"Connected is not the same as proven."
"No," I sit back on my heels. "But someone wanted both sides looking in the wrong direction. The rebels were handed a reason to attack. Your soldiers were denied the order that might have saved them. That doesn't happen by accident."
His face goes still. "No. It does not."
He doesn't reach for comfort. He gives me the limit of what we know instead, which is more useful and less kind. "Then we stop pretending this is coincidence." He turns the record back toward himself, not quite offering it, not quite taking it away. "You saw something I missed. That does not make this simple."
"No," I say. "It makes it honest."
After that, the record stays mostly in his hands. I point out what I recognize. He checks it against what he knows. Neither of us calls it cooperation, which is probably why everyone else notices it immediately.
Theren watches from beside the fire with both eyebrows climbing. One of the escorts looks once, then decides some other wall deserves his full attention. I sit back before the closeness can become something the others are allowed to read too easily. Leoric doesn't ask me to move closer again. He only keeps the record angled enough that I can still see it.
Once the light tilts toward afternoon, we have most of the idea. What we don't have is the inside of it—who else held the pen, who is moving now, what the next fire is meant to look like. Leoric folds the records and looks at the middle distance the way he does when he's already three moves ahead of the rest of us.
"This tells us what was done," he says quietly. "It doesn't tell us what's coming. For that I need someone inside the council's actual rooms. Someone who hears what gets decided before it's written down." His jaw sets. "There's one person who owes me enough, and dislikes me enough, to tell me the truth."
I don't ask who. He'll tell me when he's ready, or he'll show me. I've stopped trying to take the answers before he hands themover. I lie awake that night with two truths I can't set down. The first is that the war I tore my soul apart for was never the war I thought I fought—it was steered, lot by counted lot, by hands that profited from every fire they let me believe was mine. That one I could survive alone. I've survived worse alone.
The second is quieter, and entirely mine, and it is the one that keeps me from sleep. The only person in Protheka I would trust with the first truth is the man whose fortress I burned to the ground.
14
LEORIC
It takes Theren two days and a debt I would rather not have spent to arrange the meeting. We leave the waystation with the records folded against my chest, the escort scattered down three false trails so anything following has to guess wrong twice. Corrine rides with me. I tell myself it is because she reads the courier marks I can't, and I let myself believe it as far as the second ridge.
The holding sits in a fold of dead vineyard country, and the only living thing on it is the glasshouse — a long spine of warded glass lit gold from within while everything around it has gone to frost and ruin. Vaelis chose it the way she chooses everything: for what it tells the person arriving. Warmth she controls. Light she can put out. A room with no shadow in it, where a man either says what he came to say or wastes the only candle he was offered.
I leave Corrine with Theren in an antechamber under the pretense of checking the outer ward line, and she knows it is a lie before I finish saying it. Her eyes move once to the corridor beyond me, then back to my face.
"That is not where the ward line is," she says.
"No."
Theren's mouth tightens, but he does not correct me. That's how I know he understands exactly who I am meeting. Corrine gives me a look I have no filing system for. I have spent years being the thing other people are careful around. I do not know how to process being warned.
The passage behind the glasshouse runs narrow and hot from the ward lamps built into the stone. I take the servant stair instead of the main door, pass two attendants who look away too quickly, and enter through the side arch where the orchids climb the ironwork.
Vaelis is waiting among the flowers. She has aged into her power like the best of them do, slowly and on purpose. Platinum hair loose tonight, the crimson tattoos down her arms catching the lamplight when she turns, silver eyes that find the damaged side first because she knows it is where most people refuse to look.
"You came alone," she says.
"You asked for discretion."
"I asked foryou." She pours two glasses of something pale and does not pretend either of us will drink. "Discretion is what I offered in exchange." Her gaze moves over me, precise enough to feel like a hand checking for hidden blades. "And yet every road says the same thing. The Ash King is traveling with a human courier who has a price on every name she has ever used. That is not careful, Leoric. That is attachment wearing tactical language."
I don't take the bait. Taking it would confirm the shape she's already drawn.
"The records," I start.
"Three border garrisons reported weapons caches in the last month. Human-made. Crude. Found by patrols who knew exactly which floorboard to lift. There will be a fourth — amarket square, a refugee waystation, human hands on it where the survivors can see, a body count large enough to print." She touches a petal. "And the council will have the documents drafted before the smoke clears. I've seen two of them already."
"False flags."
"A war doesn't restart on its own. It has to befed." She glances at me. "Someone is laying a table."
Hearing what I already thought is different — Corrine taught me that, sitting in a bathhouse with a confession she'd never been able to finish. "Names."
