Then he turned, unhurried, and looked at the man properly.

"That’s specific," he said.

"Yes."

"Star-shaped jade mark, left shoulder."

"Yes." The man’s careful eyes were on him. Reading him the way Eskar was reading the man — each of them doing the same work in opposite directions.

"You’ve seen it," the other man asked as he saw Eskar’s face go through several expressions.

It was not quite a question.

Eskar let a breath pass. "Who are you looking for when you say ’boy’?"

"Our young master," the man said. And something shifted in his voice when he said it, the careful measurement dropping, just fractionally, for just that phrase, in the way a thing dropped when it was genuinely meant.

"He was — lost to us. Some time ago. We have been looking."

"Lost how?"

A pause and longer this time.

"That is a longer answer than a road rest allows."

The man met his eyes.

"It had been eighteen years since he had gone missing and we want to bring him home."

Eskar looked at him for a long, flat moment.

Then he turned and looked across the rest stop to where Jake was sitting on the stone wall, slightly apart from the others, holding his left side with the careful attention of someone managing a specific inventory of pain. His jacket was on. Both shoulders covered. He was watching the exchange with the quiet, dark eyes of a young man who had spent enough time around mercenaries to know when a conversation needed to be left alone.

Eskar turned back to the man from the east.

Eskar looked like someone who had made no decisions yet and was in no rush to make them.

He asked the older man, "Where are you from? What are you going to do with the boy once you find him?"

"Land of Roakan," the older man said.

He said it the way people said the names of places they considered self-evident — without flourish, without the slight defensive inflation that people from lesser-regarded places sometimes unconsciously applied to their origins.

Eskar was startled to hear that name but he managed to keep himself composed.

Roakan.

He knew the name the way every mercenary worth the title knew it, not from personal experience, because personal experience of Roakan required either extraordinary wealth, extraordinary power, or an invitation from someone who possessed both.

The Land of Roakan was a special region in the entire continent. It wasn’t just a simple city but a hub of diversity.

It sat at the junction of the three realms like a stone dropped at the center of a pond, ripples moving outward from it in every direction. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Old money, old bloodlines, old power, the kind that had been accumulating long enough to become architectural — built into the walls and the streets and the security measures that made Roakan one of the most thoroughly sealed cities in the known world.

You didn’t live in Roakan. You were permitted to live in Roakan, and the permission came with conditions that most people couldn’t meet and most people never got the chance to try.

That these men had come from there, traveled from there, on horseback, across however many roads and weeks — looking for a boy with a jade star mark on his shoulder—

Eskar’s mind moved quickly and quietly, the way it had learned to move in fifteen years of situations where thinking slowly was a different kind of dangerous.

He thought about Jake on the stone wall.

He thought about Jake at fourteen, at the yard pump, the green mark on his left shoulder catching the morning light — the points clearly defined, the size of a palm, exactly as the man had described, and Eskar had filed it and said nothing because it wasn’t his business and because Jake would tell him when Jake was ready, and that was simply how Eskar operated with people he cared about.

He thought about Chelsea.

He thought — and he was not proud of this thought, but he was an honest man, and honest men acknowledged the thoughts that arrived uninvited — he thought about what happened to the distance between himself and Chelsea Altoras if Jake Altoras were removed from the equation. Jake, who was the reason Eskar had a standing excuse to be at their lane twice a week. Jake, who was the connecting tissue between a seasoned mercenary with no particular talent for conversation and a woman who made him hold cups of tea he’d never ordered and forget what he’d meant to say.

Jake, who would be taken to Roakan if Eskar confirmed what these men were asking.

He was not proud of the thought.

He had it anyway, turned it over twice, examined it with the blunt honesty he applied to himself, and then — because he was who he was — he pointed across the rest stop at Jake Altoras sitting on the stone wall with his shirt half-unlaced and a jar of ointment in his hand.

"If you are looking for a boy with a tattoo of a jade star on his shoulder—"

"That’s your boy," Eskar said.

-

Jake had removed his shirt.

This was a practical decision born of necessity — the bruising along his left side had developed with impressive speed and the ointment that Brenn had produced from his kit needed direct application, which required access, which required the shirt to go.

He’d unlaced it and shrugged it off his right shoulder and was working the jar open with the particular focused attention of someone trying to accomplish a thing without using the part of their body that currently hurt most.

He became aware of the gazes the way you became aware of a change in temperature — gradually, and then all at once.

He looked up.

The eastern men were looking at him.

All of them.

The older leader and the five behind him and the sixth who’d stepped out from behind the horses—all of them oriented toward him with the particular quality of collective attention that had a weight to it, the way crowds had a weight when they all turned the same direction at the same moment.

Eskar was standing among them, face unreadable, watching.

Eskar, Jake thought.

What did you do?

One of the men — younger, quick, moving with a trained economy — crossed the rest stop in eight steps and reached Jake before Jake had fully processed that he was coming.

A hand closed on his left shoulder. Not rough, not gentle — purposeful, the grip of someone completing a task, turning him slightly to improve the angle, and the man stared at the jade star tattoo with the focused attention of someone confirming a thing they’d been told to confirm.

He turned back to the leader.

"It’s true," he said.

"Exactly as described."

The leader’s expression did something that Jake couldn’t immediately classify — not quite relief, not quite satisfaction, something older and more complicated than either, the expression of a man who had been carrying a long search and had just felt the weight of it shift.

Jake shook the hand off his shoulder. Not panicked but deliberate.

The clear, specific motion of someone establishing that they were not a thing to be held.

He picked up his shirt and pulled it back on, fingers working the laces with a calmness he was mostly manufacturing, and turned to face the group properly.

The air had changed.

He felt it before he could have explained it — the way the space between himself and the eastern men had developed a texture it hadn’t had thirty seconds ago.

A pressure and it had enveloped the entire surrounding. He could tell just by seeing them.

Like the moment before a storm when the atmosphere made its intentions known before a single drop had fallen. The men’s expressions had shifted — all of them, in the same direction, like a tide changing — and what was on their faces now was something that Jake’s blood-sense registered as a deep, resonant alarm even before his mind caught up.

They were staring at him.

Not the way you stared at a found thing. The way you stared at something you intended to keep.

"What’s wrong?" Jake asked. His voice came out level. He was proud of that.

The leader’s hand moved to his sleeve.

Eskar’s eyes tracked it—involuntarily, the trained fighter’s reflex, the hand going to an unexpected location in a tense moment — and his face did something that Jake, watching from the corner of his eye, had never seen Eskar’s face do before.

The leader produced a whistle. Small, dark metal, worn smooth with handling. He put it to his lips.

He blew.

The sound was not loud. Not the piercing shriek of a signal whistle. Something lower, shorter, with a resonance that seemed to occupy more space than its volume warranted, as though the sound traveled somewhere other than simply outward.

Then the figures came.