Page 5 of Orc’s Moon

“A copy of my request goes with me.” She’s already up, already reaching for the folded parchment she hasn’t let leave arm’s reach since the fire. “In writing. I want it on record that I asked before anyone decides I didn’t.”

Korruk’s grin sharpens instead of fading. He falls into step behind us without being asked, war hammers riding easy against his back, muttering under his breath something that sounds suspiciously like twenty years and this is the one. I choose not to hear it.

The council chamber sits dead center of the fortress, cut from the same black stone as everything else, unornamented but for the Blackfang crest carved into the floor where every captain for six generations has knelt to take his oath. Marshal-elder Doran presides from the high seat, tapping two fingers against the armrest the way he does whenever he’s already made up his mind and is waiting for the rest of the room to catch up. Two officers I’d trust with my life flank him. One clerk I wouldn’t trust with a shopping list. Doran ran this Council before I earned my commission. He doesn’t like surprises, doesn’t like historians, and likes least of all a Captain who’s marched one through his gates without asking first.

“Captain Blackfang.” He doesn’t rise. “Sent to investigate a fire. Returned with a fugitive.”

“A witness.”

“A witness the Royal Historical Council will want returned to Asterhold the moment they learn we have her.” His gaze slides to Lyessa — threat first, usefulness second, the way he catalogs everything. “The map, Captain. Confiscated, logged, handed to the royal investigators riding for the fortress by week’s end. The historian goes with it.”

Vessa, the broad-faced officer who’s fought beside me twice, shifts like she wants to say something and thinks better of it under Doran’s stare.

“With respect, Marshal, that map is mine.” Lyessa doesn’t raise her voice. Doesn’t need to — the whole chamber’s already listening. “I found it. I nearly died protecting it. If this Council intends to bury it in an evidence room until it’s someone else’s crisis, I’d like that decided to my face, not over my head.”

A ripple moves through the officers — not agreement, not yet, but the start of it. Nobody talks to Doran like that in this fortress. I’ve certainly never tried.

“You’ll speak when addressed, historian.”

“I’m addressing you now.”

Doran’s fingers still on the armrest. I watch him weigh whether spending his authority on a woman who clearly won’t hand it back is worth the cost — and watch him decide it isn’t, not with two officers and his own Captain already watching the scales tip her way.

“The map” — his fingers still tapping the armrest — “will be examined by this Council before any decision is⁠—”

The window behind him shatters.

I have her on the floor and my body between her and the opening before the sound finishes crossing the chamber — instinct ahead of thought, the way it always is when the choice is her or anyone else in the room. The arrow that would have opened her throat buries itself in the chair she isn’t sitting in anymore, shaft still humming.

Chaos, fast and total. A second shape drops through the broken window, blade already drawn, boots finding the floor with the ease of a man who’s done this before. Something in my chest goes white-hot and simple. I close the distance before he finds his footing — Nightfall clearing its sheath in one motion, catching him mid-turn, steel finding the gap under his arm where the breastplate doesn’t quite close. He doesn’t get another swing. I don’t feel the impact so much as register it a full second later, jaw locked, teeth bared, blood already cooling on the blade.

Korruk’s already moving for the window, glass still falling around him, hammers up, bellowing something that isn’t a word so much as a promise — but the archer on the roofline is gone, boots skidding on slate, and Korruk’s curse when he loses the angle rattles the clerk clean out of his chair.

One voice, distant, retreating: “Truth belongs beneath ash!”

Then nothing. Wind through a broken window. A dead man on the council floor. My own blood still hammering somewhere behind my teeth, wanting badly to have a second target and finding none.

I haul her up off the floor by both arms, hands closing around her shoulders harder than I mean them to, turning her into the light, checking for blood and finding none. She doesn’t pull away from the grip, doesn’t flinch at how hard it’s landed.

I don’t let go as fast as I should. My hands stay on her a beat too long, long enough that I feel the exact moment the shaking settles out of her under my palms, and long enough that some low, ugly part of me registers satisfaction at having my hands on her at all, arrow or no arrow. I make myself step back before that thought finishes forming.

I kneel over the body instead. Human, mid-thirties, armor plain enough to pass for a caravan guard’s — except for the mark on the breastplate, or what’s left of one. Scratched off. Not scuffed by wear. Gouged out, deliberately, with a blade and patience, until nothing remained but bright metal where a symbol used to be.

Not a hidden identity. An erased one.

“Captain.” She’s beside me, close enough now that I can still feel the tremor running through her, though her voice gives none of it away. Her hand hovers over the ruined breastplate, not touching, just close. “That’s not soldier’s damage. That’s chisel work. Patient. Someone spent real time making sure this man couldn’t be traced back to anyone.”

“You’ve seen this before.”

“I study what’s missing for a living, Captain. This is my career, standing in front of me, wearing armor.” She meets my eyes over the body, and the composure she’s been wearing since the chamber has a crack straight through it now. “Someone put an arrow a foot from my throat in a room full of armed men, and I’d like to know why that doesn’t seem to surprise you nearly as much as it should.”

It doesn’t. That unsettles me worse than the arrow did.

Vessa’s already barking the fortress into lockdown — gates sealed, watch doubled, every switchback searched before dark. Doran hasn’t moved from the high seat. He’s staring at the corpse as if it owes him an apology it isn’t in a position to give.

Doran clears the chamber before the blood’s dry, orders the map to the vault, orders Lyessa confined to a guarded room until the investigators arrive. Doesn’t ask my opinion on either point. I find him in the corridor an hour later regardless, once the watch has finished scrubbing what it can off the floor.

“You’ve something to say, Captain.”