Guin hires Talon to target the assassin guild

Guin’s recruitment of Talon turns the threat against Ashla and her unborn child into a covert campaign against the assassin guilds: rather than merely guard a family marked for death, Guin seeks to find the guild that accepted the contract and destroy it. The offer tests the old ethics that once separated Guin from his former clan, while making the family’s survival depend on an operation whose success and cost remain uncertain.

Origins and Stakes

The assignment grows out of the attempted coup at Sanctuary, Magnus’s religious house and education center. Nicoya, a handmaiden who nearly seized control by killing or converting priests and victimizing students, had also set assassins on a path toward Trace’s wife and baby. The hunt was scheduled to begin two months after the child’s birth. Nicoya was Acadian’s daughter; Acadian, a former wartime torturer, had concealed her identity and become a powerful, unknown figure within the Senate. Her campaign sought to weaken the twins’ rule through legal deception and illegal attacks. Karri’s attempts on Malaya and Magnus, as well as earlier attempts against Trace, belonged to that pattern.

The threat is personal to Guin because he had rescued Trace from Acadian’s captivity. During the civil war, Rika believed Trace had died in the invasion of the twins’ household. Acadian had instead healed him so she could torture him, keeping him imprisoned and brutalized for the better part of a year. Trace survived and recovered, but the scars across his body remained evidence of the ordeal. Guin remembers finding him and initially seeing only a damaged body; the rescue was among the best and worst moments of his life. The proposed operation therefore confronts not an abstract criminal network but a continuing danger tied to the person who had already done lasting harm to someone Guin respected.

The intended victims make the contract especially abhorrent. Ashla is Trace’s beloved mate, and the target includes a newborn. Guin knows that only a few assassin clans would accept a child’s killing, knowledge he retains despite having left his own clan fifty years earlier. His history gives him access to the criminal world, but it also marks him as an infamous deserter: his former people believed he had abandoned them to stand beside a queen.

The Recruitment

Guin approaches Talon with a favor that he admits is outside the ordinary list of work and outside the bounds of what Talon might consider ethical. The request is not to kill a single named target. Guin asks him to take out an entire guild. Talon reacts by rising sharply to leave, but Guin identifies the proposed victims: a woman and a newborn baby. Talon’s hesitation matters because, beneath his cold exterior, he holds a clear limit against contracts on children.

Guin explains that the woman who arranged the contract has already killed a baby. He describes the future attack as a deliberate massacre: two months after Ashla gives birth, both she and the child are to be murdered in a way that will leave Trace to find the pieces of his family. The detail converts the job from a contest between assassins into an attempt to prevent a planned atrocity. Talon sits back down, strikes the table with his fist, and sets out his own code: he has never accepted the killing of a child, a pregnant woman, or an innocent. He recalls that Guin shared that ethic, and connects it to Guin’s break with the clan after learning that Malaya was not the power-hungry dictator he had been tricked into hunting.

Terms, Risks, and Ethical Conflict

Guin presses Talon to take the assignment while allowing him to investigate the truth for himself. The work has a narrow window: at least six to eight months, provided Ashla does not miscarry, before the contract’s intended timing makes delay dangerous. There are three guilds willing to accept a bargain this low, so Talon must first identify which one took it. He must then learn the identity of every assassin in that guild and kill them all. The plan is not simply to disrupt one attack; it demands the destruction of the organization responsible.

The undertaking would expose Talon to a distinct danger. If the guilds discover who is responsible, he will be treated as a betrayer of his own kind. Guin recognizes that the cost may exceed the payment, and offers a career change as part of the bargain: friends in the upper levels could employ Talon, this time on the lawful side. Talon laughs at the suggestion that such a move would erase his past, and says he doubts that his sins could simply be forgiven. The exchange leaves the moral question unresolved. A new position might redirect his skills, but it cannot make the risks or his prior life disappear.

Talon does not give an immediate yes. He says he needs time to think, while acknowledging that he can carry out the operation and that doing so anonymously in such close quarters will be difficult. He weighs abandoning everything he knows against the money on offer. Guin answers wryly that he once made his own departure for a pretty face, but Talon’s decision remains his to make. The scene establishes recruitment as persuasion, not a completed contract on the page: Guin gives the assignment, and Talon weighs its consequences rather than plainly accepting it in that conversation.

Progress and Unresolved Outcome

Later, Malaya asks Guin whether he has made progress on Ashla’s danger. Guin replies that he has someone inside the guilds who will resolve the issue, expressing confidence both in that person’s ability and in the prospect of payment. He refuses to explain the method, telling Malaya that the less he says, the better for everyone, and that they will hear more when the work is over. The earlier offer to Talon makes him the evident connection, though Guin does not name him in this exchange or describe the operation’s results.

The secrecy is practical as well as dramatic. Malaya agrees that, after the affair with Fatima, they must be more careful about what they say and who is present. At this point Acadian is dead, lifting the pall of her threat, but the guild problem is presented as something that still requires action. Guin’s choice of an insider gives the response a double edge: the same knowledge of the assassin world that once made him an outsider to his people may now be used to shield an innocent family. The evidence establishes the assignment and later signs of progress, not the guild’s destruction or Ashla and the child’s eventual fate.