For three days after Aldric's arrest, nothing moved.
It was the specific, uneasy quiet of a house that has caught one threat and is waiting to see what the silence around the next one actually means. Bastian's reports continued to come in steady and inconclusive, small movements along the eastern border that could be read as ordinary supply management or as the careful, patient assembly of something larger. Rourke doubled the perimeter watch without announcing it as anything more than routine winter precaution. Damien spent long hours in the war room, and I spent them beside him, and between the two of us we built and rebuilt the same intelligence from every angle we could think to try, without arriving anywhere solid enough to act on.
It was Damien who suggested, on the third evening, t
