Aulus led the scouting party out before first light, Gregory and Andrea both insisting on a place in it over Aulus's own initial objection, and Remus stayed behind only because someone with a level head needed to hold the settlement steady if the party didn't come back on schedule, a fact Aulus had stated plainly enough that Remus hadn't found a way to argue it.
"Half a day out, half a day back, and however long it takes to actually search the place properly," Aulus had said, laying it out for Remus the night before with the same flat economy he laid out every plan. "If we're not through the boundary by full dark tomorrow, you don't send anyone chasing after us. You assume the worst, you seal the dam line, and you let Duke Ferron decide what happens next without waiting on people who may not be coming back to weigh in on it."
"I don't love that plan," Remus had said.
"It's not a plan meant to be loved," Aulus had said. "It's a plan meant to keep one bad morning from becoming two."
The walk out took longer than the scout's own breathless report had suggested, the swamp thinning gradually into higher, drier ground the further west they went, scrub pine replacing the black water and stilt-rooted trees Remus had spent months learning to build around, until the land finally climbed into the low, folded ridge the scout had marked on his hastily drawn map.
They found the camp exactly where the scout had marked it, tucked into a fold of higher ground the swamp's own maps hadn't bothered charting because nothing about it had ever seemed worth charting before, a scatter of cold fire pits and collapsed lean-tos that told a story of patient, unhurried habitation rather than a hasty ambush position.
"Weeks," Aulus confirmed, crouching over the nearest pit, sifting cold ash between two fingers. "This isn't a strike team waiting on Corvath's signal. This is a watch post. Somebody's been sitting up here counting our comings and goings since well before either the writ or the summons ever arrived."
"That answers Annabelle's question," Andrea said, grim, studying a discarded boot print alongside the strange narrow track they'd found on the dam line two nights earlier, side by side in the same patch of soft ground. "About the leak. It was never a person inside our walls at all. It was this. Watchers, patient enough to sit here through an entire season, reading our own patterns from a distance rather than needing to walk among us to learn them."
"That doesn't explain the writ," Gregory said, working the problem the same methodical way he'd learned to work every problem since coming home. "A watch post tells Corvath our grain routes, our patrol schedules, maybe even how many of us there are. It doesn't tell him a three-hundred-year-old rite exists, buried deep enough that our own senior Lorekeeper's never heard it named."
"No," Andrea agreed. "It doesn't. Which means either there's a second source feeding him the deeper knowledge, or this watch post's purpose was never purely military at all."
A branch cracked somewhere off to their left, deliberate, too loud to be accidental, and all three of them went still at once, Gregory's blade already half drawn before Aulus's raised hand stopped him.
"Show yourself," Aulus called, flat, carrying none of the uncertainty Remus imagined he must have felt standing exposed on ground he hadn't chosen. "You've had a week to run and you're still sitting here watching us find your own cold fire pit. That tells me you weren't planning to run at all."
A man stepped out from behind a stand of half-drowned trees, hands raised, empty, dressed in the same plain traveler's clothes the parley herald had worn, though his face carried none of that man's careful diplomatic calm, only the tight, hunted look of someone who'd been caught doing something he'd hoped, right up until the last possible moment, he might get away with.
"I'm not armed," the man said, quickly. "I'm not here to fight you. I was told to watch and report, nothing more, and I've done exactly that for six weeks now with nothing worse to show for it than cold feet and worse food than I was promised."
"How long have you been sitting on this ridge," Andrea asked, before Aulus could press further, her own voice carrying none of the soldier's flat authority, something colder and more precise instead.
"Since the first week after your wall went up," the man admitted. "Longer than I signed on for, if I'm honest. I was told a fortnight, maybe three weeks at the outside. Nobody's relieved me since, and I stopped expecting anyone to about a month back."
"Report to whom," Aulus asked, closing the distance slowly, deliberately, in a way that left the man no room to imagine he might simply turn and vanish back into the trees.
The man's eyes flicked, just once, toward Andrea, lingering a half-second too long on the shape of her rather than her face, and something in that single glance told Remus, when Aulus recounted it back at the settlement hours later, exactly what the watchers had actually been sent here to confirm.
"Duke Corvath," the man admitted, finally, some of the fight visibly draining out of him. "Standard reporting. Numbers, movements, patterns. That's the whole of my job, I swear it on whatever oath you'd like me to swear it on."
"And her," Aulus said, nodding once toward Andrea without breaking his own gaze from the watcher's face. "What were you told to watch for, specifically, about her."
The man's silence lasted a fraction too long to be innocent, and Andrea, watching him from a few paces back, felt something cold and certain settle over her that she didn't bother hiding from the others standing beside her.
"He's confirmed it," she said, quiet, before the man managed to find whatever careful half-truth he'd been about to offer instead. "Not the whole of it. Enough. Whatever Corvath suspected walking away from that parley meeting, he's had six weeks of a trained watcher's eyes to sharpen the suspicion into something considerably closer to certainty, and I'd guess, from the specific way this man just failed to answer a simple question, that certainty's already sitting in a report on Corvath's own desk."
"I never sent anything specific," the watcher said quickly, some genuine fear breaking through his careful composure now. "I swear it. My orders were to note anything unusual and hold it for a courier who comes through every ten days or so. I've held it. I haven't sent word about her at all, not specifically, because I wasn't certain enough of what I was seeing to put a name to it, and I didn't fancy being the man who reported something wrong to a duke who doesn't forgive being wrong easily."
"When's the next courier due," Aulus asked, sharp.
The man's silence answered before his words did, and Aulus's expression hardened into something considerably less patient.
"Three days," the man admitted, finally. "Maybe four."
Aulus looked at Andrea, and something passed between them without either needing to say it aloud, the same grim arithmetic Remus would have run himself standing in their place: three days was cutting it close against the summons's own deadline, closer against the writ's, and closer still if whatever this man hadn't yet sent finally reached Corvath's desk before either question had been properly answered.
"You're coming back with us," Aulus said, to the watcher. "Not as a prisoner in chains, though I'll bind your hands for the walk if you give me a reason to. As a man who's about to have a very useful conversation with Duke Ferron about exactly what he has and hasn't reported, and what he's willing to tell us about the rest of his lord's plans in exchange for a settlement's mercy instead of a duke's discipline for going quiet on the job."
The man's shoulders sagged, some last thin thread of resistance finally giving out. "I'd rather that conversation than the one I was dreading having with Corvath's own men if they found me sitting here empty-handed after six weeks," he said. "I'll talk. Gladly. I never much liked this work in the first place."
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