No one grieved Renn openly. That, Sion thought, said more about the state of the Council than any argument had. They buried him in the frost gardens with formal words and cold ceremony, and by the next morning the same Guardians who'd once flanked him were already dividing his responsibilities among themselves, as if he'd been a schedule to fill rather than a man.
Sion didn't trust the ease of it. Neither did Elara.
"He was killed to look guilty," she said, laying out Renn's old records across the archive table. "Which means whoever did it needed us to stop looking. That only works if we were close to something."
"Or if he was close to something," Sion said. "And they didn't want him talking."
They went through the records again — patrol logs, junction reports, the dry administrative bones of a man's last year. Nothing jumped out until Elara reached for her own notebook, the one she kept for translating fragments of the old Path-script, and stopped.
"This isn't mine," she said.
Sion looked over her shoulder. A page near the back, in handwriting close enough to hers to pass unnoticed — except it wasn't hers. The ink sat differently, colder, as if it had been written by someone standing at the edge of a dream rather than fully in the room.
Some memories are not yours to keep, it read. Trust nothing you did not choose to remember.
"I didn't write that," Elara said again, quieter now.
Sion had seen enough of the Path to know when something was speaking through a person rather than to them. "When did you last leave this notebook unattended?"
"Never." She turned the page over, searching for more, finding nothing. "Sion, I don't lose track of my own notes. I don't forget writing something."
"No," he agreed. "You don't."
Neither of them said the rest of it — that a memory-holder losing track of their own memory, even for a moment, was the first symptom every ranking system on the Path warned about. The first crack. The kind that widened slowly, until someone forgot they'd ever been whole.
They found Daryan in the lower hall, alone, staring at a wall of old junction maps as if they might rearrange themselves into an answer.
"Renn had a visitor the week before he died," Daryan said, without turning around. "I checked the gate logs myself, since apparently no one trusts the official ones anymore."
"Who?"
"No name. Just a mark — the kind used for someone who didn't want to be recorded." He finally turned, and there was something careful in his face, the look of a man choosing which truth to hand over first. "It matches a signature I've seen before. Fayrius uses it."
Sion felt the pieces settle into a shape he didn't want to look at directly. "You're saying Fayrius met with Renn before he died."
"I'm saying someone wanted us to think that." Daryan's voice stayed level, deliberately so. "Which is either the truth, or exactly what someone wants placed in front of us instead of the truth. I can't tell which yet, and neither can you, and that's precisely why I'm telling you now instead of accusing anyone in front of the whole Council."
Elara set the strange notebook page on the table between them. "There's more than one thing writing itself into places it shouldn't be."
Daryan looked at the unfamiliar handwriting for a long moment, and for the first time since Sion had known him, something that wasn't quite calm crossed his face.
"Then we're not looking for one traitor," he said. "We're looking for whatever's teaching people to become one."
Outside, the black frost thickened along every window in the hall at once, as if the Path itself had leaned closer to listen.