He came on the fifth day.
Not scouts. Not notes left at boundary markers. Not silver chains delivered through intermediaries.
Caden Stone himself, standing at the ward line at dawn with ten of his best warriors at his back and the particular expression of a man who had run out of subtle options and was now trying the direct one.
I felt him before I saw him.
That was new.
I was in the middle of a power session with Kael in the territory garden — an hour every morning now, his hand around my wrist or my hand pressed to the earth or both, working the power through its paces like a muscle being trained — when something shifted in the frequency of the ward line to the east.
Not a threat signature. The ward would have screamed for a threat. Something more complicated. Something the ward re
