Wren
I told the night guard about the figure in the tree line, and by dawn the tree line had been taken apart.
That is not a figure of speech. I watched from my window as Vessa's trackers combed the pines beyond the wards in a slow, gridded line, branch by branch, print by print, the methodical fury of professionals who have been personally embarrassed. They found where he had stood. One set of tracks, patient ones, a flattened place at the ward's exact edge, measured to the inch, close enough to watch my window and not one finger's width closer. He had stood there a long time, Vessa reported, jaw tight. He had known precisely where the wards ended.
And then he had walked away north, and the trail died in a streambed, in a wash of ash and herbs.
They tripled the patrols. Zephyr, when I
