Page 99 of The Mercy of Dawn

Soren’s brow furrowed for a moment. “I doubt it. He maintained some pretty robust trade deals with the south and the mortal lands. I’m sure very little is actually from here.”

A wave of sickly unease swept through Cyril, and it wasn’t just the smell of festering death that was getting to her.

“Do you want to go outside? You don’t look well,” he continued.

She waved him off.

“It’s fine. Just give me a minute and I’ll be out.”

“Remember what we talked about,” Runa had said to her hours ago, but Cyril wasn’t sure she wanted to acknowledge the connections her mind was forging.

Chapter 24

Three days in Brynnhold and Cyril still hadn't fully seen the city. The inn she was staying at with her uncles, the merchant district, and the guard’s station all happened to be just a couple minutes’ walk from each other. Convenient from a working perspective, to not be trekking long distances between each, but terrible for her curiosity.

It felt like an especially cruel form of torture to bring Cyril all the way here and confine her indoors, but Dion was as focused on the task at hand as ever. Bron had apparently found their most credible lead to date, in the form of a recent business deal gone particularly sour.

The details of which, of course, she wasn’t privy to.

It only took ten minutes after returning to the guard’s station that first day for Cyril to go from budding linguist to fucking bookkeeper. The only saving grace was that Soren and herself were assigned to pour through the thousands of business records together.

Misery loved company.

In the grueling days they spent together, he went out of his way to teach Cyril little bits about Brynnhold—like the devastating fire that leveled the original city centuries ago, and what the different colors of ribbons tied to front doors represented—and provided some much needed comedic relief whenever the pages and names and numbers all blurred together.

A regular occurrence, unfortunately.

Cyril sagged against the spindle back of her chair and groaned, rubbing at her burning eyes. “I hate this,” she grumbled, and Soren exhaled sharply.

“Do you even know what a suspicious business record looks like?” he asked in a terrible reenactment of the city commander’s voice as he set his stack of papers down. “Because I fucking don’t.”

Every shape and size of parchment imaginable littered the top of the table in the cramped office they commandeered at the station. Shipment manifests and customer accounts made up the majority of the records and, other than giving Cyril a wicked number of paper cuts, nothing about them raised any red flags. Not that either of them knew what those red flags would be.

Soren told Cyril he spent the bulk of his two years so far with the Royal Guard on and off border patrols, having only returned a few weeks ago from his most recent rotation. And Cyril, well…

“They don’t teach that at the guild, no,” she chuckled. “Sorry that you got sucked into being my babysitter.”

“Your babysitter?” Soren gave her a look like he’d just smelled something sour. “What? So you don’t blackmail—” He picked up a record and squinted at it. “Miss Afferly about how many bottles of almond oil she bought?”

An undignified snort left Cyril.

“Was that the one with eight on it? That’s a questionable amount! Why would one person need that much almond oil?”

“You have a point,” Soren chuckled and tossed the paper back on the table. “So why exactly am I babysitting you?”

“My uncle seems very opposed to me being alone anywhere there is the possibility of fun.” She rolled her eyes. “Gods forbid.”

“Is he the angry-looking one?”

Cyril blinked.

“That doesn’t narrow it down at all.”

Soren sat back in his chair. “So there’s the really tall, really fucking terrifying one. The one who looks like he’s allergic to feelings. The one that is simultaneously friendly and gods damned frightening. And there’s the angry one.”

Rendal. Tyriel. Bronson. Dion.

Cyril cackled, to the point she had tears in her eyes as she said, “Yeah, he’s the angry one.”