Book One – Chapter 17

He was wary, because, as good as Yu was at hearing, he was terrible at talking. Terrible at asking questions in the right order. At masking suspense and suspicion behind casual tone. At sliding from one subject into the other without catching on every edge. At using shifts in pitch and tone and timing to sound, well, … likeable. He was too dumb to even play dumb, because he needed so much time to think, so much breath in between, and just so many pauses.

It was the same now. Too many questions swarmed his mind, pressing against his beak, fighting to spill free. Yu clamped them down. Hard. The next one had to be smart. It had to count. His life was on the line.

He forced his earlier thoughts back into place. So Harrow’s party had come together from different regions — what did that mean for him? How did that matter? It did not. It made no difference. It did not contradict his suspicions. Rather, it confirmed them. It meant they were part of something large and layered — a syndicates so widespread that its members gathered from all over the continent. The kind of network where no one could possibly know everyone involved. That probably was the point. There were organisations like that, which operated on more and less secret things, with more and less secret people. The Crimson Circle was the most obvious example.

Going from there, Harrow’s “party”, if you could even call it that, was just a front. A loose mesh of criminals from different places and ties, but taking over the guild under the same banner. Some knew each other well. Some barely. Some knew the raider-guards, while others, like Imbiad, did not, which explained why he had introduced himself to Tirran.

And that was it. That explained it — the inconsistencies amidst the strange ease that framed their arrival. That quiet ease that was not familiarity, just the absence of suspicion. Not blind trust, but a shared script, already memorised.

As soon as Yu understood that they were pretending, that they were all preparing for their own agenda, he knew:

There is no on_{e I ca}n  t_{r u} s _t .  

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