We left Sorcha's settlement two days later, the letter carefully preserved alongside Verity's notebook, both of us quieter on the return journey than we had been riding out, weighed down by the shape of a threat that had suddenly grown larger and older than either of us had expected when we set out five days earlier chasing what we thought was simply a loose thread, a single unanswered question rather than an entire second architect hiding somewhere inside the walls we called home.
Whoever taught Halden could be anyone, I said, somewhere on the second day back, working through the problem the way I had learned to work through fear since arriving at Duskrail, by turning it into something practical rather than letting it simply sit and grow unmanageable in my chest the way fear used to grow
