Chapter 41: Evelyn
Chapter 41: Evelyn
The clerk disappeared through the back door with Ethan’s report still in hand.
She had read the casualty count twice before leaving. The second time, her eyes had moved from the parchment to Ethan and stayed there for several seconds, as though waiting for one of them to become more believable.
The wait stretched almost an hour. Ethan leaned against the counter and let it pass without impatience, Rune sitting at his knee, watching a stray hound work at a scrap of rind near the kitchen stairs. The hall’s noise continued around them — dice rattling, an argument over a shared tavern tab resolving into something almost friendly. Nobody paid him much attention.
When the clerk finally came hurrying back down the stairs, she didn’t stop to catch her breath.
"Come with me."
Ethan followed her up, Rune keeping pace at his knee. As they climbed, he could see the interior changing — magic lamps set into the walls at even intervals, polished floor replacing the grit-strewn boards below, the pine-and-tallow smell of the ground floor giving way to something cleaner. The clerk knocked once on a plain door at the second floor.
"In."
Ethan stepped through the door and felt it before he saw her clearly — an aura settled and controlled, the particular weight of someone who’d spent years learning exactly how much of her own strength to let show in a room full of people who didn’t need to know.
A woman in her late twenties sat behind the desk, crimson hair falling loose and slightly unruly over her shoulders, eyes the color of deep brown scanning him with an amused look that she didn’t let show for more than a few seconds.
"So you’re the one who brought the report in."
So it’s her, huh... Ethan thought. Evelyn. He hadn’t expected to find her here this early. In his previous life, they had met years later. She looked younger now, though not by enough to soften the sharp intelligence behind her eyes.
He took the seat before she told him to.
She looked at him for a few seconds longer than the moment required — not rudely, just thoroughly, the way a person looks at something they’re trying to reconcile with what they’d expected. A trace of surprise crossed her face, gone almost as fast as it arrived.
"So you’re the one who cleared the bandit group."
"Yes."
"What happened. Walk me through it."
"As the posting mentioned, I was scouting the Deadwood Thicket and mapping it as I went. I found three dead woodcutters and followed a blood trail deeper into the forest. It led me to a fortified bandit camp. There were five surviving captives." He kept his voice level. "I overheard them deciding to kill the rest of the captives once they’d finished with them. I decided to end it before they could."
It wasn’t quite the truth. He hadn’t overheard anything specific — only the noise of a camp that clearly had no intention of letting five witnesses walk away eventually. The lie cost him nothing, and he didn’t feel the smallest hesitation telling it. Men who preyed on people too weak to fight back didn’t earn the benefit of the doubt, not from him, not for even a few more seconds of consideration.
Evelyn studied him for a beat, pen still resting untouched beside her hand. "You know the standard procedure. Find something like that, you report to the nearest garrison and wait for a proper deployment."
"If I’d done that, the rest of the captives would have been dead before anyone arrived."
She considered that for a moment, and let out a small sigh.
It seems the Commander handed me a troublesome one. A mischievous glint touched her eyes despite the sigh. An interesting one, though.
"Okay. You can leave now." She said it while hiding a smile, testing the shape of the silence before she’d even finished the sentence.
Ethan didn’t move.
She’s still the same, playing with her words for her own amusement. Let’s see what she does now.
"Then I’ll file a report to the garrison commander," Ethan said, "regarding your branch’s failure to update a three-week-old posting, and the resulting exposure of an apprentice operative to a threat far beyond its assigned rating."
Something shifted behind her eyes — not quite alarm, closer to recalculation. For a moment she just looked at him, the amusement giving way to something more careful, as if she were reassessing not just his age but everything else she’d assumed about him in the last five minutes.
He paused. "I assume Commander Marcus reads those reports personally."
"Alright, alright, kid. Enough." She waved a hand, already reaching into a drawer. "I’ll give you the excess payment. And update your rank, which technically requires twenty completed D-rank missions." She held out her hand. "Card."
Huh. She accepted that easily. He filed the thought without examining it too closely. She wasn’t this agreeable last time. She used to hit me for insubordination before she’d even hear the argument out.
He handed his card across.
Evelyn slid it beneath a small device she produced from somewhere below the desk — a flat, dark artifact he didn’t recognize, its surface humming faintly for a moment — and a moment later handed it back. The card looked entirely different than the one he’d given her: the edges adorned with a faint gold inlay, the rank symbol reformed to something cleaner.
He turned it over once. He’d expected D+rank, maybe, given everything he’d argued for. What he was holdingis a C Rank one which carried a defensive enchantment worked into the metal itself — old craft, precise, the kind of inscription that took real skill to embed correctly. Sixth circle, at least. Not standard issue. She didn’t hand cards like this to anyone who walked through her door with a good report; this was something she’d chosen to give, specifically, to him.
Ethan noticed immediately.
She’s generous today. What’s gotten into her.
He looked at her once more. Evelyn had already buried herself in the next stack of papers, giving no indication that she had just handed a stranger something worth far more than the rank printed on it — or that she’d made a deliberate choice most operatives would never be offered at all.
"Get out," Evelyn said, though there wasn’t much force behind it, already reaching for her next stack of paper. "Now."
"Understood."
As Ethan left, he could still hear her muttering to herself through the door, half to the empty office and half to no one at all.
"It seems the tides are changing, huh." A pause, a short breath that might have been a laugh. "A knight, this young. Twelve, maybe. If the Imperial family caught even a whisper of it, the Emperor himself would make a fuss." Another pause, longer. "Where did the Commander even find him. Training him to be the next powerhouse of Ravencrest, is he."
"I wonder what rank his core is. Maybe I’ll look through this year records."
The guild hall hadn’t emptied while he was upstairs. He crossed it without drawing much notice, Rune close at his knee, and stepped out into a night that had come on faster than he expected — the cold sharper now, the wind carrying the first real bite of the season.
He was most of the way back to the outer district when he heard a girl arguing with a merchant, loud enough to carry over the evening traffic. She stood beside an herb stall with a worn gathering basket at her feet and several bundles of frostroot spread across the counter between them.
"You’re only giving me ten? It was fifteen a few days ago!"
"Prices change, girl. Everything’s changed this month."
"Not the herbs. The herbs are exactly what they were."
Ethan didn’t interfere. He kept walking, letting the argument fade behind him the way most things in this city did once he’d passed them, filed away without weight.
The moment he closed the door of his own room behind him, he pulled out the forty gold from inventory he’d taken from the bandits’ camp and set it beside the coin the guild had already paid him. He counted it once, out of habit rather than doubt, and let it sit in two neat stacks on the blanket.
Ah... I would have given her some, had I known she’d be this generous about it. He looked at the stack of gold again, considerably heavier than he’d expected an afternoon’s paperwork to leave him with. No. She’s rich enough already.
Marcus hadn’t given him anything. Just a dozen silver.
He sat on the edge of the cot and let the thought go, the way he let most passing thoughts go.
I think it’s time. To meet him.
If his memory held true, the man should be somewhere near the village close to Coldvale by now — settled just long enough to feel safe, not long enough to feel careless. That balance wouldn’t hold forever. Men who ran from something with real reach eventually either grew too comfortable or ran again, and either way, the window closed.
In his previous life, Ethan had reached him after that window was already gone.
Rune curled at the foot of the bed, one ear twitching once at the shift in Ethan’s stillness before settling flat again.
Ethan lay back and let the ceiling hold his attention until sleep found him, the city outside carrying on the way it always did, indifferent to what a boy in a small room had just decided to risk.