Margaret had a bowl in her hand and no intention of speaking to anyone.

  After a day spent combing the forum and coordinating with her scant agents, her hours vanished as the Landing swelled around her.

  The square buzzed with end-of-day noise—armor unstrapped, benches dragged out, voices rising over rations. Steam drifted low as a line snaked from the bathhouse across the packed earth.

  She aimed for the outer seating where the light faded early, allowing her to eat in peace. She could have eaten at the keep, but preferred being here—measuring the place while pretending not to.

  Something clattered behind her.

  A bucket striking a stone, rolling once, then caught. The kind of sound that made three people glance and forget it existed.

  Margaret turned because everyone else had.

  A recruit was righting the large bucket, red-faced under the attention, with two children laughing at him.

  Beyond them, in the space between two halls, Hale stood still.

  He was speaking to one of Caldwell’s clerks, head bent slightly, one hand resting on the pommel of his sword as if he had nowhere else to be.

  Except that Captain Hale did not stand in walkways. Their eyes didn’t meet, and they didn’t need to.

  He shifted his weight the way he did when he had found what he was looking for, and she knew the game was on. Margaret turned back at once and kept walking.

  “Not this time,” she muttered.

  Irritation sharpened her; fatigue evaporated. The square transformed from a corridor into terrain.

  She fed mana into the stealth perk she'd earned doing just this, feeling a familiar warmth ripple through her body. Each use demanded a price, a subtle but noticeable drain on her mana, reminding her of the balance magic required.

  She walked purposefully toward the glassmaker’s awning, as if she’d just remembered an unfinished task. She paused, picked up one of the thick green bottles from the cooling rack, and peered through its warped side, scanning the lane behind her for any sign of pursuit.

  Hale was gone. Of course he was.

  She set the bottle down. She fell in beside a pair of laborers carrying a crate, matching their pace for a dozen steps before slipping away into the fringe of the training ground. A century was breaking formation. Legionaries laughed as they came off the line while Raul’s voice drove the next correction into the unlucky few who had lingered.

  There were bodies, noise, and dust. It was perfect.

  She moved through them, spiked mana into the perk, grabbed a cloak by the water barrels, and took a bowl from the cookfire stack without slowing.

  Then she became someone else.

  Her shoulders lowered, and her head dipped. Her gait shortened with a faint hitch in her step.

  She reached the benches set beside the supply crates and sat, pressing her back against the wood. She angled her body to give herself a good view of all approaches, careful not to seem like she was watching anyone in particular.

  Left — the bathhouse door, steam rolling out as a group of adventurers stumbled into the open air, hair wet, skin flushed, loud with the careless relief of people who had survived something.

  Right — a group of Carter’s guards for the Lord, eating in silence.

  Center lane — clear, aside from a cluster of crafters gathered around a broad-shouldered man with a heavy beard and a German accent she had heard somewhere before.

  Margaret took a mouthful of stew and let herself breathe. She didn’t see Hale anywhere, and that was worrying.

  “You were better than that in Tunisia, Maggie.”

  The bench dipped.

  Hale sat beside her, already eating, bowl in one hand like any other officer grabbing food between duties. Dust clung to his armor. He hadn’t removed his sword.

  Margaret finished the bite she was chewing before she turned.

  “You dropped a bucket,” she said.

  “A recruit dropped a bucket,” Hale corrected. “I was being helpful. And pausing for you.”

  “You used to give me three streets.”

  “You walked straight through a noise break,” he replied mildly, turning to look at her. “You always check the source. And we don’t have three streets here.”

  She pulled the edge of the borrowed cloak tighter around her shoulders.

  “You’re insufferable.”

  “You crossed the square twice to avoid being where you were going,” he said. “You know I’ll always find you.”

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  She rolled her eyes, shooting him a heated look that meant stop, and knowing he would take it the wrong way on purpose.

  Hale set his bowl down between his boots and nodded toward the bathhouse.

  Steam billowed as the doors swung open again. Vera walked out with the others, hair damp, a fresh bruise staining her jaw, smiling at something one of the Thornwalkers said. They looked like survivors of a grim task rediscovering comfort.

  “All of them are back,” Hale said. “They’re cleaning up before they report.”

  Margaret watched them for a moment, measuring their movement, the looseness in their shoulders.

  “They’re all alive. That was a bad job to be sent on.”

  “Yep,” Hale grunted.

  “And you wanted to be there for the report?”

  “I do. I’ve heard a lot about this team. Everyone wants them for a job — even Caldwell, for some reason — and I’m hoping to get a word in before you or Lord Harold sends them off again.”

  She looked at him properly now.

  “You could have just asked.”

  He turned fully toward her and leaned in, his lips brushing past her ear.

  “This was more fun.”

  “You’re incorrigible. I don’t know why I keep you around,” she said while slapping his armoured shoulder.

  Around them, the square rolled on — bowls clattering, someone calling for more firewood, the bathhouse doors opening and closing in bursts of steam and noise.

  “Tunisia,” she said after a moment, eyes still on the bathhouse, “you stepped on the loose tile outside the service entrance on purpose.”

  “You moved that sign to block the camera angle,” he replied.

  “You noticed,” she murmured back.

  “You wanted me to,” Hale murmured back with a smile.

  A faint, unwilling smile touched her mouth and vanished.

  “We were younger.”

  “You cared less about being seen,” Hale said.

  “That was before being seen could change what happens to everyone in a room,” she answered.

  He picked up his bowl and stood.

  “This isn’t Earth, Maggie. We don’t have to worry the way we used to,” he said. “Come on. If we’re going to watch Harold take this, we should be there before the runners start coming for us.”

  He turned and walked toward the keep without waiting for her.

  Margaret sat for two more breaths, then dropped the borrowed cloak on the bench.

  She rose and went after him, the corner of her mouth still betraying her.

  ?

  Harold dragged one stack of reports across the table to make room for another and knocked his empty cup into the map for the third time.

  He caught it before it tipped fully, left the smear of cold coffee where it had landed, and kept reading.

  It was a Token dispute. Two weavers refused to be reassigned after a loom failed. One of them had broken it but claimed it was an accident. They had brought another woman in to replace her, but the first lady had better perks.

  He flipped the page, reached for the next, then pulled the first one back because he couldn’t remember a single name on it.

  “Unbelievable,” he muttered.

  The table was too small now. Once a lord’s statement piece, now just another surface, losing the battle. The shelves overflowed. Caldwell’s ledgers were stacked along one edge in neat columns that Harold kept disturbing. Patrol logs bled into supply tallies, and a map of the river villages was half-buried under labor assignments.

  He shoved the token dispute into a pile that meant later, immediately doubted the decision, and dragged it back.

  Next report.

  Dalen’s Hold. Resin quantities finally matched what he had been asking for. It was used for many things. He marked the bottom with a hard charcoal line and then shoved it into the Caldwell stack with more force than necessary. The stack reacted like a paper avalanche, cascading across the table and losing shape in a chaotic spread.

  Harold leaned forward, bracing both hands against the wood, and stared at the mess he had just made.

  Another seal broke under his thumb.

  Judge Menendez requested expanded court hours. I cannot keep up alone, translated into a dozen lines of formal language. People were getting restless as more comforts returned, but there was so much more to do.

  “I know,” Harold said to the paper, setting it aside with more care than the others.

  Margaret’s report on various threads on the forum; she thought he should read it. He snorted and reached for his cup again, finding it empty for the fourth time.

  He pushed back from the table, stood, and crossed to the window in three restless strides. The movement cracked something in his shoulders.

  Below, the square was settling into the evening. The lines were at the cook stations, and training was breaking down into loose clusters.

  He moved to head back to the desk and stopped, as movement in the square below caught his eye — a cluster breaking away from the bathhouse, walking with the loose, deliberate pace of people who had a final errand to do and wanted to avoid it.

  Bootsteps approached behind him — two familiar sets approached as they talked on the way to his office.

  “Tell me it’s good news,” he said exasperatedly, still looking out over the Landing.

  Hale’s answer came as a low grunt. “Haven’t heard yet. Came up to hear it with you.”

  Harold turned as Hale entered, standing just inside the doorway, dust still on his boots and an empty bowl dangling from his hand as if he'd forgotten it was there. Margaret slipped past, brushing Hale’s shoulder lightly as she crossed to the side table.

  The kettle was where it always was. She lifted it, frowned at the weight, and carried it to the small brazier in the corner. The coals there had burned down to a dull red.

  “You’ve been in here all day,” she said, crouching to stir them back to life.

  “Yes, I have, always something to do,” Harold replied tiredly.

  She fed in two thin sticks from the woodbox, set the kettle over the growing heat, and only then looked at the table.

  The spread of reports. The broken stacks. The charcoal smears across the map.

  One brow lifted.

  “Productive?” she asked.

  Harold pulled out the chair and sat again, dragging one of the collapsed piles back into something resembling order.

  “Weavers won’t rotate. Menendez needs another judge. Dalen finally understands how much resin we use.”

  Hale stepped in fully and nudged the door shut with his heel, leaning his shoulder against the frame instead of taking a chair.

  “Should get out more,” he said.

  Harold snorted despite himself. Margaret reached for a third cup without asking.

  Steam began to whisper from the kettle.

  “Centurion Ayen is pushing patrols out,” Harold said, tapping a report with one finger. “Towards her western treeline.”

  “She's right to,” Hale replied. “The goblins she saw three days ago were probing.”

  Margaret set the cups out in their usual places — Harold’s within reach of his right hand, Hale’s left of the table where he preferred to stand rather than sit. She moved through the room as if she belonged to it, adjusting nothing, changing everything.

  “All of them are back,” she said. Harold’s gaze flicked to her.

  The kettle began to rattle softly.

  Margaret poured, the sound of the water filling the cups cutting through the quiet in the room.

  “Vera was smiling,” she said, setting Harold’s cup beside the map he had been slowly destroying. “So whatever they were sent to do, they finished it.”

  Harold wrapped his hand around the tea without drinking it.

  “I saw them come out of the baths,” he said.

  “If they went to the baths first,” Hale answered. “They weren’t in a hurry to explain themselves.”

  “That,” Margaret said, finally taking her own cup, “or they were told to clean up before standing in front of you.”

  Harold leaned back slightly in the chair, the frustration from the reports settling into something tighter and more focused.

  “I’m sure they’re headed up,” he said.

  Hale pushed off the wall at that, setting his empty bowl on the corner of the table without looking at it.

  “Good,” he replied. “I’ve heard a lot about this team. Vera did well on the campaign but never really talked to her.”