Page 13 of Orc’s Moon

Vorren listens to all of it. He doesn’t interrupt again. By the time we reach the clock tower at the district’s heart, his shoulders have eased in a way I don’t think he’s noticed himself.

The tower stands four-faced at the market’s center, its clocks frozen at slightly different times — close enough to agree on the hour, off by minutes on the details, the way clocks always drift when nobody’s there to correct them. Whatever mechanism drove it stopped mid-chime; I can see the little hammer still raised behind cracked glass, forever a half-second from striking a bell that’s waited a thousand years for a note it never got to finish.

“I could stand here all day,” I admit, and mean it more than I expect to when I say it.

“We don’t have all day.”

“I know that, Captain. I’m allowed to want a thing I’m not going to get.” I glance sideways at him, and his expression almost softens — not quite a smile, just the start of one he decides against. “You’re allowed to, too, you know. Wanting things. It’s not a discipline violation.”

“Everything’s a discipline violation if you hold the rank long enough.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

“It’s efficient.”

“Those aren’t the same word.” He almost laughs — I hear it catch low in his chest before he swallows it back down, and satisfaction lights through me entirely out of proportion to how small a victory that actually is.

We find the ledger in a bathhouse three streets past the clock tower, converted at some point into what looks like a low-level records office — old tile work still visible under a layer of dust, the drained bathing pools now lined with shelving someone built directly into the basins, using the space the way people always use space once its original purpose stops mattering. Steam pipes run along one wall, silent for a thousand years. It would have been beautiful once. Warm light, warm water, the kind of gossip that only happens when everyone in a room is equally undressed.

Now it’s shelves of moldering paper and one determined historian refusing to leave until she’s read every page.

“Deliveries to the Hall on Oath-days.” I read it aloud twice before I trust it, finger tracing the merchant’s cramped hand across a ledger page gone brittle at the edges. “This is a supply manifest. Someone delivered goods to the Hall of Oaths on a regular schedule — candles, wine, bread — which means there was a route. A known route, common enough that a merchant didn’t need to think twice about it.”

“Does it say where?”

“Not directly.” I ease the brittle paper open, slow, the way you handle anything that might disintegrate if you rush it. “But there’s a district map folded in with it, and it marks the Hall’s general direction, even if it doesn’t give me the exact streets. It’s not the full route. It’s a start.”

Vorren’s crouched beside me, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him in a room that’s otherwise gone cold with age, studying the map like he’s trying to match it against some memory that doesn’t exist yet. “That’s more than we had an hour ago.”

“That’s more than the entire Royal Historical Council’s managed in seven years of me asking.” I fold the ledger carefully into my satchel, next to the parchment that started all of this, and let myself feel, for one full breath, that the work finally mattered. “We’ll need daylight to trace it properly. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” he agrees, and doesn’t get up.

Neither do I.

It’s the strangest thing, sitting in the ruin of a bathhouse with a man who’s killed more things in the last two days than I’ve read about in the last two years, and feeling nothing that resembles danger. My legs ache. My hands smell like old paper and dust. Somewhere above us, the light’s shifted gold, late afternoon finding its way through a cracked skylight, and nobody’s said a word in almost a minute, and it isn’t the kind of silence that needs filling.

“I can’t remember the last day that didn’t have an order in it.” Quiet. Like he’s confessing to a crime. “Not since I took the commission. Every morning starts with a task. Every task ends with the next one already waiting.”

“That’s what most people call an afternoon, Captain.” Gently, because it doesn’t sound like a joke the way it would from anyone else’s mouth. “Ordinary ones. The kind where nothing’s actively trying to kill you, and you’re allowed to just exist in a room for a while.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“You’re doing it right now.”

He looks at me like that’s news. Genuinely news, the way a man looks when someone hands him a fact about his own life he never once thought to check. The late light’s unfair to him, somehow — softening the scars instead of hardening them, the tired warmth in his expression less like a threat assessment and more like a place I could get lost in if I let myself. Heat kicks through me hard enough that I feel it in my throat.

“I’ve known exactly what I was for since I was old enough to hold a blade.” Something in his tone drops below what the room requires. “Guard the ruins. Follow the order. I never once asked myself what I wanted a day to look like, because wanting wasn’t part of the posting.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m sitting in an empty bathhouse with a historian who talks to walls, and I can’t remember the last time I minded losing an afternoon to nothing.” Something shifts behind his eyes, weighing a decision he hasn’t made out loud yet. “That’s new territory for me too.”

“You’re not supposed to know right away.” My voice comes out softer than I planned. “That’s rather the whole point of it.”

Neither of us moves. The dust in the light between us hangs still, like even the air’s decided to wait and see what happens next.

He leans in. Barely — an inch, maybe less, weight shifting forward before he’s decided to let it — close enough that his scent wins out over the bathhouse’s old stone smell entirely, close enough to see the exact moment his gaze drops to my mouth and holds there. My own breath goes shallow. Every rational argument I could make for putting distance between us evaporates somewhere behind my ribs, and for one entire suspended second I know exactly what’s about to happen and want it badly enough that I don’t move to stop it.