CHAPTER 71: 71: THE STRANGER RETURNS XIII

The forge had settled into its midnight heartbeat. Coals breathed under ash. Tools cooled in orderly ranks. From the street, the village sounded like a creature that had curled up and gone still, save for a lone cart wheel clicking twice as it rolled past a loose stone and the whisper of wind along the eaves.

John sat at the worktable with the ledger open and a blank sheet angled beneath the lamplight. His pencil hovered. He was not drawing the lab anymore, nor writing orders for leather and glass. He was thinking of the thread that always pulled tight when he let his mind slow down.

Sera was doing some night prayers. She didn’t notice what Fizz and John were doing and talking about.

Fizz floated above the table, a small warm glow that drifted side to side like a lantern on a quiet boat.

"Tell me again," Fizz said, softer than his usual stage voice. "Not the part that hurts. The part we can fix about your family."

John did not look up. "We cannot fix the past."

"We can fix how it hides from you," Fizz said. "We can fix how it keeps its secrets. We can fix who holds them. We will find out about your mother. Let’s start there."

John set the pencil down. "The midwife is dead. I did not want to believe it when it happened. I kept thinking what would I do if she was alive. I would send coins and a letter, and she would write back with her neat little lines and say she was well and scold me for not eating. She died five years ago in the winter. She was the only person who talked with me in that house." He exhaled, steady, not slow. "So there is no letter to send. No one to ask about my mother."

Fizz floated closer until his glow brushed John’s cheek. "Then we ask someone who loves money."

"Who."

"A servant," Fizz said without hesitation. "Not a grand one with silk on his cuffs and opinions about soup. Someone who knows the back stairs. Someone who knows where the laundry hangs and which door carries whispers. The kind who sees what a house wants to hide. We will find someone."

John lifted his gaze. "You want me to bribe a servant in the Duke’s estate."

"I want us to pay for truth," Fizz said. "The house owes you. Houses do not pay their debts. People inside them do, when you hand them coins and a chance. You will only grow stronger with your doom ball magic. Someone will definitely give in to your powers."

John weighed it. He found the weight honest. "How."

Fizz set his paws on his hips and became a strategist. "We will talk with the village innkeeper’s wife. She knows faces and who owes beer money. We offer a finder’s fee. We ask for a servant who used to carry laundry to the temple and now wishes he did not. We tell him we are willing to pay him for a memory with names in it. We will send someone to that house. We let him or her connect what they find out, and when he or she is done we connect the rest."

John nodded once. "It will cost a lot."

Fizz grinned. "Good. Let it. Coin should learn to do something brave. The bag from today will feel honored."

"Okay! I will think of something soon," John said.

"You better, if you find out the truth then you will find peace." Fizz echoed. "And John."

"What."

"If she lives," Fizz said, meaning the mother without needing to say the word, "we will ask for more than names. We will ask for roads. And if she is gone, we will ask for where the road ends so we can set a stone there and stop pretending it is not a place."

John’s mouth tightened and then eased. "Fine."

Fizz drifted back, satisfied, and then cocked his head toward the door. The quiet had changed. The change was small but it had a shape.

"Someone," he murmured.

John closed the ledger, stood, and moved to the side of the door where the wall gave him shadow and a view of the gate. Sera, who had been perched by the window in a prayer position and her eyes on the sky, she stopped praying without a sound. Then she rose feeling the person’s mana. Gael, half asleep on the pallet in the back room, made the questioning rumble of a bear waking to a smell it did not like.

A figure stepped into the lane’s thin light: a man about thirty, shoulders squared, boots polished even after a day’s dust, cloak pinned with a discreet iron clasp marked by a symbol John did not recognize. He did not glance at the forge sign. He did not look at the racks. His eyes found the door as if someone had told him it would be here and told him who to expect behind it.

He knocked with the back of his knuckles. Not loud. Certain.

Sera frowned. "The temple."

John breathed once and opened the door with a handspan. "Evening," he said.

The man looked past him into the room, not at him, as if doors were servants in his way. "I am here for Sera."

Sera came into view and stood beside John, calm and unhurried, chin lifted just enough to turn the night into a courthouse.

"I expected you at the temple resting room hours ago," the man said. He did not bow. He did not introduce himself. He let the iron of the clasp say what his mouth would not. "You didn’t come back, Priestess. You are not in them."

"I decided to stay here," Sera said.

The man’s mouth thinned. "With commoners."

Fizz bristled and rose, but John put a hand up without turning and the small creature halted with a vibrating pout.

"With friends," Sera corrected, voice even. "And with work to do. I am safe here. Don’t worry."