(Approximately nine months before the events of Grimwater Swamp)
Emily woke up already tired, which was new.
Not tired in the ordinary sense — she'd been tired plenty of times before: long work days, trouble sleeping, what have you.This was a different flavor entirely. The kind of tired that had nothing to do with how much she'd slept and everything to do with how much she still had to carry before she could put any of it down.
The tavern last night had been very nice. That was the worst part, somehow. Jon could have done it somewhere cheap and ugly, somewhere that would have let her be appropriately furious about the venue on top of everything else.
Instead he'd taken her to Miller's, with the good candles and the private booths, ordered her favorite wine, and waited until she was two full glasses in and feeling warm and hopeful before telling her, gently, regretfully, like he was doing her some kind of favor, that he'd "met someone" and that honestly, if she was being real with herself, she probably understood — she was starting to look a little older these days, wasn't she, and he just felt like they wanted different things.
Fuck Jon.
She lay in bed a moment longer than she should have, staring at the ceiling, doing the math on how many years exactly constituted "starting to look older," and arriving at a number that made her want to throw something.
The letter was still on her bedside table where she'd left it three days ago. She didn't need to read it again. She had it memorized. Her mother's handwriting had gotten shakier since the last one, the sentences a little more tired, a little more careful about not sounding as frightened as they clearly were underneath."The healer says it's nothing to worry over yet, dear, but I did want you to know." Emily had read that line perhaps forty times, trying to decide whether "nothing to worry over yet" meant nothing, or meant yet.
She got up. She got dressed. She avoided looking at the small, empty cushion by the window that Mister Pickles used to sleep on, and the chewed-up cat toys scattered around her bed that she hadn't been able to throw away, because throwing them away felt like a kind of admission she wasn't ready to make three days after the fact.
Then she went to the mirror, and did the thing she was actually good at.
She practiced her smile.
Not the sad one. Not the tired one. The nice one — wide, warm, professional, the one that had gotten her promoted twice and complimented by at least one visiting dignitary. She adjusted it slightly, the way you'd adjust a hat, until it sat exactly where it needed to sit. She checked her eyes to make sure they weren't giving anything away. She decided they weren't, mostly, and if they were, that was a problem for later.
"Alright," she told the mirror. "Let's go be delightful."
The mirror, unhelpfully, said nothing back.
The walk to the Guild Hall took twenty minutes on a good day, and today was determined not to be one.
It started raining somewhere around minute twelve, the fine, patient kind of rain that didn't seem like much until you'd been standing in it long enough to realize your blouse had gone see-through in a way that was going to be extremely inconvenient for the rest of her shift. She ducked under an awning to wait it out, which was when Pemberton's errand boy found her.
He couldn't have been more than fourteen, gangly, apologetic in the way of someone who'd clearly been told to expect an unpleasant reaction and was hoping very hard not to earn one.
"Miss Emily?"
"That's me."
He handed her a folded slip of paper with the air of someone passing off a live coal.
"From Mister Pemberton. About the flat."
She unfolded it right there under the awning, rain ticking steadily off the fabric above her head, and read the words "effective next month" and a number that was, somehow, seven gold higher than the number from the last time he'd raised her rent, which had itself been four gold higher than the time before that.
She did the math without meaning to. Rent, groceries, getting her uniforms cleaned – the upside of living in the Tangle was that the laundry there was cheap – and all her other necessities, plus the healer's medicine her mother kept insisting she didn't need to help pay for but absolutely did, minus what she actually made processing forms at a counter for people who called her "miss" when they were being polite and worse when they weren't.
The number that came out the other side was not a good number.
"Everything alright, Miss Emily?"
She looked up. The boy was still standing there, soaked, waiting, clearly hoping the answer was yes so he could leave.
She gave him the smile. The one from the mirror.
"Everything's wonderful," she said. "Tell Mister Pemberton I said thank you so much for the notice."
The boy's shoulders dropped with visible relief, and he scurried off into the rain, and Emily stood under the awning a moment longer, refolding the note into smaller and smaller squares until it was about the size of a coin, and put it in her pocket, and kept walking.
She was only four minutes late. She considered that a personal triumph.
The morning rush at the counter of the Dungeon Janitor's Guild Hall had its own particular rhythm, and Emily had long since learned to move inside it without thinking too hard about any individual piece — the forms, the payments, the polite send-offs, one after another after another, a kind of professional current she could let carry her along without needing to be fully present for any of it.
Which was, generally, a mercy.
Today it just meant that when yet another man in that same grey jumpsuit slid his paperwork across the counter and said, without looking up from counting his coin, "You people really ought to hire someone who actually knows what they're doing," she almost didn't register it had happened to her specifically.
Almost.
"I'm sorry, sir?"
"Your filing system." He gestured vaguely at the form she'd just handed back to him, stamped and processed in under a minute. "Wrong stamp color. Green means provisional, not permanent. This is going to cause a mess for someone."
It was, in fact, the correct stamp. She'd been using this exact system for six years. She knew it better than she knew most things in her life right now, which, given the current state of most things in her life, was not a low bar to clear.
"I assure you, sir, that's the correct—"
"I know what I'm talking about." He picked up his form, sniffed once, and walked off toward the equipment hall without waiting for her to finish, apparently confident in an expertise he had no actual basis for.
She stood there for a moment, hands flat on the counter, breathing very evenly through her nose.
"You okay?" Kara, at the next station over, hadn't looked up from her own line, but her voice carried the practiced casualness of someone who absolutely had noticed.
"Fantastic," Emily said.
"You sure? You've got a face."
"I don't have a face."
"You've got a face, Em."
Emily smoothed her blouse, straightened a stack of forms that didn't need straightening, and smiled at the next person in line before Kara could say anything else.
"Next!"
Kara waited for one more beat, said nothing, and let it go — for now.
Lunch was supposed to be twenty minutes, which in practice meant twelve, taken standing in the small courtyard behind the equipment hall where the receptionists went to eat things too fast to actually taste.
Kara had brought the good bread today — the kind from the bakery near the fountain district that always sold out by mid-morning, which meant she'd gone out of her way for it, which meant she already suspected something and had decided the correct response was carbohydrates.
"Trade you," Kara said, holding out half a sandwich.
Emily looked at her own lunch. She'd made it that morning without really thinking about it, on autopilot, the same way she'd done most things that morning, and only now registered that she'd put the mustard on the wrong side and forgotten the cheese entirely and somehow also managed to make the bread soggy despite it being fresh, which shouldn't have been mechanically possible.
She looked at the sad, wrong sandwich in her own hand.
And she felt her eyes water up over a sandwich, which was the single most embarrassing thing that had happened to her all week, including the part where her boyfriend of two years told her she was aging out of desirability in a room with good candles.
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"Hey." Kara's voice dropped, all the practiced brightness gone out of it. "Hey, what's going on?"
"Nothing. I just made my lunch wrong."
"Em."
"It's a sandwich, Kara, I'm not—"
"It's never just the sandwich." Kara set her own lunch down on the low wall between them, giving Emily her full attention. She knew that meant she wasn't going anywhere until she gave Kara an actual answer. "Talk to me."
And Emily meant to deflect it, the way she'd deflected everything else all morning, but something about the good bread and the concern in Kara's voice and the sheer accumulated weight of the last week got past her defenses before she could get the joke ready in time.
"Jon dumped me," she said. "Last night. Very nicely, at Miller's, with the good wine, so that I couldn't even be properly furious about it."
Kara's face did several things at once. "Oh, Em—"
"And my mother's getting worse, I think, though her letters are doing that thing where she pretends she isn't so I won't worry, which just makes me worry more. And Pemberton raised the rent again this morning, on top of everything else, which is fine, that's fine, I'll figure it out." She took a breath that didn't quite work the way breaths were supposed to. "And Mister Pickles died four days ago and I still haven't thrown away his toys or food because apparently I've decided that's a bridge too far, emotionally, this week."
Kara didn't say anything right away. She just reached over and took the wrong sandwich out of Emily's hand, replaced it with her own good one, and put an arm around her shoulders instead.
"You should take the afternoon."
"I can't take the afternoon."
"Em—"
"If I go home I'm just going to sit there," Emily said, and it came out more honest than she meant it to. "At least here I have to smile at people. It's something to do with my face besides crying."
Kara looked at her for a long moment, clearly weighing whether to push, and deciding it wasn't her fight to force.
"Okay," she said instead. "Eat the good sandwich. And if you need to disappear into the supply closet for five minutes at any point today, I'll cover your line and tell everyone you're doing inventory."
Emily managed something that was almost a real laugh.
"Deal."
By the time Ojola reached the front of the line that afternoon, Emily's face had gone through enough hours of professional performance that the muscles in her cheeks had started to genuinely ache — which was, in its own way, an accomplishment, since it meant she hadn't stopped smiling since the sandwich incident.
Then she saw who it was, and for the first time all day, the smile didn't need any help at all.
"Ojola!"
The orc set a heavy requisition ledger down on the counter with the particular thud of someone who cooked for an entire Guild Hall and had the biceps to prove it, and grinned back with equal warmth.
"There's my favorite paper-pusher. You look tired, honey."Emily leaned across the counter to hug her. Ojola gave the best hugs. Strong, but gentle.
"I'm always tired, Ojola. It's part of the job description."
"Mm." The orc woman narrowed her eyes slightly, reading more than Emily wanted her to, but she let it go, for now, the same unspoken mercy everyone in Emily's life seemed to be extending her today without quite saying so out loud. "Well. I brought the whole month's requisition. Grain, oil, salt, the usual. Also—" she flipped to a second page, "—I need double the usual meat order. I've got the personal acquisition form in there for you. I get it cheaper here."
Emily blinked.
"Double?"
"Thrakka's seventeen now and eating like it's a sport. Boy's gone through two growth spurts since spring and shows no sign of stopping. I swear that child could eat an entire cow and ask what was for dessert."
Emily laughed, actually laughed, the first unguarded sound she'd made all day. "How's the barbarian training going?"
Ojola rolled her eyes with the fondness of a mother describing a beloved disaster. "He wants to sign up for the Adventurer's Guild the second he's old enough. I keep telling him there's no rush, but you try telling a seventeen-year-old orc there's no rush to go hit things professionally."
"And Soren?"
Ojola's whole face softened at that, in a completely different way. "Still dancing. Still the most graceful thing I've ever seen, and I include myself in that assessment, thank you very much." She patted the ledger. "We're saving up for his Academy tuition. Got a ways to go yet, but we'll get there."
"You will." Emily meant it. Whatever else was falling apart in the world today, that felt like something true and solid to hold onto for a second — a good woman with two good sons, one who wanted to hit monsters and one who wanted to dance, both of them loved exactly as they were.
She stamped the requisition form, careful and unhurried, the way she never got to be with anyone else that day.
"There. All approved. Tell Thrakka I said good luck surviving his own appetite."
"Will do, honey." Ojola gathered up her ledger, then paused, looking at Emily a moment longer than the transaction required. "You take care of yourself, alright? You're one of the good ones around here."
It landed harder than Ojola probably intended it to. Emily had to work, for just a second, to keep her face from doing something complicated.
"I will," she said. "Promise."
Ojola gave her one more warm look, then bustled off toward the kitchens, and Emily stood there for a moment in the small, temporary calm Ojola always seemed to leave behind her, like weather clearing.
It didn't last long.
"Next!"
The young man who stepped up to her counter five minutes before the end of her shift had the look of someone freshly arrived from somewhere unglamorous and slightly damp, holding an acceptance letter like it might dissolve if he gripped it wrong.
Emily didn't know yet that this particular intake would be the strangest one she'd process in years, or that she was beginning something much bigger than she could ever know. Right now he was just another form. Another few minutes of holding her face together before the next one.
"Hello, sir! Welcome to the Janitor's Guild. What can I help you with today?"
He held out his letter. "I'm here to begin training as a Janitor. Here's my acceptance letter."
She unfolded it and read fast, the way she always did, years of practice compressing what should have taken a minute into a few seconds. A signature from the Guildmaster himself. His console already assigned, which was unusual enough to be worth noting later, if she had the energy left in her to note anything by the end of today.
"Alright, Lorne Callister! A signature from the Guildmaster himself. Quite an honor! I see your console is assigned. Now, to get your intake all squared away, I'll need to ask you some basic questions."
He nodded. "Right."
She smoothed a wrinkle out of her blouse that had been there since the rain that morning and probably wasn't going anywhere, and cleared her throat.
"First. What town and province are you from?"
He hesitated in a way that told her, before he even answered, that this was going to be one of those intakes.
"To be honest, I'm not quite sure. I came here from a House of Healing about two days from here. Waking up there is the earliest memory I have."
Something in her chest did a small, involuntary thing — a flicker of genuine sympathy, the kind she usually had to manufacture by this hour and was mildly surprised to find she still had in stock. A man with no home. No mother sending him worried letters, no landlord to raise his rent, apparently no past at all. She wondered, distantly and completely inappropriately for a professional setting, whether that made his life easier or immeasurably harder than hers.
She let the smile flicker for exactly as long as she could afford to, then put it back.
"Very well, that's something we can probably sort out eventually. Next question: height and weight?"
"I'm not sure exactly. Tall? Not very heavy?"
She laughed, mostly on reflex, the sound coming out thinner than she meant it to. "No problem! Please stand perfectly still while I take your measurements."
The sigil-work hummed to life at his feet, and she watched him startle slightly at the light, the way they always did, and reminded him — a little sharper than she intended, the exhaustion leaking through despite everything — to hold still, and then caught herself and softened it before it could turn into something she'd have to apologize for later.
"Six-foot-two, one hundred fifty-seven pounds, six ounces. Excellent!"
She wrote it down. Her hand ached faintly. She noticed, distantly, that it had been aching all day and she hadn't had a spare thought to give it until just now.
"And final question, at least for now: what is your ideal vacation destination?"
He blinked at her like she'd asked him something in a foreign language. "Beg pardon?"
"Your ideal vacation destination. What would that be?"
He thought about it earnestly. "Ummm… maybe a town in the mountains? One with hot springs?"
Something about that answer was, unexpectedly, the nicest thing anyone had said to her all day, even though he hadn't meant it as anything at all. A town in the mountains. Hot springs. She let herself imagine it for exactly one half of one second — no counter, no forms, no letters from home, nobody calling her anything at all.
"Wonderful! That should do for now." She held out the requisition form, her hand steady, her voice bright and warm and completely, professionally intact. "Here is a requisition form for a beginner's Janitor loadout. If you head down the hall to your left, fourth door on the right, you'll find the equipment room. You've also been assigned your initial skills."
"Skills?"
She was so close. She was, genuinely, so close to the end of a day that had already asked more of her than any single day reasonably should.
"Correct. All will be explained once you meet your Foreman. Please head to the equipment room!"
He took the form. "Will do. Thank you ma'am."
Something in Emily's mind went very quiet.
She felt it before she understood it — a small, precise crack running straight through the center of everything she had spent all day holding together with her bare hands. Jon's voice, in a very nice tavern, telling her she was starting to look a little older these days. Her mother's shaking handwriting. The empty cushion by the window. The rent. The rain. The wrong sandwich. Ojola's kind, well-meaning, devastating you're one of the good ones. All of it arriving at once, all of it looking for somewhere to go, and finding, entirely by accident, one single word.
Ma'am.
She turned her head very slowly.
"Did you… just… call me ma'am?"
He looked, understandably, terrified. "Ummm… I'm sorry?"
She heard her own voice come out of her, soft and measured in a way that felt, from the inside, like watching someone else drive a cart off a cliff.
"Did you… just call me… ma'am?"
"...yes, ma'am?"
Everything she had been holding since she woke up that morning, every ounce of it, found the door at once.
"LISTEN HERE, YOU LITTLE SHIT!"
She heard herself say a great many things after that. Something about honorifics. Something about being young and beautiful and single, which had been true yesterday and felt like an outright lie today. And then something else entirely — something that arrived from a part of her that had clearly been waiting all day for permission.
She was distantly aware of the security guard, Harmon, approaching, and his hands closing around her, lifting her clean off the floor, the way he'd had to do exactly twice before in six years, both times for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with the man standing in front of her.
"I'LL KILL YOUR FUCKING DOG! IF YOU DON'T HAVE A DOG, I'LL BUY YOU ONE, LET YOU GET EXTREMELY ATTACHED, AND THEN KILL IT. I'LL—"
The door swallowed the rest of it.
By the time it swung shut behind her, Emily was already crying — not the pretty, contained sniffles one has in public, but the real kind, ugly, enormous, and long overdue, muffled against Harmon's shoulder while he patted her back, as he had done for her twice before and would, without complaint, do again.
"Let it out, Em," he said. "Let it out."
So she did.
Out at the counter, Kara slid smoothly into the empty seat, smile firmly in place, already reaching for the next form.
"Our deepest apologies, Mister Callister," she said. "Poor Emily is… going through some things."