The first hush-wound didn’t feel like quiet. Quiet had texture. Quiet had a heartbeat. Frostfang had taught Silas that.
This was different.
This was a gap where sound should have been—like someone had cut the word out of the world and left the sentence stumbling.
When the bell’s voice returned, it returned wrong. The ringing was there, but it lacked the little living grit that made a sound belong to a place. It was too clean, too thin, like a coin scraped bright.
Alaric’s command came immediately. “Grey quarters. Now.”
Silas obeyed, because he could feel the shape of the mistake forming: the storm trying to cage a concept that refused cages. If the flute was the mouth of the wound, then the wards were the dam—and Stonegrave, packed with stone and footfalls and buried conduits, was the
