Aethelgard (The Silverwake Series, Book 2)

The rot had reached the silver birches overnight.

I stood at the edge of the sanctuary and watched it move, slow and deliberate, the way rust spreads through a joint you've neglected too long. Yesterday the closest trees had been clean, their bark pale and smooth in the cold morning light. Now a gray-black stain crept up their trunks in uneven rings, and the leaves at the lower branches had gone brittle and dark, curling inward like burned paper. The ground beneath them smelled wrong. Not like earth. Like something metallic and dead.

I crouched and pressed two fingers into the soil. The magic in the ley lines beneath me moved the way a failing engine moves, stuttering and lurching, trying to catch on something that wasn't there anymore. I pulled my hand back.

Footsteps behind me, uneven and fast. I turned before Jaxon spoke.

He looked worse than the last time I'd seen him, which was saying something. The dark circles under his eyes had deepened to something almost bruise-colored, and he was clutching a folded piece of paper against his chest like it was the only thing keeping him upright. He stopped a few feet away, breathing hard.

"He got a message out," Jaxon said. He held the paper toward me. "I don't know how. One of the clan scouts found it tied to a hawk's leg near the eastern pass."

I took it. The paper was thick and institutional, the kind Silas had always favored for his notes, and it was covered in tiny, precise handwriting arranged in a pattern that looked like nonsense. Numbers and symbols grouped in clusters of five, separated by a notation system that used a modified gear-tooth cipher he'd taught me years ago in his workshop, bored on a rainy afternoon when all the scrolls were too damp to unroll safely.

I decoded it in my head while Jaxon watched me, his hand working at the silver locket around his neck.

The coordinates resolved into a location three days east, into the blighted territory, near what the old maps called the Iron Ribs. Below the location, Silas had added a single line: They want the lines, not just the land. Move quickly.

"The hunters took him because of what he knows about the ley lines," I said.

Jaxon nodded. His jaw tightened. "They have people from my old unit in that group. People I trained with." He said it flat, like a fact he'd already turned over a hundred times and could no longer find a new angle on. "The Iron-Tide brought them in. Former soldiers looking for a paycheck and a cause that doesn't ask too many questions. Silas was picked up by men I used to eat meals with."

I didn't say anything to that. There wasn't much to say.

Kallias appeared from the tree line to my left. He moved quietly for someone his size, though I'd stopped being surprised by it. He looked at the folded paper in my hand, then at the blighted birches, then back at me. His amber eyes were steady.

"How far?" he said.

"Three days, if the trail holds."

He looked at the rot on the nearest trunk. Something shifted in his expression, slight and controlled, the way water changes when something moves beneath the surface. He didn't say what I already knew we were both thinking: that the blight was moving faster than the scouts had reported. The boundary they'd mapped a week ago had been at least a quarter mile farther from the ruins than what I was looking at right now.

We packed without ceremony. I took the toolkit from its hook inside the sanctuary entrance, checked the focus stones in my coat pocket, and left the rest. There wasn't much to leave. I'd been living light on purpose.

Jaxon shouldered his pack in silence, methodical about it, rolling straps and checking buckles the way soldiers do when their hands need something to do. The locket disappeared inside his shirt. I didn't ask about it.

Mirabel arrived twenty minutes later from the opposite direction, slightly out of breath and carrying something cupped in both hands. She held it out when she reached us: a small metal canister, dull-finished and foreign-looking, with a hairline crack along its seam that was leaking a thin thread of blue vapor.

"Found it on the trail about half a mile up," she said. "There are more. Looks like they dropped them in a line, maybe to mark a patrol route. The gas smells like sulfur and something else I can't name, and I didn't stick around long enough to find out what it does." She set it carefully on the ground. The vapor drifted sideways in the cold air. "Also, bad news about the path to the coordinates. Heavily patrolled. Men in brass-reinforced armor, moving in pairs, and they are not being quiet about it."

The canister sat between us on the dead ground, leaking its thin blue thread into the morning air. I crouched and looked at it without touching it. The seam work was precise, machine-pressed, nothing like anything made in the realm. Whoever had manufactured it hadn't been thinking about hand tools. They'd been thinking about scale.

"They're not just scouting," I said. "They're marking territory."

"That's what it looks like," Mirabel agreed.

I stood. The ozone smell I'd been registering since dawn was stronger now, layered with sulfur, coming from the east. The same direction as the coordinates. The same direction as Silas.

We crossed the sanctuary boundary at midmorning. The moment I stepped over it, I felt the difference. Inside the boundary, the magic in the ground was weak and stuttering but still present, still mine. Outside it, the ley lines felt like a frayed rope pulled past its tension point, and the forest around us was already half-gone. The bark on the trees here had turned the color of ash. The understory was silent, no birds, no wind through the canopy, just the slow creak of dying wood settling under its own weight.

The forest groaned. Not a single tree, but all of them at once, a low sound that moved through the ground before it reached the air.

Kallias moved up beside me without being asked. His arm wasn't touching mine, but he was close enough that I could feel the heat he gave off, steady and constant against the cold that pressed in from every direction. I didn't look at him. He didn't look at me. We'd gotten good at that particular kind of understanding over months of quiet, of standing watch together while Mirabel slept and the ruins breathed around us.

I looked at the blighted tree line ahead, at the gray-black rot threading through the ancient wood like something infectious and patient.

I thought about Silas's handwriting on that folded paper, small and careful and urgent. Move quickly.

We moved.