Drogan stops smiling. "There are people in the lower vault."
I look up.
"Refugees," he says. "Some from the waystation. Some dark elf families who came through before the cordon closed. We put them behind the warded door because it was the deepest room still holding air."
Corrine goes still at the word families.
"How many?" I ask.
"Near forty. Children among them."
The number enters the room and changes the map.
"Then no fire reaches that level," I say. "Narrow the entries, but leave one route open to us. Scouts on the south ridge before full dark—men who can hold a position without speaking for six hours. Put the youngest with the oldest."
Drogan looks at me for a second longer than necessary, then gives one hard nod. "Good. I was hoping you would say that before I had to become difficult. Road scouts?"
"Two on the village road. Whatever Varek's heralds carry to the settlements, I want repeated back to me within the hour."
Theren takes the orders out of the room without comment. He has stopped asking whether I am thinking clearly. He has decided I am, or has decided it does not matter anymore. Corrine has not looked at me the same way since the chamber, and I am still carrying the shape of her hand over my heart beneath the armor.
Corrine works at the other end of the table between two oil lamps. Drogan's gaze moves from her to me, then back to the records she is marking in quick, precise strokes.
"So that is the reason you have been making suicidal decisions with such conviction," he says.
I do not look up. "Choose your next words carefully."
"I did. Those were the careful ones."
Corrine's pen pauses for half a heartbeat before it moves again. Theren makes the mistake of looking amused. I make themistake of wanting to keep them both alive long enough for it to matter.
She has separated the documents into three piles I wouldn't have thought to separate: the originals, the copies that can survive being read once and burned, and the ones whose courier marks tell their own story even if the text is destroyed. She folds the last set small enough to be hidden in a saddle seam, and ties them with linen.
"These go with the runners," she says. "Not the cleanest copies. These. If anything reaches Vaelis intact, it should be the marks."
"Why these?"
"Because I'm the only person on her end who reads them. If I'm not at the other side, she still gets the truth in a language one of her contacts speaks. One of them owes me a crossing from four winters back." A small flat smile. "Past tense, depending on how tonight goes."
I watch her hands fold the next packet. They move like someone who has managed on her own survival and put it to one side as a separate problem. The bruise at her wrist where the manacle wore through has yellowed at the edges. She favors that hand without knowing she does. She hasn't stopped working since I gave the first order. It unsettles me in a way I can't explain to a stranger. I can put soldiers into a line and tell them where to die. I can't tell Corrine to live, and she would not hear me if I tried.
By the third hour past midnight the runners are clear of the valley, the lower vault has been narrowed and warded, and Theren takes the watch above. Drogan's men hold the corridors below. The space between is briefly, impossibly ours.
I find her in the small inner room off the records store—the one we sealed behind a half-collapsed wall, the stone keeping the air warm and the lamps low. She has set two tin cups of water onthe floor and is studying the doorway from the inside. Reading the angles. Mapping how to leave a room she has just entered. I ease the door against its broken frame.
"You're still in your armor," she says, without turning.
"So are you."
"Mine doesn't have buckles." Now she turns. "Take it off. The rest. I want to see you without the room having to fall on us first."
The instinct is in my hands before the thought finishes—the old habit of keeping the worst of myself between me and the room. But she has asked it plainly. I understand what she is asking for, and what she is offering by asking.
The first buckle, then the second. The shoulder plate comes off slower than it should because my fingers are not entirely steady, and I do not pretend they are. Vambraces. Gorget. I loosen the undertunic at the collar and let it open. By the time I am only in the linen, my whole left side is uncovered down to the waistband with nothing pressing me to do this but her.
She crosses the floor and stops within arm's reach. She doesn't touch yet.
"May I?"
