"No."
Tunxo Miang Ming didn't look up from the letter he was sealing when he said it, and the flatness of the word carried more weight than shouting would have.
"I've already decided," Shree Yan said.
"You've decided to leave your own clan's territory, days after a diplomatic guest lost two guards under our roof, to chase a theory built on a map she pulled out of her sleeve." His father set the seal down. "Tell me why that isn't reckless."
"Because staying is worse. If the pattern holds, whatever did this moves to the next bloodline whether we sit here debating it or not."
"Then send guards. Send Fen Lu. You are my only son, and I will not hand you to something that leaves men dead in the dark and doesn't bother hiding the fact."
"You didn't stop me from riding into that valley."
"I nearly lost you in that valley." Tunxo Miang Ming's voice cracked, just slightly, on the word lost. "I don't intend to make a habit of it."
Shree Yan said nothing for a moment. The silence sat between them, heavier than either man's argument.
"I'm not asking your permission," he said finally.
"I know." His father's jaw tightened. "That's what troubles me more than the danger does."
Neither of them moved. Outside, a servant's footsteps crossed the courtyard and faded.
"Then I go with a guard, or I go alone," Shree Yan said. "Those are the only two versions of this that exist."
Tunxo Miang Ming studied him a long moment, something in his face giving way before his voice did.
"Ten men. Wu Yan, if his family permits it. And you write to me every three days, or I ride south myself and drag you home by the collar, prince of this clan or not."
"Agreed."
His father rose, and for a moment it looked like the conversation might end there. It didn't.
"Your mother will want to say goodbye properly," he said. "Don't leave before she does."
"I wouldn't."
Something almost like relief crossed Tunxo Miang Ming's face at that, brief and quickly buried beneath the weight of everything else the morning still required of him.
Fen Lu arrived an hour later, a stack of cross-referenced notes under one arm, her expression carrying none of the caution Shree Yan had come to expect from her when the news was good.
"The pattern doesn't hold," she said, without preamble.
"Explain."
"Numanfung's map has six marked settlements. I checked the dates against the lunar calendar and the astral readings I've been keeping since the valley." She spread the notes across the table. "Five of the six attacks occurred during a waning moon. The sixth happened at the full."
"That's not a large enough deviation to mean anything."
"It would mean nothing," Fen Lu said, "except the sixth settlement was the only one where the bloodline carrier had already died three weeks before the attack."
Shree Yan went still.
"They struck a settlement that no longer had what they were supposedly hunting."
"Yes."
"Then it isn't blood," he said slowly. "Or it isn't only blood."
"I don't know what it is," Fen Lu said, and the admission cost her something visible in how carefully she said it. "I know the theory Numanfung gave you explains five of six. I don't trust a theory that only explains most of the evidence."
Numanfung found them there twenty minutes later, drawn by a runner Shree Yan had sent the moment Fen Lu finished speaking. She read the notes twice before she spoke.
"My grandmother never mentioned a settlement losing its carrier before being struck," she said.
"Would she have known, if it happened?"
"She'd have known." Numanfung's voice had gone quiet in a way that had nothing to do with composure and everything to do with genuine unease. "Which means either my grandmother's knowledge had gaps she never told me about, or something about that sixth settlement was different in a way none of us have accounted for."
"Or the target was never the carrier at all," Shree Yan said. "The carrier was simply where it expected to find something. When it wasn't there, it struck anyway."
"Struck for what, then?"
Nobody answered that.
They left three days later, ten guards and Wu Yan riding at the column's edges, the estate's gate closing behind them with a low, final groan that none of them commented on. Shree Yan rode beside Numanfung near the front, the map she'd carried since before her arrival now folded into a satchel between them, marked with a seventh notation neither of them had wanted to add but both agreed the evidence required: a question mark, drawn over the sixth settlement, where the pattern that was supposed to explain everything had simply, quietly, failed to.