POV: Vedran
The register was forty years old.
I had taken it from the library's locked cabinet at the third hour, when the Valdris household was deep enough in its own silence that my steps in the service corridor made no echo.
I didn't need long with it. I knew the system Erran's father had used for the prisoner logs — I had served this house at nineteen, under Veth's orders, long enough to memorize the indexing before I was pulled out.
Mira would be filed under the eastern detainee columns, cross-referenced by cover name.
She was on the page I expected.
I set the register on Caelen's desk, spine up, opened to the entry. Then the parchment beside it — folded once, smooth at the crease, the handwriting in the margin still legible by lamplight. Then I sat in the chair by the window and waited.
Caelen had not slept. He answered the door in yesterday's clothes, his eyes doing a fast read of my hands and face before he stepped back to let me in. He didn't ask where I'd been.
That was Caelen — he read the shape of a thing before he asked its name.
Sylra came two minutes later, still pulling a robe closed over her shift. Kael behind her, barefoot, already sharp enough to be watchful. She looked at the desk before she looked at me.
I did not preface.
"The register is forty years of Valdris prisoner records." I touched the open page. "Mira's on the entry I expected. East wing, third floor. Has been there since her cover went down." I held Sylra's eyes. "She's alive."
Caelen crossed to the desk and read the entry. His index finger tracked the notations in the right column — condition assessed, status unchanged, last inspection dated three months prior. He didn't say anything.
Sylra picked up the parchment.
She read it twice. First pass fast, second pass slower, stopping on the margin notes. Her face gave me nothing while she worked. When she set it face-down on the desk and looked up, her voice was the same temperature it always was.
"Tell me what it is," she said.
"The working draft of a ritual. Old Valdris work — the framework predates the current pack system by two generations." I kept it flat. "It's a power transfer. Designed for a dying carrier of suppressed gold to pull the gold from a living carrier through forced bond contact. The variables in the margin are in Erran's handwriting." I held her gaze. "The name written under them is yours."
The room went still.
Kael spoke first.
"He invited her here to see if the ritual would work." He didn't raise his voice. He stood near the door, arms loose at his sides, and he said the thing the rest of us were still calculating.
"The dinner. The hand he wanted across the table. The compliment, at close range." He looked at me, then at Sylra. "Every minute she sat in that room, he was reading her frequency. He's been measuring her since she arrived."
Sylra didn't answer that. Her eyes went back to the upturned parchment on the desk.
Caelen straightened. "Then we go tonight." His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to.
I shook my head once. "We go tonight, and we go with Mira. I am not riding out of this house with my source still in his cell."
Caelen looked at me across the desk.
He already had the answer. I could see him find it — the calculation running and landing without ceremony. He didn't push back. He nodded, once. The kind that ends a thing before it becomes an argument.
Sylra picked up the parchment again. Looked at it for three seconds. Set it flat on the desk beside the register and stepped back from both of them.
Her voice, when it came, was clean.
"Vedran leads. Caelen takes the corridor." She looked at Kael. "You stay with me. If it goes wrong and I shift, you stabilize the bond before I tear it." She looked at each of us, fast and final.
"We move within the hour. I want Mira out of his cell before dawn. I want her in our column at first light. And I want this draft in my saddlebag when we ride." She was already at the door. "Pack the wing. Move."
She and Kael left.
Caelen stayed a moment. He set his hand flat on the register cover — one press, like marking something — then lifted it. He didn't look at me when he spoke.
"Six years in his cell," he said.
"Yes," I said.
He nodded and picked up his sword belt from the chair.
I folded the parchment and put it in my coat. Six years I had carried Mira's file in my head — the route into her cover, the week I pulled out before her extraction window opened, the message that didn't reach me in time. Six years of knowing the entry existed somewhere in a Valdris register and not knowing which one.
Now I knew. I picked up the register. I would carry that out too.
Twenty minutes later the four of us were in the outer room of the south wing, dressed and packed, the fire left burning to hold the look of occupancy.
I ran the east wing route once more in my head — three service corridors, the disused chapel on the approach, two guards at the stairwell whose rotation I had timed from the courtyard window the night before. Four minutes from the chapel to the cell, at pace. The timing was tight. It was workable.
Caelen moved to the door.
He lifted his hand to the handle.
He stopped.
The war bond pulled hot — not from the corridor outside, not from the direction of the guards or the yard. From inside the wall. Behind the panel to the left of the desk, three feet from where the parchment had been lying open for the last twenty minutes.
Caelen turned to me. His voice was level and very quiet.
"There's a wolf on the other side of that wall. Not the corridor. Inside the wall — behind the panel by the desk. He's been listening." He held my eyes. "We have to assume he heard everything."