Algor moved Ophelia to the deepest ward in Clarissa's care that same night, the one with iron in the walls and silence woven so thick into the stone that even I felt my own thoughts go muffled crossing the threshold, and by morning he still had no better answer than the one he'd given me on the hall floor: the thread was dead again, or dead enough to fool every instrument he owned, and he trusted his instruments about as far as he could throw the tower they were kept in. That was where matters stood — unresolved, watched, guarded — when Zereth found me in the war room and told me, in the same flat tone he used to report troop counts, that the envoy from the seventh layer had returned.
"Alone?" I asked.
