She talked for three hours.
Not all at once — in pieces, with stops and silences between them where she was deciding how much of what she knew was hers to give and how much belonged to people who had trusted her, however complicated that trust had become. Caden sat across from her with Lyra beside him taking everything down, and I sat slightly apart because I had the sense that Nessa was talking partly to me and that the distance between me and the official interrogation structure was helping her do it.
The picture she built was not the one I'd expected.
The Ashborne were not an army. Not primarily. They were something older and stranger than that — a network, distributed across every region, embedded in pack structures and rogue communities and the spaces between. They didn't conquer t
