The man they brought him was not a soldier.
That was obvious. No lean, no readiness. He stood loose, careless, like a man who’d never needed to be ready because readiness wouldn’t have saved him anyway.
He was sixtyish. Dry skin, outdoorsman. Eyes that had seen things he wasn’t going to discuss.
His men had found him in the Thorn-waste. Not near it. In it. Deep in the section Caelum’s scouts marked impassable, beside a fire that shouldn’t exist in damp, dying wood, eating something that smelled like good bread.
He’d come without resistance. Like he’d been waiting.
“Name,” Caelum said.
The man looked at him with mild, clinical interest — like Caelum was a specimen, not a man who could have him killed. No one looked at Caelum like that.
“Fenrath. Scholar. No current affiliation.”
“A scholar in the Thorn-waste.”
“From the Thorn-waste, more accurately. Eleven years, give or take.”
Eleven years. The blight was twenty. Caelum filed it.
“Studying the blight.”
A flicker. Not surprise — recalibration.
“Among other things. You’re better informed than I expected.”
“What reports?”
“I have sources.”
“On both sides.”
“Well-informed,” Fenrath said again, pleased.
Caelum didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. Stillness came over him when he was paying attention, and most people felt it as pressure.
“You’re going to answer my questions fully. Because you’re in my camp and I’m deciding what to do with you.”
Fenrath smiled. Actually smiled. Like something had confirmed a hope.
“Perfectly. And for the record — your scouts didn’t capture me. I let them find me.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t manage this alone anymore. I’ve debated which of you to approach first. I chose you.”
“Why?”
“Because her response to unexpected information is to attack it immediately. Yours is to listen first.”
That matched Morgaine’s file.
“The blight,” Caelum said. “Short version.”
“Artificial. Erath work. Supposedly lost with their civilization. A territorial claim written in corruption. Makes land unusable to anyone without the key.”
Behind Caelum’s neutral face, Iolan’s theories clicked into place.
“Who cast it?”
“More complicated.” Fenrath pulled a folded map from his satchel — guards had checked it, only papers and glass vials — and spread it. Old, unknown style, unreadable script.
“Erath worked in circles. This scale needs twelve. Twelve anchor points, geometric pattern. A web.”
Caelum studied it. Points spread across both territories. One in the Thorn-waste itself.
“If we break them?”
“Break enough, the web collapses. Expansion stops. Whether the land recovers — another question. But it stops.”
Fenrath tapped the map.
“One side can’t do it alone. Points are placed to prevent that. You’d need both territories. You’d need—”
“Her.”
The word sat between them.
Fenrath held his gaze. “Yes. You’d need to work with the Lady Morgaine.”
Silence. Absolute. Caelum felt Reth at his shoulder, guards at the door, camp sounds outside — an army in permanent readiness for a war longer than anyone alive could remember.
Work with Morgaine. The woman whose forces he’d dismantled for eleven years. Who’d held the Crossing sixty years and lost it four days ago. Who, by every report, did not cooperate, did not accept help, had never in eight hundred years been anything but alone.
He thought about five years. About the Mira going brackish. About no viable water left to fight over.
“Why me first? Real reason.”
Fenrath’s mildness dropped.
“Because she’s carried this eight hundred years alone. She won’t accept help. She’ll hear this and try to solve it herself and fail — not because she isn’t capable, but because it cannot be done alone — and she won’t admit that until it’s too late.”
A pause.
“You, on the other hand, don’t have pride about methods. You care about outcomes.”
“So I have to convince her.”
“You have to give her a situation where cooperation is the only option. In a way that doesn’t feel like a trap. Which will require restraint your recent behavior doesn’t suggest.”
Caelum looked at him a long moment.
“You’ve been studying us both.”
“Since before the beginning. I’ve waited for the right conditions.”
“The conditions are right. Question is whether the people are.”
Outside, a horn — short, sharp. Approaching riders, unknown.
“Keep him comfortable,” Caelum told Reth. “Everything — maps, papers. Have my scholars review all of it. And Reth — this stays in this room.”
Reth nodded, already cataloging Fenrath.
One more thing.
“The Erath who cast it — gone. Civilization gone. But the working is still active. Expanding. So either it was designed to run alone, or—”
“Or someone’s been maintaining it,” Fenrath said. The old scholar face was gone now. What was left was older. A man who’d spent eleven years alone in a dying forest with a truth too big for comfortable company.
“Yes. Someone’s been maintaining it.”
The horn sounded again. Caelum walked into morning and didn’t let the cold show.