The response came in two days.
Not through a courier — through the ward line network, which suggested Eran had access to a communication method that bypassed standard channels and had been waiting for a reason to use it. The message arrived as a frequency pulse through the eastern boundary, structured and deliberate, the specific quality of someone who knew exactly what they were doing with the ward line system and had been doing it for eighty years.
Kael felt it first.
He found me in the garden — I'd been there since dawn, maintaining the eastward reach, keeping the council chamber connection warm the way you kept a fire at low burn rather than letting it go cold and relighting it. He sat beside me and said: "Eran responded."
"How," I said.
"Ward line pulse," he said. "Structured. He
