The Thorn-waste smelled of ash and salted earth.
Morgaine had stopped noticing it twenty years ago, the way you stop noticing a scar. She noticed it now.
The camp sat in a clearing where trees had given up, trunks stripped to bone, roots lifting from dead soil. Ash in the central pit was still pale. Boot depressions still fresh.
Eleven small fire pits. Not random. A configuration that pulled at something deeper than strategy.
Eleven.
She went still.
Not a camp. A working space. The kind the Erath texts described for extended practice — geometry to support a complicated, long-duration working.
She hadn’t thought about those texts in a hundred years.
“Iolan.”
He was already there. Had been awake before she summoned him.
He circled the perimeter without touching anything, then stopped. His eyes widened — fractional, the most he ever allowed.
“You recognize it.”
“Preparation space. Secondary Erath texts. Partial translations.” He crouched near an outer pit. “My Lady. Look.”
Symbols in the earth, nearly swept away. Small, precise, cut with something sharp.
“Erath?”
“Anchor notations. To record a working’s connection to a fixed point.” He looked up. “Someone’s been here to service the blight.”
Service.
“Not to study it.”
“To maintain it.” Iolan stood, mind already racing. “A working like this needs periodic renewal. Without it, it stabilizes or collapses. It hasn’t stabilized. It’s growing. Which means someone’s been maintaining it. Consistently. For twenty years.”
Twenty years. While both armies bled each other over scraps and called the dying “weather.”
Cold moved through her that had nothing to do with the sky. And underneath it, immediate and unprofessional:
I need to tell him.
She tried to dress it as strategy. It affected his territory as much as hers. Anchor sites would be in both territories. It needed coordination.
It was also because she hadn’t stopped thinking about him since the bridge.
“How many points?” she asked. Voice steady. She was proud of that.
“Twelve. Distributed geometrically. Like a web. Some in territory Lord Caelum controls.”
She knew. She’d known since Iolan’s paper. Hearing it aloud made it real.
She would have to work with him. With him. In proximity. For an extended time.
The thought should have filled her with dread. It filled her with hot, unwelcome excitement.
“Draft a message. Highest cipher. Scholar’s network, not military.”
Iolan waited.
“Tell him I have information he needs. That it concerns the blight. That we need to discuss it. Together.”
The last word hung like a confession.
“And if he refuses?”
“He won’t,” she said, with certainty she couldn’t explain. “He’ll come.”
She thought about Caelum, about the bridge, about wanting that had been building since that moment. “Some costs are worth paying.”
She walked out without looking back, not letting him see her hands shake.