Catherine stood at the table with Sena’s slate under her hand. A sheaf of seized papers laid beside it. She spoke as if the city were a map she meant to fold and put away.

  “Captain Callahan’s quadrant,” she said. “You will go now.”

  Sena kept her face still, not glancing at Rhalir.

  Catherine slid a stamped packet across the table. The seal was dark wax, pressed hard enough to leave an impression through the paper.

  “You will bring back the last three days of movement chits for equipment and supplies moving in and out of his sector,” Catherine said. “You will bring the key custody ledger for municipal lockboxes if it still exists, and you will identify who holds the ring.”

  She tapped the packet once.

  “If Callahan claims he can’t produce them, you will find the clerk who can. If the records are missing, you will identify who made them missing.”

  Sena took the packet and tucked it inside her coat without looking at the seal. Her hands stayed steady. She kept her shoulders down.

  “You will return before midday.” Catherine lifted her chin toward the door. “Escort,” she called.

  Two soldiers stepped in at once. Their coats carried Catherine’s colors. Their boots were clean. One held a shift token in his hand, a strip of cloth marked with chalk, proof he was relieving the pair already posted in Callahan’s quadrant.

  “They go with you,” Catherine said. “They will replace the men on duty at the quadrant checkpoint. You will not be unaccounted for in the streets.”

  Sena nodded.

  Catherine picked up Sena’s slate, thumbed the edge, and set it back down as if even the charcoal lines belonged to her now. “Go,” she said.

  Sena turned and left the room with the packet against her ribs and foreign boots behind her, already taking how the city would read this walk. She stepped into the stairwell and let the door close behind her without looking back. The packet sat inside her coat, its wax seal pressing against her each time she drew breath. The two soldiers followed at a measured distance that made it clear they were not escorts in the polite sense. They were there to keep her inside a line of sight.

  The taller one took the lead on the stairs as if it were a habit. He had hair cropped close and a scar that ran from the edge of his ear into his collar. His face held the blankness of someone who didn’t waste expressions on strangers. He watched corners steadily, without flourish.

  The other was younger, still broad shouldered, but with a restlessness that didn’t know where to settle. He kept turning his head toward sounds – voices in the street, a cartwheel rattling over broken stone – and then forcing himself to look forward again. The discipline was there, but it sat like ill-fitting clothes.

  When they reached the street, the air hit Sena with the bitter tang of ash. Morning light fell unevenly across Ivath, caught by broken eaves and leaning walls. Under that, something else ran through the lanes now: a new order imposed fast enough that it still looked freshly bruised.

  Catherine’s colors showed at every junction. Not banners, but bodies. Pairs posted at corners where there had once been runners and shopkeepers. A rope line stretched across an alley mouth. A chalk mark was etched into a doorframe, repeated again two streets later, the same angled sign like a private language.

  Sena caught herself cataloging it. She couldn’t stop doing it, couldn’t help the part of her that wanted to catalog the progress of Ivath. The difference was these marks weren’t hers. They weren’t even the Dagorlind’s. They were Catherine’s, and they had appeared overnight.

  The scarred soldier glanced at her, not unkindly, but not warmly, either.

  “They’re just letting soldiers know the building has been cleared,” he said, as if she didn’t know what the marks meant. She didn’t need to stare at the chalk marks or the new posts to know they were there. She could feel them in the way civilians moved, hugging walls, slipping aside before anyone told them to. She could see it in the way shop doors remained shut even though the daylight had come. The city was behaving like it expected punishment for taking up space.

  They crossed a lane where a wagon had been turned sideways into a barricade. Two of Catherine’s soldiers stood with spears angled down, and a Brighthand city guard beside them held a bundle of surrendered blades. The Brighthand man’s face was set in a rigid calm that looked more like shock than acceptance. A woman in a brown shawl tried to pass with a basket. One of the soldiers stopped her and searched the basket carefully, lifting cloth, checking the bottom, then handing it back.

  The younger escort muttered, low enough that only Sena and his partner could hear. “She looks like she’s stealing bread.”

  The scarred soldier didn’t turn his head. “Everyone looks like that under siege,” he said.

  The younger one swallowed the rest of whatever he’d been about to say. He glanced at Sena as if wondering whether she agreed with him, then seemed to remember he wasn’t here to seek her agreement. He shifted the strap of his spear and kept walking.

  At the next junction, a small knot of civilians had gathered near a water cart. A Catherine guard stood with a slate, taking names or counts. A runner Sena recognized – one of the girls who used to take her routes – hovered at the edge, twisting her scarf between her fingers, waiting for permission that would not come from Sena anymore. The runner saw Sena and froze, eyes widening for a moment, then dropping to Sena’s boots as if looking up might be dangerous.

  Sena didn’t stop. If she stopped the guards would stop. If she stopped, she would be seen as someone who needed permission to speak to her own people. She forced her hooves to keep moving.

  As they moved deeper toward Callahan’s quadrant, the Brighthand presence changed. There were fewer patrols moving with confidence, and more men standing in place, unarmed, being watched. Most had their insignia covered; some wore it openly and looked ready to be punished for it. At one corner, a city guard captain argued quietly with a Catherine sergeant while two soldiers held a chest of confiscated weapons between them.

  Sena caught fragments: “We have our own protocols –” and “Your protocols stopped working when your Spire fell.”

  The younger escort snorted under his breath. The scarred soldier shot him a look, brief and warning.

  The younger man lifted his chin. “It’s a mess,” he said, not to Sena or his partner but to the street, as if he needed the words to exist outside his skull.

  “It’s war, Mitchell,” the older one said. “Do you expect it to be tidy?”

  They reached the checkpoint where the lane narrowed between two stone buildings. A rope line had been stretched across the gap, and a Catherine post sat behind it with a brazier and a stack of chits. A pair of soldiers on duty looked up as Sena approached, eyes tracking the two escorts first, then her, then the packet under her coat as if they could see it. The scarred soldier raised his shift token. The man at the post nodded once and stepped aside, already moving his men into position to be relieved. The exchange happened easily, clearly long-practiced. Sena watched the relief take place and understood what Catherine was building: an allegiance borne on clear expectations, a grid that could hold even when everyone inside it hated the hands that drew it.

  The younger escort leaned slightly toward Sena as they passed the rope line, voice low.

  “What was it like,” he asked, the question coming out before he could swallow it back, “before she arrived?”

  “It was still a siege,” she said. “But… we were building trust.”

  The scarred soldier made a sound that might have been amusement. The younger one went quiet, and for the first time since they’d left the building, he matched his partner’s pace without fidgeting.

  Ahead, the signs that marked Callahan’s quadrant began to appear, old familiar boundaries that once meant civic order and now meant a patch of the city being managed under foreign eyes. Sena kept her posture steady and her face calm and let the street see what it wanted to see: a former Warden walking under guard, upright and moving, not asking for anyone’s permission to put one hoof in front of the other.

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  Callahan’s command room had not changed in shape, yet everything in it had been rearranged by fear. The same oak table stood near the window; the same peg line held cloaks and spare belts. The difference lay in what had been added: a Catherine guard posted inside the doorway, another visible through the open arch to the corridor, and a sergeant seated at the edge of the room with a slate on her knee, as if Callahan’s own office had become a checkpoint.

  Callahan looked up when Sena entered and did not bother to hide the anger on his face. It lasted only a moment. His eyes flicked to the two escorts behind her, then back to Sena, and the anger settled into quieter calculation.

  “You’ve been sent,” he said.

  Sena wished with all her heart that she could take Callahan by the hand and tell him how much she understood his feelings, how they were in the same position, how she wished she could change the state of things. But she kept her voice even. “I’m here for records.”

  The Catherine sergeant didn’t glance up from her slate. She didn’t need to; she was listening.

  Sena drew the waxed packet out of her coat and set it on the table between them.

  “Three days of movement chits,” she said. “Equipment and supplies in and out of your quadrant. Key custody ledger for municipal lockboxes, if it still exists. Names of the clerks who handle it.”

  Callahan stared at the packet before looking up at Sena again. “You’re fetching,” he said, and the contempt in the word was careful. He wasn’t only insulting her. He was marking the room, and telling Catherine’s men, and his own people beyond the walls, that he understood what was being done.

  Sena didn’t answer the insult. She’d learned, painfully, that answering the wrong thing was how you lost the right war.

  “Do you have it?” she asked. “Or do you want Catherine’s men tearing your records apart until they find what they think they’re missing?”

  Callahan’s brow furrowed. He turned his head toward the doorway. “Jacob,” he called.

  A Brighthand lieutenant appeared, stopped short at the sight of Sena, and then looked at the Catherine sergeant with open resentment. Callahan gave a short instruction, and the lieutenant disappeared again without speaking.

  Callahan came around the table and broke the wax seal with his thumbnail. He scanned the first page, then the second, then set them down. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll give you the chits. You’ll take them back. She’ll do whatever she’s doing with them.”

  Sena watched his hands. His left wrist had a new wrap under his cuff. He moved as if the ribs on one side still pained him.

  “You’re hurt,” she said softly.

  Callahan shrugged with one shoulder. “Everyone is.”

  Jacob returned carrying a ledger that looked too heavy for a single arm. He set it down carefully, then stood close enough to hear.

  Callahan flipped the ledger open and began turning pages. His eyes moved fast, trained by years of reading logs. Sena watched him track columns with a finger, waiting for the moment his gaze snagged.

  It happened on the third page. Callahan stopped. He went back a line and read it again. Then he looked up at Jacob.

  “Who signed this requisition?” he asked.

  Jacob leaned in and squinted. “Not you,” he muttered.

  Callahan ignored the comment and traced the entry with his finger again. “It’s not weapons,” he said, more to himself than to him. “It’s fabrication.”

  The Catherine sergeant finally glanced up. “What?” she asked, bored.

  Callahan didn’t answer her. He turned another page, then another, eyes narrowing as he found the same pattern.

  “Sheet stock,” he said. “Rivets, rings. Chain links. Not finished collars, not finished restraints. Raw work.”

  Sena kept her face still. Her pulse started to climb anyway, because she knew what metal meant in Ivath, and why the Dagorlind were afraid.

  Callahan's finger moved down the page. “Anchor spikes,” he added. “Fasteners. A request for scale-lamp oil, and a second one for sealant.” He paused, reading the destination code. “And it’s going to a place that has no business receiving any of this.”

  Jacob’s jaw set. “Where?”

  Callahan closed the ledger partway, then opened it again at the same line, as if he wanted to be sure he wasn’t inventing the danger out of exhaustion.

  “The counting house annex,” he said.

  Sena’s stomach tightened. The building was already a cage. The idea of someone building something inside it made her skin go cold. That was where they were keeping the Bernane Bell.

  Had the Dagorlind beat them to the clapper, after all?

  Callahan looked at Sena directly.

  “This isn’t resupply,” he said. “This isn’t seizure inventory. This is preparation.”

  The Catherine sergeant’s gaze sharpened at last. “What kind of preparation?” she demanded.

  Callahan’s eyes stayed on Sena, ignoring the sergeant as if she were furniture.

  Sena shrugged. “Do you have the paperwork we need, or not?” she asked.

  The question landed where it was meant to. It gave the sergeant her world back – compliance, task, return. It gave Callahan a reason to stop speaking in front of someone who had no stake in understanding.

  The sergeant sat up straighter on the chair, slate still on her knee. “You’ll take what’s been requested,” she said, her voice carrying the clipped certainty of someone used to being obeyed. “Then you return.”

  Sena’s escorts waited by the doorway as if they’d been nailed there, scarred man on one side, the younger man opposite him. She slid the packet and the ledger toward the edge of the table.

  “Take these back to Lady Catherine,” she said to the older one.

  The sergeant opened her mouth as if to object, but it must have been more about Sena’s tone than the command, because she paused, perhaps realizing that it suited her.

  “Tell Lady Catherine we found irregular movement chits tied to the counting house annex,” Sena added. “Captain Callahan is going to assist with verification.”

  It was true enough to keep Catherine satisfied for the moment, and vague enough that it did not hand her the whole shape of the problem.

  The older escort took the ledger and packet, tucked them under his arm, and left without a glance back. The younger moved with him, a half step behind. Their boots faded down the corridor.

  Callahan watched the door close. Only then did he speak again.

  “That was bold,” he said.

  “It was necessary,” Sena replied. She kept her gaze on the sergeant, because the sergeant was the hinge now. “I need to see Hellen. She’s being held at the counting house.”

  The sergeant’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t.”

  Callahan gestured toward the sergeant. “Sena, this is Sergeant Bass. Sergeant Bass, this is Sena. She was Warden before Lady Catherine arrived.”

  “I know who she is,” Bass said. “You’ve got what you came for.”

  “I want five minutes with the Glinnel.”

  Bass’s expression didn’t change. “No.”

  Sena nodded as if she’d expected that. She turned half away, already making herself smaller, less confrontational. When she spoke again, her voice had gone quieter.

  “She’s useful to you,” Sena said.

  Bass’s eyes stayed flat. “Everyone is useful to someone.”

  “Hellen’s useful in a way your men can’t be,” Sena replied. “She hears what the Sisters say when they think no one outside the Order understands them.”

  Bass shifted her slate in her lap. “Then I’ll have one of mine ask her.”

  “She won’t talk to Catherine’s soldiers,” Sena said. “She’s afraid of them.”

  “They’re soldiers, not executioners.”

  “She’s a Glinnel,” Sena said. “She’s been handled, dragged, shouted at, penned. If your men go in there and start asking questions, the Glinnel will punish her for cooperating, whether she does or not. They’ll stop talking around her.”

  Bass watched Sena carefully. “And if you go in, they won’t?”

  “It’ll be… different,” Sena said carefully. “They already have stories about me.”

  Bass’s eyes flicked over Sena’s antlers.

  “They think I’m dangerous in the way men like to pretend,” Sena said. “They think I make people act foolish. They think anyone close to me is compromised. But she knows us. We’ve been fair with her. And…” Sena paused, as if deciding whether she could afford to say it, but really she was waiting for Bass to register her shyness, to be convinced of it.

  Sena made herself look up with reluctance. “She trusts me because we’ve bonded.”

  Callahan’s eyes cut to the window as if the street outside had suddenly become interesting. The red that mottled his cheek gave Sena cover.

  Bass stared at Sena for a beat, then glanced away, as if giving her privacy she didn’t ask for.

  “Alright,” Bass said, and there was a human note under the authority, a kind of tired sympathy that came from having served under enough commanders to recognize when a body was being used as a weapon against itself. Perhaps human women and Kelthi women weren’t all that different, after all. “You want me to risk a breach in custody for five minutes of your trust.”

  Sena’s voice stayed low. “Those chits don’t point to a fight in the street,” she says. “There’s something hidden there. The first person who will have heard whispers about it is the person who’s been listening to the city’s cracks for weeks. I can’t get that information from Hellen if your men haul her out for questioning. If I arrive, they’ll think I’m there for something… different.”

  Bass was quiet for a moment, weighting the same thing Catherine would weigh: risk, cost, likelihood of noise.

  Bass’s eyes went to the corridor where the escorts had gone. “Your guard detail is gone,” she said. “If I let you walk into the counting house without them, I’m the one answering when Catherine asks why you weren’t under watch.”

  Sena didn’t argue. “Then you come,” she said. “Wait outside.”

  Bass held Sena’s gaze, then shifted her weight as if deciding whether she was tired enough to accept the least bad option.

  “Alright, former Warden,” Bass said. “Let’s move.”