He lifts his head. There is something around his eyes that I haven't seen before. "Ninety years. And I have never once heard someone say to an injured guard:talk to me.Any topic. Just — talk."
"It keeps them awake."
"I know. That's what I mean."
The candle nearest the window gutters. Neither of us moves to fix it.
Outside, the forest still waits. But in this room, the silence between us has softened into something else. He stays until the candle goes out. Then leaves before I have to ask him to.
8
DRAEKIR
The sky breaks at midnight. Clouds are static, pressing down, and the wildspont's fault line splits the dark open from below — a light that doesn't come from above but rises. The whole treeline pulses, once, like something very large drawing breath.
I find her in the corridor before she finds the window. "East quarters. Stay there until I come for you."
She opens her mouth.
"Not a discussion."
I'm already moving. I'm on the rampart when the first sound arrives. Thunder dissipates.
"Close the eastern gate." My voice carries to the courtyard below without effort. "Bring every patrol inside the perimeter. Now."
Vuldren appears at my left. His mechanical fingers are already wrapped around his sword grip.
"The storm?" he asks.
"Is the least of it." The trees at the boundary shudder, and the branches thrash inward, toward the estate, as though the forestis exhaling. "Something's moving through the outer wood. Two packs, at least. I can hear the displacement."
He doesn't question me. Vuldren has been at my side enough times to trust my read of the dark. He's already signaling the lower guards before I finish speaking.
The storm peels the sky back. Violet deepens into bruised indigo until the grounds glow with unnatural light that clarifies nothing. The shadows multiply. Beneath the thunder comes another sound — sharp cracking, like ice breaking under weight. The corruption is spreading fast.
Then the gate registers impact. Not a battering — more like sustained pressure. I'm down the stairs before the second strike.
"Grevhault. East perimeter." I pull the order from my mouth without stopping moving. "Archers to the wall. No one opens that gate."
The courtyard reorganizes around me. My hunters move with efficiency — the wildspont has always bled, and I have spent years making sure Mournhold survives it every time. I can hear — clearly now, over the wind — the grevhault's size in its footfalls. Heavier than the one in the forest. More than one. I reach the inner wall and stop.
Vuldren is two steps behind me. "The outer grounds?"
"Already breached." I'm scanning the torchlit stretch of the lower garden. "You knew that."
"I know every weakness in this structure. I built it." I turn. "Spread the hunters across the inner line. Nothing reaches the manor."
He runs. I draw and move along the outer walkway. The storm has fully committed now. The light strobes in long intervals. During each pulse I take stock: the hedge line along the wall, torn at the base. The fountain in the center has its stone rim cracked from something large moving past it without slowing.
Then the pulse steadies, and I see the east garden. She's there. Not at the window. Not behind glass as she should be. She's crouched in the open, between an injured guard and the garden's low outer wall, her borrowed linen dark at the sleeves where she's been working. The guard beneath her is one of Vuldren's patrol — the broad one, the jaw scar. He's on his side. She has her satchel open.
One of the grevhault is twenty yards from the gate. I move. Not toward her — I can't reach her before it does, and drawing its attention to her position does more damage. I cut left, toward the gap in the hedge it came through, and it sees me.
I put two arrows into its throat before it closes half the distance and the third goes through the joint where the skull meets the spine. It drops suddenly resigned, and the impact shakes the flagstone under my boots.
The second one comes through the drainage gap while I'm still moving. This one is faster. Smaller — if smaller means anything — and the corruption has taken it differently, the fur standing in weird directions, the jaw hanging too far open as though the bone structure underneath has been dissolved. It tracks the fallen one. Then it tracks me.
I give it something to chase. The next four minutes are about structure. I know these grounds better than the creature does. When it finally commits, the arrow through its eye comes from a position it never anticipated. It stops wanting, and falls.
