, I have heard of you, both in the West and the North.”

I leaned back slightly in my chair, masking my surprise with a drink. Not many knew of me from the West, and I wanted it to stay that way.

Hector looked similarly on guard.

Ilyes simply continued talking, “I am starting a new venture, a group of Elite Mercenaries with a reputation of honor that would carry us into places that normal mercenaries never get to touch. I already have arrangements with several Houses of the North, including the Morrigan House, vowing that they would value us with respect and above the normal class of mercenary work. These guarantees and support will allow us to operate unhindered from political structures within individual cities and help avoid scrutiny while we do our work. We would operate on only the highest targets at the discretion of the team. I have heard wonderful things of your skill and would very much like to recruit you for the beginnings of this team. Both of you, in fact; I have heard things of you as well, Captain Wolfe.”

Hector snorted quietly. “Thanks for noticing.”

I looked down at the table. A few years ago, it would have been everything I ever wanted, and, frankly, in some ways, it was still deeply appealing. A job that would let me move from place to place, that constantly let me employ the few talents at which I was proficient? Good pay and reputation on top of it? It was almost too good to be true. “This is just a concept right now, yes?” I verified. “You don’t know that it will work the way you say.”

“... not for certain,” Ilyes conceded, “but we are respected names, all three of us. With us at the forefront, there would be no reason for the Houses to renege on their word to me.”

“I’m sworn to Ildanach for the Skirmishes,” I said slowly. It was the easy answer.

“Skirmishes are infinite, Captain Kazere. Do you want to spend the rest of your life here?”

Yes. I did. Or at least I wouldn’t have minded, but that particular question wasn’t an issue of want. It was an issue of capability. If this general was tracking me down here from the West, if my reputation was getting that big, then it was only a matter of time before others did the same. I looked over Ilyes’ shoulder, out one of the holes in the roof, and saw Teris there.

The raven’s black eyes met my own and then briefly glowed violet.

I looked back down at the table. I couldn’t stay here forever; I knew that. But did I have to leave already?

“I almost certainly will not,” I affirmed, “but I’m afraid I’m not ready to leave just yet. I do rather like it here, and while the job is deeply enticing, you may have to try me again in a few years, I’m afraid.” I glanced at Hector for his answer.

He finished sipping from his mug. “I’m thinking quite similarly. Perhaps someday, but we’re in the middle of something at present, and I would hate to leave a job undone.”

Ilyes nodded slowly. “I understand, and I respect that. I will be in the city for several more days, staying at the Golden Calf, if you change your minds or if things wrap up. After that, I intend to spend my next few weeks in Morrigan. I will hold out hope that you will find me there. Thank you both for your time.” He stood.

We followed suit. “Thank you for the offer. I truly do expect I will take you up on it someday, should it remain available,” I told him sincerely.

“Yes, thank you,” Hector echoed, though he seemed less certain of his eventual capitulation.

“It was wonderful to meet you, regardless.” Ilyes smiled and shook both our hands before walking back out into the outer ring.

“You really want to join up that badly?” Hector asked me.

“I need to keep on the move.”

Hector arched an eyebrow at him. “Why? It’s nice here. You like it here.”

“It’s in my blood,” I told him with a faint smile, my eyes once again finding that raven.

Teris looked at me again before taking flight.

“Well, that might have to change if you find yourself a woman,” Hector told me, and I sighed, shaking my head but also smiling faintly as he got right back on track with the relentless teasing.

We talked to a few more people, hit a few more dead ends, before I turned to Hector. “Are you ready to head back to the tavern? Right now, I think Ehud is our best chance at getting anything out of today.”

Hector nodded slowly. “Yeah. I wish people here were willing to talk to us.”

“They’re criminals. They don’t like us.”

“We don’t want to arrest them!”

I shrugged and simply said again, “They don’t like us.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know,” Hector sighed almost dejectedly, and I patted him on the shoulder as we headed back into the middle ring of the city, filled with people bustling about to get their last errands run before the end of the business day.

We were almost back to the tavern when we ran into yet someone else, although this person we both recognized on sight– it was Lord Callian Ildanach, heir to the House.

People along the streets were inclining their head and stopping, bowing from the waist, ladies curtseying, the younger ones giggling a bit, as the young Lord was still very single. We followed suit, stepping aside and out of his way and bowing from the waist as he passed, except he didn’t pass by.

“Leon, Hector,” he greeted us both by name.

We slowly straightened, and as the people saw him come to a stop, they slowly did the same before continuing about their business. No one had the time to simply stand around and wait for him to move, after all.

“Lord Callian,” I responded, Hector doing the same except,

“Lord Ildanach.”

“Is there something we can do for you?” I asked directly, perhaps a bit too bluntly, but Callian didn’t seem to mind at all.

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If anything, he almost seemed relieved to not have to play word games, a sentiment I could understand if he spent most of his days in his father’s court. “No, but I just– I’m sorry about my father’s call. Yesterday.”

I shook my head slightly. “Don’t worry about it. It was a mutually agreed upon compromise,” which still rankled me to no end, but it definitely wasn’t his fault.

“It wasn’t right,” Callian insisted. “But also, I came to warn you. My father, he… he’s not always the most stable these days. He’s doing alright, better than he was right after Mom but… he hasn’t been right since she died. No one is sure if it’s just grief or if the plague got to him too and just left him a little… less.

“Anyway, obviously we keep that quiet,” and he was speaking very quietly, which I was very relieved to note; no one else needed to know this, and I wasn’t comfortable having the conversation where we were, “but you need to know. You need to know because he really hates you. He is sure that you are here to steal his House from him. He cannot think of another reason that you would be doing what you do. I guess maybe he just can’t process… that you might just be a good person.” Callian sighed heavily.

“I’m really not a good person,” I told Callian seriously, “but I am trying. I have attempted to explain that to him, but.”

“It makes no difference. He hates you, and I know you already know that but… you need to be careful. Next time it won’t just be a flogging.”

Hector gave me a sharp look; he hadn’t heard about that yet due to almost all his time having been spent with me that day.

“I appreciate the warning, Lord Callian. But you probably shouldn’t just be standing around in the open like this, talking to a Turyn.”

“You’re not just a Turyn,” Callian said, almost rolling his eyes at the suggestion.

“I am to the zealots, and your father’s no-tolerance opinion towards my people in the past has fostered a decent number of those here,” I said rather sharply, Avaline’s words from earlier still very fresh in my mind. “You should get going before it gets you in trouble. But thank you.”

He inclined his head to me, to Hector, and then went on his way.

“Won’t just be a flogging?” Hector asked, voice carefully neutral.

I sighed. “Hector–”

“When were you going to tell me about that? Why in Khane’s Depths were you being flogged!?!”

A few people turned to look at us, and I waved cheerfully before turning back to him with a sigh. “Are you done yelling?”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“I was going to wait for you to pick it up from the rumor mill and then be pissed at me,” I admitted.

Hector looked at me aghast.

I shrugged. “Would you rather I lie? I really didn’t want to tell you. Can’t imagine why not considering how well you’re taking it.”

Hector rolled his eyes at me, deeply annoyed. “What did they say it was for?”

“Insubordination.”

“For winning the Skirmish. Insubordination for winning the bloody Skirmish.”

“Pretty much.”

We stood in silence for a moment.

“He really does hate you a lot,” Hector finally said with a soft sigh.

“Yeah,” I agreed again, looking down. “I think he blames the Turyn for bringing the plague. The one that killed his wife. If you look at the timeline, he started cracking down very hard after that.”

Hector nodded slowly. “That makes sense. I’m surprised there’s any Turyn chapels left.”

“Are there?” I asked innocently.

“I– aren’t there? Doesn’t there have to be for you to be– you’re just screwing with me.”

I laughed. “Not entirely. There are a couple, but they are deep underground, and it would be best if you never mentioned them out loud again.”

Hector nodded slowly. “Okay. Noted. Wouldn’t everyone know there have to be some somewhere if you’re here? And other Turyn?”

“Most people don’t know crap about our religion,” I pointed out, heading for the door with him behind me. “You’re very unusual for being friends with me, you know.”

Hector laughed. “And to think, when I left home my siblings said that I would be the weird one no one wanted to make friends with.”

I laughed with him and then went to join my team, who were already sitting around a table on the edges of the room, drinks in hand.

“Ayy, Captain!” Jair greeted me jovially, clearly having already been at the liquor for a little while. “You made it tonight!”

“I did promise,” I told her, slipping into an empty seat and Hector doing the same.

Ehud pushed a glass of water towards me, taking a drink from his own, and I raise the cup in a silent toast of gratitude.

“How did your day go?” Will asked, sipping far less vigorously than the others at her own alcohol.

“Horribly,” I said flatly. “No one in the slums would talk to us, predictably, and these people seem to have just vanished off the face of the world entirely. We got absolutely nothing.”

“My sympathies,” Jehu muttered, mostly into his mug.

Hector hailed the barmaid and got himself some ale to join them. “But the day wasn’t a total disaster,” he said, a twinkle in his eye.

I groaned in advance. “Hector–”

“See, Leon met a girl.”

“What, are we five?” I demanded, but it was too late.

“A girl?” Willow exclaimed, as though she wasn’t one. “What kind of girl?”

“Was she ladylike?” Jair asked.

“Or could she beat you in a fight?” Jehu asked before suddenly laughing. “I would pay money to see that.”

“You’d pay money to see anyone beat me in a fight,” I shot back wryly.

Jehu chuckled some more and didn’t deny it.

“But what’s the girl like?” Jair pressed.

I sighed heavily but between the wide and excited eyes of Will and Jair, I knew there was no way I was getting out of this with dignity. “She from one of the border towns, called herself a refugee but isn’t by the technical definition of the law–”

“It’s a stupid law,” Jair muttered.

“That’s your opinion,” Tola pointed out a bit gruffly.

I didn’t want to get into our political opinions on immigration, so I just kept going, “-- so I set her up with a room when she came asking for directions.”

“A room in his hotel,” Hector pointed out gleefully.

“It’s cheap and right there!” I defended. “It’s not like I offered to let her stay in my room!”

“But you thought about it!” Jair screeched.

I groaned and put my head in my hands, fully giving up.

Ehud patted me on the back lightly. “You knew you weren’t escaping this with dignity.”

“I did,” I said, muffled into my hands, “I did know that.”

Ehud pushed my water under my nose and went back to drinking in silence.

Once the girls stopped screeching about the fact that I met and spoke to a female– despite the fact that I spoke to them all the time–, I turned slightly more towards Ehud. “So, we struck out. I’m really hoping you’re going to tell me you did better.”

Ehud slowly sipped his water and then took a breath, in no apparent rush to answer, but then, he never was. After what seemed like ages, he opened his mouth, “I didn’t find out as much as I hoped, nor probably as much as you had hoped I would. But I did learn some things.”

Hector and I both looked at him, Hector leaning forward in interest, while I maintained my posture in my chair, slightly turned towards him, sipping from my water.

“The disappearances all happened during the weekdays. There was no specific day, but none of the five happened on the weekend, whatever that means,” Ehud began. “I originally assumed they all happened during the night, but that was not the case. Two of the five seem to have vanished during broad daylight. The shade cast by the trees on the wall seem to make that more possible in the outer ring, though, than it might be otherwise. There is no apparent correlation between the victims: two female, three male– four now with Ennis’--. two elderly, three younger.

“Ennis’ man didn’t have family, but he was expected back and had only left for about an hour on a shopping trip to the inner city. Based on shopkeeper testimony, it seems he never made it out of the outer ring. One of the others did have family; a small one living in a house on the inner wall of the third ring. She was the youngest victim; she had gone out to play in the forest and never returned. The others don’t seem to have any direct ties, but they were known enough in their areas to be reported missing within two days of the initial disappearance. All of this points to something more sophisticated than a lunatic or even a serial killer.

“I’m sure you probably already knew most of this from the Peacekeeper files, but something that may interest you is a correlation that I doubt the Peacekeepers would have drawn– each of the five disappearances, taking place over the course of the last two months, occurred immediately after one of the Chantry outreaches.”

That was new information. “Chantry outreaches?” I asked, very unfamiliar with the workings of the traditional church.

“Yeah,” Hector said, “the Chantry runs charity outreaches to the slums, but don’t they do those way more often than five times in two months?”

Ehud nodded. “They do, which is why the correlation wasn’t likely to be noted. I’m not saying it means anything, just that it is there. In fact, it’s one of the only commonalities to be found between the cases.”

“But they do it all the time, and it didn’t only start two months ago,” I said, feeling that it was beyond a reach to think anything of it.

“Actually,” Hector said thoughtfully, “they did ramp up the quantity of them by a huge amount pretty recently. Not two months ago exactly, but three or four months, maybe? It was right around when they started the renovations. Before that, they were probably only doing it one or twice a month, not a week. We were honestly making the joke that they were only doing it because they needed to kick out some of their staff to make room for the construction workers.”

I blinked at him and looked around the table for confirmation before turning back to Ehud. “Okay, that’s interesting. Anything else?”

“Of course,” Ehud said, smirking slightly. One day, I was going to find out where he got some of his information. Not specifically about this, but the man knew a lot of things that he shouldn’t in general. “There’s a separate pool of people who could want each of the individuals to disappear, with little to no overlap between suspects, particularly if you want to limit any… let us say, forceful reaching, so there’s nothing for us there.

“However, I learned something else interesting has been going on in the slums. There have been missing coffins.”

“What?” Hector said blankly, and I echoed his sentiment.

“There’s a graveyard in the outer ring, as expected,” Ehud said, “somewhat near Lord Ennis’ Manor, actually. There’s a gate around the graveyard proper, and then a shed up front with shovels and a wheelbarrow, and the way unmarked graves work is that people will leave corpses in body bags or, occasionally, in coffins, outside of the shed, and then some well-meaning folk with some time on their hands will come along and bury them. Lord Ennis has actually been quite adamant about his servants taking up the duty if necessary. Regardless, it’s a somewhat morbid system, but it works.

“Recently, though, people have noticed that there have been coffins showing up outside of the shed, vanishing, and there have been no new tombstones. Yet, no one can find any missing corpses either. The slums are a fairly tightly knit community, albeit in sections, and no one seems to be able to figure out who has died when the coffins have shown up.”

“Is there any correlation to when the disappearances have occurred?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, no one was tracking the appearances of the coffins, and I couldn’t confirm the dates.”

“Still,” I looked at Hector for a moment, “they could be using the coffins to smuggle them out, somehow? Dead or alive?”

“Yeah, but it’s not like wagons or people carrying coffins are a normal sight around Ildanach. And where would they be going, anyway? None of them have turned up dead,” Hector pointed out.

And that was the thing, wasn’t it? None of the bodies had been found, none of the people had been found, since the longest reported disappearance, it had been almost two months, and there had been nothing of them. They had to be dead, an unfortunate but realistic fact, but then where were the bodies?

I sighed heavily, rubbing my forehead. “Anything else?”

“That’s all I have for today,” Ehud said.

While I had already known a great deal of the first things he had mentioned, as he had predicted, it had still been helpful to hear it all laid out in such a way and presented together. Even so, I didn’t feel like we were any closer to figuring out where these people were.

“It’s getting late,” Hector said after a short beat, talk of murder having somewhat killed the partying mood. “We’ll plan to meet up tomorrow?”

“Agreed,” I said, and got variations of affirmatives from the others. “Have a good night.”

With that, we all headed off to our respective beds, though I had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t be able to sleep that night.