The tavern didn't know her name, which was exactly how she preferred it.
She'd been in Silverfen four days now, working escort duty for a merchant's cargo — steady work that asked nothing of her beyond competence, which these days was most of what she had left to offer anyone. She'd slept through the night twice this week. She'd let a conversation with the merchant's daughter run long enough, yesterday, that it had almost turned into something like a friendship, before she'd caught herself and let it go cold on purpose. The girl hadn't understood why. Luci hadn't explained. She never did.
She ate alone most nights, the way she always did, at the edge of whatever tavern happened to be nearest whatever job she was finishing. Tonight it was a bowl of something fish-based she couldn't have named if asked, eaten slowly, mechanically, the way you eat when food is fuel rather than pleasure. She'd stopped tasting most things properly a long time ago. She'd made her peace with that.
The tavern was loud tonight, halfling sailors mostly, drinking the easy, uncomplicated way people drink when the sea has just given them back their lives a little longer. She sat near the edge of it, the way she sat in most rooms these days. Close enough to hear. Far enough to not be part of it.
That was how the story reached her — not directed at her, just spilling over from a table nearby, one sailor repeating something secondhand, embellished with each retelling the way these things always were.
"—swamp dungeon, months back now, supposed to be nothing, some rookie thing, and it pert-near killed half of Silver Fang—"
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She didn't look up.
"—paladin and some dwarf foreman going at it right there in the muck, full out, like the world's ending—"
Still not her business.
"—and this kid steps between 'em. A Janitor, some nobody, and just — stops it. My cousin's a guard down in Moorhaven, so he only heard about it — only just heard the full account myself — says the way he moved, one second he's off across the room, next he's right there between two grown men mid-swing, and neither of 'em could lay a hand on him."
Her cup stopped halfway to her mouth.
"Thirty feet in a blink," the sailor went on, warming to his audience now. "No light to it. No words 'til after. Just gone, then there."
She set the cup down very carefully.
For a moment she wasn't in the tavern at all. She was somewhere darker, worse air, watching a shape she'd once trusted more than she trusted herself simply stop existing in one place and start existing in another.
Her hands had gone still on the table. She made herself notice, and stop.
The sailors moved on to some other story eventually — a sea serpent, or a woman in some port who could talk to fish; she didn't retain which. She stayed at her table long after her food had gone cold, the noise of the room washing over her without landing anywhere. Somewhere near the bottom of her second drink, she realized she'd been turning her own knife over and over in one hand without deciding to.
She set it down.
She sat through the rest of the night the way she sat through most nights, upright, alert, giving nothing away, and if anyone had looked closely enough to notice the difference, there wasn't anyone in that tavern who knew her well enough to see it.
She left Silverfen two days later, contract unfinished — the first time in longer than she could remember that she'd walked away from paid work before it was done.
She told herself it was just to be sure.
She made sure her horse was fresh and ready, and ensured she had plenty of rations and supplies.
It was a long way to Moorhaven.