The retinue assembled in the hour before sunrise at the northern edge of the guild district, where the city's stone gave way to the packed-dirt road that wound out toward the barony of Cristfall — a single day's ride northeast, through the valley corridor where the hills rolled low, and the farmland spread wide and golden between patches of old forest.
A minor mission to the minor barony.
The kind of escort that existed more as a formality of station than any genuine threat assessment, which was presumably why they'd allowed a Class V into the formation at all.
This was the type of mission I would like to go on; no effort needed, just being present was enough.
There were six of us in the escort proper.
Halvur, the senior blade — Class III, older, lean as stripped wood, with a scarred jaw and the particular stillness of a man who had stopped needing to prove anything. He'd looked at me when I joined the group the previous evening with the flat, measuring expression of a man who had seen every variety of young mercenary and had learned to reserve judgment. I respected that, even if I suspected his eventual judgment of me would not be glowing.
Other Class III men whose names I'd caught were Brenn and Ossian — a matched pair in the way that long-time contract partners became matched, finishing each other's sentences, moving with the unconscious synchrony of people who have survived the same things.
Both solid, competent and they regarded me with the mild, unconcerned indifference of people who simply didn't care about Class V one way or the other.
Eskar, Class IV, who was technically my reason for being here.
And I, Class V, Jake Altoras, eighteen years old, am present and technically qualified.
The noble retinue itself was four wagons — two carriages, one supply wagon, and one for attendants — surrounded by the lady's own household guards, six men in the Solhani livery of deep burgundy and silver. They were decorative in the way household guards often were, well-equipped and reasonably trained and primarily useful as a visual signal that someone important was traveling. Real trouble, if it came, would fall to us.
Halvur placed me at the rear left of the formation — the trailing flank, far from anything interesting, close to the dust thrown up by the supply wagon's wheels.
I accepted this without complaint because I was, when the situation called for it, capable of being professional.
The column moved out as the first pale light cracked along the eastern hills.
*
I didn't see the lady until the first rest stop, two hours into the ride, when the column slowed at a watering point where a stone trough sat beside the road and a cluster of old oaks threw long morning shadows across the verge.
The carriage door opened, and Lady Ankerita Solhani stepped down.
I was adjusting my horse's girth strap — or pretending to, since I wasn't entirely sure I was doing it correctly — and I looked up because movement near the carriages was something I was technically paid to track, and then I forgot about the girth strap entirely.
She was…
I am going to be honest; I have lived eighteen years in this world and some portion of an entirely different life before it, and I have known beautiful women. Auntie Chelsea was beautiful in that commanding, self-possessed way that made rooms rearrange themselves around her. The women whose company I'd enjoyed over the years had ranged from warmly pretty to genuinely stunning.
Lady Ankerita Solhani was something else.
She was tall — not unusually so, but with the posture of someone who had never once in their life needed to shrink themselves for a room. Her hair was dark, somewhere between brown and black, pinned up in an elaborate traveling style that the morning wind was in the process of very slowly dismantling, one strand at a time. Her face was — the word that arrived in my mind was "composed," like a piece of careful architecture, every feature measured and placed. Large dark eyes under strong brows. A mouth that sat in a neutral expression that somehow managed to suggest she found the world faintly, privately amusing.
She wore traveling clothes — practical, by noble standards, which still meant a fitted jacket of deep green over a cream blouse, riding trousers, and good boots. A single piece of jewelry: a silver chain at her throat, small and unobtrusive, like a deliberate understatement.
She looked across the rest stop with those composed dark eyes, taking inventory of the space, the guards, the road ahead, and then — briefly, precisely, the way you'd glance at the weather — her gaze crossed mine.
For approximately one second, Lady Ankerita Solhani looked at me.
I looked back.
She looked away, back toward her attendant who was holding out a water flask, and the moment was over as cleanly as a candle being pinched out.
I turned back to the girth strap that I was definitely adjusting correctly.
"Stop staring," Eskar said, materializing at my shoulder with the silent approach of a much smaller man.
"I was assessing the retinue," I said.
"She's a noble, Jake."
"I have eyes, Eskar. I was looking with them. That's what eyes are for."
He made the sound. The grunt-sigh. Number four hundred and sixty something, by my estimate.
"Trailing position," he reminded me.
"Eyes on the road behind us."
I turned my professional, contracted eyes to the road behind us, which contained some dust, two ruts, and a crow sitting on a fence post, regarding me with the same quiet judgment as my horse.
"Thrilling," I said.
*
The road to Cristfall Barony was, in the objective, measurable sense, uneventful.
In the subjective, internal sense, I spent a significant portion of it engaged in a quiet conversation with the System, which was something I did when I was bored and trying to justify to myself that even lazy days were somehow productive.
Shadow Reach — the ability to extend my awareness through connected darkness, to feel what touched the shadows the way you'd feel something pressing against your skin. I'd been practicing that one. Quietly, mostly at night.
Blood Sense — a low-level awareness of living things nearby, felt as a faint warmth in my chest, like standing near a hearth. That one operated passively, without effort. I'd had it since I was twelve and noticed that I could always tell when someone was approaching me from behind.
The deeper abilities — the ones the system showed me the way a locked door shows you its keyhole — those were waiting.
I kept them waiting. But I was looking at the keyhole more often lately.
The valley opened up in the early afternoon, and Cristfall Barony appeared — a modest holding of stone walls and practical towers, farmland spreading around it like a skirt, the barony house itself visible above the walls, a square-shouldered building with the look of something that had been built to last rather than to impress.
The gates opened. The retinue rolled through. There was a formal meeting in the courtyard — the baron, a heavy-set man with a welcoming expression and the handshake of someone who squeezed too hard as a habit — and the lady descended from her carriage with that composed ease of hers, and greetings were exchanged in the formal language of minor nobility that I observed from the perimeter with my hands behind my back and my eyes moving across rooflines and windows in the way Halvur had told me to.
And then — as these things happened — Lady Mireva was briefly apart from her attendants, crossing the courtyard toward the main house entrance, and the angle of her path brought her within ten feet of where I was standing.
She slowed. Not stopped — slowed, for just two steps, her dark eyes cutting sideways to me with that same clean, brief precision as the rest stop.
"You're the young one," she said. It wasn't unkind, simply observational.
"Class V," I confirmed.
"Trailing position."
The corner of her mouth moved, just slightly. The faint, private amusement I'd imagined from a distance turned out to be entirely real up close, a small and contained thing, like a candle flame behind glass.
"Try not to look so bored," she said.
"It's unbecoming of a guard."
"I'll work on it, my lady."
She walked on. The moment closed behind her like water over a stone.
I stared at the space where she'd been for approximately two seconds longer than was professional.
Then I put my eyes back on the rooflines.
*
The return trip began in the late afternoon — the delivery made, the formalities observed, the contract's terms satisfied. Halvur led the escort back down the valley road with the efficient, unhurried pace of someone who'd done this kind of work enough times to know that rushing home never made you any safer.
I rode in trailing position.
The valley was beautiful in the evening light, I'll give it that — the hills going amber and rose on their western faces, the farmland stretching out in long parallel lines, a river somewhere beyond the tree line catching the last of the sun and throwing it back in silver flashes.
The kind of landscape that, in another life, someone would have taken photographs of.
Here it was just Tuesday. Or whatever passed for Tuesday in a world that named its days after the old sky gods.
We reached the city as the first stars were coming out.
The retinue peeled away toward the noble quarter. The escort dissolved at the guild yard — payment confirmed, contracts logged, the brief professional fellowship of a shared road concluding with handshakes and nods.
Halvur gave me a look on the way out that I chose to interpret as satisfactory, which was almost certainly more charitable than his actual assessment.
Eskar clapped me on the shoulder. "Not bad."
"I didn't do anything."
"Exactly," he said, with the tone of a man who had escorted more than a few young mercenaries who had done things when they should have done nothing.
He turned to go, then paused. "Tell Chelsea that I took you on a mission today, and tell her that I said hi."
I stared at his back as he walked away, raising my brows.
"I'm not your messenger, Eskar!" I called after him.
He raised one hand without turning around. Dismissive and unbothered, he was gone.
Someday, I'm gonna break his body and knock out all his teeth.