"Flinn." Lexel leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone assembling a question they'd been sitting on for a while. "Do you know any famous swordsmen? Rangers, mages — someone recent. Someone on the rise, making a name for themselves."
Flinn was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of ignorance. The quiet of someone sorting through a very large filing cabinet.
"Give me names."
"Myda," said Lexel. "And Seleron."
Flinn turned the names over. Tested them against whatever internal catalogue operated behind those eyes. Then shook his head.
"Doesn't ring a bell." A pause. "Though if you want to find people at that caliber — truly rising names — you'd want the capital. That's where the current pools. Out here in the provinces, you only hear about people after they've already arrived."
Damn it.
Lexel's expression didn't change but something behind it did, briefly, before he filed it away.
"Also —" Flinn tilted his head, almost as an afterthought, the way people deliver information they know is significant while pretending they don't. "You might want to try the guilds as well. Word is, you already got an offer from the Emperor's Eye?"
Anthierin's gaze didn't move from the middle distance.
Emperor. King of kings. So that's what it meant. A beat of quiet recalibration behind her eyes. I assumed it was just the Guild Leader's title.
"The Emperor's Eye..." Lexel murmured.
The words landed differently in his mouth than they probably should have. He wasn't thinking about the guild. He was thinking about a ruin, and a corridor, and a ghost that had looked at him with recognition before he'd put it down. The offer that had come after — formal, sealed, delivered by someone who hadn't quite been able to meet his eyes.
He hadn't decided what to do with it yet.
"You really do have your way around information," Anthierin said, looking at Flinn with something that wasn't quite admiration and wasn't quite suspicion. The midpoint between them.
Flinn's grin arrived on schedule. "Thief's secret."
A beat.
"Flinn." Lexel's eyes came down from the ceiling. Level. Conversational. "Have you joined a guild yet?"
"O-Of course!" Flinn said.
The words were immediate. The eyes were not.
They moved — just slightly, just for a moment — in the particular direction eyes move when they're checking whether something landed. When the mouth has already committed and the rest of the face is catching up.
The smile stayed in place. Perfectly reasonable. Perfectly assembled.
Lexel looked at Flinn.
Flinn looked back.
"...Of course," Flinn said again, more quietly, as if the repetition would help.
"What about you, Lexel?" Flinn's eyes had recovered their usual ease, the guild question apparently filed under resolved. "Any thought of joining the Emperor's Eye?"
Lexel leaned back. The chair creaked under the shift of weight. He stared at the ceiling with the particular expression of someone who had considered this before and arrived at the same place every time.
"Honestly?" A beat. "I don't want to be attached to any guild."
"There are only benefits in joining a guild," said Anthierin, with the practicality of someone stating that fire is hot.
"She's right," said Flinn. "The only real downside is neighboring guilds at the same strata getting territorial. Politics, mostly. Posturing." A dismissive wave. "Manageable, if you know what you're doing."
"I'll keep that in mind," said Lexel, in the tone of someone who had already moved on internally. He turned his head toward Anthierin. "What about you? You've never thought about joining a guild?"
Anthierin considered this with the seriousness she applied to most things. "Not seriously," she said. "But if I were to — probably the Ptah Guild."
The reaction from Flinn was immediate and genuine, the arch of someone who recognizes a name with weight behind it.
"Ah." A slow nod. "The dream of every blacksmith worth their salt. The regalia that came out of that place—" A low exhale. "Legendary doesn't cover it."
"It's a blacksmith's wet dream," said Anthierin, with a nod of complete sincerity. "Me no exception."
A pause.
Lexel opened his mouth.
Anthierin pointed at him without looking. "Don't."
He closed it.
"So." Lexel stretched both arms above his head, vertebrae registering mild complaints from the day's work. "Where are you headed next, Flinn?"
Flinn's gaze drifted toward the window. The last of the evening light was doing something amber and noncommittal against the glass.
"Around," said Flinn.
"Around," Lexel repeated.
"Around," Flinn confirmed, with the serene finality of someone who considered that a complete answer.
Lexel looked at the ceiling. Then back at Flinn. Something turned over quietly behind his eyes — the particular calculus of someone accounting for variables, weighing what they knew against what they didn't, arriving at a number they were comfortable with.
"Join my party," he said.
The room was quiet for a moment.
Flinn looked at him. Not the performed surprise of someone who hadn't seen it coming — something more considered than that. The look of someone checking the weight of a door before deciding whether to open it.
"...Temporarily," Flinn said finally.
"Temporarily," Lexel agreed, without hesitation, without condition. As if the word didn't bother him at all.
Flinn studied him for another moment. Then something settled — not quite a decision, more like the absence of further resistance.
"Fine."
Lexel glanced at Anthierin.
She gave a single nod. Small, certain, already done with the deliberation.
That was that.
The candle burned down in its own time. The conversation didn't so much end as gradually lose momentum — Flinn asking something minor, Lexel answering with half his attention, Anthierin saying nothing in particular and meaning it. The kind of quiet that collects in rooms where people are tired in the same direction.
Somewhere in it, without ceremony, the three of them slept.
Outside, the village settled into its own darkness. The Talon Guild down the road had long since shuttered its lanterns. The road to Lanjaar waited in the distance, patient and indifferent, the way roads always are.
Tomorrow would ask its own questions.
For now — for one unremarkable, earned night — there was nothing that needed answering.