Draekir
The beast smells worse in daylight.
I crouch over it with two fingers pressed on it, and breathe through my mouth.
The grevhault is weirdly enormous even dead, its bulk collapsed at angles that make it seem less like a fallen creature and more like something that was assembled incorrectly and has now simply given up pretending otherwise.
Flies have found it already. Corruption accelerates decomposition; by tomorrow there will be nothing left worth studying. I have, at most, an hour.
I start at the skull. The arrows are still lodged behind its eye socket — I leave them.
Pulling them would shift the tissue. Beneath the three shafts, where the bone plates overlap, something has been cut into the surface.
Not post-mortem. The edges of each mark are old enough that the surrounding tissue has partially healed around them, knitting itself to new growth in ways that flesh isn't meant to.
Someone did this while the creature lived.
I lean closer. The carvings aren't a language.
Not any script I recognize, and I know more scripts than most lords find useful.
They're geometric — a lattice of interlocking angles that collapse inward instead of outward, each line pulling toward a shared center point that doesn't quite exist. Like looking at a diagram of something that can't physically be built.
In the middle, a single circular mark, deeper than the rest, burned.
The tissue there has turned black and hard, fused to the bone beneath.
I push my thumb against one. The heat has been gone for days, but there's a residue — a faint resistance, just like what old magic does when it leaves a texture on surfaces it's touched.
Whatever burned these marks did so with precision and intent.
This wasn't ritual mutilation. This was direction.
A command carved into living bone, designed to survive long enough to function.
I rock back on my heels. This didn't wander here from the wildspont's fault lines like creatures typically do. This one was pointed. The markings aren't decorative; they're mechanical. Someone built a compass into this animal's skull and aimed it.
At her. Or me. I don't sit with the feeling that surfaces from that thought. Instead, I stand, look at the tree line, and head back to the estate.
She's in the corridor when I return. I don't break my stride, and I don't think she sees me.
I catch her before the leg gives, and what follows is brief and pointed — opinions about her situation, and delivering them without flinching, which is more than most people manage with me.
She doesn't concede anything. I don't push for it.
I watch her go back to the room as the carvings still diagram themselves across my mind, and I note — without intending to — that the anger suits her.
Inconvenient information that I put away.
Entering my chambers, I close the door and stand in the center of the room.
I pull the writing table closer to the window and set out a sheet of parchment and attempt to reproduce the lattice from memory, line by line.
It takes three attempts before it begins to feel accurate.
I study it. The fourth line of the outer ring — there's a repetition there, a rhythm, almost like a count.
Every fifth angle terminates differently than the others. Aggregated. Purposeful.
Someone designed this. I set the quill down.
Whoever carved this into a living creature — with enough patience to let the tissue heal around it before the animal was ever released — then aimed it toward that section of the forest. That 'someone' has a goal.
The political calculus of that either makes no sense or makes every sense, and I won't know which until I know what she found before the attack.
I fold the parchment and pocket it.
There are questions I need answered, and she is the only one who can answer them. I am hungry, and the kitchens are on the way.
I hear her before I reach the doorway.
"I'm not asking you to let me cook," she's saying, and the patience in her voice is the kind that has been maintained through considerable effort. "I'm asking to sit at the preparation table and sort the dried herbs. My hands work. It's sorting."
The kitchen maid — Fenra, round-faced, currently holding a bundle of thyme like it might protect her — looks between the human woman and the door as though she's been caught between two forces she'd prefer not to antagonize. "The lord said you should be resting—"
"The lord says a great deal of things."
I step into the doorway.
Fenra sees me first. The human woman — still in borrowed linen, still without shoes, the bandaging at her palm visible where she's braced her hand on the worktable — turns half a second later. She doesn't startle. She looks at me the same as she did in the corridor, like I'm nobody's business.
Fenra retreats with the rest of the servants. Sensibly.
I cross to the cold shelf, pull a cut of bread and a jar of rendered fat because I have been in the field since before dawn and I am not having this conversation on an empty stomach, and I look at the woman across the table.
"Your name?" I demand.
"Elowen."
I eat, and surprisingly she waits, which suggests she understands I'm not finished.
"The feverroot you cut before the attack. You'd been to that section before?"
"Yes."
"Recently?"
"Four days prior." She straightens slightly. "You went through my bag."
"I watched you cut them."
That lands differently than she expected. I can see it — a small recalibration, the reassessment of what I do and don't know.
I set the bread down. "Four days before the attack. Notice anything?"
A beat. She's deciding how much to give me, and I let her decide, because pressing her has already proven to be as effective as pressing stone.
"The growth was different," she admits finally.
"Not the way the magical line makes things wrong — that's usually gradual.
Diffuse. What I saw had a pattern." She tilts her head by a fraction, and I recognize the gesture: it's the same one I make when I'm building an argument I'm not fully sure of yet.
"Fungus. Moving, but it wasn't random. And the feverroot itself — the stems were darker than they should have been, at the base.
Where they pull moisture from the soil."
"Darker."
"Like the soil itself had changed composition. Closer to the surface than normal." She meets my eyes. "Which it hadn't done on its own."
She noticed the same thing I found carved into the grevhault's skull, arrived at it from a completely opposite direction, using a completely different method. I think about the diagram in my pocket. I think about the four days between her last visit, the attack, and the timing.
"You'll have guards. Outside your chambers. Starting tonight."
The temperature in the kitchen doesn't change. Elowen does.
"No."
"That wasn't a question."
"I'm aware of that." Her voice is perfectly level. "I'm also not a door that needs a lock on the outside."
"Someone drove a warped creature directly at you. Whatever you noticed in that forest is connected to why. Until I understand the connection—"
"Until you understand it, you mean. And what, in the meantime I'm to stand still with soldiers outside my door and wait for your understanding to arrive."
"You are to remain alive. Whether you find the arrangement agreeable is not a factor."
"I find you unreasonably inconvenient." She's not raising her voice. That's almost worse. "You told your staff I can't be moved or touched or spoken to without your explicit instruction, which I heard from three separate people before noon. And now you're extending it because—"
"Because the forest isn't safe." I meet her eyes. "And you already know that."
She holds the statement where it is, and doesn't argue it. There's nothing to argue — she was there. She knows what came out of it.
"Guards," she says finally. "Outside my door."
"Yes."
"I still don't want guards outside my door."
"I know."
"I'm going to find them profoundly irritating."
"Yes."
She gazes down for a minute. Then she picks up the thyme Fenra abandoned and begins sorting it with her good hand, which is the closest thing to a retreat I suspect she allows herself.
She doesn't glance at me again, before moving to the far end. I watch the back of her head for longer than I need to. Then I leave.
The corridor outside is empty. I walk slowly, the parchment pressing against my ribs through the leather. I think about the four days, the precision, the timings and the burns of a lattice built to point at something.
At what, I don't yet know.
She noticed the odd reactions before the attack. She was there just four days before. And the creature that came out of it went directly for her — not past her, not through her. For her.
It may be coincidence. I have survived too long to trust that.
I adjust my path without thinking and take the corridor that passes her door. It remains closed. No sound from within. I do not slow, but I'm aware of it — the exact placement of the hinges, the distance to the nearest guard post, the time it would take to get here if something moved.
Before I take another step, the awareness lingers.
I don't have a target, or a confirmed threat. Just direction. And I am already moving to secure it.
I have held territory for ninety years. By tomorrow, I intend to understand why or what caused the beast to surface.