The storm above starts to ease. I stand in the resulting silence — Mournhold's silence, after something violent has relaxed — and let my breathing settle.
I'm already walking. She's still there, and the guard is upright, braced against the wall while she ties off a binding at his side. She's talking, low and steady, telling him to keep pressure on it and not to use the arm until Nyssara has assessed the depth.
My shadow falls across them both. She finds my face and the steadiness she's been using doesn't leave her, but it shifts. Reading my expression, she stands in one motion, which costs her — the leg — but she doesn't let it show.
"The guard needed?—"
"Inside." My voice is stripped of everything except instruction. "Now."
"He couldn't move on his own."
"Inside, Elowen."
She hands the guard off to one of the hunters who has materialized at the garden entrance and follows me through the manor door without another word. She's trying to understand my anger and making a calculation.
The kitchen is empty at this hour except for the banked fire. She crosses to the preparation table and stands behind it — not using it as a shield, exactly, but placing it in the middle of us. I close the door.
"You were given explicit instruction." I have more edge than I intend to, and I don't moderate it. "Locked inside. Those were not suggestions."
"A man was injured in the garden." She meets my eyes without dropping them. "I was the nearest person with medical knowledge."
"You were in an unsecured space during an active attack with two grevhault on the grounds."
"I didn't know there were two."
"That is precisely the point." I take a step toward the table. "You didn't know. You walked out into circumstances you couldn't assess with a leg that still isn't weight-bearing. No weapon and no guard because you made a decision in the absence of information I had and you didn't."
"And if I'd stayed inside, he'd have bled out."
"My hunters would have reached him."
"How long would that have taken?"
She knows I don't have an answer that works.
"I watched you out there. Through a gap in the wall. You had your back to the gate and a grevhault closing on your position and you didn't know it was there."
She shifts. Not from fear — something quieter than fear. Recalibration.
"I was ten yards away."
"You were ten yards from dying. Do you understand what that means to me?" The question arrives before I've decided to ask it.
She gazes at me. Fully. That amber-brown look that never flinches, that has seen me across every argument and every silence since the first moment she woke up in my manor and decided I was nobody's business.
My hands come up. I hold her face — both palms against her jaw, firm but careful, avoiding the left side where the old bruising is still fading. She freezes on the spot.
"Someone is using you," I tell her. The words feel like something being drawn out of me rather than spoken. "The carvings in the grevhault's skull. The pointing stones at your cottage. The angles I walked at the hollow — they weren't aimed at a random target. They were aimed at a route. A schedule. A specific person who goes back to the same places, alone, at the same intervals, because she cannot be convinced not to."
Her breath moves.
"They knew you'd go back into that forest." I hold her gaze and don't let go of it. "Even after the first attack. They counted on it. And if something happened to you in that forest, they knew I would bring you here. I stood in your garden three days ago and realized every angle was pointed at me.
Not her cottage. Not the hollow. Me.
"I'm the trap," she ponders. Quietly.
"You're what brings me into the open." My thumbs press against her cheekbones, not hard. Just present.
