The council had broken apart well past midnight, no closer to a settled plan than they'd been at the meeting's opening beyond the grim agreement that Corvath's inspectors would, one way or another, be allowed through the boundary when their ten days finally ran out, and Remus had climbed the watchtower's own ladder alone afterward less because he expected to find any answers up there than because the stairs to his own bed felt, that night, like they led somewhere he wasn't yet ready to arrive.
The mist had come up thick and early, swallowing the dam line entirely below the tower's own railing, and he stood for a long while simply listening to the settlement breathe beneath it, the small, ordinary sounds of a place still choosing, every single night, to keep existing despite every reason it had been given lately to stop.
Andrea found Remus alone on the watchtower again that night, the same stretch of rail she'd climbed to nine mornings after Tacitus died, except this time it was her own hands, not his, gripping the wood a little too tightly for the composure she was otherwise managing to hold.
"I've been doing the arithmetic," she said, without preamble. "Ten days on the writ. Seven nights on the summons, five of them left now. If I simply leave, tonight, before either date arrives, both problems solve themselves at once. Corvath's inspection finds nothing to confirm, because there's nothing left inside your boundary for it to find. My brother's summons goes unanswered because I've already answered it, on my own terms, walking back toward whatever he actually wants from me instead of making this whole settlement pay the price of my staying."
"No," Remus said, immediate, flat, with none of the careful managing he'd have wrapped around the word a year earlier.
"You don't get to say no to this one," Andrea said, and there was real heat in it now, the first he'd heard from her in longer than he could remember. "This isn't Gregory's watch roster, Remus. This is my own life, and my own choice about what I'm willing to let this family absorb on my behalf, and I watched you learn, not two weeks ago, exactly what it costs to decide something like this for someone else without asking them first. I'm asking you to extend me the same respect you're still learning to give your own brother."
"I hear you," Remus said, and made himself say the next part slowly, carefully, the way he'd have laid out a Craft's material list rather than an argument. "I'm not telling you no because I think I know better than you what you can bear. I'm telling you no because leaving doesn't actually solve either problem the way you're describing it. Corvath's writ isn't really about you specifically, not anymore, not once Annabelle's leak theory holds up the way it's starting to. It's a test case, same as the land filing was. If it works once, against you, he uses the exact same rite against the next settlement that inconveniences him, and the one after that, whether or not you're still standing inside this boundary when it happens. You leaving doesn't close that door. It just teaches him it opens."
Andrea was quiet for a long moment, and when she spoke again, some of the heat had gone out of her voice, replaced with something closer to exhaustion.
"And my brother's summons?"
"I don't know yet," Remus admitted. "I don't think leaving answers that one cleanly either, though. You told the council yourself, a summons unanswered converts into something worse. I don't see how walking back to him on your own, alone, without this settlement standing behind you at all, makes that conversion any less likely. If anything I'd guess it makes it more likely, because he'd have exactly what he originally asked for with none of the resistance he was apparently curious to test."
"You've thought about this considerably more than one night's worth," Andrea said, studying him in the dark.
"I've thought about very little else since the second sigil turned up," Remus admitted. "I keep coming back to something Tacitus told me once, back before any of this, before the barrier, before the tunnel. He said a commander who solves every problem by removing the person the enemy wants most isn't protecting his people. He's simply choosing which direction the bleeding happens in. I didn't understand it properly at the time. I think I finally do."
"That's a soldier's way of saying you don't get to spend me to buy this settlement a quieter season," Andrea said, something almost fond cutting through the exhaustion in her voice.
"That's exactly what it's saying," Remus agreed. "I learned it from a man who paid the actual price of not living by it soon enough himself. I'd rather learn the rest of the lesson secondhand than watch this family pay for it a second time."
A shape moved at the edge of the tower's own light before either of them heard footsteps on the ladder, and both of them turned, tense, before Gregory's familiar silhouette resolved out of the dark, climbing the last few rungs with the easy, unhurried confidence of a man who'd walked this same tower a hundred times since the watch roster gave him reason to.
"I heard the last part of that," Gregory said, without apology, settling against the rail on Andrea's other side. "I wasn't eavesdropping on purpose. Voices carry further than either of you probably think, this high up with the mist gone quiet the way it's gone tonight."
"Then you heard me trying to leave," Andrea said, flat, not quite meeting his eyes.
"I heard you trying to solve a problem alone because you've decided, somewhere along the way, that the cost of this family's protection is a debt only you're allowed to worry about repaying," Gregory said, and something in the plain, unhurried way he said it carried more weight than a sharper accusation would have. "I know that instinct better than almost anyone standing in this swamp. I spent a year running from exactly the same one, thinking the kindest thing I could do for the people who loved me was to stop being a burden on them by simply removing myself from the equation. I was wrong. I learned that the hard way, standing at my own family's door with nothing left to offer them but an apology. I'd rather you learned it from me saying it plainly than from making the same mistake first."
"It's not the same thing," Andrea said, though the protest came out smaller than she'd clearly meant it to.
"It's close enough that I recognized it the moment I heard your voice from the bottom of that ladder," Gregory said. "You're not a burden on this family, Andrea. You're the reason half of us are still standing after Autumnshade, same as Remus. I'm not offering you comfort here. I'm offering you a fact, the same way Aulus offered me one a few weeks back that I didn't much want to hear at the time. I'm on that dam line three nights out of five now, same rotation you're on. If your brother, or Corvath's inspectors, or anyone else with a summons or a writ wants to come collect something from this settlement, they're going to have to walk past me to do it, and I'd rather you understood that plainly, tonight, than assume I'm standing there for the view."
Something in Andrea's shoulders finally eased, the same way it had, weeks earlier, in front of the whole council, and she reached out without quite looking at either of them and set one hand briefly on Gregory's forearm, the closest thing to a thank-you Remus had ever seen her give anyone who wasn't him.
A shout carried up from the dam line below before anyone could say anything further, sharp, urgent, and all three of them were moving toward the ladder before the second shout finished landing.
They found Aulus crouched at the water's edge with a lantern held low, tracing a line of prints pressed deep into the soft mud along the outer boundary, prints that belonged to no boot Remus had ever seen issued to this settlement's own soldiers, narrow, deep at the heel, spaced further apart than any human stride could comfortably manage.
"Found these an hour ago," Aulus said, not looking up. "Followed them as far as the tree line before I lost them on harder ground. Whoever or whatever left them wasn't hiding the tracks, which tells me they either didn't think we'd notice, or didn't care whether we did. Either answer's worse than I'd like."
"Corvath's men," Gregory said, "or something else?"
Aulus straightened slowly, holding the lantern out over the last clear print, and his weathered face carried none of the flat professional calm he usually managed even in the worst of the retreat's fighting.
"I've walked a great many roads in my life," he said. "I've never once seen a boot make a print shaped quite like that one."
Andrea crouched beside him without needing to be asked, studying the print with the same careful, hunting attention she'd given both sigils, tracing its outline an inch above the mud without touching it.
"Not my brother's kind," she said, finally, and something in the flat certainty of it didn't sit any easier for being certain. "I know the shape my own people leave behind when they choose to leave one at all. This isn't that. Narrower through the heel than anything human, and the stride's wrong for a man walking upright the way we'd expect. Whatever left this either isn't built like us at all, or was working very hard, for whatever reason, not to be built like us tonight."
"Could it be an animal," Gregory asked, though the question came out already doubting itself.
"An animal doesn't walk a straight line along a boundary marker for forty paces and then simply stop existing," Aulus said, nodding toward the print's own abrupt end at the tree line, no scuff, no scatter, nothing to suggest the thing had climbed or leapt or turned aside, only a track that ran clean and purposeful and then, without explanation, wasn't there anymore. "Whatever it was, it wanted us to find this much and not one step further. I don't like being handed exactly the amount of fear somebody else decided I should have tonight."
He straightened, calling two of his own men over from further down the line, already reorganizing the roster in his head the way Remus had watched him do a dozen times since Tacitus's death, turning a fresh fear into an assignment before it had time to curdle into something the whole settlement carried unspoken.
"Double the watch on this stretch starting tonight," Aulus said. "Lanterns every twenty paces instead of forty. I want eyes on this exact line until we understand what we're looking at, and I want whoever draws this watch told the whole of it outright, not left to hear it secondhand from someone who wasn't standing where I'm standing right now."
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