The frost-sigil scroll lay between them on the dusty floorboards, its ink catching the faint moonlight through the broken window. Kiro stared at it like it might bite him.
"So they know about me," he said finally.
Ara leaned back against a rotting beam, arms crossed. "They don't know you yet. Not exactly. They know there's someone with… let's call it an 'unofficial' ability that doesn't fit the kingdom's registry."
"Which is me," Kiro replied.
She didn't deny it.
The room was quiet except for the soft creak of the building settling.
"So what's the plan?" he asked. "We hit the convoy, take the prisoner, and—oh look—turns out it's me?"
Ara's expression didn't change. "That's one option. The other is letting the convoy roll straight to the Shadow Regent's front gate, following it in, and seeing exactly how deep this goes."
Kiro rubbed his temples. "You mean use me as bait."
"Not you," Ara said evenly. "The idea of you. They'll have no idea the 'anomaly' is walking free, right here."
"That still sounds a lot like me being bait," he muttered.
Her eyes softened, but her voice stayed firm. "I'm not going to hand you over, Kiro. But this—this is bigger than just you. If the Regent's building something to track unregistered powers, the balance between the Four Kingdoms could shatter overnight."
Kiro thought of his mother's calm telekinesis, his father's blazing temper and fire, the way both of them had looked at him like he was broken. "So if we follow this convoy," he said, "we get answers."
"And maybe allies," Ara added. "Or maybe enemies. Depends what we find."
The scroll crackled as she rolled it up again. "We've got two days. That's when the transfer leaves the Cryomancer's hold in South Nior."
Kiro tilted his head. "And in the meantime?"
"In the meantime," she said, standing, "we prepare you for situations where you can't use your threads."
He groaned. "Why are all your ideas about making my life harder?"
"Because," she said with a faint grin, "you're dangerous when it's easy."
The next forty-eight hours were brutal. Ara pushed him through drills until his arms shook, his legs ached, and he couldn't see the threads through the haze of exhaustion. They sparred on rooftops, in narrow alleys, in pitch darkness.
Every time he slipped—even slightly—she called it out. "That twitch in your eyes? That's you thinking about the pull. Stop it."
By the end of the second day, Kiro wasn't sure whether he wanted to collapse or punch her.
At dawn, they reached a bluff overlooking the winding trade road south. Far below, the convoy appeared: three black-painted wagons flanked by mounted guards in the Shadow Regent's colors. The frost sigil gleamed on the lead wagon.
Kiro adjusted his visor, focusing on the glimmer of threads below. Even at this distance, he could sense the minds—alert, disciplined, harder to touch than the courier he'd swayed in the outpost.
Ara crouched beside him. "You still want to hit them?"
He hesitated. His power itched at the edge of his mind, whispering how easy it would be to turn those riders against each other.
But then he remembered her warning: If you lose control in a real fight, you could bend the wrong mind.
"Let's follow," he said finally. "Find the Regent. Then decide."
Ara's grin was sharp. "Good choice."
They shadowed the convoy for hours, moving through the treeline, silent as smoke. The road dipped and curved, the wagons rumbling steadily toward something neither of them had seen before—high black spires in the far distance, catching the light like knives.
Kiro's pulse quickened. "That's it?"
"That's it," Ara said grimly. "The Shadow Keep."