"If we go to Veyne and he decides the map is crown treasure—"
"Then we will have been wrong in public instead of careful in private," she said. "I'd rather be wrong with you beside me than right alone under a hatch."
Silence a moment. Then: "The porch can wait. The quieter world can wait. I am with you in the loud one."
She smiled at the dark. "Good. Bring the staff. Ruins respect sticks more than speeches."
Morning came clear, as if the grey of the first day had been a held curtain. The ruined castle on its hill looked almost beautiful in clean light—beautiful the way a broken tooth can be, if you forget what broke it.
Osric agreed to the walk with a brevity that suggested he had been waiting for an excuse that was not his own longing. Dreven insisted on six guards. Sibley insisted on Miren, Edric, and herself. Tobin invited himself by appearing with water skins and a face that dared anyone to send the messenger home. Vetch was not mentioned.
They took the old path through the forest fringe. Saplings grew in the ruts where carts had once run. Birds argued. The air cooled as the trees thickened, then opened again onto the slope where Castle Veyne's outer wall slumped like a man asleep at a table. Char still blackened the inner faces of stones. Grass grew in the courtyard in soft, treacherous clumps.
Osric stopped inside the gate arch and breathed as if the air had a different weight here. "The stables were to the left," he said. "The well-court to the right. The hall ahead, where the roof is not."
They followed his memory. Miren kept her hand near the slate under her dress. Edric's staff tapped lightly, testing unstable flags. In the well-court the castle's great cistern mouth yawned—a wider cousin of Stonewell's village well, its wooden crank long gone, its rope a blackened twist on the stones. Far below, water glimmered faintly, a coin at the bottom of a throat.
"The cisterns held when the walls did not," Osric said. "I had them sealed afterward. I told myself it was to keep scavengers from drowning. Perhaps I was sealing a grave."
Miren took out the slate. She held it so daylight filled the etched veins. "A wellscale brought this to our well the hour your banners showed. It climbed our water with your crimson in its claws—not as a thief for vanity. As a witness. The deep lines connect Veyne to Stonewell. Sibley says they may reach farther—toward the capital's old springs—if the channels are cleared of ash and neglect."
Dreven leaned in, soldier's skepticism wrestling with clerk's appetite. "Sire, if true—"
"If true," Osric cut in softly, "then I burned above a living system I did not understand, and I have spent fifteen years taking grain from a valley whose water I may also have half-strangled." He looked at Miren. "Where is the creature?"