Chương 175: 18. Return of the Raven 3

What followed moved with the aggressive speed of someone forcibly dragging a nauseating play into its second act. Marro collected payment, signed the transfer, flipped the tags—movements crisp and practiced, like a man genuinely liquidating stock. Around us, the people who had been considering bids clicked their tongues, cursed their luck, or simply turned to examine other merchandise, as though everything had been permanently settled. I stood there, tension grinding along my jawline. I knew it was a setup.

I had given the signal myself. But watching Marro flip that slate and officially record the transfer still felt like someone pressing a block of cold iron into my chest. Before the man led her away, Ignicia's eyes met mine for the briefest instant. Just one look. No panic in it. No reproach. Only something as simple and absolute as a single spoken word. Follow. I waited half a beat before moving. Not too fast. Not too obviously. Right now I wasn't a bodyguard. Not a swordsman.

Not someone who chased after his charge through crowds. I was low-grade cargo muscle who had just helped complete a handoff and was now being dismissed to haul cloth and clear debris. So I went around to the back of the house first, picked up an empty crate, made sure to get jostled by a half-drunk dockhand, and then drifted out through the side walkway. The man didn't head straight for the docks.

He led Ignicia through two crowded narrow streets, past a stall selling old sailcloth and tobacco, then into a back alley quieter than most places managed at midnight. One side was stacked with crates and broken barrels; the other, the rear walls of two shuttered warehouses. At the far end stood a half-open side door. I stopped at the corner and controlled my breathing. He wasn't taking her to a ship. He was going to inspect his purchase first.

The moment that thought formed, the fire in my stomach rolled over again. Inside the door was a narrow storage room—burlap sacks, empty crates, and several long wooden frames covered in waterproof canvas. The light was poor, just two pale shafts of daylight cutting down through high windows. I had barely pressed myself against the doorframe when I heard the man's voice from inside, low and controlled.

"Miss. If you understand your situation, I'd prefer this conversation to be considerably more efficient than that performance outside." No flirtation. No crude commentary. No satisfaction at having secured his prize. Just cold. My expression went flat. Then Ignicia's voice cut back—familiar as breathing, and colder than his by several degrees.

"That depends entirely on what you intend to ask." Enough. I kicked the door open. The panel slammed against the wall with a crack. The man's reaction was frighteningly fast—his hand was already sliding toward his sleeve. I didn't even register what he was drawing, because Ignicia moved first. She had never been standing there waiting to be inspected.

The instant his shoulder shifted, she became a streak of crimson burning into shadow—stepping in close, seizing his arm, and wrenching the entire limb back behind him in one fluid motion.

"Urgh—!" He grunted, his free hand darting toward his waist. I didn't give him a second attempt. I came in with the crate still in my arms, drove it straight into him, and took him and the chair together to the floor. Wood cracked, dust and splinters exploding outward. I got my knee onto his chest, caught his wrist, and ground the thin blade from his grip—something so narrow it was less a knife than a needle with ambitions.

"Don't move," I snapped. He tried anyway. Professional dedication was one way to describe it. Infuriating was more accurate. Ignicia solved that problem with brutal efficiency. She planted her boot on his other arm, grabbed his collar from behind, and pinned him flat against the floor. She was clearly holding back—if she had applied anything approaching her actual dragon strength, this man would currently be learning to form sentences with his jaw wired shut.

"You wanted to ask questions," she said, looking down at him with terrifying calm.

"The direction has changed. We ask now." For the first time, his composure cracked. I had one knee in the man's back, pressing down with my full weight, his arm twisted up at an angle that made the joints produce sounds that settled unpleasantly in the back of my teeth. An ordinary person would have been screaming confessions about their entire lineage by now. This one held.

Cold sweat beaded along his hairline, but his jaw remained locked like welded steel—as though he would sooner let me disassemble his arm one degree at a time than surrender a single syllable. Professional intelligence operative. Which was precisely why the heat in my chest burned hotter, not cooler. Not the clean, releasable kind of anger. The kind that gets compressed into you by force, cooking tighter the longer it sits. From the auction house onward, I had been swallowing it. Enduring the stares.

Enduring the filth. Enduring the particular nausea of watching Ignicia get sold while knowing it was theater and being unable to convince my body it wasn't real. Now I had him on the ground, and I understood with crystalline clarity—I still couldn't afford to lose control. Because you don't beat answers out of this kind of operative with brute force. They have to decide to open their mouths. Ignicia stood beside us without commentary.

She had already secured his other arm, kicked the needle-blade out of reach, and pulled the door most of the way shut, cutting off the alley noise. Every movement was precise, economical, almost cruel in its calm—like someone who had anticipated this development and was simply waiting for the appropriate fool to arrive on schedule. Compared to the explosion building in my chest, her composure was somehow more oppressive than any threat.

Honestly, there were times I suspected this fire dragon princess processed lethal danger as a form of morning refreshment.

"Poison needle in the sleeve. Second blade at his lower back." She looked down at the man with the detached attention of someone conducting inventory.

"Boots likely contain something as well. Strip him thoroughly."

"Working on it." I answered while reaching into the inner lining of his jacket. When my fingertips found something flat and hard, my stomach dropped before I even drew it out. When I actually saw what it was, my breath stopped entirely. A token. Black base, edges darkened with deep copper-red. The markings weren't elaborate, but they were burned into my memory. Not a merchant guild seal. Not a port authority credential. Something I was constitutionally incapable of forgetting.

The moment it settled into my palm, memory tore open along a fault line I had thought was sealed. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Snow. Blood. Wind off the killing peaks that sliced exposed skin like a blade drawn sideways. Princess Erina. The squad. The ambushers who materialized from the white—figures who hadn't come for valuables, hadn't come simply to eliminate witnesses. They had come specifically for the princess.

They had failed at every step, and every one of them had died in the labyrinth. And I had personally collected these exact tokens from their corpses. I had carried one all the way back to the Kingdom. Placed it before the King. The Kingdom had traced its origin. The Yanxia Empire. The Ravens. Every loose thread I had been holding since we arrived snapped taut at once and pulled into a single, unbreakable line. This wasn't paranoia. This wasn't coincidence.

These relentless black birds had followed us all the way to Blackbeard Bay. My fingers closed around the token until the edges bit into my palm. The man beneath me felt the shift—his body tightened by one nearly imperceptible degree. That was enough.

"Cedric." Ignicia looked at me. I turned the token so she could see it. My voice came out lower and harder than I intended.

"No mistake," I said.

"It's them." She glanced once. Her pupils contracted to fine points. Not surprise. Confirmation. The man on the floor had to understand as well. From the moment we recognized what he carried, the ordinary buyer identity was finished. I leaned down and pressed him harder into the floorboards.

"The Yanxia Empire and the Eckhaus Kingdom are separated by an entire ocean." I kept my eyes on his profile, where pain had produced a faint, involuntary tremor. The words came out through my teeth.

"You already hold the eastern coast. Rich soil, stable waterways. What exactly is it you still need to take?" I genuinely could not understand it. Or perhaps more accurately: I could not accept it. One kingdom. One territory. One sea lane. Was that not sufficient? Did the reach really have to extend into other people's mountains, their snowfields, their harbors—all the way to a filthy port at the edge of the world? The man didn't respond immediately. Then he laughed.

It started as something rough scraping up through his throat, then grew—his shoulders shaking with it, the kind of laughter that had been stripped of every trace of warmth. Not sharp, but profoundly wrong. The kind that crawled down my spine one vertebra at a time. I had encountered many varieties of laughter. Mockery. Contempt. Bitter resignation. The stubborn kind people produce right before they die. This was different. He wasn't laughing because I was ridiculous.

He was laughing because my question was too small. Too narrow. The question of someone who still believed that lines drawn on maps had any relevance to what was actually being pursued. After a long moment, he forced his head to the side with considerable effort, fixing me with bloodshot eyes—looking at me the way someone looks at something almost pitiably naive. Then, slowly, he exhaled two words.

"Everything..." Something dropped in my chest like a stone into still water. Not land. Not harbors. Not a kingdom. Everything. What they wanted had never been as simple as claiming territory. It was taking whatever could be taken, swallowing whatever could be swallowed—making every visible and invisible thing into theirs. The word was still settling when I saw his jaw clench hard and sudden, the muscles along his cheek pulling into an unnatural line. Wrong. That wasn't a movement to speak. That was a bite.

"He's going to kill himself—!" My hand shot toward his jaw on pure reflex, while Ignicia simultaneously drove her boot down on his shoulder, trying to wrench his chin sideways. We were half a second too late. Crack. The sound was soft. Soft enough to be mistaken for something brittle snapping cleanly in two. But in my ears, it landed like the sound of every thread of information being severed at once. The man's entire body convulsed—a single, violent jerk—and his eyes rolled white.

Dark reddish-black fluid seeped from the corner of his mouth, carrying a sickly sweet metallic scent. His throat worked twice, and then, with what had to be the last organized effort his dying body could produce, he forced out one final sentence.

"Long live... Queen Wahlin..." The voice died on the last syllable. The storage room went still. Not from absence of sound—but because when those words hit the floor, the air seemed to drop several degrees all at once. Queen Wahlin. Not long live the Yanxia Empire Empire. Not long live the Imperial House. Not long live victory. Long live Queen Wahlin. That wasn't loyalty. That was something closer to faith.

The kind that made a man spend his final breath not on survival, not on curses, but on kneeling—in the last moment of his existence—before a name. My hand tightened on his shoulder without permission. I pressed two fingers against his neck anyway, refusing to accept it. The pulse beneath was gone. Completely gone.

"... He's dead, Cedric," Ignicia said beside me, her voice perfectly level. I stared at the corpse's face—that lingering trace of fanatic laughter still carved into his features—and felt the fire in my chest compress down until only one word came out.

"Shit." She tilted her head and looked at me.

"That hardly sounds like aristocratic vocabulary." Still kneeling over the body, I glanced down at myself—the tar-reeking, dignity-free ensemble of a cargo handler whose highest aspiration was apparently functioning as a cleaning rag—and pulled the corner of my mouth into something that wasn't quite a smile.

"I don't exactly look like an aristocrat right now either." She made a very soft sound through her nose. I wasn't certain it qualified as a laugh, but it at least confirmed that there existed in this world something more immediately stomach-turning than a fanatic's dying words—specifically, my current aesthetic configuration. Unfortunately, that moment of self-deprecation did nothing to push back the cold settling into my bones. Because I understood perfectly. Those final words were enough. More than enough.

Enough to tell me that what made the Yanxia Empire Empire truly terrifying wasn't the length of its reach. It was that the people at the end of that reach genuinely believed they were dying for someone capable of owning everything. At that moment, unhurried footsteps approached from outside. A second later, the half-closed door was pushed open from the alley.

"I knew the moment I let you two loose on your own, it was only a matter of time before some back alley started resembling a crime scene." One-Eyed Marro stood in the doorway. He looked at the body on the floor, then at me, then at Ignicia, and finally let his single eye settle into an expression that was neither surprised nor pleased—closer to the look of a merchant who had long suspected a specific page in his ledger would tear, and was now simply confirming which line had ripped. Two of his men followed him in.

They took one look at the fresh corpse and my position over it, registered neither shock nor commentary, and with practiced efficiency closed the door and positioned themselves to block every angle visible from outside.... The professional ease with which these people managed murder scenes was genuinely unsettling. Marro crouched beside the man, touched the dark liquid at his mouth with the back of his hand, pried open the jaw for inspection, then produced a short, low click of his tongue.

"Tooth-concealed poison," he said.

"Sophisticated work. Looks like what you pulled in wasn't ordinary courier trash."

"I wasn't planning to let ordinary courier trash walk away in the first place," I said, standing and tossing him the token. Marro caught it one-handed. One look, and whatever thin layer of sardonic amusement had been sitting at the edge of his expression dissolved entirely.

"I see," he said quietly.

"You recognize it?" I asked.

"Don't recognize the design. Don't need to—it's clearly nothing good." He turned the token over, his single eye narrowing.

"But that face of yours looks like you've just run into an old grudge."

"Not a grudge. An old thread." I pushed down the residual heat still burning in my chest and laid it out concisely—the killing peaks, the blizzard, the ambush on Princess Erina, the identical tokens recovered from dead attackers, and the Kingdom's subsequent confirmation that the Ravens were connected to the Yanxia Empire Empire. Marro listened without interrupting. Then he was silent for two full breaths.

Then he raised one hand and pressed it against his temple, in the manner of a man finally delivering a candid verdict on his own fortune.

"Wonderful," he said.

"I thought I was taking on a complicated smuggling contract. Turns out I've personally escorted the Yanxia Empire Empire's intelligence network directly onto my own docks."

"You're welcome to regret it now," I said flatly.

"Too late for that." His answer came without hesitation.

"The merchandise already went through the house, and someone just died on my property. If regret accomplished anything in Blackbeard Bay, this place would have been a cathedral years ago." Infuriating. And completely, damnably accurate. Marro stood and tilted his head toward his two men.

"Clean it up. Strip the clothes, extract the poison tooth, collect every identifying item. Don't dump him in the water—floats back up too fast and creates complications. Old protocol: limestone pit." The two men moved without a word. One began searching the body with clinical efficiency; the other pulled coarse cloth from a sack and started wrapping. The thoroughness was so practiced that it confirmed, once again, that corpse disposal was maintained here as a genuine professional competency.

Ignicia watched them work, then said without inflection: "You're not going to ask what he said before he died?"

"I was getting to that." Marro looked at us.

"So. What did he say?" I was quiet for a moment, then gave it to him exactly as it had been delivered.

"He said the Yanxia Empire Empire wants everything." Marro's brow drew together. I added the second part.

"And at the end—Long live Queen Wahlin." This time, his expression actually changed. Not shock. Something older and colder—the particular quality that settles onto a weathered face when a name that had only existed in worst-case speculation is suddenly confirmed by a dead man's mouth.

"Wahlin," he repeated quietly, as though measuring the weight of the syllables.

"You know her?" I asked.

"Know the name. Not the person." Marro tucked the token into his sleeve, his voice dropping another register.

"There have been rumors drifting off the eastern coast for years now. Power in Yanxia Empire shifts fast, and the blades keep getting sharper. Someone who can make death operatives shout her name with their last breath isn't sitting on a throne as decoration." He paused, then looked at me directly.

"And the worst part of this situation isn't that you've drawn Yanxia Empire's attention."

"Then what is?" The corner of his mouth moved—but there was nothing resembling a smile in it.

"The worst part is that this operative was already embedded here. Already bidding. Already positioned to receive the transfer." He reached out and rapped his knuckles once against the door panel.

"The Ravens didn't follow you to Blackbeard Bay." He let the pause settle.

"They were already here." The storage room went quiet. From outside, the sounds of the docks drifted in—hawkers calling prices, laughter and cursing, wooden wheels grinding over stone, the early noise of some tavern that had opened ahead of schedule. Blackbeard Bay was still exactly what it had always been: filthy, loud, foul-mouthed, its very air steeped in alcohol and fish. But now, beneath all that familiar noise, I felt something that hadn't been there before. A net. Invisible, patient, already spread.

From the killing peaks, to the Kingdom, to the isolated island, to Blackbeard Bay. Those black feathers had never been carried here by accident. They had always been here. I closed my hand around the lingering cold where the token had rested, and the burning in my chest didn't ease—it settled deeper, heavier, like something that had found its permanent address. Marro looked at me for a moment, then recovered his insufferable register with deliberate effort.

"Incidentally, boy."

"What."

"That profanity just now, combined with the visual of you kneeling on a corpse—you're starting to look genuinely local." I looked at him without expression.

"If that's meant as a compliment, I'd prefer you didn't."

"Unfortunately," he said, rolling one shoulder, "I don't think any of us is going to have the luxury of preferences for much longer." He said it, and his gaze moved past me and Ignicia, settling on the closed door. As though the entire port of Blackbeard Bay beyond it had, at some point while we weren't watching, stopped being a harbor. And become a board.