The slums and the residential quarters weren’t far apart. Two sides of the same coin—turn down the right alley and you’d walk from one into the other without noticing.
Sarg made his way into a comparatively clean street and knocked on the door of a tidy little house.
“Father. It’s Sak.”
The girl who opened the door couldn’t have been twenty yet. Her face brightened the moment she saw him.
“Oh! You came! You’re here for the baby, aren’t you? Come in and wait—Father! A visitor’s here!”
She ushered Sarg inside.
An old man sat in an armchair before the parlour hearth. There was a saying that at a certain age, a person’s face becomes a record of the life they’ve lived—and so it was with him. His back was bent and his hair had gone fully white, but his eyes were clear and kind.
“Father. It’s me.”
“You’ve come. I’ve been waiting. Sit down, child.”
Sarg took the seat across from him, and the girl brought out watered wine and biscuits. He shook his head.
“I won’t be long. I’m fine.”
“Have a little, at least. It’s wine from the monastery. The good kind.”
The old priest gave a conspiratorial wink as he pressed the offer, and Sarg lifted the cup and made a show of taking a sip.
The priest smiled with the patient warmth of someone who had learned long ago that kindness didn’t need to be hurried. He studied the young man across from him.
“You have a cut on your face.”
Sarg touched his cheek. The bruise from where he’d been beaten hadn’t fully healed. The priest asked, gently concerned.
“My boy. How long has it been since your last confession?”
“…So long I can’t remember.”
“Would you like to confess?”
Perhaps. He had always wanted to pour everything out—to be reckless and selfish for once, to lay all of it down and let someone else hold the weight for a while.
But Sarg shook his head.
“Um.”
A boy appeared in the doorway then, his face so like the girl’s it was unmistakable—only younger. He held a baby with the careful awkwardness of someone still learning, and extended her toward Sarg. The moment Sarg took her into his arms, the baby let out a bright little squeal and reached up toward his face. Sarg smiled before he could stop himself.
The boy smiled faintly too and said in a quiet voice:
“She’s such a good baby. Calm and patient—hardly ever fussed at night, and barely cried at all.”
“Thank you both for looking after her. Father—I’m truly grateful.” Sarg drew out a small pouch and held it out to the priest. “It’s a small token, but please accept it.”
The priest waved it away.
“There’s no need. Caring for children has always been my work.”
He looked at the girl and the boy and smiled.
The two were siblings. Orphaned, they had come to live in the retired priest’s home, helping with the small tasks of his daily life in exchange for an education.
The priest regarded Sarg with quiet steadiness.
“If you truly wish to offer something in return, then walk toward what is right. That is more than enough for me.”
Sarg laughed—a tired, hollow sound.
There had been a time when he had gone to extraordinary lengths to live by the kind of moral code that existed only in ethics books no one actually opened. His own weaker nature had often whispered to him—urged compromise, urged surrender. Pretend you don’t know. Live for yourself, not others. Desire is simply human nature. Why do you keep turning away from it?
He had spent years walking forward with his eyes fixed ahead, refusing to look back at those voices even when he couldn’t block them out. Days that had been close to a kind of earnest naivety.
He didn’t regret those years. If anything, there were days he missed them.
Carrying the convictions of childhood all the way into adulthood—it was simply too hard.
A person’s heart was like a blade: if you didn’t examine it and care for it, it would wear, and rust, and go dull without your even noticing.
Sarg bowed his head to the priest. The boy and girl walked him to the door. At the threshold, he held out the pouch to the girl.
“Keep it.”
“But Father said—”
“This is for the two of you. Having money is better than not having it. Someday you’ll have to leave the Father’s house. Save it for then.”
“But—Sarg—”
The boy seemed to want to say something more, but his older sister pressed down firmly on the back of his head until he bowed.
“Thank you. I’ll… use it carefully.”
“…Look after your brother.”
Sarg lingered for a moment, looking at the two bowed heads in front of him. Then he turned and walked away.
“Hi there, Maril!”
“Oh my, Hys! I’m so glad you came!”
“I’m sorry to come empty-handed…”
“Don’t be—just having you here is enough. Where’s your husband? Did he come with you?”
“He’s…not feeling well. Had to lie down. Sounds like he got into another brawl.”
“Men, honestly. You must be exhausted worrying about him. Here, sit down. I have a little cider. Want some?”
“I’m alright. I’ve been so worried about the man my husband apparently beat up that I can barely get anything down. I want to apologise on his behalf, but I don’t even know where the man lives…”
“Oh, you’re too kind. Do you know the man’s name?”
“No… Only that he’s quite large, and that he was once a holy knight. He seemed to run around with men named Finn and Romen…”
Maril said brightly:
“Oh! If that’s who you mean, then I think I know…”
Hyderlin smiled with all her teeth showing.
It was a dark and still night.
The big man didn’t have a clear memory of what had happened a few days before. He’d been in the middle of laying into Sarg when the woman suddenly went berserk, and he’d tried to restrain her and then—
The memory cut off there.
When he came to, his arm was hanging at a useless angle, and every last thing he’d had in his pockets—his valuables, even some of his clothes—had vanished.
Finn, half-crippled, had burst into tears and gone into hiding, swearing he wanted nothing more to do with any of this.
“Cowardly little rat. Damn them both.”
The big man ground his teeth. He was going to make sure those two bastards paid for humiliating him like this—sell them to a slaver, burn the house down, something. However they’d managed to escape last time, they wouldn’t be slipping away a second time.
He came into his house. Autumn nights in Lotsa had a real bite to them. Cold air met him at the door. He lit the dead hearth, and the room bloomed suddenly with orange light.
What the darkness had hidden, the firelight revealed.
“Hello again. Fancy running into you.”
She was at the table by the window—a woman who looked like a corpse that had decided not to lie down. She sat with her legs crossed, perfectly at ease. If you were to take the word arrogance and pour it into human form, it would look something like her—that unhurried expression, those leisurely outstretched legs, the whole bearing of someone accustomed to having the rest of the world at her feet.
None of this registered with the big man. He didn’t even stop to wonder how a woman had found her way into his home. He only felt the surge of long-pent-up rage rising to meet its moment.
“You shameless little—you’ve got some nerve showing up here!”
He threw the first punch. It didn’t connect. Instead, his face snapped sideways as a burst of dizzying light exploded across his vision.
The dark-haired intruder had knocked his wrist aside to break the punch’s trajectory and landed a clean hook before he’d processed what was happening.
He stood there blinking. Then the fury came flooding back. She must have learned a few tricks somewhere and gotten lucky—that was the only explanation. He was sure of it.
“RAAAAH!”
“Oh, dear.”
He charged. She vaulted clean over him. She hit the floor in a rolling landing that looked almost acrobatic, then her hand moved with unsettling speed—gliding past her hip, swinging back over her shoulder, and snapping forward again in a single fluid motion.
He felt a white-hot burst of pain in his right shoulder.
A short knife was buried there up to the hilt.
This can’t be right.
This can’t be.
This can’t—
“Aaaah—hgh—aaah…”
He crumpled to the floor, wheezing and shaking, brought low by a piece of metal half the size of his hand. The intruder smiled pleasantly.
“Didn’t your father ever teach you not to take swings at strangers? Your life has value—so hand over everything you have, and we can all move on.”
“You’re—you’re insane, why would I—AAAAAUGH!”
She placed one long leg firmly on top of his right shoulder and pressed down. He screamed himself raw. It was agony. Tears and snot ran freely.
She listened to him scream with the air of someone enjoying a pleasant piece of music, then asked:
“So. Where did you say you keep it?”
In the end, the big man had no choice but to give up the location of his hiding place. The intruder helped herself methodically to every piece of jewellery and coin he’d accumulated from his various mistresses.
During this process he managed to gather himself enough to think. His hand found a knife on the table. He lunged and tried to drive it into her back.
But Hyderlin—formidable, undefeated, and entirely unamused—twisted out of the way with contemptuous ease. She caught him with a kick to the stomach that folded him in half, threw him to the ground, wrenched the knife from his grip, and planted it in his other shoulder.
“You may lose the use of those shoulders permanently,” she informed him pleasantly. “Go see a physician when the sun comes up.”
She paused, rummaging through her pockets, apparently looking for something. She seemed to find it: she extended her closed fist, opened it, and gave him a rude hand gesture instead of a coin.
Then she grinned.
“That’s what you get for laying a hand on my husband.”
