Kael woke before the sun and found his boots by touch. The barracks were quiet except for the soft breathing of men who’d bedded down late after the festival. He didn’t bother with breakfast. By the time the first smear of light bled into the east, he was already at the north fields with two of his best, Rolan and Merev, keeping a step behind.

What had been green yesterday lay in uneasy stillness. Dew silvered the dirt, but the plants themselves didn’t hold it; the droplets slid off leaves that looked dull and thin, as if something under the skin had been drawn out. He stepped over the low boundary hedge into Hadden’s plot. The farmer himself waited, hat clutched, pushing his mouth flat to keep it from shaking.

“You said this happened overnight,” Kael said.

Hadden nodded. “Last I walked it, near dusk, everything was right. This morning…” He lifted his hands, palms up. “It’s like the life just slipped away.”

Kael crouched and touched a carrot top. The leaf should have been firm and slightly rough under his thumb. It flaked at the edges. He pinched the stem and it dented without spring. He tugged one of the carrots from the soil; the root came up too easily, a color too pale, flesh fine and brittle like old paper. He broke it cleanly in half with two fingers. No moisture beaded at the break.

“Any pests?” Kael asked. “Signs of rot? Mold?”

Hadden swallowed. “No bite marks. No smell, Captain. Just… this.”

Kael straightened and signaled Merev to start a perimeter sweep. He looked past the hedgerow toward the river. A light mist lay low over the ground. “Anyone sick?” he asked without looking away.

“Not sick. Tired,” Hadden said. “My Els says her bones ache like winter. I told her it was the dancing, but—” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

They moved from field to field, the cases piling up. At Mara Tolen’s, the bean vines hung limply, their pods turned a chalky gray along their seams. She kept wiping her hands on her apron, a smear of dirt appearing and disappearing as if she couldn’t remember she’d already done it. “I checked them late,” she said. “After the little ones were down. They were fine. I could see the moon on their leaves. Then I woke, and it felt wrong in my house. Quiet, like before a storm. I came out and—”

Kael let her stop. He kept notes in his head, mapping the edges of the damage. It wasn’t a circle, not exactly. Patches of normal green broke the lines, a stubborn tangle of healthy squash here, a stand of barley there that still shone with life. But the blight ran like veins between them, thin at first and then widening, and always with that same change at the edges—precise, as if a line had been drawn and everything inside it had aged without the rest.

At Joran Pell’s orchard, the change was sharper. Apples that had been nearly ripe now looked like they’d sat in storage for a season too long. Their skins had sagged and dulled without a bruise in sight. Joran picked one and crushed it in his fist with an expression that made Kael look away for a breath. “I had buyers coming next week,” he said. “They’ll think I’ve watered them down or kept them past. Who’s going to take apples that taste like yesterday’s breath?”

“Did you see anyone near your property?” Kael asked. “Any lights? Hear anything?”

Joran spat to the side. “You think my neighbors would do this?” His anger flared and fell flat. “No. I sat outside after the last of the music. Fell asleep in my chair. Woke when the dawn birds would’ve started. They didn’t sing.”

Rolan drifted close and stood at Kael’s shoulder. “South ridge is clean,” he murmured. “For now.”

Kael nodded once. His mind drew lines between the orchards, the root fields, the bean rows. It wasn’t a wind pattern. It wasn’t water—he checked the stream that ran the length of the eastern plots, and the plants right at the bank looked as bad as the ones on the rise. He knelt and dipped his fingers into the flow, brought them to his tongue, tasted only cold and silt.

By midmorning, voices carried through the fields as others came to walk their land and found the same hunger had passed through it. They called out to one another, voices tight with a need to not be alone. Fear had a sound he knew. This was quieter than fear, a scraped-out place where words couldn’t get purchase. He moved among them with the steady weight of command, asking the same questions again and again.

“Anything out of the ordinary?”

“I heard my clock stop in the night,” one woman whispered, then flushed at how foolish it sounded. “It’s nothing,” she added quickly. “It’s nothing.”

Kael tucked it away with the rest. He pressed the heel of his hand once against the back of his neck where a tension headache had started and then dropped it. He had seen blight. He had held crops slimed by fungus and watched beetles strip a field to lace. This was neither. This was subtraction without process, as if something had measured each stalk and quietly taken what made it itself.

Merev returned from the farthest plots. “Captain,” he said, low. “The old weirwood stand by the north ditch—it’s worse there. Not just crops.”

Kael didn’t waste movement. He set his jaw and walked, their pace clipped and efficient. The weirwoods had been there since before his grandfather’s father, their white bark smooth as bone, leaves a deep green that never fully left even when snow fell. He stepped into the grove and felt it in his body like stepping into a cold room. The air bit without wind. The leaves above were duller, their edges crisped to gray in a way that didn’t bend the branch but stole the shine from them. A single leaf dropped near his boot, turned once in the light, and hit the earth with the dry sound of paper. He crushed it between his fingers. It powdered at the vein.

Rolan swore under his breath. Kael said nothing. He looked at the pattern marching up the trunk—no rot, no insect bores, no fungus threads. Just color drained from the world in a shape that was too neat.

He turned back toward the fields. The farmers waited at the edge of the grove, hats in hands, faces set. He lifted his voice enough to carry. “We’re going to take counts,” he said. “Section by section. Move healthy stock to the square. Don’t touch what’s gone off more than you have to. Rolan, organize the lifts. Merev, I want runners to the healers. If anyone feels more than tired, you send for me.”

“And if it spreads?” Hadden asked, a raw edge to it.

“It is spreading,” Kael said, keeping his tone flat and controlled. “We’ll get you answers.” He didn’t add from where. He didn’t say he had none. He let authority do what it could—shore the edges.

As the men moved, Kael stood a moment longer in the thinning shade. He watched the leaves that still held their color and the precise line where they didn’t. He thought of the village wall and its wards, of the tower and the old man in it. He thought of the way the morning had been oddly quiet, as if the day were holding its breath.

“Captain?” Merev waited, ready for the next order.

Kael nodded toward the road. “Master Valerius,” he said. “Now.”

Master Valerius answered his door with ink on his fingertips and the distant look of a man interrupted mid-thought. He took one glance at Kael’s face and didn’t ask for pleasantries. “Where?”

“The north fields. And the weirwoods.” Kael stepped back to let the old mage pass, and Valerius swept up his satchel, already buckling it closed as he moved. He was leaner than his robes made him look, his hair mostly white, bound at the nape. His eyes, when they focused, were very sharp.

They walked without speaking through streets that felt dim even in clear daylight. News traveled faster than feet. People paused in their doorways, eyes following the pair the way eyes follow a doctor who has been called to a sickbed.

At Hadden’s plot, Valerius knelt without preamble. He pinched a carrot top, as Kael had done, and frowned. He cut a thin section of leaf with a small knife and held it up to the light with tweezers, turning it so the seam caught the sun. He sniffed, pressed, tasted a thread along the midrib, then spat into the dirt with delicate distaste. He sifted a bit of soil from the root bed and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, feeling the grit and the way it clung to his skin.

“Not fungal,” he murmured. “No exudate. No blackening.” He slid a glass from his satchel and peered at the leaf through a lens, checking for mites, boring patterns, anything that made sense. The glass showed veins, cells, structure intact—just dull.

Hadden hovered at the edge of the row, hat twisting hard between his hands. “Master?”

Valerius looked up at him and softened his mouth. “It’s not a rot I recognize,” he said. “It isn’t a thief we can catch with traps.”

Kael gestured toward Mara Tolen’s beans, where the pods lay limp and chalk-edged. Valerius moved to them and repeated the process, slower now. He pressed his palm to the stem and closed his eyes, and when he opened them there was a quiet that hadn’t been there before, something set back in him.

“At dawn,” he asked Mara, “did your house feel colder than it should have? Not a draft. A stillness.”

Mara blinked. “Yes,” she said, surprised to be understood. “It felt—empty. The clock in the front room… it stopped for a breath. Then it went on.”

Valerius tucked that away with the same small nod Kael had used earlier. They moved to the orchard. Joran watched the mage with his arms folded, anger curdled into a stiff kind of control. Valerius cut a neat wedge from one sagging apple and pressed it between two fingers. The flesh collapsed without moisture. No rot. No scent of vinegar or sweetness gone wrong. Just absence.

“Can a curse do this?” Kael asked, keeping his voice low. He stood close enough that the question was for Valerius’s ears alone. “Something cast over the fields? You’ll tell me if I need to put men on the walls.”

Valerius didn’t answer at once. He was looking at the roped-off edge where healthy trees met the dulled ones, studying the line. Finally he said, “Curses are messy. They leave residues, threads a trained hand can feel.” He spread his fingers a fraction as if to catch something in the air. “This is… tidy.”

Kael’s jaw tightened. “Then what?” He couldn’t work with tidy.

“I don’t know,” Valerius said, and Kael believed him. It wasn’t an excuse. It came out careful, chosen. “Yet.”

They cut across the fields to the weirwood stand, and the temperature shift met them a pace before the first trunk. Valerius stopped so abruptly Kael nearly went past him. The mage lifted his hand and brushed the bark with the back of his fingers the way one touches a fevered brow. His lips pressed together. He stood long enough to mark the silence.

“These have held winter and drought,” Valerius said, almost to himself. “They remember more than we do.” He pressed his palm flat to the bark and closed his eyes again, not to listen to sap or song, but as if he were trying to align with an unseen tide.

Kael let him have the quiet. He watched the old man’s breath slow, watched the way his shoulders lowered, not from ease but from settling into a place where he could think. Around them, the farmers kept their distance, the murmur of their voices falling away until it was just leaves and the scrape of a boot.

When Valerius opened his eyes, lines had deepened in his face. He slid his hand down from the bark and wiped his palm on his robe, subconscious and useless. “The flow is wrong,” he said softly, then louder when Kael tilted his head. “The seasons are not a page we turn; they move like a current. They should be distant here, layered. There is a balance you don’t feel until it goes off. This—” He gestured at the greyed leaves, the powder in the prints of Kael’s boots. “—is an imbalance. Something is pulling. Not rot. Not poison. Time.”

Kael’s attention sharpened at the word. It touched a thought he didn’t have a place for. “Time.”

Valerius lifted a hand, already hedging, already retreating from the cliff of his own words. “We speak in metaphors when we don’t know enough,” he said, turning it. “I don’t mean hours or days slipping like sand through an hourglass. I mean… the pacing of things. Growth, rest. The simple fact of a thing being itself at the rate it should. Imagine a song played too fast in some measure and too slow in another. It still finishes, but it is wrong in the bones.”

Kael stared at him. “Can it be fixed?”

Valerius drew a breath and let it out. “If it is what I think, it is not a pestilence a salve can heal. It is a disturbance in the pattern. Sometimes those right themselves. Sometimes they…” He searched for a word that didn’t frighten. He failed. “Sometimes they don’t.”

“Is someone doing it,” Kael pressed, “or is it… weather?” He wanted an enemy he could name.

Valerius’s eyes flicked to the far line of the tower, then back. “There are old forces that shift when pushed,” he said. “Harvests can be coaxed, storms can be called. But this does not feel like a hand at our backs. It feels like a misstep that turned a dance.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m speaking like a fool.”

“You’re speaking like a man who doesn’t want to say it straight,” Kael said, not unkindly.

Valerius met his gaze. For a beat the guardedness dropped, and Kael saw the depth of the man’s worry. “We live by the flow of seasons,” he said plainly. “It feels unbalanced. I will search the records. I will test what I can test. Tell your men to move what remains strong to the square, keep people warm at night, and if anyone—anyone—shows signs of sudden exhaustion, call the healers. And keep the children in, after dusk.”

Kael absorbed the list, filed it, already turning it into action. “That last—why after dusk?”

“Because cold settles,” Valerius said, the evasion softening into something like a plea. “And whatever this is settles with it.”

Kael nodded once. He could order warmth and curfews. He could give people something to do with their hands. He didn’t like the way the mage’s answers slid away from names and into shapes.

As they left the grove, Valerius touched the weirwood again, a quick brush of knuckles like a blessing or an apology. At the edge of the field, he paused, the lines around his mouth tightening as if he’d almost decided to add something and then thought better of it.

“You’ll keep me informed,” Kael said.

“I will,” Valerius answered. “And you—if you see a pattern I’ve missed, bring it to me.” He looked at the field one last time and then up at the sky, as if measuring the day left to them. “I need to consult the old texts.”

Kael watched him go, the robe’s hem catching on the stubble of a dead row and then lifting free. He turned to his men and began to issue orders, but the mage’s word stuck like a burr under his armor. Imbalance. He didn’t have to understand it to know it was dangerous. He set his shoulder under it anyway, because there was no one else and the day was moving whether he liked its pace or not.

Elara had come to the tower to return a bundle of borrowed candles and a chipped bowl she’d meant to mend. She wasn’t sneaking; she had no reason to. The corridor outside Master Valerius’s study was lined with shelves and scrolls, the old stone always cool on the warmest afternoons. She heard footsteps, low voices. She would have turned back, but then Kael’s voice came through the cracked door, rough-edged and quiet: Can it be fixed?

She stilled without meaning to. The bowl pressed against her hip. She recognized the cadence of Master Valerius’s answers—careful, measured, never admitting what he didn’t know. She leaned closer and the word slipped through the seam of the door like a draft. Imbalance.

The word landed in her chest and stuck.

Her fingers went cold. In her mind, the chronometer on her worktable jolted to life, brass face gleaming, the tiny gears grinding backward when she’d nudged them with a simple mending spell. It had hummed hot against her palm, then fallen still, hands frozen at a time that had never been real. She’d shoved it into a drawer and told herself it was a fluke. She’d told herself a lot of things since the festival.

Imbalance.

She didn’t move. Valerius spoke in the way he did when he was walking a student along a cliff edge without saying so, and Kael pressed with the unyielding patience that made the apprentices stand straighter when he stepped into a room. Elara watched their shadows move under the door and thought of Mara Tolen’s laugh when Elara had miswoven the water ribbon for the children, how the ribbon had kinked and sputtered and died in her hands. She’d shrugged it off and gone to hide in the dark behind the stage. Later, in her room, she’d taken up the chronometer out of habit more than hope. She’d wanted the comfort of small things that went right.

The sound of the gears reversing—soft, precise, wrong—had made her throat tighten. When it stopped, she had lain awake, listening to the night and to her own heart, counting the beats and hating herself for counting.

Now, the word she wasn’t meant to hear made those beats stumble. If time was wrong, if there was a pulling, if the seasons were stepping out of time—she didn’t breathe for a second. What if the tug had started with her? What if that ridiculous little surge of magic, that stupid impulse to show she was more than the girl who made light charms and cleaned up the workroom, had knocked something loose?

Kael said: Is someone doing it?

Her feet went numb. She pressed her back to the cool wall and swallowed.

Valerius’s answer was soft and not soft. There are old forces. Missteps. He sounded like he did when he thought he was alone, when he let his voice drop and his shoulders slope. Elara felt a swell of shame so sharp it burned at her eyes. She was old enough to know better. She had been trained not to touch certain texts, not to tug at threads she didn’t understand. And yet—she hadn’t meant to. The spell at the festival had been a water-weave any adept could have done with a hand behind their back. The chronometer had been a simple mend.

When the footsteps shifted and the conversation moved toward the door, Elara stepped back fast. She turned and fled the corridor, her breath tight in her throat, the bowl clutched awkwardly to her chest. She ducked into a side stair as the door opened. Kael’s heavy tread and Valerius’s lighter one passed close enough that the air moved. She held herself still, the stone biting her shoulder, and only let herself exhale when their voices faded down the main hall.

Her room was three flights up, a narrow space tucked beneath a sloped roof. She shut the door and slid the bolt, then leaned her forehead against the wood. The room smelled faintly of beeswax and old paper. The chronometer waited where she’d left it—buried in the bottom drawer of her desk beneath a folded shawl and a tin of sealing wax, as if she’d been hiding a weapon. She stood at the desk and stared at the drawer pull until the pressure in her chest threatened to break her open.

She pulled the drawer out and lifted the shawl. The chronometer lay there, small and precise and harmless, the brass worn soft where her thumb liked to rest. Her father’s hands had built it for her when she was ten. He had engraved the face with tiny stars and her initials around the rim. He had told her that the tick of it was not magic but the honest dance of well-fitted parts. He’d smiled and said, Some things don’t need a spell to do what they were made to do.

She picked it up and the cold weight settled into her palm. The hands were stopped at a nonsense time—two minutes shy of the ninth hour, both hands misaligned by a hair, as if they’d been caught mid-correction. She swallowed and let her magic move, barely a brush, the way she’d done a hundred times to coax light into a glass or mend a cracked plate. The air around her prickled. The gears inside the chronometer clicked in a sequence that wasn’t a sequence at all. For an instant, the room thinned. The candle flame stuttered without moving. The tiny hand twitched, not forward.

She jerked her power back the way you jerk a hand from a hot pan. The sensation snapped and everything rushed in at once. The candle tilted, as if it had breath. Her stomach rolled. She set the chronometer down like it might hurt her and stepped back, one hand braced on the desk, the other coming up to cover her mouth. A swallow crawled down her throat like a stone.

This is nothing, she told herself. You’re tired. You’re scaring yourself. But the word kept sliding over her thoughts, persistent as grit in a shoe.

Imbalance.

Her window looked over the back garden. In the creeping vine that had always been too bold for its trellis, a thread of grey ran along the green. It had been green yesterday. She remembered it distinctly because she had been stubbornly proud of coaxing the vine to grow in the pattern Valerius liked to see, neat and tidy against the stone.

She pressed her fingertips to the sill. The wood was cool, and some small part of her tried to soak the cold up into her overheated skin. She wanted to go to Valerius, to lift the chronometer into the light and spill it all. She wanted him to tell her she was wrong, that gears sometimes slipped and vines sometimes sickened and she should eat and sleep and stop listening at doors. The thought of his steady eyes seeing right through her made her stomach twist.

If she told him, he would look at her and measure her in a way he hadn’t before. He would take the chronometer and lock it away. He would tell her to stop practicing, to let this lie. He would bring in other mages, older ones, and they would look at her like a breach in a wall. Kael would find out. He already thought of her as a girl who stumbled in a crowd and needed reminders to watch where she was going. If he knew she had touched something she shouldn’t have—it was childish, but the thought made her cheeks burn.

She set the chronometer back in the drawer and closed it carefully. Her hand trembled on the handle. She sat on the bed and laced her fingers together in her lap so they would stop shaking. Her heart didn’t listen.

It’s not me, she tried. It can’t be me. She lifted her gaze to the ceiling and counted the beams. She tried to remember what Valerius had taught her about control: the size of a breath, the way to let a channel open and close gently. She should tell him. She should. But the fear that she had made a misstep, that she had hurt something bigger than herself, pinned her like a beetle.

Outside, the tower bell marked the hour with a small, clear tone. The sound came late, by a breath. Or maybe she only imagined it. Elara pressed her lips together and whispered a promise she wasn’t sure she would keep. Tomorrow. She would speak tomorrow. Tonight, she would keep her hands to herself and her mouth shut, and try not to listen to the sound of a world that felt subtly out of step.

Kael left the study with Valerius’s evasions grinding under his skin like grit. Imbalances in the flow of seasons. Everything in him rejected the phrase. Seasons didn’t flow; they cycled. They obeyed. Men obeyed or there were consequences. He’d built a life on that certainty. The blight in the fields and the hollowed eyes of the farmers told him something had slipped its leash.

He took the long corridor toward the archives, the only place that might give him a pattern he could use. The tower was quieter in that wing, the air cooler, the stone swallowing sound. He descended the last stair, palms still itching from holding dying stalks that had turned to paper in his hands.

The archives door was heavy oak, iron-banded, never truly closed. He pushed it and it opened with a soft drag. Shelves rose like ribs around a dim central table, papers and volumes in careful disarray. A single lamp burned at one end, casting a pool of light over scattered books.

Elara sat in the pool of light, sleeves pushed up, a smudge of ink near her thumb. She was bent over a spread of agricultural texts—annotations on soil memory, harvest records, drought cycles. Her hair had fallen forward, slipping from its low tie. She hadn’t heard him at first. He watched the fine muscles in her forearm tense as she traced a line with one finger, lips moving silently as she read.

His first impulse was to leave her to it and find another table. His second was to note how wrong it was that she was here with the same questions he had, and to consider why she might be looking and what she might be hiding.

She looked up then, startled by his shadow. For a heartbeat, he saw the vulnerability she tried to tuck away—wide eyes, breath caught. Then she straightened, scooting her chair back, spine erect as if he’d caught her breaking a rule.

“Captain,” she said, polite, careful. The title sat between them like a wall. “I didn’t expect anyone this late.”

“Could say the same.” He set his gloves on the table with deliberate gentleness so the sound wouldn’t snap in the quiet. “Valerius didn’t have much to offer.”

Her gaze flicked to the door, then back to him. “I heard.” A flush rose on her throat. “I mean—I didn’t hear much. Just… enough.” She looked down at her notes, aligning a page with the edge of the table. “I thought there might be records. Old incidents. We’ve had blights before. I wanted to see how they… behaved.”

He stepped closer, not crowding, but close enough to read the headings. Crop Rotations: A Century in Silverwood. Weather Anomalies of the Riverlands. A pamphlet on pests with woodcuts of beetles and worms. Harmless. Then, tucked near her forearm, a thinner volume with a title she had turned face-down as if by habit. The spine was worn, letters faded. He couldn’t read it from this angle. The hairs along his arms lifted.

“You’re sure this is where you should be looking?” The question came out more pointed than he’d intended. He wasn’t used to softening his words. “The fields aren’t going to be fixed by recipes.”

She flinched, then set her jaw. “I know how it sounds. But history leaves patterns. If we see a pattern, we can prepare.” Her fingers smoothed a margin, a nervous sweep. “It might tell us how quickly it spreads, or if certain soil holds longer.”

He looked at her hand, at the small ink smear. She’d been here awhile. A wet strand of hair clung to her temple. She was tired in the way of someone who had been carrying herself too rigidly all day.

“What did you find?” he asked, flattening the edge of his tone.

She seemed surprised he’d asked. “Nothing that makes sense yet.” She tapped a column of dates in a ledger. “There was a dry year seventy-two years ago. Yields down. But it was heat, not this. This is… cold. It steals color.” Her voice softened on the last word, like it had slipped out unguarded. “Have you—” She cut herself off, chosen question too personal. “What did Master Valerius say, truly?”

“That the seasons lost their footing.” He picked up the ledger she’d indicated, pretended to read while he watched her from the corner of his eye. “That old forces misstep. He didn’t say who pushed them.”

She swallowed. The room held, quiet and compressed, the lamplight gilding the curve of her cheek. She smelled faintly of beeswax and the dry dust of pages. He imagined her earlier, on a stair, listening. He didn’t like the image of her pressed against stone to avoid him. He didn’t like how that made him feel.

He set the ledger down and reached for the face-down book. “What’s this one?”

Her hand moved quickly, palm covering the faded cloth before his fingers reached it. The gesture was quick, small, not defiant exactly, but protective. “Just… theory. Nothing useful.” Her eyes were wrong when she said it, too bright, too still. He felt suspicion turn in him like a key in a lock.

“Theory on what?” He kept his voice even, a question on patrol rather than a threat.

She hesitated. When she spoke, it was a little too light. “Weather. Seasons. The way certain enchantments can—interact.” She slid the book, under her palm, toward the edge of the table and then, with a movement that looked casual if you didn’t know to watch for tells, angled it toward a stack as if to tidy. He saw, just for an instant, the hint of a word on the spine—Tempo—before it vanished under agronomy.

He let out a slow breath. “Master Valerius keeps his forbidden texts in a locked case.” He reached for his gloves and pulled them back on, not looking at her, not looking at the stack. “Be careful you don’t mistake curiosity for command.”

She stiffened at that. He saw it in the square of her shoulders. “I know the rules.”

“Do you?” The question was soft. He regretted it as soon as he heard it out loud. She wasn’t one of his guards; he wasn’t walking a line with a sword tip at her back. He eased his stance. “I’m not here to take books away from you. I’m here because the northern field died between morning and noon. Because Mara Tolen’s eyes are swollen from crying.” He met her gaze, let her see the steady line of his resolve. “If you know anything that can help me keep this from spreading, I need you to say it.”

Her throat worked. For a fleeting second, he thought she might tell him something, the way her mouth parted, the quick flash of fear. Then she shook her head. “I don’t. I just want to help.”

He nodded once. He believed that much. Wanting to help and knowing how were different things. He wasn’t sure if she knew the difference yet, or if she had already crossed it and wasn’t ready to admit the cost.

He reached past her, deliberately slow, and picked up Weather Anomalies. Their sleeves brushed. Her breath hitched—small, involuntary. He pretended not to notice. The heat he felt at the brief contact was unwanted, inconvenient. He ignored it the way he ignored pain in the middle of a fight.

“I’ll take this,” he said. “I’ll return it before first bell.”

She nodded, then added, “There’s a section on sudden fog formations in the back. It’s useless, but—” She caught herself, a bleak humor in her eyes. “Everything feels useless until it isn’t.”

He almost smiled. Almost. “Get some rest, Elara.” It was the first time he said her name without thinking about titles. It felt too intimate in the empty room. He didn’t take it back.

She looked at him as if the sound of it had reached a place she wasn’t guarding. Something unspooled in her expression, then pulled taut again. “You too, Captain.”

He turned for the door. The lamplight pooled behind him. As he stepped into the hall, he glanced back and saw her slide the hidden book deeper under the stack, her fingers careful, guilty. The word he’d half-seen sketched clear in his mind. Temporal. He filed it away, the suspicion cooling into resolve.

He closed the door softly. The corridor felt colder. He had records to read and a pattern to find. And a mage to watch, not as a suspect, not yet—but as someone standing closer to the cliff edge than she knew.

He didn’t go far.

At the end of the hall, he paused in the shadow of a narrow window slit where night pressed black against the glass. The archive door remained ajar, a bar of warm light across the flagstones. He told himself he was checking the corridor, listening for the tower’s creaks he had long ago mapped. What he did was watch that strip of light until a figure moved through it. Elara stood, the chair legs scraping softly. He could hear the faint rustle of pages, the soft thud of a book closed with care instead of haste.

The light shifted as she leaned, and he saw her profile for an instant, mouth set, lashes low as she focused. Her hand slid beneath the top layer of ledgers, lifted the stack just enough to feed something slim underneath. When she straightened the pile, she pressed her palm flat, as if to settle guilt with weight. The movement was precise and practiced. Not the fumbling of a student trying to hide a mistake; the reflex of someone used to tucking dangerous things out of sight.

His jaw tightened. Tempo. The partial word he’d caught rose again, stubborn as a burr. He pictured Valerius’s face earlier, the way the old mage had not answered him by looking at the floorboards. Imbalances in the flow of seasons. His mind supplied the rest the way a soldier supplied missing numbers in a count: Temporal. Temporal something. A discipline the tower pretended it didn’t house.

Elara blew out the lamp. The room fell to grey and then to dark. He stepped back from the window’s square of night and pushed away from the wall before she emerged. When she did, she pulled the door until only a finger-width of light remained, then let it close. It latched with a soft click.

She didn’t see him until she nearly walked into him. Her inhale was sharp. She jolted, a hand rising to her throat, then dropping when she recognized him. “You startled me,” she whispered, a faint reprimand softened by the hour.

“Apologies,” he said. His voice was low too, the quiet a habit of this wing. He let his eyes adjust to the hollows and planes of her face in the dim. “Didn’t mean to linger. Thought of something I needed to check.”

Her gaze slid past him to the door, a small, quick flick. When it returned, it was guarded. “I was just finishing.”

He nodded as if the exchange were nothing. He made himself step aside, giving her room. As she moved past, the scent of older paper and beeswax lifted from her hair. He noticed the tremor in her exhale when she thought he wasn’t listening.

“You were right about patterns,” he said, because silence felt like surrender and he didn’t intend to give that. “They tell you how a thing behaves. They also tell you who it answers to.”

She stopped, the words catching her like a hand on her arm. “You think this answers to someone?”

He kept his tone even. “I think nothing happens without a cause. And I think there are books you’re not supposed to have that talk about causes Valerius doesn’t want to put a name to.”

The color in her cheeks climbed, visible even in low light. “You’re accusing me of what? Stealing?”

“I’m reminding you that secrets get people killed,” he said. “If there’s a study on—” he let the pause sit, a measured step, “—temporal phenomena that explains what I saw in the north field, and you’re reading it, bring it to me.”

Her mouth parted, a protest forming and dying. He watched the struggle move across her face—the reflexive denial, the honest fear, the deep, stubborn thread of responsibility he’d already learned lived in her. She closed her lips on the lie. “I told you. I don’t know anything useful.”

“Not yet,” he conceded. “But you’re looking. Keep looking. And don’t do it alone.”

For a long second, neither of them moved. Somewhere above, a bell hushed to keep from waking novices marked the hour with a soft chime. She broke first, her shoulders easing the smallest fraction. “Goodnight, Captain.”

“Goodnight, Elara.”

She took the stairs lightly, careful not to echo, and turned out of sight. He listened until her footfalls faded. Then he went back to the archive door and set his palm flat to the wood. Cool. He knew the lock from a hundred inspections—simple, out of respect for scholars and not thieves. He opened it and slipped inside.

The room was a darker version of itself: shelves black bones against stone, the air thick with the quiet of sleeping words. He didn’t light the lamp. He didn’t need to. He crossed to the table and let his fingers map where she had pressed. Papers were squared with the care of a mind trying to impose order. He lifted the top ledger. The next. The pamphlet with the insect woodcuts. Underneath, exactly where her palm had settled, a thin spine pressed a shallow groove into the soft grain of the table.

He eased the journals aside enough to expose the book without fully uncovering it. Even a sliver was enough. The title was stamped in faded silver across dark blue cloth, the letters worn where countless thumbs had traced them. The word Temporal was whole here, not a fragment. Temporal Interference and the Mutable Thread.

He did not touch it. He did not have to. The existence of this book in a stack that should have held nothing more controversial than harvest counts was its own answer.

He slid the ledgers back into place, restoring the shape of her lie because it was not yet a weapon he needed to draw. In the corridor again, he closed the door as he had before, gently, the sound hardly more than breath.

The walk back through the tower felt different. He marked small details the way he did when entering hostile terrain: the new scrape on the stair where something heavy had been dragged, the faint scorch along a wall torch bracket, a scatter of wax drips where a novice had hurried and spilled. A place told you what it had endured if you learned its language. The tower’s language tonight was strain.

In his quarters, he set Weather Anomalies on his desk and did not open it. He leaned his hands on the table, head bowed, the muscles in his shoulders drawing tight like wire. The image of Elara’s hand covering the blue cloth played behind his eyes. He could picture Valerius’s keys, the glass-fronted case in the private study where “forbidden” things lived, and he could picture the space on a shelf where a volume might have recently gone missing.

They were hiding something that named what they all felt and refused to say. Temporal. The word had weight in his mouth even unspoken. It explained nothing and everything in the way a blade drawn explained a shift in a room.

If the mages had an answer, they’d locked it away. If Elara had a page of that answer, she was reading alone, shoulders tense, breath careful.

He straightened and unbuckled his chest harness, setting steel aside, the quiet clink steadying him. He wasn’t a scholar. He didn’t need to be. He knew how to read people who stood near edges. He knew how to hold a line.

He would let her keep her fragile advantage tonight. In the morning, he would begin asking questions a different way. He would watch the tower’s doors. He would assign a guard to the fields who knew to report more than footsteps and torches. He would walk the perimeter at the hours when mist gathered low and cold.

And if the seasons had truly slipped, if time itself had been touched, he would not allow the mages to pretend the cliff edge wasn’t there.

He doused his lamp and lay down without undressing fully. Sleep was a shallow, sandbar thing. He rested on it with his eyes open, the name of the hidden book under his breath like a vow: Mutable Thread.

He’d find out who had pulled it. He’d find out why. He’d make sure the next page wasn’t turned without him.