Bound by Blood and Fire

Surveyors

Ravenna heard it first from one of the kitchen staff, dropped so casually into conversation that she almost missed the weight of it — something about strange lights out near the old border stream at night, and men in dragon-court colors who weren't part of any patrol anyone recognized.

She waited until she was alone to let the unease actually land.

The border stream. Her stomach turned over at the coincidence of it — the same stretch of woods where she and Kael used to meet as children, now apparently crawling with people who had no obvious business being there, in the middle of treaty negotiations that were supposed to be about ending conflict over that land, not quietly investigating it.

She thought of the sovereign's careful, pleasant voice. We're glad the wolf packs sent someone of such evident composure. She thought of Ren's parting warning, sharp and pointed. Convenient bonds have a way of unraveling once people start asking who benefits from them.

She didn't yet know what she was looking for. But she'd spent six years learning to notice exactly this kind of small, deliberate inconsistency — the gap between what a room told you and what it was actually doing — and every instinct she'd built in that time was telling her the same thing now.

Someone at this court wanted something from that land that had nothing to do with peace.

She thought, briefly, of asking Kael directly. Then she thought of the careful, diplomatic distance he'd kept from her since the ceremony — polite, correct, giving nothing away — and decided, with a coldness that surprised her, that she wasn't ready to find out whether he already knew.

Not yet, she told herself. Find out what's actually happening first. Then decide who you can trust.

It was the same rule she'd lived by for six years, ever since the last time she'd trusted the wrong version of events and lost everything for it. She hated that it applied here too. She followed it anyway.