The carriage rolled forward into an silence that neither of us moved to fill.
Reichert — Zaren — did not acknowledge my greeting. In fact, he appeared to have lost interest in my existence entirely. He leaned back against the cushioned seat, tipped his head to rest against it, and closed his eyes. A moment later he let out a low, pained sound — not dramatic, barely audible, the kind of sound that escapes a person involuntarily rather than being offered for sympathy.
I noticed it and said nothing. He did not seem like someone who wanted a conversation partner, and I did not particularly want to be one. Silence suited both of us.
What did not suit me was the smell.
With the carriage windows closed and the two of us enclosed in the padded interior, the sickly sweet scent had nowhere to go. It simply settled and deepened — a heavy, layered thing, floral at its base with an overripe sweetness underneath, the kind of smell that is not entirely unpleasant in small quantities and becomes almost unbearable in large ones. It filled the carriage completely, pressing in from every surface, and I found myself breathing more shallowly than usual in an attempt to take in less of it.
It wasn't working.
I glanced at the man across from me. He appeared entirely unbothered — eyes still closed, body still sprawled with that particular ease of someone very comfortable in his own space. Could he not smell it? The question seemed impossible, and yet his complete absence of reaction suggested either remarkable tolerance or an equally remarkable lack of awareness.
I made a decision.
"Would you mind if I opened the window, Mister Zaren?" I kept my voice politely apologetic. "It's nothing to do with the carriage itself — it's just rather difficult to breathe at the moment."
His eyes opened.
He looked at me with a sharpness that was somewhat at odds with the lazy sprawl of the rest of him — focused, suddenly alert, as though the words had caught his attention in a way that idle pleasantries would not have.
"Why?" he asked. "Why can't you breathe?"
An odd question. I would have expected *of course* or *go ahead* or, if he was feeling less charitable, silence. Not *Why?*
"The scent," I said carefully. "It isn't unpleasant exactly — just very strong and very present. Opening the window should help it disperse."
"What kind of scent?" he asked.
This stopped me.
He knew the scent was there. His question had confirmed that much — he wasn't asking me to describe something he was unaware of, he was asking me to confirm what I could perceive. The distinction mattered. If he hadn't known there was a scent to be smelled, he would have looked at me with simple confusion rather than that direct, assessing look.
He knew. He simply wanted to know if I could detect it.
"Floral," I said, watching him as I answered. "Sweet. Something like overripe fruit underneath it. It sits very heavily in an enclosed space."
He held my gaze for a moment. Then the corner of his mouth moved — not quite a smile, something more private than that — and he said simply: "I see."
Then he leaned back again and closed his eyes.
I stared at him.
"You may open the window," he added, after a beat.
I turned to the window latch immediately and released it, pushing the panel open. The effect was instant — the heavy scent poured outward into the night air and the clean, cool darkness of the farm road rushed in to replace it. I breathed it in with a relief that was probably more visible than was becoming for a young man from Helga who had simply gotten lost on his way back to the first wall.
The smell from the man across from me remained — it was him, or something he carried, or something he was — but diluted now, reduced to a manageable trace rather than an all-consuming presence. I could think around it.
He didn't open his eyes again. His breathing had settled back into the even rhythm of someone who has decided to sleep, or to approximate sleep convincingly, which amounted to the same thing from my side of the carriage.
I settled back and let my thoughts run.
The first and most obvious question was what he was doing outside the second wall on a farm road at this hour of night. He was a merchant conducting business in the city's commercial district. There was no trade-related reason I could construct for a carriage bearing the Silver Eagle emblem to be navigating the agricultural outskirts of Arpa after dark. None that were straightforward, at any rate.
And he was so completely unlike the man I had met twice before that the contrast was almost difficult to account for. In the construction yard that morning, there had been that precise bow, that polished courtesy, the careful management of a social situation that had gone wrong. In the warehouse the previous day, the same — controlled, professional, reading the room and adjusting accordingly. This man, sprawled in red velvet with his tunic open and his eyes closed, apparently indifferent to everything except whatever pain he was carrying quietly in that low, involuntary groan — this was not the same performance.
Which meant it wasn't a performance at all. This was something closer to the thing underneath.
The second thing I turned over was the magic.
The scent was magic — I was certain of it now. My own workings produced nothing olfactory, but this magic had a smell, specific and recognisable, and it was coming from him or from something he carried. Which meant he either used magic himself or handled enchanted objects as a matter of course, the kind of person for whom magical artefacts were simply part of the ordinary texture of life.
He was probably not a mage or a sorcerer — those were extraordinarily rare, in any part of the world, and they tended to produce a different quality of magical signature than what I was sensing. More likely he was someone with a natural affinity: not the ability to work magic directly, but the capacity to use engraving magic — the practice of embedding spells into objects through complex formulae and drawn circles, a system invented by an elf of the western world roughly five hundred years ago.
I had read about Heyrian once, in the Draga library — the single volume they held on the subject, which was less a practical text than a history. An elf who had grown up among humans and been moved, genuinely and deeply, by the disparity between what he could accomplish in a moment through magic and what they had to labour toward through sheer effort over years. He had spent his life trying to close that gap, to make magic accessible to those who hadn't been born to it, and he had succeeded — the system of engraving magic was his life's work. It had never spread much beyond the western world; the eastern and central regions knew of it mainly as history rather than practice. But in the west, it was widely studied and applied.
The ending of Heyrian's story stayed with me when I read it. After everything he had built for humanity, he had been killed by the person he was closest to — his most trusted human companion — using the very system he had invented. The reason had never been established. The book offered no satisfying explanation.
I had felt terrible for him when I first read it, and I felt terrible for him again now, the memory surfacing unexpectedly in the swaying interior of a rich man's carriage.
I let out a quiet breath and set the thought aside.
Heyrian had been dead for nearly four centuries. There were considerably more immediate concerns sitting three feet across from me.
If Reichert — Zaren — could use engraving magic, or handle it at the level implied by the necklace's craftsmanship and what I was sensing from him, then he was not simply a merchant with good taste in jewellery. People capable of working at that level of magical sophistication were dangerous in the particular way of those who can alter the properties of objects without anyone being the wiser until the object has already done what it was made to do.
That included me. My own capacity for destruction did not make others less capable of surprising me.
I needed someone to follow him. Discreetly, consistently — someone who could track his movements and report back without alerting him. It would not eliminate the unease he produced in me, but it would give the unease something concrete to work with rather than simply sitting in my chest being persistent and uninformative.
Outside the window, the farmland continued in darkness. The road was long and the city was large, and at the pace the carriage was maintaining it would take the better part of four hours to reach anything approaching the city's centre. Arpa was enormous in the way of things that have been built over centuries by people with grand ambitions and unlimited space, and crossing it at night, by carriage, through the outer districts, was not a swift undertaking.
I looked at the man across from me.
He breathed evenly, eyes closed, face unreadable in the low amber sway of the magic lamp.
*Yegney Zaren*, he had said.
Not Reichert. Not Dorken. A name that belonged to someone I had never heard of, offered without explanation and with no apparent concern about whether I found the discrepancy strange.
I settled in for a long ride and kept my thoughts to myself.