The council chamber had once been a storage room, cleared out and fitted with a long table Rennick had built himself during the siege. Five people sat around it now, the weight of Halden's report still hanging heavy over every face.
"We need to send an armed response," Kestrel said, not for the first time since the meeting began. "To the southern village, to the eastern one. If this thing is leaving pieces of itself wherever it touches someone, we contain it before it spreads further."
"Contain it how?" Doran asked, voice sounding calm, but carrying the authority of someone who'd learned the cost of moving too fast the hard way. "You send armed men, and they find what. A shadow that vanishes before dawn. Swords don't work against something that isn't fully solid."
"Then we send people w
