The job came two days later, through the usual channel.
A short message. Orin read it, folded it, and said: "We leave tomorrow morning."
They reached Sagehold by midday, walking on feet that knew the road. Geminia walked carefully, her side still a presence when she moved wrong.
Sagehold felt like a coiled spring.
Not in anything large or obvious — the buildings were the same, the streets the same width. It was the small things. Gate guards checking every cart twice. The market clearing out an hour before it usually would. Too many soldiers moving through the main streets, and moving like they were late for something.
Orin catalogued it silently as they came through the gate.
"Something's off," he said, low, walking beside Leo.
Leo had a coffee from a street vendor. He sipped it, looked around. "Yeah."
Behind them, Geminio had stopped to point out a young soldier standing stiff-backed in front of a building.
"Look at that," he whispered to Geminia. "He hasn't moved since we came through the gate."
"Stop staring at him."
"I'm not staring, I'm observing. There's a difference."
"His face looks like he's eaten something that disagreed with him."
"His whole life has disagreed with him."
Piscessa, at the back, said nothing. Her eyes were doing the work her mouth wasn't.
They found a spot under a stall canopy near the square to wait for their meeting. Across the street, two older men sat on a bench in front of a shop. Talking quietly, but the air was still enough to carry it.
"…west road's been closed three days. Soldiers not back yet."
"Word is the villages along the Rowanthar route—"
"Which villages?"
"Several. Nothing coming out."
A pause.
"Halfwolves?"
"What else is it ever."
Geminio had stopped whispering to Geminia. He looked at Orin. Orin didn't look back, but something in his jaw settled.
"Orin," Geminia said, quietly.
"I heard it," he said.
Their client was named Harven. Heavy-set, merchant-comfortable, but today his eyes were doing the work of someone who wasn't comfortable at all.
Back room of a small inn. Cheap candles. Old wood dust. Two guards stood behind him, and both of them would have been more convincing as guards if they hadn't looked more frightened than Harven.
"Rowanthar," Harven said. "Four carriages, cloth and spices. Three days via the western route, normally."
"The route that's gone quiet," Leo said.
Harven nodded. "Which is why I came to you specifically."
"How much?" Orin asked.
Harven named a number.
Geminio and Geminia exchanged a look so fast that only each other could have caught it.
"We leave before dawn," Orin said. "Be ready."
Nothing more than that. Harven looked like he wanted to say something else and decided against it.
Outside, Geminio waited until they were half a block away. "Did you hear that number."
"I heard it," Geminia said.
"I nearly—"
"I know."
"I'm going to buy—"
"Focus," Orin said.
"I am focused," Geminio said. "I'm focused on the number he said."
Their last night in Sagehold, they found a bar at the end of a back alley. Low ceilings, dim lighting, chairs that had seen better decades. Nobody in there was interested in who came in.
Leo drank. Piscessa was quiet in the way that meant she was thinking. Geminio and Geminia were subdued — still talking to each other, but low and not for anyone else's ears.
The four soldiers at the next table were the kind whose faces tell you they've been somewhere they're still partway living in. Their voices were down, but in a room this quiet it wasn't much of a barrier.
"Eryndel. You know it?"
"No. Where?"
"Between here and Rowanthar, back road, small. Maybe two hundred people."
"What about it?"
"Two weeks, no contact. Sent a unit three days ago." A pause. "They haven't reported back."
Silence for a moment at that table.
"General moving on it?"
"Day after tomorrow. But the western border—"
"Right. Can't split everyone."
Orin had his eyes on his glass. Hadn't touched it. Leo, without looking at him, said quietly:
"Village of two hundred. Two weeks."
Orin didn't say anything.
"Our route goes through that area."
"I know."
Leo picked up his drink and finished it slowly.
Geminia was looking at the table. Geminio put his hand over hers, briefly, without a word.
They went back to the inn early.
Dawn was barely a suggestion when they moved out.
Four carriages, eight horses, Harven's nervous guards riding alongside. Orin at the front. Leo flanking the lead carriage. Piscessa at the rear. Geminio and Geminia spread out on either side.
Two hours without incident.
Then the birdsong stopped.
It had been there — sparse morning birds — and then it wasn't. The trees on the right side thickened. The air had something in it that wasn't smell exactly, more like a pressure change.
"Geminio."
"I feel it."
"Hundred meters into the trees. Right side."
Geminio was gone without another word, moving through the undergrowth like he weighed nothing. Geminia stayed, eyes working the left side of the road. Orin watched the right.
Geminio came back a few minutes later. His face was different.
"Fresh tracks. Lots of them." He kept his voice down. "Halfwolf smell. Strong."
Orin looked ahead. Above the treeline, the sky was slightly wrong — not the clear grey of morning but something murkier, with a thin dark plume drifting above the trees in the distance.
Leo had already seen it. "Eryndel," he said.
Orin stood still for a moment.
Then he turned to the carriage. Harven was already holding the curtain back, face asking a question he didn't want answered.
"Stop here," Orin told the driver. "Harven. You don't move until you hear from us."
"What's happening—"
"Stay here." Orin turned.
His team was already ready. Piscessa with the rifle down from her shoulder. Geminia checking her blade straps, one hand quick at her side before returning to work. Leo rotating his neck once, settling.
They went into the trees.
Eryndel was visible from the last stand of trees before the open ground.
Wooden houses around a central well. A low fence on the south side, down in two places. Two buildings on the west end burning. And in the paths between the houses, in the square that should have been empty — halfwolves. Too many halfwolves.
Villagers were running. Some had found corners to hide in. Some hadn't found corners in time.
A child screaming near the well.
"Forty, maybe more," Piscessa said from behind a trunk, counting. "There are more on the other side I can't see."
"Five of us," Leo said.
"I know," Orin said. He looked at each of them. They looked back. Geminio and Geminia were already in their fight faces — everything else turned off, just the work left. Leo gave him one short nod. Piscessa had already moved slightly, already positioning.
"We go in," Orin said.
Geminio killed the first one before it could make a sound — closest halfwolf to the tree line, blade in the throat and out again before anyone nearby registered that something had happened.
Six seconds.
Piscessa was on the nearest rooftop. Leo was moving left, cutting off a halfwolf from a villager who'd been running out of road. Geminia had two small children from behind a barrel and was moving them into an empty house, fast and quiet, door locked behind them.
Then it broke open.
The pack was hungry and disorganized, which made them hard to predict and therefore more dangerous than a trained unit would have been. They came from everywhere.
Orin drove through the center of it. First cut, second cut, step, turn, the claws that nearly caught his shoulder catching air instead, third cut — he didn't stop moving, couldn't afford to, keep moving or become a target.
Geminio was sparks — nothing to track, just sudden and gone. He never stood still long enough to be dealt with cleanly. By the time the halfwolf turned to where he'd been, he was somewhere else.
Geminia took the flanks and the gaps, longer blade claiming territory, closing off the angles that would have let things through. Her side flared once when she turned too fast, but she didn't stop.
Leo was a wall. He didn't look like much in a fight — no elegance, nothing to watch — but he was exactly where things needed to not go, and when his shield moved something in a direction, it stayed moved.
Piscessa from the roof worked like a traffic director, never quite killing, just making things go where the others needed them to go. Each shot broke a momentum, bought a second, opened a gap.
Ten minutes in, still manageable. Twenty, the weight of it starting to accumulate. Thirty — Leo had a cut on his arm that was slowing his shield side. Geminia had blood on her face from something that had come too close to her eye. Geminio had jammed a blade into a timber beam at some point and hadn't had time to work it free.
Piscessa, from the roof, said: "Orin. East treeline."
But it wasn't halfwolves.
A trumpet call split the morning — one long, two short — and then the soldiers came at a run, two columns, blue and silver of Sagehold, pouring in from the east side of the village. On horseback at their front, a man with grey hair and a sword already drawn and the face of someone who had done this before.
The halfwolves, for the first time that morning, found themselves caught between two forces. It changed everything.
Fifteen minutes later the sounds had dropped off. Twelve minutes after that, the last one was over.
Then quiet.
The smoke was still rising from the two burned houses. Villagers came slowly out from where they'd been — behind doors, under carts, inside wells — and looked at what was left of things.
Eclipse Blood stood in the square.
Leo was tying off his arm with cloth torn from his coat. Geminia touched the side of her face carefully, feeling the wound, then pressed her side for the first time since the fight started, breathing in slowly. Still bruised. Not broken. She'd take it. Geminio had gotten his second blade back and was turning it over in his hands, checking it.
Orin stood and looked at the square.
His eyes moved over the burned houses, the broken fence, the people who were crying and the people who were too shaken to cry yet.
Then they stopped at the well.
A small child was sitting at the well's edge. A woman — mother, the way she was holding on — had her face buried in the child's hair. The woman was crying without sound. The child had both arms wrapped around her as tightly as they could go, holding on, not letting go.
Orin looked at them and something passed across his face that didn't have a clean name. Then he looked away.
The officer from horseback was already dismounting. He moved like someone who had climbed down from a horse after a battle too many times — efficiently, without ceremony. He handed off the reins and walked directly toward them. Scarred chin. Hard face. The kind of hard that gets made over years, not born with.
"General Revan," said one of his soldiers.
Revan stopped in front of Orin. He looked at Eclipse Blood — not quickly, not dismissively, the way you look at something you're actually trying to assess.
"You held them before we got here," he said.
"We were passing through," Orin said.
Revan looked at him for a moment. "That's a convenient way to be passing through." Something shifted at the edge of his expression. Not quite a smile. "Casualties?"
"Still counting," Orin said.
"So are we. But there are people alive in this village who would not be if you hadn't—" He stopped. Looked at the square. "Well."
"How many?" Leo asked.
"Fewer than it should have been." Revan looked at Leo. "Because of your people."
Orin had already turned to his team. Leo's bandaging was done, expression back to baseline. Geminia's eyes were steadier. Geminio was ready.
"We're going," Orin said.
They started walking.
Behind them, Revan watched them go. Beside him, a young soldier said, quietly: "General. Who are they?"
Revan kept watching the trees where they'd disappeared. "You ever hear rumors about a hunting outfit? Halfwolf specialists, no crest, no name most people know?"
The soldier's expression changed.
"Seems like it," Revan said. He turned back to the square and started working.
Harven was where they'd left him. Pale, not fled.
He watched them coming back with an expression that was mostly relief and partly not knowing what to do with himself.
"It's clear," Orin said as he passed. "We move."
Harven opened his mouth. Closed it. Then, very quietly: "Thank you."
Orin kept walking.
The convoy moved. Wheels on stone. Horses settling back into their rhythm.
Geminia walked beside her brother, both of them quiet for a while.
"When Orin looked at that child," she said eventually, low enough that it was only for Geminio. "At the well."
Geminio nodded slowly. "I saw it."
"What do you think—"
"I don't know." He glanced at Orin's back ahead of them. "I really don't know."
They left it there.
The smoke from Eryndel thinned into the sky behind them. Orin walked. The road was still long.