17. Corrine
CORRINE
The letters of credit sit between us, and I realize I'm looking at Gideon Valecrest's handwriting. My stomach drops. Then my hands go cold. The recognition finishes arriving in my head, three steps behind the animal part of me that already knows.
Leoric is working through the intermediary seals Vaelis flagged, matching them up. He hasn't noticed my movement has stopped. Or he has and is giving me time, which is worse because it means he's learned how I process things and is already adjusting for it.
I pull the creased sheet closer. The notation is rebel format — I've already confirmed that — but the hand beneath the spacing is specific.
Gideon wrote with a slight leftward drag on his descenders because of the missing fingers.
I used to watch him draft intelligence briefs in the Thornwall basement, his pen moving with the understanding that what he put on paper would become someone else's reason to act.
I trusted that precision. I built my certainty on top of it.
The sheet before me is a procurement order routed through a trade house that should not have existed before the ceasefire.
Underneath the visible transaction — medical supplies, destination unlisted — the rebel-format spacing hides a second layer.
I read it how I was taught to, letting the gaps between characters form the message underneath, and the message is a delivery confirmation.
Not medicine. Documents. Delivered to an outpost I know by its coordinates before I know it by name.
Blackwater. Three months before the fire.
"Corrine." Leoric's voice reaches me. I'm aware he's spoken because the sound exists, but I'm reading the next sheet already, and the next, and the pattern is forming with a speed that tells me it was always there, sitting in plain sight.
Eight documents. Gideon's hand on all of them, hidden beneath notation I would've recognized instantly if I'd ever thought to look at his work like I do enemy intelligence — with suspicion instead of faith.
Testimony from witnesses near the outpost describing prisoner transports.
Dates that align with real military movements.
Names of officers I later confirmed were stationed there.
Details specific enough to feel sourced, verified, cross-referenced through independent channels the way Gideon always claimed his information was.
Except the witnesses don't exist. The testimony uses phrasing pulled from three separate verified accounts of dark elf atrocities at other locations — real suffering, real words, transplanted onto a site I never visited and attached to prisoners I never saw.
The dates are real. The officers too. The crimes described are not fake, they happened.
But the claim that they happened at Blackwater would make a twenty-four-year-old girl with a dead family and a head full of fury believe that lighting a match was the only moral thing left to do — that was created.
Carefully. By someone who knew what I needed to hear because he was the one who taught me what to listen for.
I set the sheet down. My whole body is shaking.
"The intelligence I was given before Blackwater.
" My voice comes out flat and procedural, the way I talk when I'm holding something that will cut me if I grip it wrong.
"The sourcing that made me believe executions were happening inside those walls.
" I look at Leoric across the fire. "Gideon wrote them.
All of them. The witnesses were fabricated from real accounts at other sites.
The dates were grafted from verified military movements.
None of it was sourced from Blackwater itself. "
Leoric doesn't move. His eye stays on my face like he's processing what I just told him.
"He gave me exactly what I needed to believe," I continue.
Stopping means feeling it, and I'm not ready for that.
"Real pain from real places, arranged around a target he'd already chosen.
He didn't invent the suffering. He moved it.
He took things that actually happened and used their words to point me at a building full of soldiers and told me I was saving lives. "
He doesn't seem shocked or surprised, so I tell him more.
"I never saw the prisoners. I planned the attack.
I helped build the charges. I positioned myself and I lit it.
And I never once went inside to confirm that what Gideon showed me on paper existed behind those walls.
Because I trusted him. Because he found me when I was seventeen, furious, half-starved, and gave me something to blame for what had been done to my family.
I followed him because following felt like fighting and fighting felt like the only thing that still made sense. "
Leoric is watching me with an expression I can't read and don't want to.
"He chose me. Not because I was capable.
Because I was angry enough and decent enough to believe that burning a building down was the right thing to do if it meant stopping people from dying inside it.
He used my compassion. He counted on it.
He handed me grief that belonged to other people and watched me carry it into a fortress and set it on fire, and then sang about it in the streets while I sat upstairs trying not to choke on what I'd done. "
I stop talking because my throat has closed. A lump begins to surface, and I want to cry. The cavern seems to tilt around me, and my head begins to hurt.
Everything I did after Blackwater, I built all of it on the belief that I had done a terrible thing for a true reason and owed the rest of my life to making it mean something.
If the reason was manufactured, then the debt I've been paying was calculated too.
Gideon didn't just use me to light the fire.
He used the guilt too to keep me useful — a courier who would never stop running because she believed she deserved to.
I stand. The cave narrows and widens around me depending on where I look.
My hands find the wall and I push my palms into stone that doesn't care what I'm feeling, and I breathe.
I think about the drainage channel where I sent the Farrow family for what feels like a lifetime ago and whether the mother reached the cache and whether any of it was worth the person I became to do it.
"I should stop." I don't turn around. "This — the records, the investigation, whatever we're building toward — I am the wrong person to carry it.
Everything I touch started with a lie someone else put in my head.
Every crossing I ran, every child I moved, every night I spent telling myself I was fixing something — it was all downstream from blood I spilled.
I don't get to be the one who exposes the truth when I'm the proof of how well the lie worked. "
I hear him stand. I hear the sound his clothes make when he moves, and I know without looking that he's crossed toward me.
I know he's going to say something and I don't want him to say it gently because gentle will break me in a way I can't come back from right now.
He doesn't touch me. He stops next to me so I feel the heat off him, but far that I'm not cornered.
"You were used," he says. Not soft. Not hard.
Just the way he states things that are true and finished being argued about.
"By a man who studied what you cared about and built a weapon out of it.
That is what happened. It does not make you innocent.
It makes you the thing they needed you to be.
They picked you for the best part of you and they burned it for fuel. "
"That doesn't fix what I did."
"Nothing fixes what you did. Nothing fixes what I did.
Nothing fixes any of it. But you are not the architect of Blackwater.
You are the hand that held the match, and the match was placed there by someone who'd already decided what would burn.
Walking away from this because you feel unworthy of carrying the truth is exactly what Gideon wants you to do.
Carry the guilt. Stay useful. Never look up long enough to see who's holding the strings. "
My jaw locks. I hate that he's right. I hate that it sounds like something I would say to someone else and never to myself.
"You want to stop?" he asks. "Stop. I'll finish it alone.
But you will spend the rest of your life knowing you quit because a man who lied to you at twenty-four still had enough hold on your shame to make you quit at thirty-one.
And you are too stubborn and too angry and too goddamn good at reading courier marks for me to believe that's actually what you want. "
The last part isn't comfort. It's a dare.
And he knows exactly what a dare does to me because he has watched me take every single one since the checkpoint.
I lean my forehead against the rocks. It's cold and for one breath it holds me where my own bones won't. The guilt doesn't leave.
It doesn't soften. It sits in the pit of my stomach and the space behind my ribs, and I let it be there because fighting it has never once made it smaller.
But underneath it — quieter, harder to hold — something else.
The Farrow mother reached the cache. I know because Evelisse was alive at the settlement and she came through the same network.
The children in the ruins knew what a bird's nest meant because someone taught them, and some of those someones learned from routes I built.
Gideon poisoned the root. He didn't poison every branch that grew from it.
He couldn't. Because the people I moved through those crossings were real, and the cold I walked through to reach them was as well, and no amount of falsified intelligence changes the fact that a woman with broken ribs survived a ditch outside a checkpoint because I was there and I chose to stop.
I turn around. Leoric is watching me the way he does — without flinching, without softening, without offering me a single thing I haven't earned. I look at his eyes and I don't say thank you because that isn't what this is.
"Show me the rest of the authorization chain," I demand. "I want to see what Gideon's hand connects to on the council side."
Something passes through his expression. Not relief. Recognition. He nods once and steps back, and I follow him to the fire, sit down beside the records and keep going. Not because the shame is gone. Because Gideon doesn't get to decide when I stop.