Elowen
The tunnels beneath Mournhold are dark, damp, and make me feel uneasy. Nyssara moves ahead like she's done this walk before. She told me yesterday she thinks I'm good for Draekir. She's had me questioning what she knows, but I didn't dare dig for the information.
It begins to narrow as we descend, the ceiling dropping until Nyssara has to angle her lamp sideways to keep it from scraping stone. The walls change down here — the dressed stonework of the upper passages giving way to raw rock face, that's when I first see it.
A vein. Pale and threaded, running horizontally at shoulder height, branching up in irregular forks the way mineral deposits do, except these pulse. Nyssara stops beside me.
"It appeared two weeks ago," she advises. "It's spread twelve feet since."
I press a finger against the rock beside it, avoiding the vein itself.
The surrounding temperature is different — warmer than it should be this far underground, the heat concentrated.
We follow it, and it branches twice more before fading into discoloration across the stone.
I crouch and hold my light close. The damage isn't surface-deep.
Whatever is driving this runs beneath the tunnel itself.
"Does Draekir know?"
"He knows they're here. He doesn't yet know what they're carrying."
I stand, and look down the wall. In the lamplight the network is visible all at once — weirdly glowing and reacting to my light.
We bring what we've found up to the herb room, spreading the specimens alongside the collection already laid out.
The afternoon light has thinned to something pale and directionless by the time I take the oldest samples — those pulled from closest to the ritual site — and hold them under the window.
The traces are not residue. Not something applied to the exterior, not something absorbed through soil contact. Whatever the magic left behind traveled through the plant, embedding itself. The tissue has been permanently rewritten. That tells me it's ritual magic.
I set the stem down and reach for a second one from a different location.
Same depth. Same internal signature. A third — fainter, but structured identically.
Contamination disperses. This doesn't disperse.
It transmits. The trace weakens with distance, but the structure remains identical.
Whoever designed this understood enough about herbalism to hide the evidence inside the plant itself.
"There should be older samples," I murmur, scanning the labels again. "The ones from the first breach."
Nyssara's expression tightens.
"There were."
"Where are they?"
"Gone. Not misplaced. Not spoiled. Removed from the drying racks, the ledgers scraped clean, the jars washed and returned as if they had never been used."
Cold slips beneath my skin. Hiding magic inside living tissue is one thing. Erasing every earlier trace of it is another. This has not only been done carefully. It has been cleaned up carefully.
I think about every patch location I've documented. Every route I walk on collection days. Every attack I've traced has originated from or cut through those exact zones. And the zone with the strongest imprint of all sits closest to the outer wall, here.
I don't say it aloud. Nyssara is staring, and I hold the thought where it is.
The attacks haven't been moving outward.
They've been moving inward. Each one closer than the last, the creatures are more coordinated, the breach points more specific.
Whoever is causing it is closing the distance, week by week, and what started in the forest is no longer contained to it.
I need to take my mind off this, and put everything down and move to the medical room. It could do with cleaning after the attack. As I clean, I hear the door, and Draekir stands with green blood stains on his coat. He searches for a person.
"Nyssara—"
"Tunnels." I nod toward the instrument table. "Sit."
He doesn't straight away. His back stays against the doorframe, because he can't immediately do anything he's been asked to do.
"Sit," I repeat. "Shoulder or ribs?"
"Both."
He settles on the corner table and I take the coat from his shoulders, undoing the fastenings at the collar first. The fabric has stiffened where it's dried against the wound, and when I ease it back from the joint he flinches — once, contained immediately, his jaw tightening and releasing before his expression resettles into composure.
The wound tracks from the shoulder joint downward, closed badly from being left unattended. I soak a cloth and press it against the damaged edge. His chest expands once, controlled, and holds.
"Hours ago, this needed attention." I speak with an even tone.
"There were other priorities."
I trace carefully around the older scar tissue near the wound, and his breathing shifts beneath the touch. I move to his ribs, and he lifts his arm as I press along the lower section. The sound he makes is brief and involuntary.
"Where does the name the Black Stag come from?" I try to take his mind off everything.
"The name Black Stag. Well, it didn't come from the noble houses."
I don't respond, hoping he will just talk.
"The previous lord of Mournhold held the territory for sixty years before me.
When he died without an heir the estate fell into dispute — four houses moved on it simultaneously within a season.
I was twenty-three years into my rank. None of them considered me a serious claimant.
I held the boundary for eleven months. Alone, mostly.
When it resolved, the houses that had moved on it had each lost something they couldn't recover, and I had the estate with a name I didn't choose. "
"Because of how you hunted them," I assume.
"Because of how I waited. A stag doesn't pursue. It holds ground until it becomes irrelevant." The muscle in his jaw moves once. "The reputation was useful. I let it grow because fear is a perimeter that doesn't require maintenance the way walls do."
I tie the first anchor point and he breathes carefully around the pressure.
"To hold the territory I needed people I could trust with parts of it I couldn't watch myself.
Correspondence. Intelligence. The political networks.
" He hesitates. "There was a man. Rethvan.
My master of the hunting guards for nineteen years.
Trained under the lord before me. He knew Mournhold — every weakness, route, and servant.
I trusted him with everything the way you trust the ground underfoot.
Without thinking about it. Because the alternative is exhausting and eventually you have to trust something. "
I move around him to check the tension at his back, and I feel through my hands the small shift in his posture as he keeps talking.
"He arranged it from the inside. Not quickly — that's what I return to.
Years of it. Small things at first. A servant dismissed on a false account here.
A patrol route subtly adjusted there. Nothing that flagged on its own.
" He sighs. "By the time it moved, he had positioned people.
The attempt on my life came from inside, from the hands I had fed, housed, and placed there myself.
I only survived it because Vuldren was awake when he should not have been and reached the corridor before the second blade found me. "
"What happened to Rethvan?"
He dismisses the question, but I can guess.
"I lost eleven people that night. Staff.
Guards. People who had nothing to do with it.
I rebuilt everything. Closed every position he'd touched.
And I decided, very clearly, that trust will only extend to a certain point so a single betrayal could never again reach that far. "
I lower myself onto the stool so that we are level. "And then," I push for him to continue.
He exhales slowly. "He came with a reputation for patience and discretion. Both proved accurate. He managed the political architecture." His eyes finally lift to mine. "I called him the Silver Fang. Because he worked quietly, at close range, and you never saw it coming until it had already landed."
"Who? Zevrik?" I presume that's who he means.
"Zevrik." The name lands differently than everything before it. "My most trusted advisor. Twelve years of it." He stops there, like the sentence isn't finished.
"He's been good to you," I carefully say.
"He has been essential. There are parts of this territory that hold together because of how he manages them. I don't overlook that."
"After Rethvan I told myself I would not extend that kind of trust again." His voice has dropped so quietly I have to be still to hear. "And then I did. Because eventually you have to trust something."
The silence that follows isn't uncomfortable. It's the kind that arrives when someone has said the true version of something. I reach out and cover his hand with mine. He looks down at it, but doesn't move.
"You rebuilt it," I say quietly. "After everything Rethvan took from you." I don't elaborate because he doesn't need me to. He lived it. "That isn't nothing."
"It cost more than I expected it to. I was younger than I understood myself to be at the time.
I didn't know yet what it was to lose something you had been given.
" He turns his hand until his palm rests against mine properly.
"Every person I placed trust in after that, I measured against what Rethvan cost me. It is an exhausting way to live."
"I know," I understand more than he knows.
"Do you?"
"I lost my parents young. There was no one after that who was obligated to stay. You learn to keep your needs small enough that their absence can't hollow you out."
Something changes beneath the words, born from what we both recognize — an understanding between us both surfaced realizing we've been managing the same wound through completely different methods and have only just seen it in each other.
He is tired, injured, and for this one unguarded hour, not performing anything at all.
"Rethvan's name," he says, after a long moment. "I haven't said it aloud in twenty years."
I don't fill that with words. I simply stay on the stool and let it mean what it means. He's no longer braced entirely against himself while we both gaze into each other's eyes.