"Roran's quarters," Kael said.
Lyra held the lamp steady. "The east-facing servant's passage runs adjacent to them. I've watched the timing three times — always late, always the same window of the night. Never a direct exit through the main corridor." She paused. "Whoever carries them knows the servant routes. And whoever receives them knows to expect that routing."
He stood in the middle of his room and worked through what that meant.
Roran's quarters. Not Roran necessarily — the letters leaving *from* his section of the keep could mean a servant under his oversight, someone with access to his rooms, anyone who'd learned the east-facing servant's passage as an alternative to the main halls. But most of those required either Roran's knowledge or Roran's absence, and the second required a confidence about his schedule that implied close familiarity.
"How are they delivered out of the keep?" he asked.
"The north postern gate. The guard on that rotation has been the same man for eight months. Fen Adler — hired from outside, not from the city." She met his eyes. "His last position was in the Caldenveil garrison."
Caldenveil. The consortium credit. The Cavren trade agreements. The maintenance riders.
He was beginning to understand the geometry of it — not just the individual pieces but the shape they made together. A structure assembled over years, each element load-bearing, each one deniable on its own. A passage, a ring, a credit line, a gate guard, a letter route. And at the center of all of it, as the visible point of failure — because every constructed collapse needed a visible point of failure, something to point at after — Roran Voss, grieving his unused capability, venting to a sympathetic ear.
*Manufacturing a traitor out of someone who's just unhappy.*
"Thank you," he said.
Lyra looked at him for a moment with those gold eyes that gave nothing away except that they were giving things away to someone paying attention. "What are you going to do?"
"Talk to him."
"Tonight?"
He thought about it. Roran at midnight, dragged out of sleep, defensive from the first word — the confrontation would be about the disruption rather than the content. "Tomorrow," he said. "When he can't claim the hour as the reason for his response."
She nodded once and moved to the door. Then stopped, hand on the frame. "Kael."
He looked at her.
"Be careful how you do this," she said. "Not for your sake. For his." She said it without softness, the way she said most things — as observation, not counsel. "I've seen men confronted with things they didn't know they were doing. They don't always stay in the room."
She left.
He stood in the silence after she was gone and thought about that. *They don't always stay in the room.* One hundred and forty years in four houses, learning the places where people broke. She'd handed him a warning she hadn't needed to give.
He added it to the weight of things he intended to do right.
---
He spent the morning building the picture properly.
Not assumptions — evidence. The distinction mattered, because if he walked into that conversation with the wrong shape of it, Roran would find the gaps and use them as exits.
He went to the secondary vault and found the household ledger from eighteen months ago — the period when Lyra had confirmed the letter routing began, at minimum. He read through the staff records with the Trade-Instinct passive running quietly, and it flagged three things he might otherwise have dismissed: Fen Adler's hire date matched a week after the Cavren maintenance visit, which matched a week after the north wall's first deliberate treatment. The east-facing servant's passage key had been duplicated on the key ledger fourteen months ago — recorded as a spare, authorized by the household quartermaster. The quartermaster had resigned six months later for family reasons and been replaced by a Caldenveil referral.
Small things. The kind that vanished individually into the background noise of a functioning household. Together they had a direction.
Then he went to find what was actually in the letters.
He couldn't read them — they were already sent. But he could read what had been available to send. He sat in Orin's office with the steward's cooperation and went through what a person in Roran's quarters with Roran's access would have known, each month, for the past six months.
The repair schedule — including the north wall's absence from it, which meant the sabotage schedule was being updated. The reserve levels, which came from overheard conversations rather than direct access to the ledger, but Roran's rooms were adjacent to Aldric's study and the walls were old and thin. The staff rotations. The period when Aldric had briefly considered reaching out to House Sellwyn to renegotiate the broken engagement terms, which he'd abandoned — someone had known about that approach and its abandonment within days, faster than any formal communication could have traveled.
None of it was strategic intelligence. It was operational intelligence — the granular detail of a house's daily functioning that was only useful to someone already running an active operation inside it. The kind of information a sympathetic ear would ask for gradually, never too much at once, never anything that seemed like intelligence gathering. Just conversation. Just a listener who was interested in how Roran's difficult days were going.
*Tell me about the house. Tell me about your father. Tell me about your brother, the failed one. Tell me about the walls.*
He closed the ledger and sat with the full picture for a while.
Roran hadn't known. He was as certain of that as he was of anything in this house. A man who'd knowingly betrayed his family's structural vulnerabilities to the people engineering their collapse would carry it differently — the weight of deliberate complicity had a specific shape, a specific way of manifesting in posture and avoidance and the particular quality of guilt that knew what it was. What Kael had seen in the courtyard was something else. A man losing an argument with himself about who he was, not who he'd been caught being.
He'd been used. Specifically, carefully, with an understanding of his psychology that required either inside knowledge or very patient observation.
*The ring,* he thought. *Suppressed for four years. Running slow, running under capacity, unable to understand the gap. And then a voice that said: it's not your fault. It's them. Tell me.*
He stood up.
Time to go find his brother.
---
Roran was in the east courtyard, working through sword forms alone.
This was, apparently, his morning habit — Kael had learned it from the household pattern without asking directly, the way you learned anything about people who didn't invite inquiry. He practiced every morning regardless of weather, which said something, and he practiced alone, which said something else. The forms were good. Better than good — the fluid economy of someone who'd been doing this for years, whose body had learned it past the point of conscious instruction. Strength cap notwithstanding, Roran Voss could handle himself.
He stopped when he heard Kael's footsteps on the flagstones. Lowered the practice sword. His expression arranged itself into the default — the guarded bluntness, the slight forward set of his jaw that was either aggression or preparation for it.
"You're up early," he said.
"I need to talk to you."
"So talk."
Kael looked at him for a moment. The cold morning air, their breath coming in small clouds, the practice sword held loosely at Roran's side. He'd run through how to start this a dozen times since last night and none of the versions had felt right. There was no version that was right. There was only the version that was honest.
"Letters have been leaving this house," he said. "From your section of the keep. Weekly, for at least six months. Routed through the east-facing servant's passage to the north postern gate. A guard hired from Caldenveil eight months ago has been carrying them out." He paused. "They've been going to House Cavren."
The silence that followed was not the silence of someone calculating a response.
It was the silence of someone who'd been hit somewhere they didn't expect and needed a moment for the pain to locate itself.
Roran's face went through three things in rapid sequence: incomprehension, the particular blankness of a mind refusing to process something, and then — slower, heavier — something beginning to understand and not wanting to finish the process.
"That's—" He stopped. "No."
"The routing is confirmed. The guard's hire date correlates with a Cavren maintenance visit. The—"
"I said no." Harder this time. The jaw setting. "You're saying I've been sending information to Cavren. That's what you're saying."
"I'm saying the letters left from your section of the keep."
"Which means I sent them."
"Which means someone did, with access to your rooms and knowledge of your schedule." Kael kept his voice even. "I don't think you knew."
"You *don't think* I—" Roran's voice had gone tight, the way voices went tight when something was happening underneath them that hadn't decided yet whether to become words or something else. "You're standing here telling me there have been letters, going to Cavren, from my rooms, and you *don't think I knew.* That's very generous of you."
"It's not generosity. I've read what was in those letters — the kind of information they contained, the pattern of it. And I've looked at the mechanism. A duplicate key issued fourteen months ago, a guard with Caldenveil connections, a servant's passage that runs—"
"I know what runs adjacent to my rooms, Kael." Flat. Controlled. The control of someone working hard at it. "I've lived in them for twenty-four years."
"Then you know someone with that access has been using it without your knowledge."
Roran stared at him. The practice sword was very still at his side. His knuckles were not.
"Tell me what was in the letters."
Kael told him. The repair schedule. The reserve levels. Aldric's abandoned inquiry about the engagement. The staff rotations. He went through it methodically, without emphasis, the same way he'd read the evidence — as facts, not accusations. He watched Roran's face while he did it and saw the specific progression of a person recognizing, piece by piece, information they'd shared. Not in a letter. In conversation. Small amounts, over time, never feeling like much.
By the end Roran's face was doing something Kael had no name for. Not rage — underneath rage. The thing that lived under rage when the rage was at yourself.
"I have a source in Caldenveil," Roran said. Voice low. "Have for two years. He's a merchant contact — I thought he was a merchant contact. He trades in goods along the eastern routes and he had useful information about the trade realignments and I—" He stopped. "We talked. He asked questions. I thought it was—" He stopped again.
"A sympathetic ear," Kael said quietly.
The words landed exactly where he'd known they would.
Roran turned away. Walked to the far side of the courtyard, which wasn't far, and stood with his back to Kael and his hand braced against the stone wall. His shoulders were up and rigid in the way shoulders went when the alternative was something that couldn't happen in a courtyard.
Kael waited.
"Two years," Roran said, to the wall. "I've been talking to this man for two years."
"Yes."
"The engagement inquiry. I mentioned that conversation to him. Offhand. Aldric was considering it and then abandoned it within a week and I — I said something about how even that was being taken from us." A pause. "I thought I was venting."
"You were," Kael said. "That's the point. Someone identified your grievances and put a patient listener next to them. That's not your failure. That's a designed mechanism."
Roran turned around.
His face had arrived somewhere past the first stages — past the blankness and the refusal and the first wave of self-directed fury. What was left was something rawer and less organized. The expression of a man standing in the wreckage of two years and trying to decide what he was going to do about it.
"Don't," he said. Voice rough. "Don't tell me it's not my fault. Don't manage me."
"I'm not managing you. I'm telling you what I found."
"You're — " He stopped. Made a short, hard gesture with his free hand, something between dismissal and the inability to complete a sentence. "You come out here and tell me I've been feeding our enemies the internal workings of this house for *two years* and you want me to feel better about it."
"I don't want you to feel anything specific," Kael said. "I want you to know what happened. What you do with it is yours."
Roran looked at him across the courtyard. The cold between them. The practice sword finally set down against the wall, both hands free, which was either de-escalation or a different kind of preparation.
"Why are you telling me instead of Aldric?" he asked.
"Because Aldric would fix the symptom and miss the mechanism. He'd dismiss the guard, review the key ledger, tighten the household routine. None of that addresses why this worked." He met Roran's eyes. "It worked because you've been running below capacity for four years on a suppression curse someone put on your ring, and because nobody in this house ever told you your failures weren't your fault — except the one man who was collecting your grievances and sending them to Cavren."
The silence that followed was a different kind.
Roran looked at him. Something shifted in his face — not the anger, the anger was still there — but something working itself out underneath it, some calculation running that he hadn't expected to be running.
"My ring," he said.
"The signet. I had it assessed." Not true — the System had assessed it — but the conclusion was true and the distinction wasn't something he could explain. "Low-density suppression curse. External placement. Approximately four years old."
Roran looked down at his right hand. At the ring he'd worn since his eighteenth year, the one their father had given him at his majority, the Voss crest on silver that had been in this family for three generations.
He took it off.
Set it on the courtyard stone beside the practice sword.
Looked at it.
Then he looked back at Kael with an expression that was, for the first time in the body's memories, entirely unguarded. Not warm — they weren't there yet, weren't anywhere close — but *unguarded,* the face of a man who'd removed something he'd been wearing so long he'd forgotten it was there.
"Four years," Roran said.
"Yes."
"I thought—" He stopped. Rubbed the back of his neck. "I thought I was getting slow. Losing focus. I thought it was something I was doing wrong." A short exhale that was almost a laugh and wasn't. "Turns out someone was doing it *to* me."
"Yes."
"And you found this when."
"Three days ago."
Roran was quiet for a moment. "You waited three days."
"I needed to understand the whole shape before I brought you any piece of it. Bringing you half a picture wouldn't have been useful."
Something crossed Roran's face — a rapid, complex thing, layers of it. Some of it was still anger. Some of it was something Kael recognized from structural assessments — the specific quality of recalibration when you realized the load had been distributed differently than you thought and everything needed to be re-measured.
"You're not what I expected," Roran said. "Since you — since the awakening." He said it carefully, the way people said things they were still deciding whether to say. "You're different."
"So everyone tells me."
"No — I mean—" He stopped again, the bluntness hitting an edge it couldn't quite get past. He picked up the practice sword. Stood with it, not in a form, just holding it. "We've never talked. Not really. I was — I made assumptions about you. After the awakening." A short pause. "After before the awakening."
"I know," Kael said.
"I'm not apologizing."
"I'm not asking you to."
Roran looked at him sharply. The look of someone who'd prepared for a specific conversation and found a different one.
"What are you asking, then?" he said.
Kael thought about how to answer that. He'd been thinking about it since before he'd come out here. He'd spent the night with the full picture — the passage, the ring, the credit, the gate, the letters, the north wall's interior face — and what he'd found, arranging it all at once, was not a list of crises. It was a structure. A structure someone else had been building, carefully, for years, using this house as their material.
You could fight a structure. You could dismantle it piece by piece, trace each element back to its origin, cut the connections.
Or you could build something else. Something the existing structure couldn't load-bear against.
"I'm not asking anything," he said. "I'm telling you what I found. You know about the Caldenveil contact now. You know about the ring. What you do with that is yours." He met Roran's eyes. "But I'm going to start fixing this house. Not patching it — fixing it. And if you want to be part of that, I won't turn you away."
Roran stared at him for a long moment.
"You're eighteen years old," he said. "You failed your awakening. Your physical stats are—"
"Suppressed forty percent by an active blood curse, yes. I know the math."
"—and you're standing in a courtyard telling me you're going to fix a house that's been failing for three decades."
"Yes."
"Why." Not *why as in I think this is stupid.* Something closer to what Aldric had asked about the wall — the genuine question of a person who'd stopped expecting reasons.
"Because the alternative is watching it fail and I'm not built for watching," Kael said. "And because whoever built this mechanism is going to find out their timeline is wrong, and I'd rather they find out from a position of strength than weakness."
Roran was quiet for a long time.
He picked up the signet ring from the courtyard stone. Turned it over in his fingers. Looked at it with the expression of a man deciding something about an object he wasn't sure he could trust anymore.
He put it in his coat pocket instead of back on his finger.
"I'll think about it," he said. Which was not yes. Which was also not the door closing.
Kael nodded. He turned to go. He was three steps across the courtyard when Roran's voice came after him, lower than before, with the specific texture of something said before the speaker could decide not to say it.
"The Ashfield contracts," Roran said. "In the secondary vault. The survey from forty years ago." A pause. "There's a secondary survey. Smaller document, separate case, filed behind the first one. Father doesn't know it exists — I found it twelve years ago and never showed him because I didn't think it mattered anymore."
Kael stopped.
"What's in it?"
"I don't know. I couldn't read the notation. The surveyor used a technical system I didn't recognize." Another pause. "But the depth measurements were different from the primary survey. Much deeper."
He walked back to the keep without waiting for a response.
Kael stood in the empty courtyard with the cold coming off the stones and thought about depth measurements in the Ashfield that were different from the official survey, and what that might mean about what was down there, and whether the Compact Author had anything to do with what was down there.
He went inside.
---
He found Aldric in the library.
Not working — reading, which was different. A history of the empire's eastern territorial disputes, the kind of reading a man did when he was thinking about something adjacent to the text. He looked up when Kael entered, the recalibration expression now arrived quickly, like a muscle that had been getting regular use.
"I need to access the secondary vault's Ashfield case," Kael said. "There's a secondary survey document behind the primary file."
Aldric's expression changed slightly. "I know about the survey."
"You said you didn't."
"I said the secondary vault had the original documents." A measured pause. "I didn't say I'd read them all."
Kael looked at his father. "You've read the secondary survey."
"Twelve years ago. Roran found it and showed me." Aldric set the history down. "I told him it didn't matter and to forget it."
"What's in it?"
"Depth measurements." Aldric's voice was even. "The Ashfield goes deeper than the original survey indicated. Considerably deeper. There are cavern systems at the four-hundred-meter level that weren't in the primary documentation." He paused. "The curse density at that depth, according to the notations, is—" He stopped.
"Exceptional," Kael said.
Aldric looked at him sharply. "Yes. How did you—"
"I'm guessing." Which was half true — the System had been feeding him directional data about the Ashfield for days, fragments that added up to a shape he hadn't looked at directly yet. "What else?"
His father was quiet for a moment. Looking at him with the expression that had been shifting for a week — the performing-competence wearing further through, the underneath showing more.
"There was a relic classification in the secondary survey," Aldric said. "Old notation. Pre-empire survey system, which is why Roran couldn't read it." A pause. "I recognized it because your grandfather had a copy of the notation key in his personal library. Before I sold that library." He said the last sentence without inflection, which was its own kind of inflection. "The classification indicated an unknown artifact of significant attribute density. The surveyor's note said: *do not approach without preparation. Do not approach alone.*"
Kael held that for a moment.
"You knew this for twelve years," he said. "And didn't go."
"I knew it for twelve years," Aldric said, "and had neither the attribute base to approach safely nor the resources to develop one." He looked at his hands, then back up. "And then the house continued declining and the window continued closing and eventually—" He stopped. "Eventually you stop looking at windows."
The library was quiet. The fire low, the smell of old paper and pipe ash and something medicinal. His father in the chair with his soldier's hands folded, looking at the youngest son who kept arriving at different angles than expected.
"What are you doing, Kael?" he said. Not the exhausted question from three days ago. Something with more weight, more direction. A man who'd been watching and had decided the watching required a question.
Kael looked at him for a moment. He thought about the twelve answers he could give — the partial ones, the careful ones, the ones that kept the picture small enough not to threaten. He thought about what Lyra had said about Roran: *be careful how you do this.* He thought about the wall repair and the morning in the courtyard and a conversation about a ring and a secondary survey document.
He thought about what it would mean to finally tell someone the honest version.
"Figuring out what's actually holding this family up," he said. "And what isn't."
Aldric looked at him steadily.
"And then?" he said.
"And then I'm going to fix the second category and strengthen the first."
His father was quiet for a long time. The fire shifted in the grate. Outside, somewhere above them, the repaired north wall held its new mortar against the cold, indifferent to everything except the weight above it.
"The Ashfield document," Aldric said finally. "The notation key is in the red case in my study. Top shelf, behind the campaign maps." He opened his book again. "It's yours."
---
He was back in his room before dark, the notation key on his desk, the secondary survey document — retrieved from the vault — spread beside it. He worked through the notation slowly, cross-referencing each symbol, building the translation.
The surveyor had been careful. Meticulous about depth, about temperature gradients, about the specific character of the curse density at different levels. At the four-hundred-meter mark, the character of the density changed — the notation shifted from standard measurement to a classification system that clearly indicated something other than ambient curse saturation.
A source.
Not the Ashfield's pervasive curse-dense soil. Something specific. Something that had been there long enough to saturate the surrounding stone for a kilometer in every direction.
He was still translating when the System notification appeared.
Gold text, larger than usual. The System used size for emphasis rarely enough that he'd learned to pay attention when it did.
*[FORGE OPPORTUNITY DETECTED.]*
*[Location: ASHFIELD, approximately 3km north of Ironholt.]*
*[Curse density classification: EXCEPTIONAL.]*
*[Relic classification: UNKNOWN.]*
A pause. Then:
*[Warning: attribute poisoning risk to unprepared individuals. Your current Endurance may not be sufficient.]*
Another pause. Shorter.
*[May.]*
He looked at the word.
*May.*
He looked at the survey document. The depth measurements. The surveyor's careful notation: *do not approach without preparation. Do not approach alone.*
He looked at the compass in his coat pocket, the one with the needle that pointed slightly wrong. The Wayward Curse. More likely to find significant things. Less likely to find safe routes.
He thought about the Compact Author. About a deal made three generations ago. About a curse that was also the seed of something and an entity that intended to be paid and a Stage 2 of 5 that was going to become a Stage 3 whether he was ready or not.
*May,* the System had said.
He had never found the System's use of language imprecise.
He closed the survey document. He looked at the notation key. He looked at the compass.
He started making a list of what he needed to do before he went into the Ashfield.
---