Chapter Sixteen
Avoiding the inn’s main room—although it sounded deserted at this late hour—Nocren went out through the back. He struck off down the road, his mind wandering as much as his feet. There was a briskness in the air now that the storm had abated. He’d hoped it would wake him up. Clear his head of the old doubts lingering at the edges.
A chill wind wrapped around him, offering nothing in the way of enlightenment. When he reached out, the soft glow of magic at his fingertips, the wind flurried away, recalcitrant as only the fucking wind could be. His annoyance came out as a puff of condensation. No use trying to get the wind to cooperate; he’d burn through magic for a scattering of images and even more confused impressions than he already had. Maybe other air mages could wrestle the element into submission, but Nocren could not.
My submission is a gift.
Calya. He’d thought the wind had meant for him to be wary of her, but then it kept throwing them together. Tempting him with the possibility of her. Never before had he met a woman whose acquaintance necessitated a set of fucking directions. Repeatedly, she threatened his staid, painstakingly curated life, yet every time he recognized her danger, he wanted to fall in.
Worse, hadn’t she been frank with him? All business, no heart. He’d identified her moral directive early on: ambitious. Reckless. Do not trust,—well, that was a sentiment shared. He couldn’t trust her. She’d confirmed it, by word and action. Snooping through his room. Through Avenor’s. Her quip of having a diviner on call.
He couldn’t trust himself with her. That last remark had been a joke, but the reaction on his part, it was a warning. He knew better than to ignore it.
But Nocren had known better than to do so many things when it came to Calya. She’d opened up enough with him to let a sliver of vulnerability see daylight. He wanted to do the same, to dare to hope that he’d found a kindred spirit. Conventional wisdom might have warned against diviners forming attachments, but there was nothing conventional about Calya.
The wind didn’t contradict him on that part.
Nocren comforted himself with those thoughts as he plodded toward the bakery side of An Honorable Pelf. A flicker of lamplight shone in the window on the upper floor, drawing him in.
The front door was locked, but unwilling to admit defeat, Nocren went around the back. It was curiosity driving him, he told himself, not a vague sense of unease at the thought of returning to the inn. Not Avenor’s smug words of always knowing where one stood with Calya and the wind’s whisper of Change spiraling through his head. He wouldn’t forsake the scant amount of peace he’d won for himself.
The back door was locked, too, but the shadow of figures sitting at a table above it was visible through the window. Froley noticed his presence, descending the stairs with something silvery glinting in their hand.
A knife, and they held it in a way that implied they possessed not only the knowledge but the will to use it.
“It’s me,” Nocren murmured when their face peeked through a curtain next to the door.
Froley’s hard stare didn’t waver, and for a long moment Nocren thought they’d refuse him entry. But then they stepped away. He heard a snippet of their voice calling up the stairs—“the Sentinel”—before the door creaked open.
“Out for a midnight stroll?” Froley closed and locked the door behind him.
“Something like that.” Nocren nodded toward the blade in their hand. “Expecting someone else?”
“Something like that.” Froley led the way back up the stairs. “I don’t believe you’ve met Magister Eren.”
A cloaked man sat beside Zhenya at the small table. He looked up, his eyes narrowing as he tried to place Nocren. Then he sat up, recognition dawning on his face.
“Not formally,” Nocren said.
“You. You and that Graelynd woman were spying on us.” Eren’s shoulders hunched, elbows coming to rest on the tabletop. His eyes met Nocren’s for less than a second before darting away.
The Rhellian was the picture of exhaustion, the lines around his eyes and mouth more pronounced than most men in their mid-fifties. His unshaven jaw had gone past the point of scruff and into beard territory, poorly maintained. Lack of sleep bruised his eyes, his pale hair limp and beginning to look greasy.
Yet, for all that the older man looked in desperate need of rest and hygiene, there was nothing strained about him. No peace, either, but a sense of subdued resignation. The Sylveren University robe was gone, replaced by a nondescript shirt, trousers, and brown cloak. A battered haversack rested on the floor next to his seat.
“Going somewhere?” Nocren asked.
Eren glanced at Froley, who sighed and waved their hand as if to say carry on.
“Away,” the Rhellian man said, his tone careful. “The project here is… There’s nothing more I can do.”
“For what?”
Eren shook his head, his palms coming up to press into his eyes.
“He’s going to find out,” Froley said.
Eren shook his head again, voice muffled by his hands. “Not before I’m away. We had a deal.”
