Novels by DIVIN

The message came wrapped in something ordinary.A supply run. Two of the younger camp members had gone for water at first light, the way they always did, and come back with a folded square of paper tucked under the strap of the empty jug — not thrown, not pinned to a tree where wind could take it. Placed. Someone had wanted it found by the right hands and not the wrong ones.Ivy unfolded it in the clearing where half the camp could see her do it.No signature. No threat spelled out in words anyone could quote back later. Just a single line, block letters, the kind of handwriting that gave nothing away on purpose: WE KNOW WHERE YOU DRINK.She read it twice. The second time didn’t change what it said.“That’s not a threat,” Sawyer said, before anyone else had finished reading her face. He hadn’t raised his voice. He never did. “A threat tells you what happens next. This tells you they’ve been close enough to know your water source for longe

Marrow called the camp together at midmorning, which was itself a kind of announcement. She never called the whole camp together. She sent word through two or three people and let it spread the way water finds the low ground.This time she stood at the fire pit herself and waited until the last stragglers came.Ivy had rehearsed nothing. She'd told herself the night before that she wouldn't shape it, wouldn't soften the parts that made her look reckless or the parts that made Ashworth look worse than reckless. What we saw. What we said. What it might cost. In that order. She'd said the words to herself so many times they'd stopped sounding like a promise and started sounding like a fence.She kept to the fence.She told them about the clearing. About the agent's voice when he said Ashworth would hear about this, and the particular stillness that had followed it, the kind that wasn't calm so much as calculating. She told them what she'd said back,

The camp came into view before the sound of it did.Ivy saw the smoke first — thin, ordinary, rising the way it always rose over the cookfires at this hour — and something in her chest that had been braced for three days let go all at once, so fast it hurt worse than the bracing had.Sawyer walked beside her without matching her pace exactly. He never had. But she felt him notice the smoke too, felt the small adjustment in how he carried himself, the sentry-tension easing by a fraction that wouldn't have been visible to anyone who hadn't spent four days learning to read it."She'll have heard by now," he said. Not a question."She'll have heard by now," Ivy agreed.Marrow was waiting at the tree line before they reached it, which meant she'd been waiting there a while. She didn't run to them. She never ran. She stood with her arms loose at her sides and let Ivy close the distance, and when Ivy did, Marrow's hand came up to the side of her

Ivy woke before anyone else did, which was how she knew it hadn’t worked.Sleep should have felt different after yesterday. It didn’t. Her body ached in the same places, from the same ground, and the sky over the trees was the same gray it had been every morning since they’d left camp. She had said the thing that couldn’t be unsaid, in front of people who would carry it back to Ashworth by nightfall, and the world had not rearranged itself to acknowledge that.Petra was already up, crouched at the edge of their camp reading the ground the way she read everything—turning it over before she trusted it. Yara sat with her back to a tree, eyes open, watching the tree line with the specific stillness of someone counting exits. Roan stood a little apart, and the thing that had been “watchful” in him for days had gone somewhere else now. He looked less like a man on guard and more like one waiting to be given a reason.Sawyer wasn’t with them.Ivy found h

Contact wasn’t a sound. It was the absence of one.Ivy felt it before she understood it—the treeline ahead had gone quiet in a way the last hour of walking hadn’t prepared her for, no birds shifting, no wind moving through anything that could rustle. Sawyer’s hand came up, flat, and the whole line stopped like it had rehearsed this.“There,” he said. Low. Not a whisper—whispers carried different, wrong, and he knew it. “West edge. Two, maybe three.”Petra was already crouched, reading the ground instead of the trees. “Boot prints. Fresh.” She didn’t look up. “Funneled us here on purpose. This clearing’s the only flat ground for half a mile.”“So we go around,” Yara said.“We’re already in it.” Petra rose, slow, hands loose at her sides. “Going around means they see us change direction. Staying still means they think we haven’t noticed yet.”Roan hadn’t spoken since the treeline sighting, but his stillness had a different weight t

Yara stopped walking before she said anything, which was how Ivy knew it mattered.She crouched at the treeline, two fingers pressed into a patch of churned mud, and read it the way she read everything now — once fast, then again slower, correcting herself out loud before anyone could ask. “Someone camped here. Not us.” A pause, her fingers shifting an inch. “Not more than a day ago. Maybe less.”“Could be anyone,” Sawyer said, but he was already moving toward the ash pit, already crouching beside her.“It’s not anyone.” Yara didn’t look up. “The fire’s banked wrong. Buried, not burned out. Someone wanted it gone fast.”Ivy felt the ground shift under something that wasn’t the ground at all.Petra circled the site without speaking, the way she circled everything — the ledger, the map, now this — turning it over in her attention before she trusted a single piece of it. She stopped at a boot print half-swallowed by the mud, pressed her palm flat beside it for scale, and said nothing for

I found her in the room where they kept the older files, the ones nobody had asked to see in months. She had a cup of something gone cold beside her elbow and a stack of council notices she wasn’t reading so much as guarding, like the paper itself might do something if she looked away from it.“You’ve been standing there for a while,” she said, not looking up.“Working out how to start.” I came in and shut the door, which she noticed — her eyes went to it and back to me, a small recalibration I’d learned to read as she was deciding whether to be worried yet.“That bad.”“Not bad. Not proof, either.” I set the folder on the table between us. Three pages, my handwriting, dated across four different nights because I hadn’t trusted myself to write it all at once, and hadn’t wanted a single sitting’s certainty mistaken for something more considered than it was. “I want to be clear about that before you open it. This is a pattern. It isn’t a conclusion. If you read it and it feels like one,

RONAN The fence line needed checking twice a day. I'd started making it three. Nothing had changed out past the tree break, no new tracks, no broken brush, nothing the last watch hadn't already logged, but the extra pass wasn't really about the fence. I tested the corner post with my palm. Solid. I moved to the next one anyway. The notice was in my coat pocket. Had been for the better part of an hour, since one of the watch handed it off at the gate with the council's seal still whole across the fold. I knew the weight of that kind of paper by now. I knew, too, the particular quiet it made in my chest, the old, familiar pull toward just opening it, reading what it wanted, deciding what she needed to hear and what she didn't, and handing her the decided version instead of the question. I'd done that once already. Not with paper. With a door, and a choice that was never mine to make, and months of her voice going flat every time exile came up in conversation like it was a country sh

KESSAI want that on record: I didn't go looking for a reason to doubt him.The letter had been back in its box for three days. I'd told myself that was the end of it — read, catalogued, filed under things I already understood. But I kept pulling it out anyway, evenings, when the cottage went quiet enough that I could hear myself think and didn't especially want to.Dorian's voice from that first night came back whole, unprompted. That's her hand. I'd know it anywhere. He'd said it fast, certain, the kind of certain that doesn't leave room to ask how. I'd taken it the way I took most things from him that week — as fact, filed, moved past.I could still place exactly where we'd been standing when he said it. The archive room, the table with the bad leg, everyone talking at once about what the letter meant and nobody, myself included, asking the much smaller question of how we knew whose hand had written it in the first place.There'd been too much else in the room that night to make sp

DORIAN I found Kessa alone at the cottage’s back window, watching a tree line that had gone still an hour ago. I’d been rehearsing this since the corridor outside the council chamber, and every version I’d built had fallen apart somewhere between my chest and my mouth. Coward’s mercy. I’d used the phrase enough times it had stopped meaning anything, become a shape I recognized without feeling. But it fit here too, and I made myself hold onto that instead of letting it slide past unexamined the way I’d let so much else slide. “You’ve been standing there a while,” she said, not turning. “I have.” “Working up to something.” “I have.” I came to stand beside her, close enough to talk without raising my voice, far enough that she could step away if she needed to. “Ronan told me. What he said to you, on the trail. That he’s the one who argued for the cell.” Her shoulders didn’t move, but something in the room changed anyway, the particular stillness of a person deciding how much

KESSA The council chamber had a smell I hadn’t expected — old stone and beeswax, something almost domestic underneath the formality. I filed that away, the way I filed everything now. If I was going to sit in front of five strangers and let them decide what I was, I wanted at least one thing in the room I could hold onto that wasn’t fear. Ronan sat to my left, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched. Dorian stood a half-step behind, near enough to speak, careful never to crowd — the same watchful distance he’d kept through every hour of preparation before this. Cassian stood apart, by the door, the way a man stands when he’s already counted the exits. Elowen sat directly across from the council table, and I want that on record, even now: I watched her do it and felt nothing but relief. “The council recognizes this hearing was moved to this session at request,” the eldest councilor said. Her voice had the flat cadence of someone who’d said the phrase a thousand times and w

CASSIANThere’s a way silence sits in a room full of people who trust each other, and a different way it sits in a room where one person is choosing, specifically, not to say something. I’d had two days now to learn the difference from the inside.The front room had mostly cleared. Ronan had gone out to walk the cottage’s perimeter again — his third time since breakfast, though he hadn’t said so and I hadn’t asked. Dorian sat near the window with paper he wasn’t writing on. Kessa and Elowen were somewhere past the sleeping room, low voices, nothing I could make out and nothing I tried to.I had my own paper. I’d had it most of the morning.Guard rotation, night of. Archive access, three days prior. Letter timing, cross-checked against the duty roster twice now, same result both times. None of it was new. I’d built the shape of it a week ago and hadn’t found a reason to unbuild it since. What I hadn’t done was say any of it out loud.I turned the page face-down when Dorian glanced over