By noon the banners on the high keep cracked like whips in the wind. Below them the city sprawled outward into crooked shacks and lean sheds. The hard skin around a soft fruit. In the market the sounds were coins scraped from tables, a crossbow crank pulled back with a tired groan, the breath of a woman who went still when a man in mail paused at her stall.
Estaron watched from the broken ribs of an old bell tower. Pigeons had claimed the beams. Rain had eaten half the stair. From here he could read three streets and the thin strip of the south road where tax squads liked to arrive with clean faces and dirty hands.
He kept a small leather book in his palm. Patrol times went on the left. Names on the right. Who skimmed. Who kept a hand light. Harvest runners moved between alleys and the palace with priest smiles and small boxes at their belts. The kings called it tithe. Estaron called it theft written down neatly so the guilt would not stick.
Rumor ran like a draft through a door that did not quite shut. Someone had been hunting Exalted and leaving the bodies where alleys could tell stories about them. No trophies. No vials taken. No rise in a gang's power. A ghost who killed and left the glow for the ground. Useful if it was true. Dangerous if it was not.
At the edge of a lane a boy tried to chase crows with a wooden sword. Bare feet chalked with dust. A guard that would get him buried. A lean stranger stopped without crowding him. Two quick taps put the boy's hands in the right place. Chin down. Elbow loose. Blade across the chest. No praise. No smile. Then the man drifted on and disappeared between two walls as if the city had opened to make a space just for him.
Estaron tracked the wake he left. A bread stall where a heel of crust changed hands without coin. A fletcher who turned his face politely while a child pulled two arrows and missed both times. A well whose pulley squealed like a pig being born. When the stranger moved he did it like a man who had fought for a long time and kept the habits of survival close. No flourish. No swagger. Only a body that knew where to stand.
Boots clicked on the stair. Sera climbed into the light and sat on the ledge with her spear across her knees. She looked down at the lanes like a hawk reads a field and decides which shadow is a rabbit.
"Anything worth watching?" she asked.
"Always," Estaron said.
She found the boy with the wooden sword and squinted. "That one wants to live. He just does not know how."
"Someone is teaching him," Estaron said, and nodded toward the place where the stranger had vanished.
Sera followed the nod and lifted one brow. "Old soldier. The good kind. Or what is left of that kind."
"Knows his way around footwork and a fight. That is all," Estaron said.
They let the city chew the afternoon. When the tax squads turned for a second pass, Estaron closed his book. He had seen what he needed. South lanes at first bell. That was where tomorrow would break. He meant to be standing where it fell.