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?—"
