Nyra found the goat path an hour after the quarry had gone quiet behind her, the last of the smoke from Vhar's fight still visible over the ridgeline when she looked back the one time she allowed herself to look. The two sets of tracks running down the path told her almost everything she needed before she'd covered the first hundred meters.
One set of prints ran straight. Their owner placed each foot cleanly, even at speed. The other set wandered along the left edge and slipped twice on loose stone. Its owner carried a hard load heavy enough to slow him down.
Vhar closed distance until he could touch his target. Nyra stayed close enough to a trail that she could read every turn. She had learned that work long before she met him. She had never wanted his job instead of hers.
Before the fight, Nyra told Vhar to clear the pit while she held the goat path. He accepted it without argument. He had done that from their first week together. He never treated her spear work as a lesser part of the fight.
The tracks themselves told her more the longer she read them. Twice the wandering man had stopped to listen behind him; she could see it in the way his weight had shifted onto both heels rather than carrying forward, a held breath rendered into dirt. He'd been right to be scared of being followed; he simply hadn't been fast enough for it to matter, which was a different failure than the one he thought he was making.
The path dropped through a dry wash, then climbed the far side. The wandering prints stopped there. Their owner had set down his load, changed his grip, and lifted it again. Nyra crouched over the mark it left: rectangular, hard-edged, and roughly the size of Tavik's strongbox.
A second locked case, then. Whoever had packed that cart hadn't trusted everything to a single lock.
She caught sight of them at the top of the second rise, close enough now that stealth mattered more than speed. The steady-footed man carried nothing but a short sword at his hip; the second, younger and visibly flagging, hauled a document case strapped awkwardly across his back with both hands still gripping its edges like it might slip free on its own.
Nyra closed the remaining distance along the tree line rather than the open path, and the steady-footed man heard her closing a breath too late to make it matter.
He turned with the sword already clearing its sheath, a trained draw that could have cut an unguarded throat. His grip was clean, and his stance had settled before the blade cleared leather. Nyra's spear met the blade's arc a hand's width from her throat, turned it aside with one twist of her wrist, and reversed into a thrust through his chest before he recovered from the parry.
THUD!
He was dead before he finished falling, and Thronebreak came free of him clean, no wasted motion spent on a killing blow that had already done everything it needed to do.
The younger one dropped the document case and ran.
Nyra let him run until the narrow path and loose stone left him nowhere to turn. A man cornered on bad ground fought harder. She would not give him that advantage. He tripped over the same loose stone that marked his tracks. Nyra put her spear haft across the back of his neck before he finished falling.
"Don't," she said. "I've killed one of you already today, and I didn't enjoy it enough to need a second."
The young man went still beneath the spear, breathing hard against the dirt. Up close he looked younger than he had from a distance, closer to Ossa's age than to his dead companion's, with hands that hadn't yet earned the calluses a career at this work would eventually leave on them. Whoever had sent a boy this green to carry the second copy of a ledger this valuable either hadn't expected pursuit at all, or hadn't valued him enough to spend a more experienced pair of hands on the risk.
She could have killed him with one thrust. She kept him alive. A dead courier could not name the person waiting for the ledger, any more than Tavik's dead raiders could. Nyra chose the prisoner because the name mattered more than a clean second kill.
"Get up," she said, easing the spear back. "Slowly."
He got up slowly.
The document case held what the strongbox's twin had promised: more ledger pages, cross-referenced against the first by a hand that clearly hadn't expected both copies to end up in the same set of hands by the same afternoon. Names of routes. Weights and dates. The same absent signature at the bottom of every transaction that Tavik's copy had already shown her.
One page held a tally the first copy had lacked: complaints dated across two seasons from bands and outposts along the same frontier. Each listed missing cargo, cut snare lines, poisoned supplies, or vanished workers matching Tavik's people this week. The people behind the thefts had been doing it long enough to keep files.
"Who were you taking this to," Nyra asked.
"I don't know his name." The young man's voice cracked on the last word. "Couriers get a drop point and a password, not a name. Ask too much and they stop hiring you."
"Where's the drop point."
He told her. A trading post two days east, well outside anything Tavik's band's contract touched, further than anything Vhar's authorization was written to reach.
Nyra made him repeat the directions while she watched his hands. A split ridge shaped like a broken tooth. A dry well with a cracked stone ring. A post with blue cloth tied below its signboard. The password was not a name or a slogan. It was a question about iron weight and an answer about rain.
"Who hears it first?" she asked.
"A woman at the counter, if she's there. If she isn't, I leave the case in the grain shed and walk away." His bound wrists pulled tight when he tried to point east. "They check the shed at dusk. I never met the buyer. Never saw the same face twice."
Nyra opened the document case again. Beneath the ledger pages, a narrow waxed pouch had been stitched into the lining. Inside lay a thin strip of blue cloth, a brass token stamped with a grain measure, and a scrap of paper bearing only the same rain answer the courier had given her. She held the token where he could see it.
"This is your proof you reached the post."
He nodded.
"And someone removes it after they take the case."
Another nod. His face had gone pale under the dirt. "If the token isn't gone when I come back, I don't return to the post. I walk south until I find a road and never use that name again."
"You were paid to carry pages and disappear if the pages stayed put." Nyra folded the cloth and token back into the pouch. "That is not work. That is bait."
"It was work to me," he said. "Work that paid."
Nyra looked at the dead man on the path, then at the boy who had carried the case. "Walk."
He took the first step because the spear point stayed between his shoulder blades. The second came easier. By the tenth, he had stopped looking back at the body and started watching where Nyra placed her boots.
Nyra turned pages by the fading light and chose the sheets she could carry. She buried the rest beneath a flat stone and marked the spot. Smoke still rose from the quarry behind the ridge. The drop point lay two days east. She would not reach it tonight.
She bound the young man's wrists with the same cord Tavik had used on his own prisoner and started the walk back with both the ledger and its courier in tow, weighing, without quite deciding yet, exactly how much of tonight she was going to let House Severin's people hear about before she had to.
There was a version of tonight House Severin would have approved without hesitation: a Severin defending contracted allies, recovering stolen intelligence, killing where killing was warranted and nowhere else. The version closer to what had actually happened looked different: a Severin acting alone, two days from any House sanction, making a custody decision about a living prisoner without asking anyone's permission first. Both were true. House Severin had never been especially interested in which true account arrived first, only in which one reached their door before the other did.
House Severin's own letters had gone quiet since the timing defense, in exactly the way that meant they were watching rather than waiting, and she'd learned a long time ago that their silence cost more attention than their questions ever did.
Word would reach House Severin eventually; it always did. The only real question left was whether it reached them from her, on her own terms, or from someone else's account of a Severin acting without sanction two days from anyone who could have granted it in time.
She already knew which answer cost less; she just hadn't decided whether cost was the thing she was optimizing for tonight. The young man walked ahead of her without being pushed, wrists bound, head down, the ledger's weight riding in her own pack rather than his, the one part of tonight's outcome that wasn't going to be up for negotiation with anyone, House Severin included.