Beyond the plaza, past the ring of silent stone kings, a structure waited that even Torv's practiced eye recognized immediately for what it was — a library, or something close enough to the concept that its purpose required no explanation.Shelves carved directly into the stone walls held rows of material Kael didn't initially recognize as text at all — thin sheets of some dark, metallic substance, etched rather than written upon, stacked in careful, deliberate order that suggested a civilization considerably more organized than its current, buried obscurity implied."Kael," Rat said, already moving among the shelves with the same careful, hungry focus he brought to every piece of intelligence that crossed his path. "These aren't decorative. This is a record. An actual record."The symbols along Kael's arm pulsed faintly as he approached the nearest shelf, and the etched text resolved beneath his gaze the same way the plaza's inscription had — not translation exactly, something closer

The letter came wrapped in silk, which told Kael something before he'd even broken the seal. Nobody in this war had sent silk. Lady Ashvane wrote on plain paper because plain paper burned fast and left nothing behind. Denner's stolen correspondence had come on cheap parchment, hurried and smudged. This was different. This wanted to be noticed.Rat turned it over twice in his hands before he'd let it near Kael at all."No courier network I recognize," he said. "Whoever sent this didn't route it through any of the usual channels. It just appeared. Left on the outer perimeter, under a rock, where a patrol would find it and nowhere else.""That's either very careless," Mira said, "or very deliberate.""With this war, I'd bet deliberate," Kael said, and broke the seal.The handwriting inside was elegant in a way that made Kael think of a person who had been taught penmanship the way other children were taught to walk — early, strictly, without much say in the matter.I am told you like pla