The clinking of glasses and low laughter mixed with the heavy smell of alcohol in a bar on the edge of town. Dim lamps hung from the ceiling, their light pooling on worn wooden floorboards. A handful of men and women sat talking about their work, but the conversation that made the back of the neck prickle was the one about Eclipse Blood.
"You hear about the forest road south of Keln?" asked a middle-aged man, leaning over his drink.
His friend shrugged. "Dead halfwolves, right? Third time this month."
"Ten of them. Just left there. No tracks, no nothing." He glanced toward the window, then back. "People are saying it's Eclipse Blood."
"Eclipse Blood. The hunters?"
"More than hunters." He dropped his voice. "Shadow outfit. Their name turns up wherever halfwolves turn up dead. And the man running it — Orin Nymphaea. You know that name?"
The friend shook his head.
"Lira Village. Nine years ago. Only survivor of that whole attack. Twelve years old." He picked up his glass, turned it. "People say whatever he was before that night, he isn't anymore. Cold. Fast. Doesn't negotiate, doesn't explain, doesn't leave a body alive that's trying to kill him."
"Including people?"
The first man didn't answer that. Which was its own kind of answer.
The bar noise kept going around them, but in a slightly different key now. People laughed. People drank. But nobody sat with their back to the window.
Meanwhile, in Eclipse Blood's underground headquarters, the celebration had reached the point where everyone was talking over everyone else.
Empty glasses covered the tables. The remains of dinner hadn't been cleared yet, and nobody was in a hurry to clear them. Geminio was standing on his chair — actually standing on it — making his point with both hands.
"Twelve! Tell her, tell her — twelve individual halfwolves before Leo even showed up, right, Leo?"
Leo, seated across the table with his beard resting in his hand, looked at Geminio with the expression of a man waiting for something to end. "Mm."
"That means yes." Geminio pointed at Geminia. "That means yes."
"He said 'mm.'"
"His 'mm' means yes. I know his 'mm.'"
Geminia, who was already grinning, grabbed his arm and pulled him back down into his chair. "Sit down before you fall on someone."
"I'm fine, the chair is fine—" He sat anyway. "Twelve. Just putting that on the record."
"It's on the record."
"Good."
Leonard raised his glass in their direction. "Stars of Eclipse Blood," he said, deadpan.
Geminia pointed at him immediately. "See? Leo said it."
"I said it once."
"Leo said it."
In the middle of it all, Orin leaned against the far wall with his arms folded, watching. Not with discomfort — just with the expression of someone who had long ago accepted that this was what the room looked like when things were going well.
Leonard looked over at him. "Oi. There's a chair right here with your name on it."
"I'm fine."
"You look like a painting of someone being unhappy at a party."
Orin pushed off the wall and dragged a chair over. Sat down. "Happy?"
"Ecstatic." Leo refilled his own glass.
From Orin's right, Piscessa slid a drink across the table toward him without comment. He looked at it.
"We don't do this often," she said, before he could say whatever he was going to say.
"We could do it less."
"We could. But we don't."
He picked up the glass. She turned back to watching the room.
Across the table, Geminio was already halfway into a new story, Geminia cutting him off every third sentence to correct details. The plates were nearly empty and neither of them had stopped moving — hands reaching for food, elbows landing on the table, the kind of eating that happens when you're too happy to be fully concentrating on the food.
"Like they haven't eaten in a week," Piscessa murmured.
"Eating is the reward," Geminia said without looking over.
"For killing twelve halfwolves," Geminio added.
Leo exhaled through his nose. "Eleven."
Geminio went very still. "What."
"One was already down when you got there. The old man with the cart clipped it with an axle."
"That—" Geminio turned to Geminia. "That doesn't count."
"He said eleven."
"Leo—"
"Eleven," Leo said, and went back to his drink.
Geminio spent the next ten minutes constructing an argument. Geminia sided against him for the entertainment value. Orin sat and drank slowly and didn't say anything, and somewhere in the noise he stopped thinking about the night's work and just let the sound of it fill the room for a while.
Later, when the laughter had started to thin out, Leonard leaned over.
"Payment from the Dorven job come through?"
Orin nodded. "This morning."
"Good." Leo set his glass down. "He always pays late."
"He paid."
"That's what I said."
One by one, the room went quiet. Geminio folded his arms on the table and put his head down and was asleep in about thirty seconds. Geminia watched him, snorted softly, and then did roughly the same thing. Leo stood and stretched with a crack that seemed to originate somewhere in his spine, looked around the room once, and said "right" to no one in particular before finding his corner.
Orin stayed up a little longer. He watched the small fire in the center of the room until the last of it was just embers, then leaned his head back against the wall.
"Quiet finally," he said.
Piscessa, who hadn't moved from her chair, glanced at him. "You prefer it."
"I prefer both." He closed his eyes. "In the right order."
She didn't say anything to that. But she didn't move either.
The underground headquarters settled into its nighttime sounds — the drip of water through the tunnel walls, the low creak of old wood, the slow breathing of sleeping people.
Orin woke first.
The room was dark except for the dying glow of the embers. He sat up, found his sword where he'd left it, and started working the blade with a cloth out of habit more than necessity. His hands knew the motion. He didn't have to think about it.
The footsteps that came across the room were light enough that they wouldn't have woken anyone else.
Piscessa dropped into the chair across from him. Her hair was slightly askew and she'd wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, but her eyes were already clear.
Neither of them said anything for a while. The cloth moved across the blade. The embers shifted.
"You've been awake a while," she said eventually.
"A bit."
She watched the blade for a moment. "Something keeping you up?"
Orin didn't answer immediately. His hands slowed. He was quiet long enough that she started to look elsewhere, and then he said, "I keep thinking about the fortress."
Piscessa went still.
"Lira Village," he said. "When we ran. The fortress wouldn't open the gate." He turned the blade slightly, watching the faint light catch it. "Three minutes, they said. It would have taken three minutes. And they decided it wasn't worth it."
"I know," she said quietly.
"People always frame it like it was reasonable. Pragmatic. They protected a lot of people inside." He put the cloth down. "And maybe that's true. But my father is dead because of that decision. My mother. Elara." He paused. "Elara's father."
Piscessa didn't try to reframe it or soften it. She just let it sit.
"I know it wasn't simple," Orin went on. "I know it was a choice between bad and worse and they picked the one that saved the most people. I understand the logic." He looked at the blade. "I still can't forgive it. I've tried. I can't."
"You don't have to."
"People think I should."
"People think a lot of things." She leaned back in her chair. "You're still here. Still fighting. That means something, even if it doesn't feel like it."
"It doesn't feel like anything," he said. "It just feels like the alternative is to stop, and stopping would mean all of it was for nothing."
Piscessa looked at him for a long moment. "That's a hard way to live."
"It's the way I live."
She nodded, slowly. "Then don't do it alone. That's all I'll say."
Orin looked at her. Then he picked up the cloth again and went back to the blade.
"That's more than I usually talk," he said.
"I know." She stood. "I'll be here if your head gets loud again."
She went back to her corner. Orin sheathed the sword, set it beside the chair, and closed his eyes.
The embers faded. From the tunnel, water dripped onto stone in its slow unvarying rhythm.
Morning came grey and quiet through the ceiling slits.
Leo woke the way he always did — one eye first, a long pause, then giving up. He worked his beard with one hand and sat there for a moment with the expression of a man making an inventory of what hurt.
"You been up long?" he asked, looking at Orin.
"A while."
Leo got up and stretched, which made a noise like a bag of old furniture. On the floor nearby, Geminio groaned and pulled his coat over his face. Leo looked at him, then at Geminia, then shook his head.
"A battlefield," he muttered. "Definitely."
He crossed to the supply corner and came back with two cups of water from the kettle. Set one in front of Orin without a word.
Orin took it.
They sat together as the grey light slowly strengthened through the slits in the ceiling, drinking water that tasted like nothing, waiting for the day to decide what it was going to be.