Chapter narrated by Lira:
6/14/95
It was already dark when we arrived at the Sleeping Bear. The warmth had already abandoned me until the next morning.
Holta spotted us the moment we walked in and pointed at a table near the window without a word. Apparently the meal was not a negotiable offer. She had already decided where we were sitting.
We sat.
"I'll go get the food." Sera was already standing back up. "Don't let anyone take the table."
"Is that a real concern?"
"At this hour? Possibly." She disappeared before I could respond.
With her typical energy she left me alone at the table.
I did the only thing I could.
I thought.
I thought about the person in the guild.
They had been there all morning — through the whole time we were reading contracts, talking to Mary, signing our names. They had still been there when we left and also when we came back at night.
A mysterious someone who knew Sera and whom Sera knew. Both of them had reacted the moment they were in the same room. They clearly were not on good terms if they made everything so awkward.
Now that I thought about it, Miss Ezra did almost say a name before she was interrupted. Sera also said something about someone telling her she was a bad partner.
Could it be Sera's old partner?
By how tense she was when I asked her about it, they clearly hadn't ended things in a friendly manner.
The only way I would know the truth was if I asked her directly.
I wanted to ask.
I really wanted to ask.
All this thinking was making me remember the time Ali and I conducted a thorough investigation into the disappearance of Sister Mayreel's special chocolate.
It had been Brother Halven. It was always Brother Halven when something food-related went missing...
I miss Ali, and Dad, and Mayreel, and Halven, and...
No, Lira. Focus.
I was curious about the person in the guild, but if it was her old partner then it was a sensitive topic for her.
I heard Sera coming back before she arrived — her footsteps distinct even among the noise of the inn, the careful sound of someone balancing bowls giving her away completely. She placed one in front of me, close enough that my fingers found it easily, then took the seat across from mine.
"Holta makes the best stew in Vareth." She said it like a fact she was personally responsible for. "You need to try it."
The bowl did smell very good.
"Have you eaten here before?"
"Three times. Always after the rat contract." She tore off a piece of bread. "This is technically my fourth time doing that contract."
"You keep taking the same one."
"The rats always come back." She shrugged. "Reliable work."
I tried the stew and decided not to argue with her method. It was genuinely very good. I made a note to never tell her that too enthusiastically or she would consider it a personal victory.
We ate quietly for a while. I had expected Sera to fill the silence with something but she seemed content with just the stew and the noise of the room settling around us. The fire crackled. Someone at another table laughed too loudly at something and then laughed again at themselves laughing.
It was a good meal.
None of us was saying anything. Sera broke the silence.
"You want to ask something."
"I don't..."
"Your face is really expressive, you know? People that want to ask me something but feel that they can't say it make a face like that." She said that like it was a really specific facial expression to know. "We are partners now, Lira. Ask the question. The worst that can happen is that I don't answer."
"The person at the guild this morning..."
I tried to keep my voice casual.
"The one who also was there when we came back tonight."
Sera did not answer immediately.
"Do you know them?" I asked.
A long pause.
"Yes," she said. "I do."
She did not say anything else for a moment. I waited, the way I had learned to wait with her — not pushing, just staying open. Giving her the space to decide.
"Not here," she said finally. "Let's go up."
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The stairs creaked under us. Our room was cold — the inn did not bother heating the upper floor after dark — and I heard Sera pull her jacket tighter before she sat down on her bed. She did not speak immediately. I found the edge of mine and sat too, and waited.
She was quiet long enough that I thought she might have changed her mind.
"His name is Fin," she said finally.
A pause.
"He was my old partner. It is a bit of a sensitive topic for me, but you will probably see him a lot in the guild and I don't want you to feel awkward for that."
A pause.
"We were partners for five months." A pause. "He is — careful. Precise. The kind of person who thinks three steps ahead before he moves and notices things that most people walk straight past. We worked well together. For a long time we worked really well together."
"What happened?"
She took a breath.
"Three months ago the guild offered us a rank two contract on a trial basis," she said. "They do that sometimes when a party is close to review — give them something one step above their rank to see how they handle it. Ours was a monster extermination job. Northern edge of the city, just past the old mill district."
She paused.
"The brief said a small nest. Six, maybe eight goblins, young colony, recently established. The kind of job a strong rank one party could handle with careful preparation. Clean location, open ground, clear exits." Another pause. "We prepared well. We had a solid plan. We went in confident."
"And?" I said.
"The scouting information was wrong," she said. "Not slightly wrong. Completely wrong. What was actually there was an established colony — not young, not small. Three times the size they had reported, with adults in it. The kind of thing that should have been a rank three contract minimum, possibly four."
She stopped.
The room was very quiet.
"It went bad immediately," she said. "The moment we were inside the perimeter we knew the brief was wrong and by then repositioning was not a clean option anymore. We tried to fall back to the secondary exit point and it was blocked. We tried the primary and there were creatures between us and it." Her voice was steady but something underneath it was not. "We were managing it. Just barely. But we were managing."
She paused. I did not need sight to know that she was tense. I tried to reach for her hand. I ended up grabbing her elbow. She let out a small laugh and continued her story.
"Until we weren't," she agreed. "There was a moment — Fin was holding the left side and I was supposed to hold the right and there was a decision to make very fast about whether to push forward or pull back and we made different decisions at the same time and it — created an opening that should not have been there."
She stopped again.
"Holt came in," she said quietly.
"Holt himself?"
"He monitors trial rank-up contracts sometimes. Watches the first hour from a distance to see how the party handles pressure before the guild formally evaluates them." She paused. "When it went wrong he came in."
She said it simply. But something told me it had not been simple at all.
"What was it like?" I asked. "When he arrived."
Sera was quiet for a moment.
"You know how sometimes something happens so fast that your mind cannot keep up with it in real time and you only understand it afterward?" she said. "It was like that. One moment we were barely holding the line and the next moment Holt was there and then — it was over. Just over. The creatures that had been between us and the exit were not between us and the exit anymore and the ones still moving were not moving anymore and the whole thing had taken — I do not know. Seconds. It felt like seconds."
She paused.
"I have been in the guild for eight months," she said. "I have seen good adventurers work. I have seen rank fours handle situations that would have ended me without breathing hard. I thought I understood what the difference in rank actually meant in practice."
"And?" I said.
"And I did not," she said. "Not until that moment. A rank ten adventurer working at full capacity is not a faster version of what I do. It is something else entirely. It does not look like effort. It barely looks like movement. It looks like the problem simply stops existing."
She let that sit for a moment.
"He stepped back afterward and looked at us and said, and I remember this exactly because it is very difficult to forget the things Holt says when he has just saved your life — he said: you had a sound plan for the contract that was written. That is worth something. Then he walked away."
"That was all?"
"That was all." A pause. "With Holt that is actually a great deal."
I thought about that. A man who had seen everything there was to see, offering two frightened rank one adventurers the specific thing they needed to hear and nothing more.
"After," Sera said, "we had a discussion."
The word sat heavily the way she said it.
"We were standing outside the mill district with the adrenaline still in us and we were both scared and neither of us knew how to be scared gracefully so we were not graceful about it at all." A short pause. "It started as a debrief. What went wrong, whose call was whose, whether the plan had been sound. Normal things to go over."
She stopped and took a big breath.
"Then we..." She stopped again. "And then we..."
"Sera, it is okay," I said. "You don't have to say it if you don't want to."
"It is not... it isn't that, Lira. It is just that... For the love of the fourteen! Then we started saying things, Lira. It got personal. I hurt him, he hurt me. I feel stupid right now because looking back at it the whole discussion was stupid. We were just both scared because we almost died and it got to our heads. By the end of it I decided to fill out the dissolution. He did not stop me. And now every time we see each other it feels awkward. Part of me feels anger and part of me feels sadness. I don't know how to handle it, to be honest."
I sat beside her and gave her a hug.
"It is okay if you don't know how to feel about it, Sera. Feelings are difficult."
She hugged back.
"He has a new partner now," Sera said, before I could speak. "Balyn. Half-orc, rank two — he got the rank up a few months before Fin and I dissolved. Everyone in the guild knows Balyn. He is—" She paused, and something in her voice shifted slightly, losing some of its edge. "He looks terrifying. He is enormous and he does not smile much, and when you first see him you think, that is a person who has never been gentle in his life."
"But?" I said.
"But he is the kindest person in the guild," she said. "Possibly the kindest person I have ever met who carries a weapon. He helped a lost child find her mother last month and apparently sat with her for an hour keeping her calm while he waited, and the child kept trying to braid his hair, and he let her." A pause. "Fin deserves a partner like that. I am genuinely glad he has one."
She said this plainly. Not without cost, but plainly.
"And yet he was my friend," she said. "Before the contract, before all of it — he was a close friend. And I ended it badly and I have spent three months in this guild taking the same rat contract in the same building as him and not saying anything, and I do not know how to fix that or whether fixing it is even something that is possible now."
"Do you want to fix it?" I asked.
She was quiet for a long moment.
"I don't know if we can fix something like this, Lira. It happened three months ago. He has gone on with his life, last month he got to rank two and I feel like I haven't progressed myself at all. I'm still a rank one after eight months."
I released the hug and looked at her face.
"When I wanted to become an adventurer and left the church, Ali got angry. She felt that I would leave her behind, go live my life and forget about her. We had a fight and didn't talk for some days. Both of us wanted to take the first step and talk to the other. On the third day I decided that my relationship with her was worth taking that step and breaking the silence first. It was a hard conversation but we resolved everything and continued. Now I'm here outside the church away from Ali. I miss her and she probably misses me too but we both know we will meet again and when we do I will tell her all about my rat hunting adventures with my great partner Sera," I said. "Maybe you and Fin can still talk things through."
"Lira... You... First of all, thanks for listening to me. Second of all, maybe you are right and I can still talk things through with that idiot. Not tomorrow though, probably not the day after that either. I need to think about it a little bit more and then see if the right moment for that happens and then... Sorry, got carried away. What I wanted to say was that I'm really thankful for you listening to me."
"Thanks for telling me."
She let out a small laugh.
Outside, the street had gone properly quiet. The fire downstairs had died down enough that the inn had stopped creaking with warmth. I lay back on my own bed.
"You know, Lira?"
"What?"
"You are very perceptive," Sera said eventually, from across the room. "For someone who cannot see."
"You are very hard to read," I said. "For someone who never stops talking."
A short silence.
Then another small laugh from Sera.
"Goodnight, Lira," she said.
"Goodnight, Sera."