"Wren." Zelene kept her voice gentle, still crouched at the girl's level, though her mind was already working through the practical shape of the problem. "How old are you?"
"Seven," Wren said, then, with the particular solemnity of a child correcting an adult, "Almost eight. My birthday's after harvest."
"Is there anyone else looking after you right now? A grandmother, an aunt, a neighbor?"
Wren's chin trembled, just slightly, before she caught it. "Mama says Old Pell watches me when she's at the bridge. But Old Pell's been sick. I didn't want to bother her." Her small hands tightened on the scrap of cloth in her arms — a shawl, Zelene realized now, worn thin and clearly not the girl's own, clearly her mother's. "I've been staying at our house. By myself. I didn't tell anyone because I thought Mama would be mad if I made a fuss and she came back and everyone was looking at us funny."
Something in Zelene's chest ached at that — the particular, quiet dignity of a child who had already learned to manage a crisis alone rather than risk being a burden. She glanced at Corvin, and found him already watching her with the same thought written plainly on his face.
"You're not going to be alone anymore," Zelene said. "Not today. All right?"
Wren nodded, though her eyes stayed wary, the practiced wariness of someone too young to have earned it yet.
"We have someone else we need to speak with first," Zelene said carefully. "A woman named Mira, not far from here. It's important — it might even help us understand what happened to your mother faster. Would you rather come with us, or wait somewhere safe while we go?"
Wren considered this with the gravity of someone twice her age. "Can I come? I don't — " Her voice caught. "I don't want to be by myself again."
Zelene's throat tightened. "Then you'll come with us."
Corvin crouched down as well, offering Wren a small, careful smile — the same measured gentleness he'd once offered Nym in a cavern full of firelight and fear. "We'll walk together. And once we've spoken with Mira, we'll go straight to finding out what happened to your mother. That's a promise."
"You promise a lot," Wren said, with the blunt honesty only children seemed capable of.
"I intend to keep every one of them," Corvin said.
That, at least, earned him the ghost of a smile.
---
The mill sat at the edge of town, its great wheel turning slow and steady against the current, the low rush of water nearly loud enough to swallow conversation entirely. Mira Kell turned out to be younger than Zelene expected — perhaps thirty, with flour dusted along her forearms and a guarded, tired look that settled deeper the moment she registered strangers approaching with purpose in their stride.
"If you're here about the drowning," Mira said, before either of them could speak, "I've told it to enough people already. Guild sent you, didn't they."
"They did," Zelene said. "I'm sorry to trouble you again."
Mira's eyes flicked to Wren, softening slightly despite herself. "Whose girl is that?"
"Mine, for the moment," Zelene said. "Her mother's gone missing. We're helping look for her, once we're done here."
"That's its own trouble, then," Mira said, not unkindly, though her attention didn't linger on it. "Different sort from mine. You'll want the bridge folk for that, not the mill." She wiped her hands on her apron, considering them both a moment longer, then sighed, as if deciding the retelling was inevitable regardless of how tired she was of giving it.
"Fell into the river current near the old crossing," she said. "Foot caught, water high that week. I remember going under. I remember it going dark and cold enough I stopped fighting it, if I'm honest with you." Her hand drifted, briefly, to her own collarbone, an old habitual gesture. "Next thing I know I'm on the bank, coughing up half the river, breathing fine within the hour. Healer said I shouldn't have survived that long under, let alone recovered that fast."
"Do you remember anyone pulling you out?" Corvin asked.
"That's the strange part," Mira said. "I don't remember anyone at all. No one came forward to claim it, which you'd think they would, wouldn't you, saving a life. But I do remember — after, when I was still half out of my senses on the bank — someone crouched near me. Just for a moment. I couldn't tell you if it was a man or woman, young or old. Just that they were there, and then they weren't, and by the time I could properly focus, I was alone."
Zelene kept her expression carefully even, though the shape of it settled into place easily enough now — a stranger no one could describe, arriving and vanishing without proof, leaving only an outcome too clean to explain. The same shape as the guild's missing records, just wearing a different sleeve.
"Has anything like that happened to you since?" Zelene asked.
Mira hesitated. "Not to me," she said slowly. "But there's talk. My cousin's husband was in debt bad enough the moneylender was set to take their house. Papers went missing overnight. No proof it was ever owed." She shrugged, though the gesture didn't quite land as casual as she meant it to. "People round here don't ask too many questions about good luck. Only bad."
"Thank you," Zelene said. "For telling it again."
Mira nodded, already turning back toward the mill, though she paused once more before disappearing inside. "That girl's mother," she said, glancing back at Wren. "Bridge folk keep to themselves. If she's truly gone missing, you'll want Old Fen at the fishmonger's stalls."
Then she was gone, leaving the three of them standing in the mill yard with two separate threads now laid out plainly in front of them — one leading toward whoever had been quietly erasing the town's inconvenient truths for years, and the other leading, with far more urgency, toward whatever had actually happened to a fish seller who never came home.