Half-elves, contrary to popular belief, slept.

Wil was no exception to that rule, but the sleepiness that lodged itself into his bones was not the normal languor of waking. It reached deep into his core, burying him beneath a haze so thick that it took several moments for him to pry his eyes open, and several more before he realized he'd succeeded. The snowy streets of Pendel lay before him, bathed in the splendor of early dawn.

He blinked, slowly, as his eyes nearly refused to open the second time, and, with far too much effort, hauled himself into a sitting position. He stayed there for some time, swaying. His thoughts were mere threads of coherency — fragmented and distorted. He saw the festival; Everna staggering about in a drunken stupor and the coill and his partner. There was a significance to it, but he couldn’t say what.

Dark boots obscured his vision then, followed by a face. A flicker of recognition thinned the fog, if only just enough to draw the connection between the face and the name floating about his mind. Everna's mother — Evelina — crouched before him, her face set with barely restrained fury.

He then realized how similar Everna looked to her mother. The resemblance was uncanny, though the difference lay not in their hair or eye color, but in the finer details of their dispositions. Where Everna had a certain softness to her, Evelina was all harsh lines and sharp edges. There was a thinly veiled promise of violence in Evelina's gaze — the look of a hardened killer — that Everna failed to emulate, even when she took the head off of a Shroud agent.

"Where's my daughter?" Evelina demanded.

"I don't... know?"

As far as he could remember, which was not far at all, she was right beside him. Yet as he turned to look about the street, she wasn't anywhere to be seen. While that alone should be enough to shock him into wakefulness, his body simply refused to respond. She wasn't there, and that was a problem, but he couldn't shake off enough of the daze to fully grasp why.

Evelina seized him by the throat, her nails biting into his skin. "What do you mean you don't know?!"

"Easy, Evelina.” Leah placed a hand over Evelina's and pulled it from his throat. "There's potent magic lingering in the area. He's dazed, if not coming out of a hefty sleep spell. You can't expect him to know anything."

That would explain why he felt so put under. Half-elves slept, but not like elves, who merely rested their eyes, nor like humans, who fell into the deep oblivion of unconsciousness for eight hours at a time. He never slept for longer than three to four hours a night, or day — whenever he had the chance, really.

Accounting for the shift of the day's length, if dawn touched the sky, then he slept for over six hours.

"That's not—"

"The level of magic here is comparable to the traces at the town hall," Leah reasoned, her voice soft yet carrying sharp undercurrent. It was as close to annoyed as Wil had seen her. "I understand you're worried — we all are — but flying off in a fit of rage and taking your anger out on the first person you see won't help anyone. It certainly won't help Everna."

Evelina scowled. "You expect me to believe he was conveniently asleep this whole time? Shroud would've killed him. They're not that careless."

Osain who spoke next, standing somewhere off to Wil’s right. Leah must have contacted him when she realized neither of them had made it back to the tavern. "You're right; they're not that careless. That's why they left him alive. Everna ripped the head off the last Enforcer that tried killing him. They probably didn't want to risk it happening again, or they couldn't get back to him without getting caught."

"Everna? Killing an Enforcer?" Evelina asked, her voice laced with sardonic amusement. "You were a lot of things, Osain, but a good liar wasn't one of them. My daughter could never."

Wil almost laughed. Even half-awake, he knew better than to believe that. Everna was a living testimony to the belief that looks could be deceiving. She was far more capable than most gave her credit for — and perhaps far more than she herself believed. It wasn't every day an unassuming barmaid survived an encounter with one of Shroud's more dangerous agents.

She’d known what she was doing. There was too much clarity beneath the burning fury in her eyes to think otherwise. At that moment, she'd done everything right, short of obeying orders.

Osain raised a brow. "You don't know your daughter as well as you think. Or, like always, you're denying the obvious because you don't like it. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and you know damn well with Everna that the apple may as well have clocked you on the head."

Evelina released a sharp huff through her nose. "She's nothing like me."

"She's exactly like you before Shroud got to you. The sooner you recognize that and stop smothering her for your own comfort, the better off she'll be."

"That is not your decision to make! She's my daughter."

"She's my niece and I'm the one who's been busting my ass to keep her alive these past two months while you ran around and made matters worse, like you always do.”

Wil glanced between them, confusion slowly morphing into a startling realization. It wasn't apparent until they were next to each other, but the longer he looked at them, the more he noticed the similarities. They had the same hair, pin straight and black as night, though strands of gray peppered Osain's. Even their faces were the same, though Evelina's bore the hallmarks of femininity that weren't present in Osain's.

Leah's reaction was far more appropriate. Her head snapped up as she looked between the two of them. "You're... siblings?"

Evelina scowled. "Twins, unfortunately."

Osain snorted. "If you think that's a shock, wait until you find out who our half-brother is." He turned back to Evelina, a sardonic smile on his lips. "Speaking of, I am thoroughly looking forward to watching you try to explain everything to your daughter, since you've been lying to her all this time."

"It was for her benefit! What was I supposed to do? Sit her down with a cup of tea and tell her half her family are murderers and assassins?!"

"Yeah, well, it's really benefiting her now. You better pray like hell she really is like you, otherwise she won't survive long enough for us to find her."

"Check the gallows," Leah said, with no small amount of sarcasm. "That's what they wanted this whole time."

"Wanted, yes," Osain said. "But the plans have changed, according to the few sources I have. They don't know exactly what, a feeling it's the usual response to a particularly troublesome individual."

"Which is?" Leah asked. Wil relaxed as her hand came to rest on his head, a rush of refreshing cold washing over him as the last lingering threads of bewilderment fled from his mind.

"Shroud has several methods of dealing with their problems," Evelina said. "When killing doesn't work, some of their Taskmasters resort to... induction."

"The agent in Windhollow said they wanted her alive," Wil said, the details now much clearer. "Even if he threatened to kill her right after. I thought maybe they wanted to hang her, but—"

"Shroud's been having issues with agents acting on their own lately,” Osain said. “Allegedly, Windmore wasn't supposed to correct the error; I suspect that when you thwarted their hanging attempt, he panicked because he realized it put him on the chopping block."

Evelina shook her head, her hands fisted in the folds of her dress, which was wrinkled and stained with various liquors. She must've woken up and realized her daughter hadn't come home after the festival. "Unless there's another plan we're not aware of, they're going to convert her."

Wil’s stomach turned at the thought. Shroud had finally gotten ahold of her, and if Evelina and Osain were correct, she'd wish they'd just killed her. It would be a much kinder fate.

You fucked up, he thought.

He should've never let her convince him to have the first drink — it only spiraled from there. He should've cut her off before she'd drunk too much, but for the first time in weeks, she looked as if she wasn't crumbling beneath the weight of the Nine Realms. Gods, Osain was going to strangle him once this was over.

He should've listened to Osain and the Courts the first time and stayed out of it, but no, he just had to let that pitiful look in her eyes sway him.

"Why, though?" Evelina demanded. "Why the hell is Shroud so hellbent on getting their hands on my daughter? What could she have possibly done—"

"She's a threat to the entirety of Shroud."

The four of them turned to the source of the new voice — Lyra. It'd taken Wil a moment to recognize her.

Living dead was an apt description for her. Her eyes were dull and red at the edges. Tear stains trailed down her cheeks. Flaccid curls hung around her shoulders, streaked through with coppery blood. Blood stained her boots, legs, and skirt if she'd knelt in a pool of it. It reminded him of how she looked the night Shroud killed Mayor Ashburn, only rather than panic, her eyes held nothing.

Truly nothing.

If not for the steady rise and fall of her chest, he'd have thought her a walking corpse.

"What did you say?" Evelina asked. She went to stand, her hand reaching for the dagger strapped to her thigh beneath her skirt, but Leah threw an arm out to block her.

"That's... That's what they say. The rumors," Lyra said, her voice hollow but trembling. "They said if they didn't do something about Everna, Shroud was in danger."

Evelina narrowed her eyes. "How do you know that?"

That question alone broke her. With an anguished sob, Lyra fell to her knees, her hands over her face. Wil could hardly understand her, but what little he could make out was enough. She mentioned something about her father, about Shroud, and coercion — a threat against her family if she didn't cooperate.

He shouldn't pity her. Her silence on the matter was treason and her cooperation more so, but the tiny flicker of sympathy refused to abate. Threats against family were one of Shroud's preferred methods; it rarely failed. They'd done it to him several years ago. He hadn't known better. Not a week later, they killed his sister, Emery, and threw him at the mercy of the Courts.

Lyra could be lying to save her skin, but he doubted it. He saw it in her eyes — that blank, thousand-yard stare. Everna had the same look in her eyes during their return from Windhollow. He'd seen it a dozen times over since he'd joined Shadowguard. It wasn't easily faked, even for the best of actresses.

Osain sighed. "That sounds exactly like the sort of shit Shroud would pull."

To his surprise, Evelina, let out a sharp breath and released her dagger. "Sounds like? That's what Shroud did to our father. You think we spent three weeks hiding in a wine cellar for the fun of it? Fat lot of good it did us. They still got us eventually."

“Some more easily than others,” Osain muttered.

Evelina threw him a caustic glare.

Leah stood slowly and moved to Lyra's side. She set a hand, encased in the soft golden glow of her magic, atop her head and said, "I need to know exactly what happened. All of it."

"I stumbled into it," Lyra said, taking a shuddering breath. "Landen... he killed Mayor Ashburn. He made me tell him where Everna’s sword was. I... he knew she couldn't refuse looking in the room, so he made me go get her."

The more she talked, the more sense the situation made. Shroud used Lyra to monitor Everna while Landen kept to the shadows to subvert suspicion. Windmore took care of the legal side of the matter, altering and misplacing reports and records to further insinuate Everna's guilt and interfere with the investigation. They hadn't counted on the Courts releasing her.

"Why were you back there? You're a waitress, not a housekeep. That's Fallon's job," Evelina said, skeptical.

"Fallon skipped her shift again.” Lyra pushed her hair out of her face and drew another shuddering breath before continuing, "Everna had me check the rooms before I went home since I was the last waitress there. I... I heard the commotion and when I opened the door... I tried to save him. I really did."

Wil worried at the inside of his cheek. The details of Shroud's design finally fell into place. Everna wasn't an end to a means but the primary target. Mayor Ashburn's assassination and the political opportunity it created were merely favorable byproducts. Windmore would get his revenge. Shroud would have their first chance in thirty years to reclaim control of Pendel, which would give them a firm hold in the southern portions of the region. It would force Shadowguard to split their forces to face them on two fronts as opposed to one.

"What went wrong, though? That's the last remaining question," Evelina muttered. "Why couldn't they pin the blame on someone else and target Everna discreetly?"

"Someone tipped Shadowguard off. Shroud doesn't know who, but him being there that night," Lyra said, pointing at Wil, "threw everything off. They thought maybe Pala or you had someone watching her to give her an out, but that's clearly not the case."

Leah removed her hand. "She's telling the truth. We have everything now, except for who tipped us off, and I can't shake the feeling that may be the most important part of this."

"Someone knew," Osain agreed. "But who? And why would they incriminate her?"

Evelina scoffed. "As if Shadowguard would do anything otherwise. You'd have wasted your time trying to track down the source while Arden and Everna died. I'm amazed you lazy slags have done this much."

"More than you have," Osain reminded her.

Before the conversation could derail into another argument, Leah sighed and stood. "Until we can find where they've taken her, there isn't much we can do but hope Everna can pull herself out of this mess. In the meantime, perhaps it's best we return to the tavern. Corden will have to handle the documentation, and that will take time, but we’ll need to send someone to inform the Courts of the situation. Someone we can afford to spare. There is also the matter of finding a way of... lessening the potential ramifications of Lyra's involvement."

Lyra shook her head. "Gods, no. Just let me take the blame. I'd... I'd rather Everna think I betrayed her than... She'll blame herself."

"While you're not wrong, and I'd love to wring your neck for your role in this, you know as well as I do she'll find out," Evelina chided.

Wil rolled his eyes. "More than that, she already feels guilty that so many people have died or gotten hurt over this. Don't make it worse with the self-sacrificing bullshit."

Lyra refused to yield. "She'll forgive me. She's too nice not to, and she shouldn't."

"If she chooses to, that is her decision," Leah said. "You have no say in that and I have a feeling Everna would say the same."

"It doesn't matter," Lyra said, almost panicked. "Shroud's going to... if they find out I spilled..."

"We’ve kept Everna out of reach, until now. Shouldn't be too difficult to do the same for you," Osain said. "It'd probably be easier, actually. They might not even care, now that they have her."

Evelina turned to him, scowling. "Everna dies, and you'll be joining her."

"She dies, and we'll all be joining her."

Coercion

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