He started with the steward.
Orin Mast had been managing Ironholt's household operations for fourteen years — long enough that the distinction between the house's problems and his problems had blurred into something he'd stopped examining. He was fifty, compact, with the permanently harried expression of a man running a budget that didn't have enough columns. He looked at Kael the way he'd been looking at Kael since the awakening: carefully, without commitment, the expression of someone reserving judgment on whether the investment of attention was going to pay off.
"The north wall," Kael said. "I need masons. Good ones, not contract labor. And I need them today."
Orin's expression didn't change. "The north wall hasn't been scheduled for repair. Lord Aldric—"
"I know it hasn't been scheduled. I'm scheduling it."
"Lord Kael." A careful pause. "The repair budget for the season was allocated in the autumn. There's nothing left for structural work."
"What's the cost of the wall failing in deep winter?"
Orin blinked.
"Estimate it," Kael said. "Partial collapse of original north-face construction. Emergency patching, structural assessment, potential rebuilding of the affected section. Temporary housing for any residents displaced. Factor in winter labor rates." He waited. "Is it more or less than the preventive repair?"
The steward was quiet for a moment with the particular expression of a man who'd been doing the wrong math for a long time and had just been shown a different equation. "I'd need to look at the specific damage," he said, slowly.
"I'll show you this afternoon. Bring your repair ledger."
He left Orin recalculating and went to find the materials list.
---
The first day was logistics.
He walked the north wall in proper light — morning, the sun at an angle that showed surface texture — and mapped the compromised sections with careful measurements. Three sections, each approximately a meter and a half, spaced at the load-path intervals he'd identified the night before. The mortar treatment had been applied to a depth of about four centimeters on the exterior face; the interior face would need checking, which meant scaffolding inside the hall.
He wrote the materials specification in the margins of Orin's repair ledger. Lime mortar, specific mix ratio — he wrote out the proportions by memory, the good Liam Reyes kind of memory, the kind accumulated across years of actual material assessment rather than textbook formulas. Aggregate size. Application sequence. Curing time given the current temperature.
Orin watched this process with increasing attention.
"Where did you learn this?" the steward asked, after the third specification note.
"Reading," Kael said, which was technically true in both lives.
He sourced the masons through Orin's contacts in the lower city — not the cheapest available, the most reliable, because speed mattered less than quality and quality mattered more than it usually did given that he was repairing deliberate sabotage rather than natural decay. He briefed them that afternoon. He watched their faces when he explained the mix ratio and the application sequence and saw the specific look of craftsmen being told how to do their jobs by someone who actually knew how their jobs worked. Not offense. Something closer to attention.
They started work the next morning.
---
Aldric came on the second day.
Kael was on the scaffolding inside the great hall, checking the interior face of the north wall with his palm flat against the stone, when he heard the footsteps below. He climbed down. His father stood in the middle of the hall looking at the masons on the exterior scaffolding through the high window with an expression Kael hadn't seen on him yet.
Not the tired performance-of-competence. Something older. Like a man standing in a room that used to mean something, trying to remember what.
"Orin said you ordered structural repair," Aldric said.
"The north wall mortar was failing. I'm fixing it."
A pause. His father's eyes moved from the window to him, the recalibration look that kept appearing. "The repair budget was exhausted."
"I reallocated from the decorative maintenance line. The east garden wall can wait until spring. This can't."
"The east garden wall was your mother's." Not a rebuke. Just information, delivered carefully, like a man handing over something breakable.
Kael held that for a moment. "I know. It'll be repaired properly in spring, when I can source the right stone." He kept his voice even. "The north wall failing in January isn't something she'd have wanted either."
Aldric looked at him for a long time. Then he looked back at the window, at the masons working with the morning cold coming off the stone.
"Kael." He stopped. Started again. "Why are you bothering?"
The question landed with a weight that wasn't accusation. It was something closer to genuine bewilderment — the question of a man who'd been operating for years on the assumption that the house's trajectory was fixed, that the remaining months were about managing the decline rather than stopping it, and who had not adjusted that assumption because adjusting it would require hoping again and hoping had cost him things he couldn't afford to lose twice.
"Because it needs doing," Kael said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have right now." He met his father's eyes. "The wall is failing. Repairing it is cheaper than losing it. Everything else can wait until I have a better answer."
Aldric was quiet. He stood in the hall with his soldier's hands at his sides and looked at his youngest son with the expression of a man who'd received a report in a language he used to speak fluently and found, with some surprise, that he could still understand it.
"The masons," he said finally. "Are they good?"
"Yes."
"Then." He nodded once. The particular nod of a man giving permission for something he'd decided not to question. "Carry on." He walked toward the door, then stopped. "Lunch is at the usual hour. Orin tells me you've been eating in the kitchen."
"It's faster."
"It looks strange." Not a criticism — an observation. "People notice things that look strange. Eat at the table."
He left.
Kael stood in the empty hall and thought about the specific grammar of that exchange. *It looks strange. People notice things.* His father had just told him, in his own precise way, that presentation mattered. That Kael moving through this house differently was being observed. That Aldric was, in his limited and rusty way, paying attention.
He went back up the scaffolding.
---
The Cavren evidence came on the third day, from the masons themselves.
He was watching the exterior repair work — the old mortar cut back, the new mix going in at the right consistency, the whole process moving with the methodical satisfaction of something being done correctly — when the lead mason, a broad man named Edvard who'd been working Valdenmoor stone since before Kael was born, paused in his work and looked at a section he'd just cleaned out.
"Lord Kael."
Kael climbed to where he was on the scaffold.
Edvard was pointing at the cleaned mortar joint. "This wasn't time," he said. "The original mortar here is fine. Better than fine — good old lime, this stuff, mixed right. Someone put something in after." He scraped at the boundary between old and new, where the treatment had been applied, and showed Kael the residue on his chisel. "Saltwater soak, I'd guess. Or something similar. Gets into the binding, breaks it down from the inside. Takes a few years to show."
"How long ago?"
"Hard to say exact." Edvard turned his chisel in the light, examining the residue. "The breakdown is pretty advanced. I'd say three, four years at least. Maybe longer." He looked at Kael steadily. "This isn't accident or neglect, my lord. Someone did this on purpose."
"I know," Kael said. "I need you to document what you found."
The documentation came that afternoon. Three sections, application consistent, original mortar deliberately treated at the load-path intervals. Edvard's written account used careful professional language — *evidence of post-construction chemical application* — but the meaning was clear to anyone who read it.
The question was who.
He went back to what he knew. The east wall passage — inside access, skilled labor. The passage had been there for at least a few years based on the plaster weathering. The mortar treatment — outside access, at scaffolding height, during what must have been a legitimate maintenance visit when nobody would question workers on the exterior walls. Roran's signet ring — inside access, specific knowledge of curses. The Caldenveil consortium — outside connection with Cavren-adjacent financial territory.
He laid these out in his head and looked for the overlap.
Inside access plus outside capability plus long game plus Caldenveil connections.
He went to the secondary vault and found the old trade correspondence from eleven years ago. The Cavren agreement documents. He read through them with the Trade-Instinct passive running quietly in the background, and it was almost uncomfortable — like reading with a lamp that was too bright, every weighted clause and asymmetric obligation lighting up like a flaw in a structural drawing. He found what he was looking for in the maintenance rider: a standard-looking clause that granted Cavren trade representatives access to Voss properties during scheduled maintenance visits, for the purpose of *assessing shared infrastructure adjacent to the border territories.*
A shared maintenance clause. Entirely standard. Cavren men on Voss scaffolding, every eighteen months, going back a decade.
Cavren men on Voss scaffolding with saltwater and time.
It was circumstantial. He couldn't prove specific intent from a maintenance rider and chemical residue. But it fit the load-bearing points too cleanly to be coincidence, and he'd learned in two lives that when a structure looked like it was designed to fail, it usually was.
*[Agreed,]* the System said, which he hadn't asked for.
*[For what it's worth.]*
He put the documents back and went to eat at the table, as instructed.
---
Fenn Cavren arrived on the third afternoon.
He came under trade pretext — a discussion of the spring border assessment, the kind of routine administrative contact that the Cavren agreement provided for. He had two men with him, which was one more than strictly necessary and one fewer than a statement. He was twenty-one, which Kael knew from the memories, but twenty-one landed differently in person.
He was handsome in the way expensive things were handsome — assembled correctly, maintained carefully, with the particular quality of a person who'd never had a reason to become anything other than what they already were. Dark hair, a clean jaw, clothes that cost more than the Voss household's weekly food budget. He moved through the front hall with the unhurried confidence of someone who considered the space an inconvenience to cross rather than someone else's home.
He saw Kael and smiled.
Not the smile you gave people you were glad to see. The other kind — the kind worn briefly, almost to oneself, when something confirmed what you'd already suspected.
"Lord Kael," he said. "I heard you were—" A pause, the pause timed exactly right. "Recovering."
"Lord Fenn." Kael gestured toward the meeting room. "The trade discussion is arranged in here. My steward has the relevant documents."
Fenn didn't move yet. He was looking at Kael with the kind of attention that wasn't attention — the way people looked at things that didn't require close examination. "I was sorry to hear about your awakening results," he said. "House Voss has always been—" Another pause. A half-gesture with one hand, completing the sentence with implication rather than words.
"Proud," one of his men supplied quietly, with the practiced timing of someone who'd done this before.
"Proud," Fenn agreed. "Exactly."
Kael met his eyes and said nothing. He waited, the way he waited on structural problems — not passive, not impatient, just present and observing while the other element did what it was going to do.
Fenn's smile held. "Shall we?"
---
The trade discussion took forty minutes.
It was about the spring border assessment, ostensibly, and Kael let it be about that for the first twenty minutes — listening, watching Fenn talk, reading the Trade-Instinct data running underneath every clause the man casually proposed. It was impressive work, in its way. Every suggestion Fenn made was structurally sound on its surface and mildly damaging in its specifics — the border assessment timeline, if adopted, would require Voss to commit two weeks of labor and one experienced surveyor at peak spring farming season; the cost-sharing arrangement for the joint maintenance clause was written to give Cavren access approval over any modifications to shared infrastructure, which would effectively give them veto over Ironholt's exterior repair schedule.
Normal-seeming. Asymmetric. Designed to look like cooperation and function like control.
"The maintenance clause amendment," Kael said, during a pause.
Fenn looked up from the document with precisely the right degree of attentiveness — not too sharp, not dismissive. "A minor clarification of the existing terms."
"The current terms give Cavren access during scheduled maintenance visits. The amendment gives Cavren approval authority over any modifications. That's not a clarification, it's a conversion."
A silence that lasted slightly too long.
"I think you may be misreading the language," Fenn said. Still pleasant. Still that faint private smile, though something had shifted behind it — a reassessment happening, quickly, beneath the surface.
"I may be," Kael said. "I'd like legal counsel to review it before we proceed. Standard practice for anything that modifies access rights." He set the document down neatly. "The spring timeline is workable. I'll have Orin confirm the labor commitment within the week."
Fenn looked at him for a moment. Really looked — not the non-attention from the hallway, something more focused. It lasted perhaps two seconds, which was longer than Kael suspected Fenn usually spent on Kael's family.
"Of course," Fenn said. "Plenty of time." He leaned back in his chair with the ease of a man who'd lost nothing and knew it. "I understand the wall work is proceeding well. Proactive of you." Something in his tone landing soft and sideways, the way a comment landed when it was also information — *I know about the wall work.*
"It needed doing," Kael said.
"Old buildings." Fenn shook his head with the specific mournfulness of a man who found old buildings touching rather than useful. "They require such constant attention, don't they. It's a great deal of work." His eyes moved around the meeting room — the worn tapestry, the crack in the far wall's plaster, the window that didn't quite seal. "Such a great deal of work for a house this size."
He said it like a man contemplating weather. Observational. Sympathetic. Like the decline was a natural phenomenon and Kael a man standing in a field watching rain come.
Kael looked at the tapestry. Then at the window. Then back at Fenn.
"Which section of the border assessment concerns you most?" he asked. "The drainage survey or the road markers?"
Another half-second recalibration. Then Fenn smiled again, this one different — something appreciative in it, in the way a man appreciated a dog that had learned a new trick. "The drainage survey. The eastern tributary has been shifting."
They finished the meeting efficiently. When Fenn stood to leave, he did so with all the ease he'd arrived with — nothing accomplished, nothing lost, the whole visit a minor routine administrative event that would be recorded in both houses' logs as such.
At the door, he paused. "You know, Kael—" First name, deliberate, the specific familiarity that was also diminishment. "I hope the keep serves you well this winter. These old structures." He glanced at the ceiling with what might have been genuine appreciation for stonework. "One never quite knows."
"I find they hold up," Kael said, "when you attend to the right things."
Fenn held his gaze for a moment. Something moved behind his eyes — brief, involuntary, the expression that crossed a face when something didn't land the way it was supposed to. Then the smile was back, and he left, and his two men followed, and the sound of boots on stone diminished down the corridor.
Kael stood in the meeting room and listened to them go.
He thought about a man who'd just spent forty minutes probing for weakness and found something he hadn't expected. Not strength — Fenn Cavren would have known how to handle strength. Something harder to categorize. A person who'd heard everything he said, understood exactly what it meant, and responded to none of it the way it was designed to be responded to.
That was more unsettling than strength, to certain kinds of people.
He heard Fenn's voice in the outer courtyard — low, talking to one of his men, the words not carrying. Then the gate.
He went back to checking the mortar.
---
*Later, in the outer yard, Fenn Cavren's man fell into step beside him.*
*"The youngest one?"*
*Fenn was quiet for a moment. Looking at the keep's north wall as they passed it — the scaffolding still up, masons packing their tools for the day.*
*"Don't bother with him," he said.*
*His man nodded.*
*Fenn walked through the gate without looking back.*
---
Three days of repair work concluded on the fourth morning.
He paid the masons from the decorative maintenance reallocation, tipped Edvard separately from his personal funds — what remained of them, which was not much — and asked him to leave the documentation with Orin. He walked the repaired sections that afternoon, palm flat against the new mortar, feeling the correct resistance of it, the binding that would hold through freeze-thaw and the weight above it.
It was good work.
Not permanent — old structures were never permanently fixed, only maintained — but solid. Sound. The kind of repair that gave you time.
*[Note,]* the System said. *[The mortar treatment on the interior face was more advanced than the exterior. If left unrepaired, interior face would have failed approximately six weeks ahead of the exterior. Structural collapse would have been first apparent from inside, not outside. At night, most likely, when load-bearing stress is highest in cold conditions.]*
*[I mention this in case it affects your assessment of intent.]*
He stood in the great hall and thought about that. A collapse apparent first from the interior. At night. In winter, when everyone was inside.
He had assumed the sabotage was aimed at the house's stability — financial, political, the long project of bringing Voss down without visible fingerprints.
That was still true.
But the interior face changed the timeline. Six weeks ahead meant the interior went first, which meant people in the building when it happened. Which meant it wasn't just about the house.
He was still working through the implications of that when he went up to bed.
---
The knock came past midnight.
Not a knock, exactly. A single deliberate touch on the door frame, the way someone knocked who'd decided to knock and then reconsidered the sound of it. He was awake — he'd been awake for an hour, turning the interior-face timeline over, finding implications he didn't like — and he crossed to the door and opened it.
Lyra stood in the corridor.
Off-duty clothes, not the handmaiden's uniform — a dark, practical tunic, the silver braid down. She was carrying a small lamp, low-turned, the kind of light that didn't travel far. Her gold eyes caught it and held it without reflecting it, the Ashenveil trait that still registered as slightly wrong in the back of his brain every time he saw it.
She looked at him with the measured expression he'd come to recognize as her default, which was not blankness but economy — she'd already done the calculation of what she was going to say and discarded everything except what was necessary.
"I know what time it is," she said. "This keeps until morning if you prefer."
"It doesn't," he said. "Come in."
She stepped inside. Stood near the window, not near the fire — the specific positioning of someone who wanted an exit within easy reach and had arranged it without making it obvious. He'd noticed she did this in rooms. He hadn't mentioned it.
"I've been watching the letter delivery patterns," she said. "Since I arrived at this house."
He waited.
"Someone in Ironholt has been sending correspondence to House Cavren. Weekly, for the last six months. Minimum. The delivery I can trace goes back six months; the actual duration may be longer." She held the lamp steady, her voice the same. "I've been watching because I watch things in houses. It's what you learn to do when you have no other leverage."
"I know," he said.
She looked at him briefly — acknowledging that, filing it. "The letters leave from a specific part of the keep. I've tracked the pattern three times to confirm it. I didn't want to bring you speculation."
"Which room?"
Her eyes held his. Not hesitation — the final beat before a door opened.
"Would you like to know," Lyra said quietly, "which room they leave from?"
---