Kael found the guard within a week, though the discovery brought considerably less satisfaction than he had hoped, given the grim circumstances surrounding it.
The man, a mid-ranking prison overseer named Bellek, had vanished from his post the same morning Halvard's death was discovered, a detail dismissed at first, amid the initial chaos, as unremarkable staff turnover. It was only Aldric's careful digging through the prison's personnel records, cross-referenced against the guard rotation from the night of the poisoning, that identified Bellek as the likely source of the poison's access.
"He's been gone eight days," Kael reported to Elira, in a letter carried by their most trusted courier rather than the usual channels, given the particular sensitivity of what he'd uncovered. "No family
