Koyalev Ilgazred squints at the half-polished guardsman’s badge in her hand, then dips a cloth in some alcohol and resumes scrubbing. She can’t see her reflection yet, so she –

The badge disappears under her pillow as she hears the front door swing open. A moment later, she hears her uncle come grumbling in. Koyalev sets the cleaning bowl aside and makes her way downstairs to see Kilgaius Ilgazred – broad shouldered, tall as a house, perpetually bumping into things in their too-small hovel – muttering to himself about sticking doors as he hangs his soaking wet cloak by a hearth fire.

He glances up at her on the stairwell and gives her a wry smile. “Pouring down out there, love, ‘fraid you’re stuck in with me tonight,” he says. “I see you’ve got the fire going already. Thanks for that.  Here, now, why are you looking at me like I’ve got something stuck in me teeth?”

“You’ve got…something on your face, uncle Gaius,” Koyalev says. “It’s all over your cheek. Let me—”

Kilgaius curses angrily, surprising his niece, and reaches for the corner of his drenched cloak, holding up his other hand to ward off Koyalev’s threatening advance with a washcloth.

“Don’t, love,” he mutters, the smile disappearing from his face as he wipes his cheek. “It’s alright. Sorry about that. Thought the rain would have washed it off.”

“Is it jam or something?” Koyalev does her best to sound like she doesn’t know very well what it is – a mercy for her uncle, who she knows worries over her.

“No, not jam,” Kilgaius sighs. “It…was a bad night, Koya.”

“What happened?” Koyalev says, crossing from the stairwell to her uncle. “Are you hurt?”

“Tended to myself already. Small cut in me side, nothing tragic.”

“Do you want me to take a look?”

“No, Koya, I’m fine, I promise.”

“…you didn’t tell me what happened, Uncle Gaius,” Koyalev says.

He turns to look at her again, his face curled into a pained frown. The expression wavers at the forefront of some internal conversation before Kilgaius pats her shoulder gently.

“No, I didn’t,” he says. “Can you get me some tea, love?”

“Only if you promise to tell me what happened,” she says. “I’ve seen people at funerals look less anguished than that, Uncle Gaius.”

“You are too wise for a teenager,” he grumbles, turning back to the fire. “Fine, you get me my tea and I’ll get you your story, aye?”

“Aye,” she says.

…

There is a part of him that wants to believe: it’s them or us. It was him or me. Either I did what I did or Koyalev grows up alone. She’s already lost her father and mother. I’m all she has left. I have to come home, every night. She’s just thirteen, for Cayden’s sake. This city would eat her alive. (It wouldn’t, he knew – Koyalev is smarter than she should have to be, and probably more capable than him, all told. But the city would rob her of her childhood, given half a chance. It already tried once.)

But there’s another part of him that knows if he and his colleagues hadn’t given chase, maybe the man wouldn’t have felt so desperate. It was a bag of gold pieces – a lot of money, for sure – but it could be replaced. The other men didn’t see it that way, of course, and if Kilgaius was honest with himself, neither did he, in the moment. There was a criminal afoot. He had to be caught. That’s what you did as a guard. You Kept The Peace.

Kilgaius retrieves a stained badge from his pocket, and stares at the bloody silver, his reflection marred by the spatter of blackened red across the metal. The Kaer Maga city watch is an informal force, at best – a loose militia of mostly respected persons meant to keep people and property safe in a city that, broadly speaking, didn’t take well to anyone standing up and making rules.

That was where the phrase came from. You weren’t there strictly to tell people what to do, as a Kaer Maga guardsman. You were there to make sure people didn’t kill each other and money stayed where it was meant to. You Kept The Peace.

Only, it wasn’t peaceful, the way the man ambushed them from around a corner with a shortsword he’d nicked off someone. It wasn’t peaceful when Merriweather went down, gargling a scream through the stab wound in his neck. It wasn’t peaceful when the man lunged after Kilgaius next, screaming furiously.

It wasn’t peaceful when Kilgaius managed to get his shortsword up and through the man’s ribcage in a terrified reflex, either.

Merriweather might be alright – the family knew some clerics, had some money. But nobody even knew the man’s name. A recent arrival in Kaer Maga, as far as anyone knew, and desperate for some starting capital, which he decided to retrieve from what he thought was an unattended merchant’s stall.

That man was dead, and would stay dead.

“Hard to get more peaceful than being dead,” Kilgaius supposes, placing the badge on the table between him and his niece.

…

“You did what you had to,” says his niece, sitting across from him as he sips his tea. “He was going to kill you, wasn’t he?”

“Probably,” mutters Kilgaius. “Bugger was handy with that sword. Got Merriweather in one. Knew to go for the neck where the collar doesn’t quite reach.”

“So—I don’t understand,” Koyalev says. “You made it home safe. You did your job.”

“…but a man is dead, Koya,” the guard mutters. “Over some gold.”

“It was you or him, wasn’t it?”

“It was some gold – we could have let it go, the merchant could have spared it,” Kilgaius says. “If we had just found somewhere else to be for a few minutes, someone would be alive who isn’t anymore. I know I made it home, Koya, and I’m glad for it, but…”

“But what? What else could you have done?”

“Anything that didn’t kill a man, Koya,” Kilgaius says.

Koyalev starts to protest again, then sees her uncle’s expression, and thinks better of it. They sit in silence for a long time, listening to the rain pounding down on the hovel’s roof, and watching the fire crackle as Kilgaius finishes his tea.

“I’m glad you’re safe, at any rate,” Koyalev says.

“Me too.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Uncle Gaius,” Koyalev says, and she stands to come and hug him around his broad shoulders. He marvels at it: last year she couldn’t so much as close her hands around the other side of him. Now she hugs him easily – when did she get so tall?

“You won’t have to find out,” Kilgaius says. “I’m alright, Koya.”

“No you’re not,” she says. “You’ll feel guilty about this for days. I know you, Uncle Gaius. You’re not half as subtle as you think you are.”

“I don’t think I’m subtle.”

“That’s exactly right,” she says, letting him go. “You rest. I’ll handle dinner tonight.”

“Thanks, Koya.”

“And no staring blearily into the fire,” Koyalev says, as she heads back to the larder. “Get a book off the shelf and try to relax, old man.”

“I’m not old! I’m aught but 40 years old, you perishing whelp!”

She answers him with a laugh, and he laughs too, despite himself – deep and loud and cleansing.

…

It isn’t until Kilgaius is most of the way through dinner when he sees that the badge on the table has been replaced with a half-polished one. He has no idea when this occurred – another sign of an increasingly distressing talent for sleight of hand on his niece’s part, he suspects.

“What the—”

Koyalev has, of course, made herself scarce; she found somewhere else to be almost immediately after finishing her food.

“How did she do that? Where did she get…” Kilgaius mutters to himself, staring into his own blurry reflection on the badge. “Has she been polishing my spare badges? The little rogue…”

The lettering curls under the muddled mirror:

You Keep The Peace.

“…I suppose she does,” he says, quietly, to no one in particular.