Voss's report reached the capital eleven days after his return, and Kael read it three times before he allowed himself to fully believe what it was carefully, deliberately choosing not to say.
The document itself was almost aggressively unremarkable. Veskara's garrison, it noted, had shown notable improvement in coordinated response times. The province's outlying villages had organized an effective early-warning network against raiders, apparently through local initiative rather than any crown-directed intervention. Agricultural recovery in the eastern territories, including Aldermere, appeared ahead of typical seasonal projections despite an unusual blight earlier in the season, now resolved through means Voss described only as "local remediation efforts, details of which fall outside th
