Page 18 of Beds and Blades

“So the line isn’t just containment,” I said. “It cuts them off from the fuel that amplifies their abilities.”

“Yes. Slow. Imperfect. But real.” Her expression shifted. She had arrived at a harder piece of information. “She is still feeding, however. Not freely, but enough. Sorcerers who serve her move through the kingdom. They take people—travelers, isolated families, people whose absence takes time to be noticed—and bring them alive to Druvenfall. They are drained to the edge of what the body can survive, allowed to recover, and drained again. It sustains her inner circle.”

“There are people in those mountains right now?” I asked.

“Yes.” She did not look away. “There are. The line holds that number to a trickle. Every year that the line holds is a year her army remains weakened.”

I looked at the map.

Nobody spoke. The fire took a log apart. I wasn’t sure what question came next. There were too many.

Skip pushed off from the doorframe.

“That is enough for one day,” he said.

I looked up.

“You need quarters. And clothes suited to this world.”

His expression shifted into warmth.

“You are safe here, Meghan. Whatever else is uncertain, that is not.”

***

Skip led me from Caen’s tower into the keep.

It was warmer inside than I had expected. The kind of warmth that comes from a building heated continuously for years, until the stone itself begins to hold it.

Hearths stood at regular intervals along the corridors, each one large enough to matter. The walls were dark stone, worn smooth where many people had brushed past them and rough where nobody did. Tapestries hung between them. Flames appeared again and again in their woven patterns. This was a symbol I now understood carried religious significance.

As we walked, Skip pointed out the places I needed to know without breaking stride. The great hall. The infirmary. The armory. The war room.

Then he stopped beside a door slightly larger than the others.

“My quarters,” he said. “If you need anything in the night.”

His gaze lingered on me for a fraction longer than necessary.

“Anything.”

The smile that followed suggested he was aware of how that sounded.

For one deeply unhelpful moment, my imagination supplied several possible interpretations.

I swallowed.

Compose yourself, Meghan Callahan.

The room announced itself the moment the door opened—unmistakably his.

A hearth burned low and steady, casting warm light across the stone. A heavy desk sat near the wall beneath a collection of maps and neatly stacked papers.

And then there was the bed.

It was massive.

Wide enough for a man of his size and then wider still. Certainly not a narrow garrison cot. I cataloged the details automatically—solid oak frame, reinforced joints, generous proportions.