# Chapter Nine: The Return

The walk back to Drenwick took longer than it should have.

Not because of the distance — two hours south, two hours north, simple arithmetic. But my legs had opinions about the arithmetic, and those opinions were increasingly negative. The neck wound had sealed cleanly under Carter's field kit, but the skin pulled with every step, a small insistent reminder that something with six legs and crystalline teeth had tried to open my throat twelve hours ago. The verdenshade sat heavy in Carter's pack, six clusters wrapped in oilcloth, and every time the pack shifted I felt the faint hum of concentrated magical residue against my spine.

The bracelet was worse.

Not painful. Not even uncomfortable. Just — present. A steady, patient draw against reserves that had nowhere left to go. I'd estimated fifteen percent when I left the Barrows. That number had not improved. If anything, it was lower now, the bracelet sipping from a well that was already showing mud at the bottom.

(*Twelve percent. Maybe eleven. Stop counting.*)

Drenwick materialized in stages — first the canal bridge, then the warehouse roofs, then the smell. Fish, coal smoke, canal water, and underneath it all, the lived-in sourness of a city that had been awake for hours while I'd been stumbling through empty countryside like someone who'd forgotten how doors worked. Saturday midday traffic filled the streets: dock crews on half-shifts, market sellers hawking end-of-morning bargains, a cluster of students from the academy arguing about something I was too tired to eavesdrop on.

I turned toward the guild quarter boundary. Carter first. I'd told him I'd come back after, and I meant it. The guild was two blocks past his shop — efficiency mattered when your legs were voting to stop.

* * *

Carterson's Supplies occupied the same unremarkable storefront it always had — narrow entrance, hand-lettered sign, a quality of organized chaos visible through the front window that told you the owner knew where everything was even if you didn't. The bell above the door rang when I pushed through, and the front counter was empty.

Sounds from the back. Metal on stone, the faint whisper of inscription work — a stylus against treated steel, precise and repetitive.

"Carter?"

The sounds stopped. A chair scraped. Carter appeared in the doorway to the back room, wiping his hands on a cloth that had given up on cleanliness several projects ago. His eyes moved across me in the same quick, categorizing sweep he'd given me on my first visit — except this time the categories were different. Not *what does this customer need*. More like *damage assessment*.

"Saturday midday," he said.

"Saturday midday," I confirmed.

"Job was Friday night."

"It got… complicated."

He looked at the neck wound — sealed, clean, but visible above my collar where the field kit's binding had pulled the skin tight and shiny. He looked at my hands, which were steady enough if you didn't watch them too long. He looked at my eyes, which I imagine told him most of what he needed to know.

"Gear held up?" he asked.

"Everything performed. The rope was the right weight, the ward-resistance compound worked exactly as described, and the medical kit sealed a crawler wound in under a minute."

Carter nodded. Professional satisfaction, nothing more. He didn't ask about the wound itself — how I'd gotten it, how close it had been. He'd sold me the kit to handle exactly this situation, and the kit had handled it. That was the relevant data.

"Get that neck looked at properly when you can," he said. "The field seal's good for a few days, but you'll want it checked." He paused, eyes moving to the pack on my shoulders and back. "Come back when you've slept. I've got a project I want a second pair of eyes on."

It was a professional invitation. It was also, underneath the professionalism, something else — the kind of thing a man said when he wanted to know you'd come back alive without admitting that was the question.

"I will."

I left through the front, the bell chiming behind me. Two blocks to 14 Greystone Lane.

* * *

I took the bracelet off before I reached the guild's front door.

The absence hit immediately — Flaw Sight dimmed, the world losing a layer of resolution I'd only had for half a day. The ambient magical noise of the arcane district, which had been rendering in sharp detail, softened to its usual background haze. I slipped the bracelet into my jacket's inner pocket, where it sat against my ribs like a secret with weight.

(*Don't declare it. Don't mention the second floor. The brief said verdenshade. You retrieved verdenshade. Everything else is personal business.*)

The receptionist at 14 Greystone Lane was as politely immovable as ever. She took my name, noted the job number — NS-7714 — and directed me to the second door on the left. Not the interview room from my first visit. A different room, smaller. One desk, two chairs.

One occupant.

He stood when I entered, which was either courtesy or positioning. Medium height, lean build, arms no longer crossed but carrying the same energy of contained assessment. The man who'd sat on the interview panel with nothing in front of him and his arms folded, watching for what others missed. The most dangerous person in that room, and I'd known it the moment I'd walked in.

"Pleasure to see you again, Varrant." His voice was even, unhurried. "We never exchanged formalities. I'm known as Ledger."

I set Carter's pack on the desk between us. "Ledger. That sounds more like a title than a name."

"Guild convention. Everyone uses an alias when possible — anonymous is safer for everyone. Members, clients, the guild itself." He gestured to the chair opposite. "You should think about choosing one."

I sat. The chair was more comfortable than the interview room's, which meant this was where real business happened. The interview room was theater. This was the office.

Ledger opened the pack with practiced hands, unwrapping the oilcloth to reveal the six verdenshade clusters. He examined them without touching — eyes moving across the root systems, the dark moss-like rosettes, the faint residual glow of concentrated magical energy.

"Intact root systems," he said. "All six. Careful extraction — methodical, not rushed." He looked up. "You took your time down there."

It wasn't a question, but it wanted an answer. I gave it the minimum. "The environment required care. Verdenshade is fragile if you force the harvest."

"Mm." Ledger rewrapped the clusters. "And the environment itself? The brief mentioned potential hostiles — resonance crawlers, last confirmed three years ago."

"I encountered three. They're dead."

"How?"

(*He knows. He already knows. The Barrows have crawlers, you're not built for hand-to-hand with crystalline parasites, and you're sitting here with a sealed neck wound and the particular exhaustion of someone who burned through their reserves. He's not asking how. He's asking if you'll tell him.*)

"Standard containment approach," I said. "Fire workings, primarily. The crawlers hunt in packs — I separated them and dealt with them individually."

"Fire workings." Ledger's expression didn't change. "Your file lists basic defensive training. Standard curriculum from Brannick's."

"It is standard curriculum."

"Most practitioners with standard defensive training don't solo three resonance crawlers in a confined underground environment and walk out with nothing worse than a neck wound."

"Most practitioners don't take Tier One field retrieval jobs in the Greymarch Barrows."

Something moved behind Ledger's eyes. Not a smile — the architecture of one, dismantled before it reached the surface. He let the silence sit for three seconds, which was two seconds longer than comfortable.

"You look like you need thornwell root for the migraine residue," he said, shifting registers so smoothly I almost didn't catch it. "And feverwort for the muscle fatigue. Both available at any decent herbalist, though I imagine you already have a supply."

That landed wrong and he knew it. Thornwell root and feverwort — both in Gavren's farewell parcel. Either the guild knew about the parcel, or Ledger was simply reading my symptoms with the same clinical precision I used on magical workings. The first option meant guild intelligence reached into farewell gifts from former employers. The second meant Ledger could diagnose my specific herb needs by looking at me.

I genuinely didn't know which was worse.

The discomfort sat in a place I wasn't used to feeling it. I read people for a living — motivations, pressure points, the gap between what they said and what they meant. Being on the receiving end of that same process, executed with my own level of precision, was like watching someone pick a lock you'd built. Not threatening, exactly. Worse than threatening. It meant there was someone in the room who saw me the way I saw everyone else, and the view from the other side of that lens was deeply, specifically uncomfortable.

"I'll manage," I said.

"I'm sure you will." Ledger opened a drawer and produced a leather pouch. "Forty silvers, job rate for NS-7714. Minus the standard twenty percent guild commission." He set the pouch on the desk. "Thirty-two silvers."

(*Forty minus eight is thirty-two. Not forty. Thirty-two. You read the contract. You signed the contract. You did not do the math on the contract. Read the contract next time. Read the — thirty-two. Not forty. Thirty-two.*)

The number settled in my chest like a stone. I'd been carrying forty silvers in my head since the job brief arrived — forty silvers that would cover the rent for months and leave enough for proper meals. Thirty-two still covered rent. With room to breathe. The house dream stayed where it was — distant — but for the first time the distance felt measurable.

I picked up the pouch without counting it. Ledger watched me not count it, and I watched him watch me, and we both understood that the act of not counting was itself a data point — either trust or exhaustion, and Ledger would file both possibilities without asking which.

"First job complete," he said. "Competently executed, from all evidence. The guild is satisfied with the delivery." A pause. "Is there anything else to report from the Barrows? Anything beyond the scope of the brief?"

(*The second floor. The death ward. The bracelet in your pocket. The pre-Compact artifact you don't understand, claimed from behind a ward that no one was supposed to breach, in a sealed repository that the guild may or may not know the full extent of. Is there anything else to report.*)

"The first floor was as described in the brief," I said. "Verdenshade in the lower terminus chambers, resonance crawlers as anticipated. The entrance ward was degraded but functional — I've left it intact."

Ledger held my gaze for exactly two seconds. Then he nodded.

"Think about that alias," he said. "You'll want one before the next engagement."

I left 14 Greystone Lane with thirty-two silvers and the distinct sensation of having survived two dangerous encounters in the Barrows and a third one at a desk.

* * *

The walk home took the last of what I had.

Not metaphorically — the reserves were scraping bottom, the bracelet's steady draw pulling from a well that had gone dry sometime between the guild's front door and the canal bridge. My legs moved because legs move, because the body is a mechanical thing that continues its last instruction until something interrupts the sequence. The noise had gone quiet. Not the good quiet, the one Mere's presence created — the bad quiet, the one that meant the engine had run out of fuel and was coasting on momentum. The migraine I'd been pretending wasn't there stopped pretending back somewhere around the canal bridge — Ledger naming it had apparently given it permission to arrive. How he'd known was a problem for a version of me that had the energy to care.

(*Almost home. Four blocks. Three. The shack is not a home. It's a box with a door. Two blocks.*)

The shack was exactly as I'd left it — small, cramped, and containing a bed that I had never in my life been more grateful to own. I dropped Carter's pack by the door, fumbled the thirty-two silvers into the lockbox under the floorboard, and sat on the bed to pull off my boots.

The bracelet caught the light from the window. I'd put it back on after leaving the guild — the absence had felt wrong, like removing a lens you'd been seeing through and finding the world blurry without it. In the dim afternoon light that filtered through the shack's single window, the stone was different.

Not black. Not the pure, light-absorbing jet-dark it had been in the Barrows' chamber.

Very dark red. Just barely. The kind of color shift you'd miss if you weren't looking for it, or if you hadn't spent ten minutes with your face six inches from the thing while your Flaw Sight mapped its architecture. And warmer — not the ambient warmth it had carried in the Barrows, but something with a pulse to it, a faint rhythmic fluctuation in the stone's temperature that hadn't been there before. The reservoir — the second function, the one that trickle-charged from the wearer's natural recovery — was taking in energy. Color and heat, both shifting. Two data points where there had been none. Slowly. Patiently.

I should have analyzed it. Mapped the charge rate, estimated the reservoir capacity, studied the pre-Compact notation I couldn't fully read. I should have done a lot of things.

I was asleep before my head reached the pillow.
