They came to Willowford under a sky that wanted to be unnoticed. Fog rode the river in broad, lazy bands, and the willows that lined the bridge dipped their hair like old women who'd seen enough to be polite. Kaelen had wrapped his cloak tight and kept his hands empty unless he needed them. He had promised to go alone — a stupid vow that honesty had already shredded — so he brought two things instead: Bria, who could split a man's face and keep the argument fair, and Isolde, who could find a lie and stitch it to a ledger until it bled truth.
"Midnight seems dramatic," Isolde murmured as they stepped onto the old planks. "People who want drama usually mean trouble."
"People who want truth usually mean trouble too," Kaelen said. He kept his voice low; the fog swallowed sound the way winter swallows light. "If this is a trap, I wanted only two witnesses. If it's not, then we don't parade a column we can't afford."
Bria's boots thudded, solid and unadorned. "If it's a trap, I'll make them regret ever choosing wood over water to meet someone." She blinked once, half-smile and full menace, which reassured him more than any paladin's oath.
They waited where the bridge narrowed and the willow's branches scraped the air with thin fingers. A single lantern hung on a post, its flame flat in the damp. The river below gurgled like a man trying to quiet his mother.
A figure came from the dark opposite, shoulders hunched beneath a travel cloak, hands tucked in sleeves. He moved like someone who had learned to be unseen; he moved the way a mendicant counts his coin without a ledger. When he came close enough that Kaelen could see the lines carved around his eyes, he stopped and bowed once — a small, imperfect gesture.
"You came," the man said. His voice had the rasp of someone who'd swallowed smoke for a long time.
"We came," Kaelen said. "Who sent you?"
"No one sent me," the man answered. "A man asked questions at the chapel. He put the questions inside me until I could not sleep. So I came." He waited as if that explained anything. It did not.
Isolde stepped forward, impatience knocking at her tongue. "You could have given a name."
The man's hand went under his cloak and produced, carefully, a small roll of paper. "Names ruin everything," he said, and then he unrolled it. It smelled of old ink and river-water: a page torn from a ledger, neat columns, a line of sums and a signature half-hidden by haste. The name beside the sums was clean enough to sting. Garrin. Below it, in a different hand, a quick scrawl: *for the feast. For silence.*
Bria's mouth made a blade. "So the merchant paid hands."
"And someone else gave coin to the merchant," the man continued. He drew out a second scrap, more private: a note bearing a curl Kaelen knew like a bruise. It matched nothing on court seals he'd seen and yet wore the air of counsel — someone who could make the right people look away. Aldric's hand, Kaelen realized, and then the paper blurred with the same terror that made men's throats tight.
"You say Aldric?" Kaelen asked. "He was dead at the feast."
"He was, and he wrote." The man's shoulders hunched. "Aldric wrote a note to a man who turned it into a promise. Then the note was burned and re-written. They wanted Aldric's blood to be the proof. They wanted Renard to look guilty. They wanted one man to stand accused, so the rest of them could look clean."
Isolde's eyes were small and bright with fury. "That fits too neatly. Who burned the note?"
The man shrugged as if shrugging could sweep the question away. "They burned it with oil that had a smell. Northern oil, thick with pitch. A merchant's special order. They used a device that exploded heat from within a cloth, not a common pyre. They wanted a blast, and someone paid for sound."
Kaelen's head thudded with the pieces. Garrin paid, Aldric's signature moved like a puppet, Renard framed — it stitched a story that made sense for those who wanted war. "Who gains?" he asked. "Who wakes with profit when the city sings of blood?"
The man looked at the water and did not answer. He produced one last thing — a small talon of fur, matted and cheap, no noble trimming. "They had this hidden in the pages, to make someone think it northern. A bait." He let the fur dangle in the lantern light. "But there is something else. A mark on the seam of the cushion in the great hall. A sigil that doesn't belong to a house but to a small order — the Ivory Needle."
Isolde's breath hit like cold. "Ivory Needle?"
"A guild of artisans," the man said. "They make things to people's measures — garments, seals, little things. They are small and supposed to be harmless. Last year they sewed a flag for a caravan heading north. Their master speaks with a voice like shaved glass. He takes commissions for urgent clothes. He is gone since the feast."
Bria spat into the fog and did not bother to hide the sound. "So the trail leads to craftsmen and merchants and a man dead in a chair. Who set them? Did Garrin act alone?"
The man shook his head. "Garrin took coin. He likes coin. But those coins came from a chest with a ledger that matches a merchant out of Redmarsh, which trades often with the North. Far enough south to be plausible, close enough to be convenient. Garrin is a middle hand. The hand feeding the ledger is not Garrin's."
Kaelen felt a cold coil tighten around his ribs. Every new scrap pushed the problem deeper: if the coin came from a northern-friendly chest, if an artisan's sigil was planted to point blame, then someone had engineered the feast to do precisely what it had done—set a man free to be scapegoat, set a northern-friendly scent in the air, and let Roderin have fuel for his Protectorate.
"Who told you these things?" Kaelen asked. The question was small; he wanted a name, a face he could take to the council. The man's head dipped, and for the first time Kaelen saw the ruin in the man's life.
"My sister worked in the great hall," he said. "She sewed for long tables and took scraps. She found a note under a cushion after the feast and kept it. She left it near her bed and a man took her sister in the night and left a knife. The guild master paid coin and told her to go. She told me to leave. She gave me a scrap of thread — and then they came for her too. I have been running."
The fog listened like it had a heart. Kaelen felt suddenly invader and protector both. "Why tell me?"
The man's eyes were bright with something beyond fear. "Because someone used your name for coin at the edge. Because they want you to look weak and dangerous both. Because I'd rather die with the truth on my tongue than wake to another body on my door."
He reached out a shaking hand and pushed a small sealed bundle toward Kaelen. "This is the ledger," he said. "Not full, not all of it — but enough. If you want truth, take it. If you want war, burn it."
Kaelen took the bundle as if it were a live thing. It was heavier than it should be, full of names and scribbles and a careful hand that hid violence with math.
"Who put the mark for the Ivory Needle on the cushion?" Bria asked, fingers already itching at the hilt of her blade. She'd been quiet, like a thing that builds pressure. "Who benefits if Renard hangs?"
The man sucked air and then, almost too soft for the river to carry, said, "A circle. Not a house—less elegant than that. Men who profit when chaos loosens trade: some merchants, a man from the temples who hates Aldric's reforms, a captain in the guard who thought a new crown meant his debt would be cleared."
Before anyone could turn that into a name, a sudden sound — a dry snap, a hiss like a rearing net — came from the far side of the bridge. A bolt thudded into the wood a foot from Kaelen's boot, splinters jumping like startled teeth.
"Trap!" Isolde spat. The man who'd given them the ledger stumbled, startled, and the lantern pitched; its flame flared and guttered low.
Bria moved first, two steps and a blade that took the throat of the dark. She spun and the wool of a cloak flashed. Figures spilled out from under the willows: three, then another couple. Quiet, trained. Not common brigands; these were men with knives meant for clean work.
"You brought company," a voice called, cultured and casual as taking a sip. It carried from under the veil of the willow and made Kaelen think of court rooms and flayed hides. "I expected as much, Prince. Your habit is to bring a show."
"Who are you?" Kaelen demanded. His hand fell to the sword at his hip because he had to make a noise of defiance or the world would swallow him.
A masked figure stepped into the lantern light — not a hood but a precise, artisan's mask, carved with a tiny needle motif. "A concerned citizen," the mask said. The voice was smooth. "A buyer of tidy things. A guardian of commerce."
Bria's blade sang up. Two of the attackers lunged. Bria intercepted and drove a man back into the water's edge. Isolde, quick as a thought, grabbed a knife from her boot and cut at a wrist. Kaelen shouted orders because shouting is sometimes the most commanding thing a man can do.
The fight was brief; practiced hands met practiced hearts. They were not many, but they had the advantage of position. A man with a crossbow tried a careful shot and missed; the string slipped on the damp.
In the scuffle the ledger bundle skittered from Kaelen's grasp and into the mud. The thief nearest it dove and managed to snatch it, springing back toward the willows, but Bria's foot found his flank and he went down with a curse that made the willow shiver. Isolde's hand closed on the ledger and she held it like a woman who had claimed a thing from fate.
A single figure broke toward the lane and ran — masked — and Kaelen saw that the mask was not ordinary. It bore a stitchwork emblem that matched the ivory needle the ledger man had spoken of. The figure's cloak flashed and he was gone into the fog.
They held the bridge and took prisoners: two men with hands that smelled of river-rot and coin, and the injured ledger-man with his bleeding palm. He had been stabbed shallowly, probably meant as lesson rather than to kill; the cut burned black with the river's stink. He was breathing and wide-eyed.
"You must leave," Bria said after the fight as they bound hands. "Take him back to the city. Hide him. We'll come for the ledger."
"No," Kaelen said. For a moment the crown in his throat was the only thing he could feel. "We need him to say everything. The city needs all names and faces. If they run, they'll scatter like rats."
He looked at the ledger — wrapped in mud, its corners ruined but legible where Isolde held it. "And we need proof that the feast was staged."
They argued back and forth like men balancing knives. It was Isolde who made the small, cold decision: "We take the ledger now. We take the man. We go to Varin. He will know how to read what's left."
They carried the wounded man and the ledger back toward the road where a dying lantern smoked and the willow branches swayed as if to whisper gossip. Kaelen kept his eyes on the fog as if it might hide more than attackers — as if it might hide the very shape of his court at home.
Before they were three steps from the bridge, the wounded man's lips moved, and in a voice like river-stones he said, "They said the merchant was a middle hand. They lied. The coin came in a sealed chest with a sigil that looks like the Sun's hand. The hand of the Sun Temple. Not the priests you bow to, but a small cult that calls itself *The Bright Quarter*. If you find the Bright Quarter, you find who wants the crown in shadow."
The words dropped like a stone. The willow leaves made a noise like breath.
Kaelen's heart tightened. The Sun Temple again, the very institution meant to be the house of law and light. If a cult within it had fed this flame, then the war's roots reached into the things he had thought steady.
He tucked the ledger under his cloak and felt its weight like a promise: dangerous, necessary, and not easily kept. They moved toward the city with the wounded man limping between them and a fog that seemed to press close as if telling a secret it didn't mean to keep.
Behind them, in the willow's shadow, something small and precise — a tailor's needle perhaps, or a tiny scrap of ivory — glinted and fell into the black water with a faint, final sound.