She doesn't move. Mirelle has managed this estate and has earned the right to her two seconds. She takes them, and then she tucks the letter into her sleeve.
"The eastern garrison riders?" she asks, falling into step beside me.
"Send them home. I'm not holding the perimeter for the garrison's comfort."
"The supply lines from Duvek?—"
"Will manage without my attention for the next twenty-four hours or they won't, and I'll address whichever outcome survives." I push through the main door and into the corridor where Vuldren is already waiting. "Every hunter who can ride. Every soldier whose loyalty I'm certain of. Tell me a number."
Vuldren doesn't hesitate. "Thirty-four confirmed. Another nine I'd stake my arm on."
"Forty-three." Not enough, and both of us know it. Zevrik knows our numbers. He helped me count them. "It will have to be sufficient."
"There are two soldiers from the border garrison who stayed when the others were sent back," Vuldren adds. "They heard what happened to the guards at the east passage. They want to come."
"Tell them yes."
He marks it. Behind me I hear Mirelle issuing instructions in her carrying voice to three separate people at once, the tone she uses when she has decided the manor will not collapse under her watch. Whatever else Zevrik took from me, he didn't take her, and for the first time in weeks I am grateful for that without reservation.
The forest is wrong within a quarter mile of the wildspont's outer boundary. The trees bleed where they shouldn't — not sap, not water, but the dark slow seep of corrupted matter that has replaced whatever lived inside the wood. Roots push upward at angles that suggest the ground beneath is no longer holding its shape. The sky overhead has begun to stain.
I read the trail without slowing. Broken branch here — deliberate, too low for wind. A charm abandoned against a root ball, the cord cut fast, dropped rather than placed. Boot marks in soil still soft from the storm. Someone carrying something, or someone injured at the right leg. My hands are steady onthe reins. I note this the way I note everything — without commentary.
Two hours in, Vuldren signals from the left flank. Three of his hunters have intercepted a pair of soldiers moving through the secondary pass, dressed in unmarked gear that Zevrik's hired hands used. They're brought to me in the clearing beside the collapsed ironwood, and I dismount.
I crouch in front of the first one, who is young enough that his fear is still readable on his face.
"Where is she?" I bellow.
He tells me he doesn't know what I'm referring to. I believe him, which is unfortunate for him, because believing him means I have to ask the next question instead, and the next one costs more. By the time I reach the question that matters — who gave the order, and what route did they take — he tells me everything he has. The route. The timing. A landmark I know.
The ruins at the wildspont's secondary fault, where the land drops into a natural basin and the stone is old enough that the corrupted magic has had time to sink into it. I stand. I leave them in Vuldren's custody, and I don't look back.
Nyssara finds me at the edge of the basin overlook while I'm studying the terrain below and calculating the approach. She shouldn't be here. I didn't bring her. That means she followed, which means she understood that telling me she intended to come would have produced an argument she couldn't win. I hear her approach and don't turn.
"You're going to get yourself killed," she says quietly.
"That's a risk I've assessed."
She stops beside me. Her eyes move across the basin below, the distant pulse of ward light visible even at this distance, and she is quiet long enough that I understand she hasn't followed me to argue about tactics.
"You haven't eaten since yesterday morning," she tells me. "Vuldren told me. He worries about it because he's not able to say so directly, so he tells me instead."
"Nyssara."
"She's alive." Her voice is steady. Not reassuring — precise. "Whatever they need her for, they need her alive to do it. You have time."
I don't answer. The light pulses from the basin, one long surge and then a pause that feels like something drawing breath.
"Draekir." She says my name the way she does when she has decided to say the thing I have not asked her to say. "I have known you for forty years. I was here after Rethvan. I watched you rebuild this estate from the inside out, board by board and policy by policy, and close every door behind you as you went. I have never once watched you move the way you've moved tonight."
The wind carries the line's pressure upward. I feel it at my jaw and across my hands.
"She matters," Nyssara continues. "I know you know that. I'm not asking you to confirm it." A pause. "I'm asking what happens to you if she doesn't come back."
"I don't know," I admit. My voice lands bare. "I have understood exactly what I am capable of surviving and calibrating my decisions accordingly. She's not something I can calibrate around. The thought of her dying down there—" I stop. Start again, quieter. "I don't know what I am on the other side of that. I don't think it's functional."
Nyssara is quiet. The wind moves through the corrupted trees below and the sound it makes is wrong, too resonant, like noise through something hollow.
