In Edhegoth, the beacons on the peaks have always meant one thing. There is no second interpretation.

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Three nights later.

Seryn woke before she understood why — the bells reaching her through the Windway stone before her body was fully awake, the sound arriving as sensation before meaning. Then the meaning: the low, bronze, continuous toll that ran under the harmonic of the wind-song like a counterweight. Emergency assembly. All duty personnel to the Windhall. All aerie staff.

All.

She dressed in the dark. She had not been sleeping well for three days, and she was dressed in the time it took the echo of the first bell to fully travel through the citadel. She went out her door and into the lower Windway passage, where lamplight was dim and the wind-song ran low against the stone.

Footsteps ahead of her: two, three people, moving in the direction of the Windhall at the citadel’s core. She went the other direction.

She had spent three days thinking carefully about the gaps in Ivellis’s map. She knew who among the permanent Skyhearth staff used the northern Windway access — it was not a long list, and she had narrowed it further by the second day by thinking about who had nothing to gain from Galaronel and who had everything to gain from nothing. She had a name in her head that she had not yet spoken aloud, because speaking it would require certainty she had not finished building.

She had thought about the clutch chamber. Three clutches, eleven eggs from four bonded pairs — the future of Skyhearth’s cavalry, the source of every gryphon rider Edhegoth would field in the next ten years. She had thought about what it would mean for Galaronel to have bonded gryphons of their own. She had thought about the fourth invasion.

She had thought about Commander Talvren’s face when she’d told him the delegation’s map included information that couldn’t have come from the tour route.

She had thought: enjoy your evening, Tender.

She went toward the northern aerie.

―――

The Windways at night were a different world from the Windways in the day. The lamp-keepers came through at evening and lit the wall-brackets in the main passages, but the side routes — the service shafts, the old maintenance channels between the aerie levels — ran in near-total darkness. Seryn had walked them for three years. She knew which turns were marked by sound and which by touch: the change in the wind-song’s pitch when a passage widened, the different mineral smell of the Dvarin-cut stone versus the older human-built sections, the slight give in the flagstone near the third junction that she had reported twice and been told was structurally unimportant.

She moved quickly. Not running — running in the dark Windways was how you got hurt — but fast, with the confidence of someone who did not need light to know where she was.

Thresh was in the service passage junction before she reached it.

She stopped. He had not been in his bay — she had passed it on her way through the lower aerie, and his alcove was empty, and she had told herself she was glad he was elsewhere because the last thing she needed was a large, opinionated juvenile gryphon complicating whatever she was walking into. She had been telling herself this for approximately four minutes. He was looking at her from the junction with those amber eyes that gathered whatever faint light existed and gave it back tenfold.

“No,” she whispered. “Go back to your bay.”

He walked toward her.

In the confined space of the service passage, he was enormous — larger than she normally registered because outdoors and in the high bays there was always sky above him, always the sense that he could expand into it. Here the ceiling was six feet of Dvarin thickstone and his shoulders were level with her collarbone and his wings were folded tight against his body with the compressed urgency of something that very much wanted to be moving.

She could not make him go back. She had never been able to make him do anything. That was, she supposed, the entire point.

“Stay behind me,” she said, which was not quite the same as going back.

He followed her, and in the dark of the service passage, she was aware of his warmth at her back like a source of light that gave off heat instead of illumination, and she found — with the part of her mind that was not occupied with moving quickly through the dark toward something she was very nearly certain was going to be dangerous — that she was not afraid.

She was not certain what that meant. She filed it for later.

―――

She heard them before she reached the clutch chamber access point. Four voices, professional and low — no wasted words, the kind of communication that indicated people who had rehearsed this operation until it was muscle memory. The accent was interior Galaronese: consonants pressed flat, vowels clipped. She identified three position-points by sound: two near the chamber entrance, one further inside, one that she could not locate, which was the one she was most concerned about.

The north access door was open. A thread of lamplight leaked from the gap — narrow-beamed, directional — and fell across the passage floor in a line. It should not have been open. The north access was a Windway-side approach, off the service shafts, not accessible from the tour routes or the outer citadel.

Someone had told them about it.

Seryn pressed herself against the stone wall of the passage and thought for a moment that felt considerably longer. She had no weapon beyond the belt knife used for harness work, which was adequate for leather and approximately useless against four trained operatives. She had three years of knowing this passage structure in the dark and they had, at most, one night of it from someone else’s secondhand description. She had Thresh at her back, which was either an advantage or a significant complication depending on the next sixty seconds.

She had come this far. She had come here because no one else had, and because someone needed to, and because the eleven eggs in the clutch chamber represented ten years of Skyhearth’s aerial future and she had tended the parents of some of them and knew their names.

She put her hand briefly against Thresh’s neck, in the place where the feathers were densest and warmest.

Then she stepped into the lamplight.

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