Akebono, Day Two

Hayate woke to the sound of nothing.

No voices from the next room, no siblings at the door, no smell of breakfast from downstairs. Just the ordinary noise of a town going about its morning and the particular quality of light that meant he had slept longer than he intended.

Haruki was at the window.

He was sitting on the sill with his back against the frame, one knee drawn up, looking at the street below. He hadn't heard Hayate wake. His face was turned away but Hayate didn't need to see it --- he knew the shape of that stillness. He had been lying in the same stillness himself for the first few minutes before he'd shaken it off and sat up.

He understood without needing to name it. He let it sit for a moment, then cleared his throat.

"Morning" he said.

Haruki turned. Something in his expression reset quickly --- not hidden exactly, just put away.

"It's afternoon" he said.

Hayate looked at the light coming through the glass. It was, in fact, afternoon.

"Good afternoon" he said.

Haruki almost smiled. "Get dressed."

They ate what the boarding house offered --- bread that was a day old and a thin soup that was mostly hot water with ambitions --- and headed for the job board.

Lyra was already there.

She was standing in front of the listings with her arms crossed and the focused expression of someone running calculations, the bow across her back and the dagger at her hip. She did not look up when they approached.

Haruki stopped a polite distance away and waited until she had finished reading whatever she was reading. Then he said, "Excuse me."

She looked up. Her eyes moved from him to Hayate and back again with the quick, assessing quality he was starting to recognise --- the look of someone who had learned to read people fast and trusted the reading.

"The goblin camp" Haruki said. "Yesterday. I apologise for the lack of manners. We hadn't eaten in several days and we weren't thinking clearly."

A pause. Something shifted in her expression --- not softening exactly, but recalibrating.

"Lyra" she said.

"Haruki." He extended his hand.

She looked at it for a moment as though the gesture was slightly foreign, then shook it. Her grip was firm and brief.

"Hayate" said Hayate, from slightly behind Haruki's shoulder.

She glanced at him. He gave her a small wave. She did not return it but she didn't not return it either, which Hayate decided to count as neutral.

Haruki did not waste time. "We're looking to take on larger jobs. The kind that pay better but need more people. We work well together and we could use a third who handles range --- you cover priority targets from distance, we front-line. Any earnings split three ways." He paused. "It's a reasonable arrangement if you're open to it."

Lyra looked at him for a moment without answering. Then --- "You're human."

"Yes."

"And you want to party with an elf."

"I want to party with someone who can shoot" Haruki said simply. "You can shoot. The rest of it isn't relevant to me."

"It's relevant to a lot of people" she said. "The history between the races isn't exactly ancient. Most of it is still living memory for my people."

"I know." Haruki's voice was even. "But I don't have ill feelings toward elves. Or toward any of the other races. Our only vendetta---" something crossed his face then, just for a moment --- a fracture in the calm, something dark and raw moving underneath it before the composure closed back over "---is with the demons."

It was there and gone in under a second. His expression was steady again before most people would have registered the change.

Lyra had registered it.

She said nothing about it. She filed it away in the same part of her mind where she had filed the things she had seen at the goblin camp yesterday --- because she had been there earlier than they knew, watching from the treeline before she'd stepped into the clearing. She had wanted to assess them before they assessed her. Standard practice.

What she had seen was a seventeen year old fighting with a calm, expressionless face that belonged on someone twice his age --- precise and controlled and completely without heat, like a man solving a problem rather than surviving a fight. She had watched him move and noted the instincts underneath the technique, rough but real, the kind that couldn't be trained from scratch.

She had also noted the younger one, who fought like a small catastrophe and somehow made it work.

The crack in the calm just now --- the split second of grief and something much harder underneath it --- told her more than the fighting had. You did not look like that unless you had earned it.

"Temporarily" she said. "I want to see how you fight first. Properly, not a goblin skirmish."

"Fair" said Haruki.

She turned back to the job board and pulled a listing without hesitation. "This one. Large goblin camp --- multiple shamans, possible chief. The payout reflects it." She handed it to Haruki. "Sunrise at the gate."

Haruki looked at the listing, then at the payout figure, then at Hayate.

Hayate nodded.

"Sunrise" Haruki confirmed.

Lyra was already walking. "I have errands" she said, without turning around. "Don't be late."

They had the rest of the afternoon for the market.

It was larger than anything Kasumi had prepared them for --- stall after stall stretching through the central square and down several side streets, selling everything from food to tools to cloth to weapons. The noise of it was constant, the smells layered on top of each other in a way that took some getting used to.

Hayate noticed it within the first few minutes. Haruki noticed it shortly after.

The market was divided.

Not by signs or barriers --- nothing so formal. Just by the particular arrangement of where people stood and where they didn't, which stalls had which customers, which groups moved through which sections. Humans browsed human stalls. The elven merchants clustered together three rows in and their customers were predominantly elven. Further down, dwarven work displayed to dwarven buyers. The races moved around each other with the practiced efficiency of people who had long since learned to occupy the same space without acknowledging each other.

The brothers looked at it.

"Hm" said Hayate.

"Mm" said Haruki.

They moved on.

The weapon stalls were a disappointment. Everything was either too expensive, too cheap and obviously poor quality, or neither and still somehow wrong in a way Haruki couldn't articulate beyond a general sense that the person selling it didn't know enough about what they were selling. He stood in front of a rack of short swords and felt the particular frustration of not knowing enough to know what he was looking for.

Hayate had drifted ahead of him, which was normal. Haruki kept half his attention on his brother's location as a matter of habit and kept looking at the short swords.

"Haruki."

He looked up.

Hayate was standing about fifteen metres away, in the gap between two rows of stalls, looking at something. He wasn't pointing. He was just looking, with the expression he got when he had found something and was deciding whether to say anything about it.

Haruki walked over.

The door was set slightly back from the main row of stalls --- easy to miss, which was perhaps the point. Nondescript wood, a single small window set not quite at eye level, dark inside. The kind of place a person walked past without registering it unless they happened to be at exactly the right angle.

Above the door, a hand-lettered sign. The letters uneven, the spelling worse.

wepons

Hayate looked at Haruki.

Haruki looked at the sign.

"We should check it out" Hayate said.

"It says wepons."

"I know what it says."

Haruki looked at it for another moment. Then he sighed in the way he sighed when he had already decided something and was taking an extra second to pretend he hadn't.

"Fine" he said.

Hayate was already at the door.