Gregory found the second sigil himself, three mornings later, at almost the exact hour the first light usually broke through the mist over the outer dam, and the fact that it was his own boot that nearly caught it in the mud this time, rather than Aulus's, struck Remus, hearing the shout that carried up from the water's edge, as the kind of small, unasked-for mercy the last month had otherwise been considerably stingy about handing out.
It was not shaped like the first one. Remus saw that plainly the moment he crouched beside it, charcoal already out from behind his ear though he didn't yet trust his own hand enough to draw with it, and Andrea, arriving a breath behind him, went still over it in a way that told him, before she'd said a single word, that the difference in shape was not a small one.
"Identify," Remus said anyway, out of a habit he no longer expected to actually work on anything belonging to Andrea's people.
Item Identified: Demon Sigil, House Unaffiliated.
Unable to Determine Origin. Insufficient Data.
"Same as before," he said. "It still won't give me anything past the shape of it."
"It wouldn't," Andrea said, quiet, crouching beside him without touching the thing itself, her eyes moving over its carved edge with the same careful, hunting attention she'd given the first one on this same stretch of mud weeks earlier. "But I can read this one, and it isn't what the last one was. The first mark was a claim. This one is a summons. Not to me. To whoever this settlement recognizes as speaking for it. My people use this exact shape when they intend to treat with something they've decided is worth treating with as an equal, rather than simply taking."
"Meaning what," Aulus asked, arriving at a near run with his sword already half drawn, Gregory a step behind him, both of them breathing hard in the cold morning air.
"Meaning my brother isn't just watching this settlement anymore," Andrea said, and something in her voice, hearing herself say it, carried a dread considerably colder than anything Malchor's own presence at the dam had managed to put into her three nights earlier. "He's decided it's big enough, and dangerous enough, and inconvenient enough to whatever he actually wants, that it's worth negotiating with directly instead of simply taking a piece of it the way he tried to take me. That's not a threat against one woman anymore, Remus. That's a demon lord asking to sit down across a table from your family the same way Corvath already sat down across one from him. I don't know yet what he'd even ask for. I only know that nothing good has ever come, in the whole of my people's long history, from being asked that particular question twice by the same patient mouth."
Nobody said anything for a long moment, the mist curling slow off the black water around them, the barrier's light pulsing steady and indifferent along the horizon behind it all, and Remus understood, crouched in the mud with a summons he couldn't read himself and a sister beside him who could read it all too well, that whatever this settlement had survived so far, army and writ and grief and a brother's first quiet warning, none of it had actually been the whole of what was coming. It had only been the knock before the door.
"We're not answering it today," he said, finally, straightening, the charcoal still unused between his fingers. "Not until the council's heard exactly what it means to say yes to a thing like this, and exactly what it costs to say no. I've learned that much, at least, this month, even if I keep having to learn the rest of it twice."
Andrea looked up at him from where she still crouched over the sigil, and something in her expression, tired and wary and, underneath both, something that might almost have been hope, told him she'd heard the promise for what it actually was this time.
"Then let's go wake the rest of them," she said. "I don't think whoever left this particular mark is in any hurry. I don't think that means we should be either."
They walked back up the dam together, the four of them, lantern light thinning fast against a sky going properly grey with morning, and behind them, in the mud at the water's edge, the second sigil sat exactly where it had been left, patient, unclaimed, waiting for an answer that none of them, not Remus, not Andrea, not the whole council still sleeping in the longhouse above the rising mist, yet had any real idea how to give.