Part Fifty-Two — Word From the Western District

　Life in Roshan settled into something worth calling a routine over the following weeks — jobs from the guild board, evenings spent teaching Eris finer control, mornings where Ace insisted on accompanying me to the market in his smaller form purely, as far as I could tell, to judge the quality of meat available with the discerning air of someone who considered himself an expert.

You're not even the one cooking it.

I am the one who will be eating it, Ace replied, entirely unbothered by the logic gap. That qualifies me as a stakeholder.

A stakeholder. Sure.

　We'd advanced to Bronze-plus-Iron standing at the guild by then, enough that Marta had started handing us slightly better jobs without our having to ask — escort work mostly, the occasional pest-control contract that turned out to be considerably more dangerous than "pest" implied.

　Nothing that tested us the way the bandits had, that first week.

　Nothing, either, that got us any closer to Selwyn or Aldenreach.

Patience. I keep telling myself patience.

Doesn't make the waiting any less frustrating some days.

　It was Eris who brought home the rumor that actually mattered, returning from the market one afternoon with a look on her face that told me before she even spoke.

"There's trouble in the Western District," she said, setting down a bag of supplies. "Elves. A small group of them, apparently — refugees or travelers, nobody's entirely sure. The local guard's been harassing them for two days straight. Word is it's about to get worse."

Elves. Haven't run into any of those yet, not properly.

"Harassing how?" I asked.

"Denied lodging. Denied trade at half the stalls. One of them got roughed up outright yesterday, from what the shopkeepers were saying — nothing serious, but enough to make the point."

That's a familiar shape of story.

Fenrik's shape, more or less, dressed in different details.

　I felt something tighten in my chest at the comparison — old grief, old protectiveness, both rising at once.

"Anti-Subconsciousness," I said, out loud, testing something. "Any read on why? Is this typical, here, or is something specific driving it?"

<Insufficient data to determine motive with certainty,> it replied — promptly, this time, none of the deliberate pauses it sometimes used when weighing whether a question deserved a full answer. <However, elven persecution in human territories frequently correlates with either resource competition, or perceived threat from magical capability exceeding local norms. I would recommend direct observation before drawing conclusions.>

Direct observation.

Fine. Guess I know what we're doing today, then.

"You've been more talkative lately," I said, half to myself.

<You have been asking better questions,> it replied.

"That's almost a compliment."

　The Western District turned out to be a rougher stretch of Roshan than I'd yet seen — narrower streets, fewer patrols, the particular tension of a neighborhood that had decided collectively to look the other way about something happening in its midst.

　We found the elves easily enough — four of them, huddled near the edge of a market square that had visibly cleared around them, shopkeepers pointedly not making eye contact, a small knot of local toughs loitering close by with the specific posture of men working themselves up toward something worse than harassment.

There it is.

Same shape, different setting.

　Eris tensed beside me, old memory clearly surfacing in her own posture. Ace, in his smaller form, went very still and alert.

"We should do something," Eris said, quiet, urgent.

"We are," I said. "Just watching a moment first. Want to actually understand the shape of this before I decide how hard to lean into it."

　One of the elves — younger, sharp-featured, silver hair pulled back in a practical braid — stood slightly in front of the others, posture defensive but not yet desperate, the bearing of someone used to handling trouble on her own even when the odds weren't favorable.

She's the one holding the group together.

Worth paying attention to.

　The toughs closed distance, voices rising, and I felt the moment tip from tense standoff toward something about to turn genuinely ugly.

Alright.

That's enough watching.

　I stepped forward.