Draekir
Vuldren finds me before I've finished the first cup.
He doesn't knock either — none of my hunters do, not when they have something worth saying. He steps into the morning room with stillness that he carries when the news isn't good, and I set the coffee down and wait.
"Another one," he hurriedly tells me. "East of the boundary. The patrol found it before dawn, moving through the trees south of the human's cottage."
I rise up to stand.
"Same behavior?"
"Slow. Circling. As if targeted."
I pull my coat from the hook by the door and tell him to hold the perimeter until I return.
Elowen's cottage sits at the edge of Duskmire's outermost plots, close enough to the village to share its smoke on winter mornings and far enough that no one would hear anything that happened inside it after dark.
The structure is modest. Wattle walls, thatched roof with a repaired section over the east corner, a kitchen garden pressed right against the south-facing wall to catch whatever sunlight the treeline allows.
I push it open with one hand and step inside.
Every shelf is organized by type, labeled in a hand I recognize as someone who writes for themselves rather than for legibility.
Roots bundled with twine. Glass jars sealed with rendered fat.
A worktable worn smooth. A single chair angled toward the window, which tells me enough about how she spends her evenings.
But what's off is the mess — someone searched it.
Not ransacked — whoever did this wasn't careless. They've moved through the space, leaving the surface appearance intact. The jars have been shifted and replaced. The chair is a half-inch from where it left its marks in the earthen floor too.
They were looking for something. I don't know what.
I step back outside, and crouch at the south edge, near where the soil transitions from worked ground to forest floor, and I find the first marking eight inches into the dirt.
Same geometrics I sketched from memory a few nights ago.
The soil beneath it still smelled faintly metallic.
Blood and residue. Carved into a flat stone half-buried under the garden's border. It looks recent.
There's a second stone eleven feet from the first, oriented toward the main cottage door. A third at the northeast corner of the property line, aimed at the treeline path she would have used when coming back from the forest.
Three points. A triangle, if I complete it with a fourth. I walk the geometry in my head and find the fourth — thirty yards in, scored into the bark of an ironwood trunk at shoulder height. They match the lattice on the grevhault.
Someone stood in this forest and aimed.
Not at the cottage. It isn't pointed to there. I walk the lines again in my head, recalculate the convergence. When I find it, the space between my shoulders draws tight.
The angles point at the feverroot hollow.
Exactly where she was.
This wasn't an animal that wandered in the wrong direction. This was a mechanism built around one person's habits, routes, and schedule — whoever built it had been watching her to know.
I stand at the center, and hold this information where it is without reacting to it. Reactions are for when the thinking is over.
I know enough to move. The rest can wait until Mournhold.
Mournhold comes into view as the light shifts past midmorning, and I find Fenra in the entrance hall before I take off my coat, her round face doing something complicated that means she doesn't want to be here.
"Where is she?" I command.
"My lord—"
"Fenra."
"She went out," Fenra says, the words arriving fast. "To the east garden. I told her the guards were occupied and she said she'd take the long path and I — she wasn't gone long, and she came back through the kitchen gate twenty minutes past. She's—"
"Where."
"The kitchen."
I cross through the manor with a speed that empties ahead of me. Not running. I don't do that. But the space between my steps compresses and I arrive at the kitchen entrance in time to hear her, back to the doorway, discussing the water content of stored mushrooms.
She twists her head when she hears me.
The calm she leads with doesn't hold under a close read. She sees my expression and coat, still on, and the distance between us that I'm reducing faster than she's comfortable with.
"You went outside without a guard," I raise my voice.
"I went to the east garden."
"Without a guard."
"Draekir." She faces me fully. "I walked to a garden inside your own grounds. I was gone forty minutes."
"You were gone in an area I hadn't cleared, on grounds I hadn't confirmed were secure, with no one to alert me if something had come through the east perimeter, which—" I stop. I start again, with more control than I had in the previous sentence. "The standing instruction was explicit."
"Your instruction was for inside. I went to a garden, not a forest."
"The perimeter borders open ground for a quarter mile. There is nothing between that garden and the treeline but space."
"I needed air."
"You needed air." I repeat this back to her with the flatness it deserves. "And that outweighed—"
"Don't." Her voice sharpens, not raised but edged. "Don't spit calculations at me like I've made an error in strategy. I was forty minutes in a walled garden. You cannot put a door on a human being and expect them to stand quietly behind it."
"I can expect them to follow a direct—"
"A direct order." She says it with a measured precision that contains something just short of contempt.
"You give orders. You don't ask. You don't explain.
You station guards and issue instruction and assume everyone inside this manor will restructure their existence around whatever you've decided is necessary.
" She takes one step forward. "I have a leg that barely cooperates and a shoulder that woke me up twice last night, and I went to a garden.
It's not up to you to make that into a military failure. "
The cook has evaporated. The kitchen is empty behind her.
"Someone was at your cottage," I tell her.
She goes very still.
"Not the creature. Before it. They searched the building.
They left markings in your garden and through the treeline aimed at the hollow where you gather the feverroot.
" I hold her gaze and don't soften what comes next, because softening it won't make it less true.
"Three pointing stones and a carved anchor in the ironwood.
That geometry wasn't aimed at the cottage.
It was aimed at you. At your route, at your schedule, at the specific location you'd be at the specific time you were there.
" My voice has lost the controlled edge it usually carries.
I notice it and can't recover it fast enough.
"This wasn't random. You were chosen. Someone built that attack around your habits and that means they have been investigating you for a long time, and that means every minute in an unsecured garden is when I cannot guarantee anyone who is watching you doesn't use it. "
The kitchen is very quiet.
She's glaring at my face. Her shoulders aren't squared against me anymore. She's reading me the way she reads her plants — carefully, looking for something underneath the surface.
"How long? How long do you think they were there, watching?" Her fist tightens slightly.
"They know you'd go back even after dark." My hands find the kitchen table edge and I stop there, four feet from her. "Which means they knew exactly which plants you would touch."
She breathes once, slow, through her nose.
"So the guards."
"Are not negotiable." Interrupting her before she can finish.
Another few silent seconds. The fight hasn't gone out of her, I can see it still there, but it's sitting alongside something else now. Something quieter.
"Then tell me what you find. When you go. When you investigate. Tell me what you find instead of deciding what I need to know."
It isn't concession. It's a condition.
I consider it.
"Yes."
She looks slightly surprised. Then she pulls in a breath and looks at the table beside her, covered in herbs she's been sorting, and the fight finishes leaving her for now.
"Fine," she responds.
I leave the kitchen the way I came and stop just outside the doorway, back against the wall, one hand at my side.
My heart rate is elevated.
I note it, deliberately, without commentary, and begin walking toward the war room where Vuldren will be waiting.