She didn’t sleep.
Not anymore. Sleep was a surrender she couldn’t afford when the reports kept coming.
Morgaine sat at her map table, three lamps burning, cold tea at her elbow. The words were starting to double.
Twelve miles.
That was the number in the survey report. Twelve miles in the last year. The blight had eaten twelve miles of living land.
She pressed her fingers to her eyes — the closest she came to distress these days.
Five years. Her chief scholar Iolan gave it five years before the blight hit the Mira River. Maybe six if it slowed. It wasn’t slowing.
Five years before the last clean water in the contested territories went brackish. Before both sides — hers and Caelum’s — had nothing left to fight over.
After that, she didn’t finish the thought. After that was a problem for future Morgaine. Future Morgaine always found a way, paid a price no one else would pay, refused to let her people die even when dying was logical.
Lately, she was less sure future Morgaine would.
She reached for the next report. Iolan’s handwriting, anxious.
On the Possible Artificial Origin of the Greywood Blight.
She read standing up. She only stood when a report demanded her whole body.
His argument was careful, qualified, and damning. The blight didn’t act natural. Its border was too clean. Too uniform. Roots first, then water, then soil, leaving dead trees standing like they were arranged. No disease did that. No geological process.
But one thing did. A class of ancient workings in the oldest texts in her archive. Texts that predated even her. A method of claiming land — not with flags, but with a corruption that made it unusable to anyone without the key to reverse it.
Not a petty hex. A true curse. A territorial claim written in death.
She stood with the paper in her hands a long time.
If Iolan was right, this wasn’t a disaster. It was an attack. On both sides. Twenty years, expanding toward the Mira, patient, needing no tending.
Who benefits from two exhausted peoples grinding each other down over shrinking scraps while a third party waits?
The question was so large her skull felt small.
She walked out into the cold. Stars hard and brilliant above Ashen Ridge. The same stars her people had navigated by for millennia. Tonight they felt like the only thing untouched.
Orin materialized at her shoulder. “My Lady. You haven’t slept in four days.”
“I’m aware.”
She sent him away. Let her eyes fall shut, craving empty dark.
She got Caelum instead.
Winter-grey eyes. Hand hovering near her cheek, heat radiating. His voice low, saying her name like something sacred.
I can see through you.
She wanted him. A drumbeat, relentless. Not just his body — though gods, his body — but his attention. That focused, terrifying attention turned on her pleasure while the world rotted.
“My Lady?”
Her hand went to her dagger. Senna in the tent entrance.
Morgaine forced her fingers to uncurl, willing her pulse to slow, hoping dark hid the flush. To be startled was rare. To be caught distracted like a recruit was unacceptable.
“Report.”
“A rider at the outer pickets. White flag. Seal from Lord Varek.”
At this hour? Varek had ignored envoys for three months.
“He calls for parley at dawn. Neutral ground. Ruins of Keth’s Ford.”
Three miles away. Practically on the blight’s leading edge.
“Why now?”
“Rider wouldn’t say. Only that it’s mutual survival. And—” Senna hesitated. That was rare enough Morgaine went still.
“And?”
“Varek won’t be alone. He’s bringing Caelum.”