# Epilogue: The Category

Winter had found Drenwick the way winter always did — not arriving but accumulating, grey skies deepening into iron, the river fog thickening until the mornings tasted of cold metal and the evenings came early and stayed.

The new place was on Chandler's Row, at the border where the guild quarter's respectability began its gradual concession to the practical bustle of the trade streets. The smell of tallow drifted up from the chandler's workshop below when the wind came from the south. Larger bedroom, a small but functional kitchen with an adjacent dining area. Small sitting room, single bathroom because that's all required, and a workshop space, proper stone walls, a foundation that didn't shift when the river rose. The rent was manageable with two incomes and no pretension — more than the shack, less than comfortable, exactly right for two people who measured value in structural integrity rather than square footage.

Mere's books occupied the shelf by the window. Her moss preparations — the drying racks, the dampened cloths, the small ceramic containers labelled in her angular handwriting — had colonised the workshop corner with the systematic precision of an occupying force that had no intention of retreating. The house plans were on the wall. Revision ten. Her annotations had migrated from margins into the drawings themselves — pipe routing in blue, structural notes in black, a question mark beside the workshop's east wall that meant she'd identified a problem she hadn't solved yet and intended to.

Sniff had a corner. A folded blanket, a water bowl, and the territorial calm of a dog who had established dominion over his allocated space and saw no reason to contest anyone else's. He'd gotten heavier since Thresholds — Mere's doing, or mine, or the accumulated consequence of two people who expressed care through practical acts and occasionally feeding table scraps.

(*Morning. Deep winter. The light through the window is the colour of pewter and the floor is cold but the floor is stone, not boards, and the cold is the kind that says "proper building" instead of "shack built for someone who'd given up on insulation." Reserves: ninety-two percent. Bracelet: warm amber, full. Stone hasn't been dark in months. The reservoir cycles now like breathing — charge, discharge on the days the work demands it, recharge overnight. Autonomous, patient, settled. Like everything else.*)

The silence in the rooms was particular. Not empty — not the silence of a space designed for one person and occupied by exactly that many. This was the silence of a home that had two people's quiet in it. Mere's quiet was focused, purposeful, the absence of sound of her reading or preparing or solving something in her head. Mine was restless, layered, the noise running its background threads at the volume I'd learned to work with rather than against.

Between the two kinds of quiet, something liveable.

Mere had left for Thresholds before I was up. The cup beside the kettle was still warm.

She'd left Charlette's controlled orbit three months ago. Not dramatically — Mere didn't do dramatically. She'd informed her mother that she was moving out, had packed her belongings into two canvas bags and a crate of books, and had walked out of the house on Warden Street with the methodical efficiency of someone executing a plan she'd been refining for years. Charlette had not taken it well. The details of that conversation were Mere's, not mine, and she'd shared approximately four sentences about it, each one delivered with the clinical detachment of a woman describing something that had happened to her body rather than her heart.

Thresholds was still Charlette's. The deed was still the leash. Mere went to work every morning in a shop she'd built from inventory lists and client relationships and systematic curation, and every day the shop belonged to someone else, and every day Mere filed that fact in the category of problems with solutions that hadn't materialised yet.

That fight was coming. Just not today.

The kitchen in the rented place faced west.

Mere had noted this exactly once, on the day we'd signed the lease, in the tone she reserved for design flaws in other people's architecture. She hadn't mentioned it again. She didn't need to. The house plans on the wall — revision ten, east-facing kitchen, pilings not slab, reclaimed Henwick timber for the framing — said everything that needed saying about west-facing kitchens and the temporary nature of interim solutions.

* * *

The training yard behind the chandler's shop was Leon's suggestion and the chandler's grudging concession — a flagstone courtyard twenty feet square, walled on three sides, open to the alley on the fourth. The chandler charged us two coppers a day for the noise and the scorch marks and looked the other way when the flagstones cracked.

Leon was already there when I arrived. Sixth bell. Daily.

"Late," he said.

"On time."

"Late by my clock." He rolled his shoulders, stretched his fingers, produced a small, clean flame in his right palm that he let dance for a moment before extinguishing it. Warm-up. "Ready?"

The morning training had started two weeks after the Floundry cure, when the bracelet's stone had returned to full amber and my reserves had stabilised above ninety percent. Pragmatic motivation, not heroic training — the cure had nearly killed me at two percent, and guild work put me in environments where combat readiness was the difference between coming home and not coming home. Operational necessity. The rust from months of dormancy needed burning off, and the stamina that had limited me to eight to ten seconds of integrated combat in the Barrows needed expanding.

Leon was the ideal training partner for the same reasons he was the ideal riffing partner: he matched my speed, pushed past my comfort, and didn't waste time on encouragement when correction was what was needed.

The fire came easier now. Not the sluggish, reluctant whisper it had been in the shack before the Barrows — that fire had moved like it was filling out paperwork. This fire moved like it remembered what it was for. The ring focused it, the bracelet buffered the cost, and months of daily practice had rebuilt the muscle memory and stamina that years of dormancy had eroded.

(*Fire sequence: twelve seconds integrated. Up from eight to ten in the Barrows. The third-form transition — the over-rotation Leon identified in our first session — is gone. Corrected through repetition, not talent. Stamina window: two full sequences before degradation, three on a good day. Reserve cost per sequence: manageable. The eight-to-ten-second combat window from six months ago is expanding. Not through breakthrough. Through work.*)

We sparred. Leon's fire was what it had always been — brute-force, overwhelming, the philosophical opposite of my precision. The two approaches collided the way they always did, his volume against my targeting, his persistence against my efficiency. After fifteen minutes, we were both sweating despite the cold, and the flagstones had two new scorch marks and a hairline crack that the chandler would pretend not to notice.

Leon leaned against the courtyard wall, breathing hard. His face was flushed, his hair damp. He looked satisfied in the way that physical exertion satisfied people who spent too much of their lives in their heads.

"Someone asked about the Vethani Crypts," he said.

The shift was casual. Conversational. The tone didn't change, which meant the content was heavier than the delivery suggested.

"Asked how?"

"Inquiries. Through a broker I've used before. Someone wants to know about pre-Compact artifacts from the recovery — specifically, what was recovered, what was sold, and whether the buyer of the Mallory focusing crystal has been in contact." Leon took a drink of water from the skin he'd brought. "People ask."

(*People ask. And Leon's response is the response of a man who sold twelve hundred silvers' worth of pre-Compact crystal to an anonymous buyer and didn't ask who was buying. Because Leon's operating philosophy — the tomb-raiding philosophy, the big-score endgame — doesn't include provenance questions. He doesn't care who bought the crystal. He cares that the crystal paid twelve hundred silvers and the twelve hundred silvers bought the life he wanted. But someone asking questions about the buyer means the buyer did something with the crystal, or wants to do something, or attracted someone's attention by having it. And Leon's dismissal — "people ask" — is either genuine unconcern or the kind of unconcern you perform when the alternative is examining a decision you can't unmake.*)

"People ask," Leon repeated, when I didn't respond immediately. "It's the Crypts. Pre-Compact sites generate interest. Some academic, some commercial, some from people who collect things." He shrugged. "Not worried."

Filed. Not urgent. Present.

The noise processed it the way the noise processed everything — involuntarily, thoroughly, storing it in the architecture of observation that never quite shut off. Leon's careless sale. An anonymous buyer. Inquiries from brokers. The pattern of attention that follows when something valuable changes hands without documentation.

I didn't push. Leon wouldn't have responded to pushing, and the data was insufficient for conclusions. But the noise filed it, and the filing was its own kind of attention.

We did another fifteen minutes. The fire improved. The stamina held.

* * *

The case brief was on the table when I got home.

Not the table at the guild — the table at Chandler's Row, the one with the house plans and Mere's annotations and the overlap of two lives' worth of paperwork. Ledger had started delivering briefs to the home address three weeks ago, which was either a professional courtesy or an acknowledgment that the Locksmith's operating base had shifted, or both.

This one was different.

The cover sheet was guild standard — case number, classification, client reference, fee structure. But the classification wasn't Tier One. The fee wasn't forty silvers and expenses. The brief carried the weight of a case that came with expectations attached, the kind that Ledger delivered personally and that came with the unspoken understanding that refusal was possible but would be noted.

I sat down. Opened the brief. Read the first page.

(*The guild has noticed. Ledger said that, weeks ago, in the planning room with the Floundry completion fee on the table. The guild has noticed. And this is what noticing looks like — not a ceremony, not a promotion, not a formal reclassification. Just a case brief that assumes a different level of capability. A fee that assumes a different level of risk. And a problem that assumes a different kind of mind. The lattice has more visible flaws than it used to. Or I've gotten better at seeing them.*)

The bracelet's stone — Carter's focusing matrix, built from a principle I'd tossed off and he'd turned into precision engineering — pulsed warm amber against my wrist. Full. Rested. Ready.

The noise engaged.

Not the scattered, seventeen-thread chaos of the early months — the constant cataloguing of ward-work and foot traffic and architectural detail that had been my brain's default operating mode for as long as I'd been aware of having a brain. It had changed. Not quieter — the noise was never quiet. But purposeful. Like the difference between a river flooding and a river channelled. The same force, the same volume, the same relentless forward motion. The threads converging instead of scattering, each one feeding toward a centre that I was learning to guide rather than simply survive.

(*The case. The numbers. The training. The kitchen that faces east. The category that doesn't need a name. The chain that held. The chain holds.*)

I read the brief. The stone pulsed. The noise ran. Mere's books sat on the shelf and Sniff breathed in his corner and the house plans showed a kitchen that faced east in a house that didn't exist yet but was getting closer — revision by revision, piling by piling, the patient accumulation of a future built from numbers and plans and the quiet certainty of a woman who'd said *the kitchen should face east* and meant it as architecture, not sentiment.

Something like contentment. If contentment had sharper edges and kept one eye open and the noise running and a case brief in its hands that promised the world was more complicated than it looked and that the complications were, in the particular way that mattered to a mind built for finding flaws in things other people called unbreakable —

Worth the trouble.

I turned to page two.
