Chapter 29 — Corvin's Report

Kael came to Vale himself three days later, ostensibly to inspect the guards he had posted at the gate, though I had stopped pretending, even to myself, that his visits were ever truly about the guards.

He found me in the training yard, sweat-soaked and breathing hard, Maren calling corrections at my back while I worked through the same drill she had drilled into me for weeks — feet wide, weight low, block and turn and strike, again, again, until the movements had begun, finally, to feel like something closer to instinct than imitation. He watched from the fence a long moment before Maren noticed him and called a halt, and I turned to find his expression unreadable in the way I had learned meant he was choosing his words with unusual care.

"You've improved," he said, when Maren had withdrawn to the far end of the yard with the particular tact of a woman who understood exactly when two people needed privacy and had decided, without being asked, to grant it.

"Weeks of falling on my own face will do that."

"I don't doubt it." He studied me a moment longer, the ghost of something like pride crossing his face before it settled back into its usual careful composure. "Corvin has finished his inquiry into Vane. I thought you'd want to hear what he found before I brought it to your father."

My stomach tightened. "Tell me."

"Fifteen years ago, around the time your mother came to Vale, Vane was already an old name in Concord circles, though a quieter one than he is now. He spent the better part of that decade traveling — the eastern territories, mostly, places with older, stranger histories than the northern packs ever kept. Corvin found record of him in at least three archives that catalogue founding-era treaties and oath-texts, always requesting the same category of documents. Boundary agreements. Ritual bindings. The old language of thresholds." Kael's jaw tightened. "He was searching for something specific, Liora, long before your mother ever crossed his path. Corvin couldn't determine what. The archivists who might have known are all long dead."

"And after? Once my mother arrived at Vale?"

"His travels stopped." Kael held my gaze, steady and grim. "Almost entirely. For fifteen years, Edric Vane has remained close to the northern packs — advising councils, mediating disputes, cultivating exactly the reputation for gentle neutrality that makes him welcome in every house from here to the coast. A man who spent a decade hunting old secrets across half the continent simply... stopped, the same year your mother arrived, and settled close enough to watch her for the rest of her life."

I thought of the empty compartment. Of four fingerprints in gray dust. Of a warm, familiar voice telling me once, in another life, that cruelty was not the same as strength.

"He's been waiting," I said slowly. "All this time. Watching the house. Watching me, once I was old enough to matter."

"That's my reading of it as well." Kael's voice had gone low, careful. "There's something else. Corvin found a single reference, in an old Concord ledger, to a formal request Vane submitted eleven years ago — the same year my mother died, the same year the room in Draven Hall was sealed. A request for access to Draven's private archives, specifically concerning founding-era oath-texts. My father refused him. I don't believe Vane has forgotten the refusal."

The pieces did not yet form a whole picture, but I felt them shifting toward one another regardless, the way iron filings shift toward a hidden magnet, each fragment straining toward some center I still could not see clearly. My mother's arrival. Vane's sudden stillness. His mother's death. A sealed room. A request denied.

"He wants the gate," I said. "Whatever it truly is. He's wanted it for fifteen years, maybe longer, and he's simply been patient enough to wait for the pieces to come to him rather than chase them across the continent."

"That would explain the appointment," Kael agreed grimly. "The Concord observer's post gives him exactly what a decade of quiet travel never did — a reason to live inside your walls, unquestioned, for as long as the investigation into your attack remains officially open."

"Which means the longer the attack stays unsolved," I said, understanding landing cold and sure, "the longer he stays."

Kael did not answer immediately, and in his silence I read the same conclusion I had just reached myself.

"We need to solve it, then," I said. "Quickly. Before he finds whatever he's been searching for beneath my own roof."

"Quickly," Kael agreed, "and carefully. A man who has waited fifteen years for an opportunity like this one will not simply walk away from it because we've grown suspicious. If anything, suspicion may only make him more careful — and more dangerous."

Maren had drifted back within earshot by then, her practice blade resting against one shoulder, and she did not pretend she hadn't heard the last of it. "If it's Dressen's murder you mean to solve," she said, "you'll not find your answer at Vale. Whoever wore that man's face long enough to fool your father did it with more skill than any hired killer I've ever known. That's not the work of a bribed farmhand or a desperate debtor. That's craft. Old craft, the kind that isn't taught anymore, not openly."

"Skinwalking," Kael said, low, and Maren's jaw tightened at the word as though it cost her something to hear it spoken aloud.

"A word for it, yes. I've heard the old soldiers speak of such things, from wars fought before either of you were born. It's rare. It's costly to whoever uses it — costly in ways that leave marks, if you know where to look for them." Her eyes moved to me, sharp and assessing. "If someone in this house carries that kind of craft, they didn't learn it cheaply, and they didn't learn it recently. That narrows your list of suspects considerably, whatever Corvin's ledgers do or don't say about old travels and old requests."

"Vane," I said.

"Or whoever taught Vane," Maren said grimly, "assuming it's him at all. Old knowledge like that rarely dies with a single practitioner. It gets passed on, carefully, to whoever's patient enough to earn it." She shouldered her blade and turned back toward the yard, throwing one last remark over her shoulder as she went. "Find out who taught him his letters as a boy, Alpha Draven. I suspect you'll learn more from that than from any Concord ledger."

Kael watched her go, something thoughtful settling over his features, and when he looked back at me I could see the shape of a new plan already forming behind his eyes — one more thread to pull, in a house already thick with them.