A mark meant a name, and a name meant an organization. Organizations, in Revan's experience, never sent only three people.
He pressed his palm against the first corpse and opened the Shadow Storage. The body sank into the dark beneath it with a wet, sucking sound, then the second followed, then the third. By the time the last boot vanished, his stomach was rolling like a ship in a storm.
The storage always took its small toll of mana. On a healthy day he never felt it. Tonight, with his blood painting the alley floor, the drain landed somewhere behind his navel and twisted.
Revan swallowed bile and slid down the wall until he was sitting in the filth. Cold brick bit into the gash that ran from his shoulder blade to his spine, and his hands would not stop shaking. Blood loss, adrenaline, or both. At this point the difference was academic.
'Why me?'
He stared at the mouth of the alley.
'I'm a servant. A butler with a sword and a bad attitude. What does a secret society want with the help?'
Fanatics who chewed poison rather than talk did not waste themselves on butlers. They came for things they needed, and that thought hurt worse than the wounds.
And if he died here, between the rats and the rotting cabbage, House Vespera would not mourn. Someone would file a report, someone would complain about the inconvenience, and a replacement would be requisitioned by the end of the week. Broken tools went to the scrap pile. He had watched it happen to better men.
Then he forced himself upright. The alley tilted, black spots bloomed at the edges of his sight, and he caught a crate a heartbeat before his knees gave out.
Stay put in your dorm and do not show your face or do anything without my direct order.
Sylvia had said it a week ago, perfectly calm, and Revan had nodded like a well-trained dog. Since then he had left the academy without permission, walked into the worst slum in the capital, bought favors from an illegal blacksmith, and nearly been butchered by a squad of assassins.
'If there's an award for most thorough violation of a direct order, I'm taking first place. Unopposed.'
The laugh that escaped him turned into a wet cough, and something red landed on the cobblestones.
He knew exactly what disobedience cost in that household. Vargos had stolen cargo, and Sylvia had folded a Master-rank warrior into the dirt with her gravity magic as if she were swatting a fly. Revan could still picture the Black Rose blooming over the forest, the air turning heavy as lead, those pale violet eyes narrowing in mild irritation.
'Yeah. If she finds out, I'm dead. Absolutely, categorically, pancake-shaped dead.'
'Maybe I should let the bleeding finish the job. Dying in an alley is at least more dignified than being flattened into a meat patty.'
Instead of indulging the thought, he reached into the storage again. The nausea surged, but his fingers found what he wanted: a slim vial glowing faint green. Minor Healing Elixir. It could not mend the damage, though it would stop the bleeding and keep his organs from staging a mutiny.
He drank it in one gulp. It tasted like expired medicine stirred into lawn clippings.
Warmth spread through his chest a moment later, and the pain stepped down from actively dying to merely wishing he were dead.
'Good enough.'
A dark cloak came out of the storage next. Pulling it over his ruined shirt, he winced as the fabric glued itself to the drying blood, then tugged the hood low and checked his reflection in a puddle.
'Less murder victim, more suspicious vagrant.'
He tilted his head.
'No. Still a murder victim. Just one who stole a cloak.'
***
Valorheim never truly slept. Even past midnight, drunks spilled out of the taverns in the merchant district, night carts rattled toward the bakeries, and figures in doorways conducted business that preferred the dark.
The walk back to the academy usually took thirty minutes. Bleeding, he needed far longer, and Revan spent every step of it doing what he did best.
Disappearing.
No Warrior could make himself silent, so Revan borrowed noise instead. He let a cart wheel cover the scrape of his boot, timed his breathing to a drunk's bellowed song, and only moved when the wind banged a shutter somewhere down the street.
Every footstep behind him made his hand drift toward the kunai in his sleeve. But nothing came.
'Either they only sent three, or the rest are regrouping.'
And neither option was comforting.
By the time the academy's outer wall rose in front of him, the moon hung high and the main gate had been locked for an hour. Curfew.
'Wonderful. Now I get to break into my own school like a delinquent dodging detention.'
At least he knew how. A few months of slipping in and out on Sylvia's errands had taught him which stones on the eastern wall were loose, which patrol dawdled at the fountain, and which window in the servants' wing never latched. His fingers found the familiar grooves, and he climbed. Each pull felt like dragging his torso across broken glass.
At the top, he swung over and dropped into the servants' garden, rolling to absorb the landing.
His ribs objected to the roll immediately and violently.
"Ngh—!"
He bit his tongue to kill the sound, and copper flooded his mouth.
'I'm fifteen. Fifteen years old. Why does my body feel like a seventy-year-old veteran of a war he lost?'
Limping through the servant passages, he skirted the night patrol with the ease of long practice. Ahead, the dormitories were mostly dark, except for a few windows where students were studying, or more likely panicking over assignments due in the morning.
'Almost there. A few more corridors, then bed, and I'll pretend tonight was a fever dream—'
"My, my. What do we have here?"
Revan stopped walking.
The voice behind him was soft and melodic, amused in a way that made the hair on his arms rise.
He turned slowly, because slow was the only speed his body had left.
A woman leaned against a pillar at the end of the passage, half in moonlight, as if she had been waiting there all evening. Early twenties, perhaps. Long black hair fell over her shoulders like spilled ink, and her face had a sharp, aristocratic beauty that reminded him uncomfortably of Sylvia.
The resemblance ended at the eyes. They were the same pale violet as his master's, almost exactly, yet where Sylvia's gaze was frozen fog, this woman's burned with curiosity, hunger, and amusement all at once.
Her black dress was plain to the point of strangeness and seemed to swallow the moonlight instead of reflecting it. No jewelry, no house crest, nothing that said who she was, or what.
'Faculty? I memorized every instructor's face in my first week. A noble visitor? In the servants' passage, at midnight?'
His fingers crept toward the kunai.
'Or the rest of The Garden.'
Her smile widened as she watched his hand move, yet she made no attempt to stop it.
"Relax, little servant. If I wanted you dead, you would have died on that wall."
Revan forced his voice level, though his body was voting loudly for running.
"Who are you?"
She pushed off the pillar and walked toward him, each step unhurried and graceful.
"Straight to the point, no groveling, no stammering. I like that. Frightened people usually waste so many words."
She stopped an arm's length away. This close, he could see darker flecks of purple in her irises and smell her perfume, something floral with a heavier note underneath.
Lilies, he decided. Funeral lilies.
Her head tilted the way a scholar might tilt a specimen jar.
"I've been watching you, Revan von Alstaire. The servant who challenged a Master-rank warrior and lived. The shadow of the Vespera princess."
Her gaze dropped to his blood-soaked shirt and climbed back up, and her nose wrinkled delicately.
"Those cuts are clean, so someone trained gave them to you. And you smell of coal smoke, rust, and hot iron. The Undergallows, I think."
'Great. A stalker. Did I manage to anger another woman without noticing?'
He searched his memory anyway, every face from every errand, and came up empty. His record of irritating women was long, but she was not on it.
"The question is, does your precious mistress know where her little dog has been wandering tonight?"
Her smile thinned.
"Because I'm fairly certain she told you to stay in your dorm. Not to show your face. Not to do anything without her direct order."
The air caught in Revan's throat.
'Those were her exact words. She said them to me alone, in a closed room. How?'
The woman laughed softly, a sound like wind chimes in a graveyard.
"Don't look so alarmed. I'm not here to report your little adventure to Lady Vespera. Quite the opposite."
From her sleeve she drew something small and held it up between two fingers. The moonlight caught dried petals, pressed flat and preserved with care.
A black orchid.
Revan's breath went shallow. It was the same flower inked on the wrists of the three corpses sitting in his Shadow Storage.
When she spoke again, every trace of play had left her voice, and what remained was cold and very old.
"The Garden. They took something precious from me, and I intend to take everything from them in return."
She tucked the flower away without looking at it.
"You killed three of their people tonight. Impressive, in your condition. But those three were expendable. Scouts, sent to see how you bleed and how you react."
His expression soured further.
'Of course they were bait. Who does she think she's talking to? I've finished more games and novels with this exact plot than she's had birthdays. And I'm an assassin. Expendable scouts are page one.'
What frightened him was everything after page one: what they actually wanted, and why they wanted him.
"The real threat hasn't shown itself yet."
Revan flinched before he could stop it. She had answered the question in his head as if he had asked it aloud.
"When it does, that broken body of yours won't last three seconds."
She took one last step, close enough that he could have counted her eyelashes. For a moment, something looked out at him from behind the violet that had nothing young about it, something that had watched far too many people die to be surprised by one more.
"So tell me, Revan von Alstaire."
Her voice dropped to a whisper that somehow carried farther than a shout.
"Would you like to know what The Garden is really planning? Or would you rather keep stumbling around in the dark until they get bored of playing with their food?"