"You found them," he says.
"Near the service tunnel."
His mouth tightens. "They are posted on the north road as well. Fresh paste. Same wording."
"Both authorities?"
"Yes," Theren answers. "Someone distributed them before dawn. That is not standard warrant procedure."
It isn't. Standard ones take days. This was pre-prepared, released the moment the ambush gave them cover. They're not just hunting us. They're constructing something around us — a story that holds from both directions, so that wherever we surface, one side or the other sees exactly what they've been told to see.
Leoric folds both of them and puts them inside his coat. Then, without raising his voice: "Give us a few minutes."
Theren's eyes cross between us. He takes the escorts out of the chamber without comment.
"You still won't tell me where we're going," I declare.
"Not yet."
"But you'll use my route."
"Yes."
"That's not trust."
His gaze holds mine. "No. It's need." The answer lands worse because it is honest.
"You want my roads, my hiding places, my memory of every ugly hole people used to survive your war. But not my judgment."
"Your judgment burned Blackwater." There it is. The old wound, opened without ceremony.
"Tell me about the outpost." Leoric's voice is level. "Not the version from the estate. The one before that."
"We've had this conversation."
"We had a version of it. You gave me the frame. I want what was inside it."
The warm air hits my boots. "There were documents. Seven of them over three months. Names, dates, testimony from people who claimed proximity to the outpost. Officers named by rank. Specific methods described in enough detail that I could picture the rooms." I stop. "I'd spent two years watching dark elf soldiers do exactly what those pages described, in places I grew up. The pattern fit. The sources looked independent. I had no reason to think the entire thing was fake."
He says nothing.
"I believed it because I wanted evidence for what I already knew was happening," I continue. "The war had given me enough real examples that a false one could sit inside them and I wouldn't notice the edges."
"And when it started."
"When the fire went past what I planned for." I say it flat, because flat is the only way it comes out. "I heard it before I could see what was happening. Not soldiers. Not—" I pause. "I understood within the first hour what I had actually done. Not what I intended. What I did."
His expression is blank, and no words leave his mouth. That's worse.
"The cell celebrated for three days," I lower my head. "I sat two floors above the singing and tried to find the version where what I'd done was still right, but I couldn't. I left on the fourth morning without saying anything to anyone."
My voice stays flat until it doesn't. The last word catches, small and ugly, and I hate him for hearing it. I hate myself more because there is no way to take it back.
"They were singing," I whisper. "And all I could hear was?—"
I don't finish it. I've never been able to. Somewhere above us, a piece of loose stone shifting in the wind. Leoric doesn't offer anything soft. He shifts, not dramatically, just enough to put himself beside me on the same broken tile. Close so I'm aware of his shoulder near mine. He looks at the opposite wall like he resents it for witnessing him move at all.
He hates this. I can see it in the locked line of his jaw, in the way his hand curls once before going still. He hates that he came closer. He stays anyway. Every word of that confession was something he could have picked up and turned into leverage, but he leaves it on the floor between us.
