Corvis Eralith
"The Unraveler's Company."
I let the name settle on my tongue, tasting it, turning it over, testing its weight against the roof of my mouth.
It had a certain rhythm to it—the Company of the Unraveler, contrasted to the Guild of the Adventurer.
The first promised something more than profit and the mere looting of dungeons: from the ruins of the Ancient Mages to the dens of mana beasts that had nothing to do with the greatest civilization that has ever been.
It promised understanding. It promised the slow, patient work of pulling at the threads of the world until they came apart in your hands and you could finally see how they had been woven.
Precisely what I intended to do when I suggested the name to Elder Rahdeas, through Finn Warend of course.
The northern Grove of Zestier was called the Vedette, and the Bough where we stood—the Riverside Yard—was its southernmost edge, pressed against the Alabaster Ring like a child leaning into a parent's side.
This was not the Zestier of the Royal Palace nor the Zestier of the Grand Nectary.
The buildings here were smaller, humbler, built not for nobility but for the people who kept the city running: workers and artisans, weavers and smiths, men and women whose hands were rough with labor and whose eyes held the particular clarity of those who had never been given anything they did not earn.
It was the perfect place for this building.
Behind me, the Winetail River flowed. It came from the west, I knew, winding from tbe western district and through the northern and eastern Groves before finally turning toward the sea.
Its water was dark here, deep, and when I looked at it I saw another river—the river, the one that had swallowed me twice now, the one that ran beneath everything, the one that had shown me the threads of Fate and let me live.
I blinked, and the vision was gone. The Winetail was just a river. It was just water.
The building in front of me was new. Four stories tall, its white stone matched the Royal Palace, and red flowers climbed the walls in careful spirals, their vines trained to follow the architecture rather than overwhelm it.
It was beautiful, in the way that all things were beautiful when they were built with intention, with care, with the knowledge that they would outlast their builders.
Above the entrance, workers—both dwarven and elven—were affixing a sign, and on it, in letters that would catch the morning light and hold it, was written: Unraveler's Company.
"This is truly surprising, Your Highness." Alea stood beside me, her voice pitched low, her eyes fixed on the building with an expression I could not quite name.
The river birds were singing, their calls echoing off the water, and the wind was moving through the leaves of the Watchful Willows and I let myself simply stand there, in the sound of it, in the peace of it.
"I agree." I meant it. I had not expected this—any of this—to happen so quickly. But Elder Rahdeas had been waiting for someone to give him permission to build such a place in such a city. "But why are you here? I don't think I've ever seen you outside the palace. Not officially, at least."
She smiled, and it was the smile she used when she was pretending to be nothing more than a maid, nothing more than someone who carried trays and opened doors, fading into the background when important people entered the room.
"Her Majesty wanted me to check on this passion project of yours. She was very happy to see you spending your time on this."
"She was?" I heard the surprise in my own voice, and I did not try to hide it.
Alea turned to look at me, and her expression shifted, the mask of the maid falling away for just a moment.
"I certainly don't need to tell you what a mother thinks of her son doing the life you do, do I, Your Highness?" Her eyes held mine, and there was something in them—warmth, perhaps, or worry, or the particular weight of someone who had watched me grow and knew, better than anyone, what I had become.
Then she winked, and the mask was back. "And she doesn't know even half of your adventures."
I clicked my tongue. "Yes. My mother doesn't." I shoved my hands into my pockets. "But a maid with little to do with a maid does."
Berna's tongue was on my face before I could react, warm and rough and utterly without shame. She had been watching and waiting for the tension in my voice to rise, and she had decided that the only cure for whatever I was feeling was to lick it off.
I tried to push her away, but she was a Guardian Bear, and I was a nine-year-old prince, and she had decided I needed comfort.
"I am a perfectly ordinary maid, Your Highness." Alea's voice was light, innocent, the voice of someone who had never been anything but what she appeared. "I don't know what you're talking about."
When Dad finally told me about the Lances—when he finally decided I was old enough to know the truth about the twl white core women who protected our kingdom from tb shadows—I would make sure Alea was there.
I would make her sit through the whole conversation, and I would smile, and I would not let her forget that she had spent years pretending to be ordinary while she clearly wasn't!
This game between us had been going on for most of my life. Just like the game I played with Alwyn, the endless, hopeless effort to make him call me by my name, to make him see that we were the same, that he did not need to bow or kneel or treat me like something sacred.
However I had never won that game and I did not think I would win this one either.
But I would keep playing. That was what you did, with people you loved. You kept playing.
"What problem do the Triscan siblings have?" I asked, and Alea laughed.
Ashton Auddyr
The study smelled of old paper and the particular dust that settles on things left untouched for too long.
Grandfather Jarnas sat behind his desk, the same desk he had used when he was captain of the Leafguard, the same desk that had followed him from campaign to campaign until he had finally, reluctantly, retired.
But he remained a soldier and Eidelholm was where he had gone to wait for something other than conflict.
I had waited with him, for a time. Thirteen years in that house, watching him watch the forest, learning the Branchberd in the long afternoons when the light was gold and the shadows were long and the world seemed to hold its breath.
Then my parents had decided I was old enough for Zestier, old enough for the court, old enough to be seen, judged and measured against the sons of the other Sister Houses.
We had moved. I had not wanted to go. I had wanted to stay in Eidelholm, but I had done what I was told.
"Grandfather." I closed the door behind me, the latch clicking into place with a sound that felt too final for such a small thing. "You called for me."
"Ashton." He set down the paper he had been reading. "How is the training with His Highness progressing?"
"Fine, Grandfather." I stood with my hands behind my back, the way he had taught me, the way a soldier stands when reporting to a superior. "Prince Corvis learns quickly. The duel-cane suits him."
It was true. Prince Corvis was not the swordsman Albold Chaffer was—no one of our generation was—but he had something else in him.
He moved like someone who had been learning things he should not have known for longer than any of us could guess. He was completely unpredictable.
There was also the commoner boy. Alwyn Triscan. He was the same age as the Prince, six years my junior, and he was good—very good—for someone who had never held a weapon until a few years ago.
I sparred with him when the Prince asked, which was often, and I did not mind it. The boy was earnest, hungry, willing to learn. But I still did not understand why His Highness cared for him the way he did
Not that it mattered.
"And the Chaffer boy?"
The words landed in the quiet of the study like a stone dropped into still water. I felt my jaw tighten, felt the memory rise unbidden: that duel four years ago, when the Greyunders' visited, the way Albold's Courtblade had moved and the way I had lost.
I had been eleven. He had been eleven. It should not have mattered. It should not still matter.
"I don't understand, Grandfather." I kept my voice level. "What about him?"
He looked at me for a long moment, and I saw something in his eyes that I could not name.
"Nothing." He waved a hand, and the topic was dismissed.
"I called you here because of Prince Corvis." He leaned back in his chair, and the wood creaked under him, the same sound it had made when I was small, when I would sit at his feet and listen to him talk about fights I had never seen. "He has founded an organization. The Unraveler's Company."
"I know." I nodded. "No one my age speaks of anything else."
It was true. The Unraveler's Company had appeared suddenly, grown quickly, and become the only thing the sons and daughters of the Sister Houses and other lesser Houses wanted to talk about.
"That is good." Grandfather's voice was quiet. "What do you think about becoming an Unraveler?"
I stared at him. For a moment, I forgot to be the heir of House Auddyr, forgot to be the boy who had been trained to hold his tongue and guard his face. "I—I can?"
He did not smile, but something in his expression softened. "Yes, Ashton. You can."
I had never said it aloud. The dream had been too small for someone like me, too common, too far from the duties that had been laid out for me before I was born.
Elves could not be Adventurers. But the Unraveler's Company was different. Prince Corvis had made it different. And now Grandfather was telling me I could go.
"It will give you experience." He was speaking, his voice matter-of-fact, as if this were just another duty, just another step on a path that had been set for me. "And the Beast Glades are useful to the Kingdom. Your time there will serve House Auddyr."
I bowed my head, and I hoped he could not see my face. "Understood, Grandfather."
The words were the words of a soldier, a servant, a grandson. But beneath them, something else was stirring.
I was going to the Beast Glades. I was going to be an Unraveler. And for the first time in my life, I was going to do something I had chosen for myself.
Albold Chaffer
I slipped through the servants' passage like smoke through a cracked window, the stone cool against my palms, the shadows deep enough to swallow a boy who had spent his life learning to move unseen.
My family's estate in the Canopie was full of such passages—built in an age when every noble house had needed a way out. Tonight, it was my way to freedom.
The servants were oblivious. They always were. I had spent fifteen years learning to be invisible to them, learning to move through the halls without a sound, to open doors without a creak, to exist in the spaces between their attention.
Mother and Father thought they had raised a son who followed rules, who understood duty, who accepted the weight of being a Chaffer. They did not know the boy who climbed out his window on moonless nights.
Tonight, I was going to pay a different debt.
The northern gate of Zestier rose before me, white stone gleaming like the light of Elenoir. The Leafguard stood at their posts, checking those who entered and left the Queen's Grove, their silver armor catching the sunlight.
I walked past them without slowing, without meeting their eyes, without giving them a reason to remember my face. The gate swallowed me, and I was out.
Riverside Yard unfolded around me, the streets narrower here, the buildings older, the air thick with the smell of the Winetail and the particular silence of a working neighborhood at rest.
I had walked these streets before, in the long afternoons when I was supposed to be training, in the evenings when I was supposed to be studying, in the hours when I was supposed to be becoming the heir House Chaffer needed.
The Unraveler's Company stood at the end of the street that hugged the river's southern bank. Its white stone glowed, the red flowers that climbed its walls dark as wine, the sign above the entrance still new enough to catch the light.
I had watched them build it, had counted the days, had waited for the moment when I could walk through those doors and become something other than what I had been born to be.
The doors were open. I stepped through, and the world shifted.
Dwarves. Elves. Men and women I had never seen before, standing together, talking together, planning together.
The sight of it stopped me for a moment—the dwarves in their heavy coats, their beards braided with silver, their voices low and rumbling; the elves in the colors of Houses I knew and Houses I did not, their laughter bright, their hands moving as they spoke.
And there, speaking to a dwarven boy who could not have been older than ten, was Ashton Auddyr.
The sight of him made my jaw tighten. Ashton, with his glacial stillness, his formal speech, his face that never betrayed a single thought.
He was the son of a Sister House, the same as dozens of others who had been raised to believe that duty was the only freedom they would ever have. But he was here, standing in the light of the Unraveler's Company, and his family had let him come, because of course they did.
Ashton Auddyr was nothing like me.
I pushed the thought aside. I was of House Chaffer, Blades of Elenoir. The words were old, older than my father, older than his father, older than the walls of Zestier itself. I was proud of them. I would always be proud of them. But pride was not the same as chains.
I walked past Ashton without acknowledging him, letting my shoulder brush the air where his should have been. His eyes widened—just for a moment, just long enough for me to see it—and then his face was stone again.
"Ashton?" The dwarven boy's voice was light, curious, the voice of someone who had not yet learned to guard his thoughts.
"Apologies, Warend." Ashton's reply was so formal it could have been carved from the same stone as his face. I wanted to laugh. He spoke to a child like he was addressing the King himself.
The dwarven boy turned, and his eyes met mine. For a second—just a second—I thought I recognized something in them. The shape of them, perhaps. The way he held himself.
"Are you here to sign up as an Unraveler?" he asked.
"I am." I kept my voice steady, though my heart was beating faster than I wanted it to. "Do you know where Prince Corvis is? I thought he would be here. I wanted to ask him how to enlist."
"And you really think His Highness would waste his time doing paperwork for you, Chaffer?" Ashton's voice was flat, but I heard the edge beneath it.
The same edge that had been there for four years, since the moment I had beaten him and he had learned to hate me with the quiet, patient hatred of an elf who had never been taught to feel anything else.
"Calm down, you two." The dwarven boy stepped between us, and his voice had changed—sharper, more certain. "His Highness isn't here right now. But I am Finn Warend. Grandnephew of Elder Rahdeas Warend of Darv, main financier of this organization. After all, the Unraveler's Company takes all its funds from the Warend Trading Company."
I frowned. "I thought this was backed by the Crown. Our Crown."
"It is." He nodded, and there was something in the gesture that made me think of Corvis, of the way he always seemed to be carrying more than he showed. "Prince Eralith made the construction of this building possible. He also granted the Unraveler's Company access to Elenoir's border with the Beast Glades—the largest border with the Wild East any country in Dicathen has."
I nodded, not caring about the politics.
"So." I leaned forward, letting my voice drop. "How do I become an Unraveler?"
The boy's face shifted. The openness in it closed, like a door sliding shut. "Do you have permission from your parents?"
I stared at him. "What?"
"We don't sign runaway children." His arms crossed, and for a moment he was not a boy at all.
"You're the one to talk." I heard the anger rising in my voice and did nothing to stop it. "How old are you? Nine? Ten? I'm fifteen. I'm an adult."
"We do things a bit differently here." His voice was calm, infuriatingly calm. "Either you have a family member—your mother or father, or both—to confirm, or my hands are tied."
My heart was pounding now, a wild rhythm that drowned out everything else. "Let me speak with His Highness. I'm sure we can come to an agreement."
Something flickered in the boy's face—hesitation, perhaps. "Fine. I'll see what I can do."
I clenched my fist, the victory sharp and sweet in my chest. I turned to Ashton, let him see the triumph in my face, the certainty that I would get what I wanted, the same way I had always gotten what I wanted.
His expression did not change, but I knew him. I knew the way his jaw tightened, the way his hands curled at his sides. He was enjoying this. He was watching me dance on the edge of everything I had ever wanted, and he was waiting for me to fall.
But I would not fall. And I was going to be an Unraveler, whether my parents liked it or not.