"River and coastal merchants. They track weather anomalies because it affects shipping and insurance rates. Any captain running routes through fae-active territory would have access or could buy access."
The moment Moira saidcaptain, their eyes locked in discovery.
"You're thinking what I'm thinking," Isla said.
"I'm thinking that someone with river trade connections followed a paper trail from the Ardenmere incident through the fae-weather records and tracked you to Hollow Oak." Moira picked up the note again. "And I'm thinking they left this to let you know they'd done it. Not to threaten you outright. To show you they could."
"That's a threat, Moira."
"It's leverage. There's a difference, and the difference matters because leverage implies they want something." She set the note down. "Do you have any idea who would go to this kind of effort?"
Isla thought about the presence she'd felt on the river road two nights ago. The careful quiet of it and how it had stopped near the dock turn and waited.
"No," she said. "I don't know anyone who would. I haven't given anyone a reason to look."
"You don't need to give a reason. You just need to exist in a record somewhere and be worth finding." Moira begangathering the pages back into the folder. "In the meantime, I'm going to pull everything I can from the archive on fae-weather tracking. Who maintains the records, who's accessed them recently, what kind of trail someone would need to follow to connect Ardenmere to Hollow Oak. It'll take me a day, maybe two."
"Moira."
"Yes?"
"This stays between us."
"Obviously." She slid the folder back into the cabinet and closed the drawer. "But Isla, if someone has tracked you here, they've been watching long enough to know your patterns, your location, and your connection to this town. That means they've been here longer than tonight."
Isla picked up the note from the table and folded it back along its crease. Through the archive room wall she could hear Lucien locking the front door, the click of the bolt and then the low sound of the shop cat dropping from the windowsill to the floor.
"Thank you," she told Moira. "For the records. For not asking more than you needed to."
"Come back tomorrow evening. I'll have more by then."
The square was dark when she stepped outside, the shops closed, the cobblestones damp from an evening mist rolling off the lake. She walked the western path home with the note in her jacket pocket and her mind turning over every face she'd seen in the last week. The traders at the dock. The freight runners passing through. The harbourmaster's staff. Anyone with a reason to be near water and access to old records.
Nobody fit. That was the worst part. She had no face to put to this, no name, no direction to point her fear, just three lines on a piece of paper and the certainty that someone had walked up toher door and left them there while she was out practicing control in a meadow, thinking she was making progress.
Hollow Oak had let her stay because she was trying. Because the Council had weighed the risk and decided she was worth it.
If whoever left that note decided to share what they knew, not the wrong version on the page but the real one, the one with two boats and eleven crew and a girl who ran, that room could close overnight.
She let herself into the cottage, latched the door and stood in the dark kitchen listening to the lake hit the bank as she tried to focus on her breathing. Calm, she needed to stay calm.
11
RAFE
Freya Bloom had sent him to Isla's door, and he didn’t know her well, but he planned to hold it against her for a long time.
He'd gone to the apothecary that afternoon about the static discharge in the hull wood, the way Silas had suggested. Freya had listened, asked three precise questions about the type of lightning and how long the charge had sat in the timber, and then told him that residual storm-fae energy in cured wood wasn't something she could diagnose secondhand.
"You need the source," she'd said, already turning back to the row of tincture bottles she'd been labeling. Copper-auburn hair catching the shop light, green eyes not remotely sympathetic to his discomfort. "Isla can tell you whether the charge left anything in the grain that'll cause problems down the line. Nobody else can."
"You can't test it here?"
"I can test for herbal toxins, mineral contamination, and about forty kinds of curse residue. Storm-fae energy signatures aren't herbs, minerals, or curses." She'd set a bottle down andlooked at him. "She's the only stormcaller I've ever met. If her magic is sitting in your wood, she's the one who'll know."
So here he was, walking the western path at half past five with a six-inch section of hull plank under his arm and the sky doing something ugly to the northwest.
He'd noticed the weather building on the walk over. The clouds had stacked fast along the ridge, darker than what the afternoon forecast warranted, and the wind had picked up a particular pitch that he'd learned to pay attention to after years on water. This wasn't fae weather. It was the ordinary kind, a late-spring pressure front dropping hard off the mountains, and it was going to be bad.
