Chapter 22: Mara Confronts Osric

The morning she chose was deliberate. Not the morning after the ravens — that would have been reactive, and reactive confrontations produced reactive defenses, and she needed something else from Osric. Not defensive. Present. She waited three days, and she spent those three days watching him in the market and in the subcommittee sessions and twice at the harbor, watching the way he moved through the settlement's social geography with that particular ease of his, filling vacuums, smoothing edges, the warm word here and the practical arrangement there, and she thought: he believes in this. That was the thing she kept returning to. Not the betrayal's architecture but its sincerity.

She found him at his usual table in the back corner of the cooperage building that had been repurposed as a trading house after the original guildhall washed with floodwater in October. He was reviewing a manifest with a narrow-faced man she didn't recognize, and when she came through the door he glanced up and the recognition was immediate and entirely controlled. He said something brief to the man and the man gathered his pages and left without looking at her. That, too, was practiced.

"Mara." He gestured at the empty stool across the table. "Sit if you want. I'll have someone bring—"