Morning came grey and still.
The innkeeper was already behind the counter when the first pale light crept through the shutters — bandages wrapped carefully around his face, covering the worst of it. His lip was split, one eye half-swollen shut, and every movement carried the quiet stiffness of a man trying not to show how much it hurt. He kept his head down, his hands busy, his attention fixed firmly on anything that wasn't the staircase.
Then the footsteps came.
He caught the movement from the corner of his good eye. Fenlor descended the stairs with Henry a step behind, unhurried, scanning the room the way a man scans a road before walking it. The innkeeper's body reacted before his mind could stop it — he flinched, turned sharply, and busied himself with a stack of cups that didn't need rearranging.
Fenlor said nothing. He pulled out a chair at the nearest table, sat down, and gestured for Henry to do the same. A server brought bread and broth. They ate without speaking, the quiet of the common room settling around them like morning fog.
Then the door opened.
The man who entered did not announce himself. He didn't need to. The two guards flanking him on either side were announcement enough — broad, armed, their eyes moving across the room the moment they crossed the threshold. The man himself was composed, unhurried, dressed plainly but carrying himself with the particular stillness of someone who had never once needed to raise his voice to be obeyed.
He crossed the common room without acknowledging a single soul, leaned close to the innkeeper, and said something low. The innkeeper set down his cloth, straightened his back, and led the man toward one of the rear rooms without a word.
The door clicked shut behind them.
Henry leaned slightly toward Fenlor, his voice just above a whisper. "I think that's the one the innkeeper mentioned."
Fenlor finished the last of his broth, set the bowl aside, and wiped his mouth slowly with the back of his hand. His eyes remained on the closed door.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "That's what I think too."
Inside the room, the man looked the innkeeper over with the unhurried patience of someone cataloguing damage.
"What happened to you?" His eyes moved across the bandages, the swelling, the careful way the innkeeper held himself. "What is all this?"
"I ran into some trouble," the innkeeper said. "Nothing I couldn't handle on my own."
The man studied him a moment longer, as if deciding whether the answer was worth pressing. Then he let it pass.
"Report."
"Nothing out of the ordinary. All quiet on my end."
"Good." He turned slightly, hands clasped behind his back. "We continue as planned."
The innkeeper hesitated — just briefly. "There is one other matter. I've brought on two people to assist me here. I recruited them myself."
The man's eyes sharpened, almost imperceptibly. "Can you be certain they won't cause problems?"
"Yes. I vetted them personally."
"How many?"
"Two."
Silence stretched between them, thin and taut. The man turned and looked at the far wall, as though the answer to some private calculation were written there. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter — and somehow heavier for it.
"Do as you wish. But hear me clearly." He didn't turn around. "The moment anything seems wrong — and I mean anything at all — we will remove them. And you along with them." A pause. "As though none of you ever existed."
The innkeeper's throat moved. He said nothing.
"Bring them in. I want to see them myself."
The innkeeper came back out into the common room moving like a man walking toward something he would rather avoid. He stopped at Fenlor's table and kept his eyes somewhere between them.
"Follow me."
Fenlor rose. Henry followed. They walked into the room and stopped a few feet from the man, who looked them over the way a buyer examines livestock — thorough, impassive, giving nothing away.
"These are the ones?" he asked.
"Yes," the innkeeper said.
Another long look. Then the man moved toward the door, unhurried as everything else about him. He paused at the threshold without turning back, his voice carrying cleanly over his shoulder.
"Fine. But remember this. Whatever you do — do not cross the line you are not supposed to cross."
He walked out. His guards fell into step behind him. The door swung shut, and the room went quiet.
The innkeeper stood in the middle of the floor for a long moment. Then he sank into the nearest chair, pressed both hands over his face, and exhaled like a man setting down something very heavy.
Fenlor looked at him. "Why the long face?"
"Did you not hear what he just said?" The innkeeper's voice came out muffled behind his hands. "If he finds out you beat me and forced me into this — he will kill us. All of us. Without a second thought."
Fenlor considered that. "Is he really that dangerous?"
The innkeeper dropped his hands and looked at him with his one good eye. "You don't know who he is. He is a personal guard to the nobles. Not some street enforcer — a personal guard. The kind that doesn't get that position without leaving bodies behind."
Fenlor was quiet for a moment. "Then why is he coming here himself instead of sending someone?"
The innkeeper let out a short, humourless breath. "Because he doesn't trust anyone else to do it."
Fenlor gave a small nod, turned, and walked out of the room. Henry fell into step beside him. The corridor was narrow, their voices low as they moved back toward the common room.
"Sounds like a tough one," Fenlor said, more to himself than anything.
Henry glanced at him sideways. "Are you going after him now?"
Fenlor smiled. "I'm not crazy. The mission comes first. We finish what we came here to do — then we worry about him."
Henry looked almost disappointed. "I thought you were about to go for it when you started asking those questions."
"I thought about it," Fenlor admitted. "But I'm not Rudravaan. I can't just do whatever I want and walk away clean."
Henry snorted quietly. "Yeah. He always does exactly what he wants and never listens to anyone."
They stepped back into the common room. The morning crowd had thinned, the fire burning low in the hearth, the smell of bread still hanging in the air.
"Now that we're in," Henry said, "we can actually start asking around. Get real information." He looked at Fenlor. "What do you think?"
Fenlor pulled out a chair and sat. "Yeah," he said. "Let's get to work."