Cold first — the particular, creeping cold of evening settling over water, sinking into Zelene's hands before she'd even registered the sun was fully gone. Her fingers ached faintly around Wren's smaller ones, and beneath that, quieter, a tightness had begun gathering low in her chest that had nothing to do with temperature at all.
More than a dozen. The number sat wrong in her, heavier each time she turned it over. And nobody's said it out loud until now.
"A dozen," Corvin repeated, his voice carefully even, though something had gone taut in his jaw the moment Old Fen said it. "You're certain of that count."
"Certain as a man can be, counting whispers instead of names." Old Fen's hands had gone still on the edge of his stall, no longer even pretending at work. "Nobody keeps a proper tally. That's rather the point of it, I'd wager. Easier to lose a woman quietly than to lose her loudly enough that someone has to answer for it."
Wren's hand tightened in Zelene's, small and sudden, and Zelene glanced down to find the girl staring hard at the fish stall's edge, her jaw working the way a child's does when they're trying very hard not to cry in front of strangers.
She's seven. Almost eight. And she's had to be brave about this for two days straight, alone, before we ever showed up.
Something in Zelene's chest cracked, quiet and sharp, gone before it could show on her face.
"You mentioned a woman," Corvin said. "Near the tannery. Someone who might talk to us."
Old Fen's eyes flicked toward the square again — reflexive now, a habit worn deep enough it barely registered as fear anymore, just caution gone bone-deep. "Past midnight," he said. "Not before. Daylight's not safe for that sort of talking, not with them watching who comes and goes."
"Them," Zelene said.
"You'll understand soon enough who I mean, if you go looking hard enough." He shook his head, done, it seemed, with handing over more than his nerve could carry. "I've said more than I should already."
He turned back to his stall, and this time, when Corvin opened his mouth to press further, the old man simply didn't look up again — the particular, final silence of someone who'd decided the conversation was over whether they agreed or not.
They found a quiet corner near the bridge to sit while the sky finished bleeding out its last color, the river running dark and steady beneath them, close enough that the sound of it filled every pause in conversation before anyone had to fill it themselves.
Wren had gone quiet somewhere along the walk, curled into herself on the low stone wall beside Zelene, the borrowed shawl — her mother's, Zelene remembered now, with a fresh ache — clutched tight against her chest.
"You don't have to talk," Zelene said softly, "but I'd like it if you did. Even just a little."
Wren was quiet a long moment, watching the water. "Mama used to say this town has two faces," she said finally. "One for daytime. One for after." Her small hands twisted in the shawl. "I didn't understand what she meant before. I think I do now."
Zelene's throat tightened. She didn't have a gentle answer ready for that — didn't think one existed, honestly, that wouldn't feel like a lie to a child who'd clearly already started understanding more than any seven-year-old should have to.
"We're going to find her," she said instead, quiet but certain. "I promise you."
"You already promised once," Wren said.
"Really?" Zelene chuckled.
That, at least, earned the faintest ghost of a smile — small, fleeting, but real.
Corvin had gone still beside them, staring out at the water with the particular stillness that meant something was working itself loose behind his composed expression. Zelene recognized it now, after enough days beside him to know the shape of it.
"Corvin?"
He glanced over. "It's nothing yet," he said, before she could even ask. "Only — a dozen women, vanished quietly enough that a whole town's decided silence is safer than searching. That's not carelessness. This is probably a work of a group of people." His jaw tightened. "Someone's profiting from this. Or protecting themselves by letting it happen."
"The guards," Zelene said slowly, the shape of it settling into place the way it always seemed to, piece by piece, cold and unwelcome. "Ray said they didn't look like guild men."
"No," Corvin agreed quietly. "They didn't."
Beside them, the river carried on exactly as it had before — indifferent, endless, utterly unconcerned with whatever secrets the town on its banks had decided were safer left to drown.
Zelene looked down at Wren, asleep now against her side despite everything, exhaustion finally winning out over fear, and felt the cold in her chest settle into something harder, more determined.
Midnight, then.
Whoever's waiting near that tannery had better be ready to talk.