It wasn’t a large fire, not yet, contained to the surface of the table, but a block of a man with lank pale hair and a face covered in scars was slowly feeding the merchant’s son’s few possessions to the hungry flame.
“See?” said the stranger, crunching the word between his teeth. “Told you that would wake him up.”
“A knife would have been faster,” said a second voice. It came from the woman who was balanced on the back of his chair, her hair shaved short on the sides and braided long on top. She wore a metal bracer on one forearm, and it caught the light of the growing blaze.
“Left your door open,” she said. “Someone could walk right in.”
Of course, someone had.
He didn’t know their names, but he knew what they were, and who they worked for. He’d seen them there, lurking like shadows against the wall, on the night he had been given his mission.
Now the woman tapped her fingers absently against the bracer, and as she did, the metal rippled like the surface of a pond. Across the room the pale-haired man tossed a shoe into the fire, which bellowed with unhappy smoke.
The merchant’s son tried to rise from his bed, only to feel his body refuse, his limbs leaden. “Put it out,” he croaked, wincing as the words raked his burning throat.
The man raised a scarred brow, and tossed the other shoe in.
“We waited,” said the woman, unbothered by the growing flame. “Down at the docks. You three were supposed to come to us. But you didn’t. We know, because we had to wait.”
“Not a nice night for waiting,” muttered the man, who was now tearing the pages from a journal.
“Please stop,” said the merchant’s son, head swimming as he forced himself to sit up. He tried to stand, but the bed was no longer a bed but a boat at sea, rocking beneath him. He sank down again, fought back the urge to retch.
“I hate waiting,” continued the woman. “It’s boring as shit. And I have to look at Calin there. Which is punishment enough. So I say to him, let’s go find them. And turns out, the other two never made it back. And here you are, having a nap.”
“If you ask me, Bex,” said Calin, “that’s pretty inconsiderate.”
The woman—Bex—stared at the man, eyes wide, and he frowned. “What?”
“I honestly didn’t think you knew any words that big.”
Calin turned on her, fists clenched, and for a second, he thought the two might kill each other instead of him. But she waved him away, her eyes still on the merchant’s son. They were the flat grey of unpolished steel.
“Where is it?” she asked. He didn’t answer. She leaned forward. “You came all the way back to London,” she said. “So you must have it.”
“I don’t—” he tried, and her expression darkened.
“Wrong answer.”
“No, I—” he started again, but his stomach heaved, and bile rose in his throat. He retched over the side of the bed. Whatever came up left his mouth tasting like ash and rot. He swallowed. “I don’t have it,” he managed, “but I did, and I will. It got broken, back on the ship. So I took it somewhere, to get fixed. She’ll have to bring it to me. I kept the key.” He clawed at his pockets, searching for the metal ring.
But it wasn’t there. It should have been. It had been.
Panic rolled through him, but he couldn’t think, not with the sickness and the fever and the fire, which was spreading now, licking up one wall, smoke clouding the ceiling. He coughed, searching for something, anything. All he found was the little black ticket, with the gold H printed on one side, and the number on the other. He held it out, hoping it would be enough. The woman sat forward and plucked it from his shaking fingers.
“Well, Bex,” said Calin, as he splashed the oil from a lantern into the growing blaze. “What do you think?”
“I think this is a fucking mess,” she said, pocketing the ticket and getting to her feet. She turned toward the door. “And you can have him.”
The merchant’s son squeezed his eyes shut.
He didn’t want to be a hero anymore.
He didn’t want to be a Hand.
He just wanted to go home.
“Nah,” said the man. “Waste of a good weapon.”
“Since when do you have standards?”
Black smoke plumed across the ceiling, and the two strangers chatted on about who was going to kill him. The man drew a coin, and told the woman to call it. He won, and she rolled her eyes, and the merchant’s son decided that he must be still asleep. This was all a horrible dream. He would wake up back at sea, sailing for the floating market. Or in the hull of a docked ship, in bed with a beautiful woman, their limbs still tangled, her fingers running through his hair. He must have drifted off. But he’d wake up.