They didn't speak much on the road to Verath.There wasn't much to say that the silence wasn't already saying. Sera rode a half-length behind him, which she did when she was thinking and didn't want to be interrupted, and Draven let her think. He was doing the same. Three names carved into stone above a dead warrior's burial chamber. Three beings that had done this before, the same towns, the same pattern, three hundred years ago, and Aldric Voss had failed twelve times before stopping them and had written every name of everyone lost in the process.They reached Verath before noon.It was a market town, which meant it was loud at this hour, carts and stalls and the noise of several hundred people conducting the ordinary commerce of an ordinary morning. Draven pulled his hood up out of habit. The Dragon Slayer title moved ahead of him in populated places now, and he didn't want it moving ahead of him today.Elysande had sent the name of a street in the card, no inn specified, and he fo

He didn't knock this time.The door to Elysande's room opened when he pushed it and she was at the table where he'd left her, the maps still spread out, a cup of something cooling beside her right hand. She looked up when he came in. She read his face. She set the cup down."Sit down," she said."No." He stayed near the door. Sera came in behind him and stopped to his left. "Rosanora said something like your family made a deal with the dragons. Information and access in exchange for protection." He watched her face. "She said it's been going on for a generation."Elysande looked at him for a moment. Then she looked at the table."Yes," she said.The word landed in the room and sat there."That's it?" he said. "Yes?""What would you like me to say instead?" She looked back up at him. Her voice was even but there was something underneath it that was not even, something that had been carried for long enough to have weight. "I could explain it at length. I could give you the context, the

He found her in the east corridor outside the study rooms. She was standing with her back against the wall, arms crossed, eyes on the floor. Not waiting for him specifically. Just standing there with the stillness she used when something was happening inside her that she hadn't decided what to do with yet. He'd been looking for her to tell her about the formation sites. The full map, six locations, what Elysande had said, what it meant for the timeline. He started talking before he'd fully stopped walking. "Rosanora sent the complete map. Six sites, three I hadn't seen before. We need to start planning the order we hit them, because the tournament is—" "Draven." He stopped. She was looking at him now. Her face had something in it he hadn't seen there before, or hadn't recognized when he'd seen it. A decision that had been sitting underneath everything for a long time and had finally come to the surface. "I need to tell you something," she said. "Okay." She looked at

The security chief's evening report didn't come in. Draven only knew because the academy director sent a staff member to find it, which was the director's standard procedure for any missed administrative filing. The staff member came back without it. The director filed a note. Nobody thought much of it because the security chief had been quietly removed from his post that morning and replaced with a deputy who was still learning the reporting schedule. Except the deputy filed his report. Draven checked. On time, complete, nothing missing. Which meant someone else was using the security chief's access codes to send an absence signal, or someone had borrowed his schedule and deliberately created a gap. Either way, it was a message being sent through the administrative system to someone reading the administrative system. He told Sera. She put her hands on the floor. "Something's moving," she said. "Outside the east wall. Further out than last time. Not on the grounds yet." "How ma

The director's archive catalogue confirmed it the next morning. Pre-imperial object, dark stone, ovoid, approximately four inches at its longest dimension. Acquired two hundred years ago from an estate sale, provenance uncertain, origin pre-dating all known imperial records. No cultivation signature detected at acquisition. No practical function identified. Catalogued under unknown classification pending further study. That study had never happened. It had sat on a shelf for two hundred years behind a card that said do not remove. Draven read the catalogue entry twice. "Someone knew it was here," Lyra said. She was reading over his shoulder. "They didn't come for the academy. They came specifically for that object." "The infiltration was cover," Draven said. "The thirty operatives, the tunnel, all of it. A distraction large enough that a small team could reach the vault while we were managing everything else." "And we gave them the vault," Jin said from the doorway. He didn't say