By morning, the den felt like it had swallowed too many secrets and wasn’t digesting any of them well.
News travels fast in a pack, even when no one officially spreads it. By the time I’d grabbed coffee and made it halfway down the main hall, I’d heard:
“…Bryn nearly dragged into Serin’s nest—”
“…the kid heard voices through a washing machine—”
“…old magic wants us to ‘dance in the rain,’ whatever that means—”
Half of it was wrong. All of it was dangerous in the right (or wrong) ears.
I found Corren and Maera in the small meeting room off the kitchen, hunched over a spread of maps and Sela’s latest drawings. Dris’s chart of “mysterious symptom spikes” had joined the paper chaos, weighted by a salt shaker.
Sela’s upside-down tree sketch sat in the middle.
“Morning,” I said. “Or what
