CHAPTER TWO #3
"I don't know yet." He was already moving toward the balcony's inner doors, some of the careful control sliding back over his features like armor, though Briar caught the last flicker of something unresolved in his eyes before he turned fully away from her — whatever had almost happened between them, interrupted but not gone, banked like a coal instead of extinguished.
"Stay close to the hall. If it's what I think it is, you're about to meet someone who's going to complicate things considerably. "
"Complicate things how?"
Kade didn't answer. He was already moving, and Briar had no choice but to follow, the almost-kiss still humming low under her skin, unfinished and aching, as the horn sounded again somewhere below them in the dark.
The horn was still sounding when Kade reached the outer gate, Briar half a step behind him, and whatever had almost happened on the balcony was buried so far beneath his expression by the time they arrived that Briar could almost believe she'd imagined it.
Almost.
The gate itself was chaos — dragon-guards in half-shifted states, scales rippling up forearms and along jawlines as their control frayed under the alarm, torches and fire-globes throwing frantic light across a scene that took Briar a moment to understand.
A section of the outer ward wall, black stone that should have been as solid as the mountain itself, had cracked clean through in a jagged line taller than a person.
Green-white light pulsed faintly along the fracture, the same sickly color she remembered from the ground giving way beneath her in Duskmere.
"Veil-gate," she said, before anyone else could. "It's another breach."
"Not another." Kade's voice was tight, controlled in the specific way she now recognized as him actively holding something down. "The same one. It's grown."
Lord Ashgrove was already there, flanked by a handful of his personal guard, his expression carved from the same black stone as his hall.
He didn't so much as glance at Briar as she approached, which she suspected was deliberate — a small, cutting reminder of exactly how much he wished she wasn't standing there at all.
"Report," he said.
"The fracture's widened by roughly a third since this morning's patrol," said one of the guards, a scarred older dragon Briar hadn't met. "No incursions yet. But the ward-stones along this whole stretch are humming wrong, my lord. Like something on the other side is pressing against it."
"Pressing from where?" Kade asked. "The human world doesn't have anything with that kind of power."
"No," Lord Ashgrove said slowly, and for the first time Briar saw something that might have been real unease cross his controlled features. "It doesn't. Which means whatever's causing this isn't coming from the human side of the Veil at all."
The words settled over the group like a physical weight. Briar felt the earth-pull under her skin stir faintly in response to the tension in the air, an instinct she still didn't fully understand, and forced it down before it could do anything embarrassing.
"You think it's coming from inside Aetherfell," she said. "Something already here."
Lord Ashgrove's gaze finally slid to her, sharp and assessing, and for once it didn't seem entirely hostile — more like he was recalculating what she might actually be worth to this conversation. "Wolf-shifters have no more insight into veil-magic than dragons do. Why would you assume that?"
"Because the fracture I fell through didn't act like an accident," Briar said. "It opened exactly where I was standing, right when I needed somewhere to go. That's not instability. That's not the wall randomly weakening. That felt like something reaching for me."
The silence that followed was longer this time, heavier, and Briar watched Kade's jaw tighten as he turned the idea over.
"If something inside the Veil itself is reaching through," he said slowly, "targeting specific people—"
"Then this isn't a wall failing from wear," Lord Ashgrove finished, grim. "It's being deliberately unmade. And I want to know who — or what — has both the power and the reason to do it."
He turned to the scarred guard. "Triple the watch on every known fracture point along the Reaches border.
And send word to the Hollow Court — if the instability is spreading, every clan territory needs to know, not just ours.
" His gaze cut to Kade. "Including Stormreach.
Their coastal wards will be the next most vulnerable if this pattern holds. "
Something in Briar's chest went very still at the word.
Stormreach.
She hadn't let herself think about Torin in longer than she probably should have admitted — hadn't let herself wonder whether word of a wolf found wandering the Ember Reaches would eventually reach all the way to the tiger-clan cliffs where he'd grown up, where his father still held territory beside the memory of a friendship that had once meant everything to both their families.
If Stormreach was being drawn into this — if delegates were going to start moving between territories to manage the threat — it wasn't impossible that he'd be one of them.
She wasn't sure, standing there in the flickering light of a cracked ward wall, whether that thought frightened her or not.