Aldric Vane hunched over his books and muttered the names of men he once trusted. The temple had banished him for a crime he never committed. Somewhere behind its locked doors sat the records that could prove it. He needed those records. He had no way back inside. "It was one of the three," he told the old phoenix on the shelf. The bird ruffled its greying feathers and blinked one amber eye. Aldric tapped a page. "The senior keeper had the keys. But the archivist knew the charge before it was read." He crossed out a name, then wrote it again. The phoenix said nothing useful, which was its habit. A knock rattled the cottage door. Aldric did not move. The knock came again, softer, and a voice followed it. "Aldric. Please. It's Lunara." He knew that voice. Lunara Silvercoat was the young wolfkin priest he had once taught. He had already broken temple law once for her, sharing the moonstone tablet with its missing verses. He opened the door. She stood in her white robes, ears flat, mud caked to her paws. She had been running. "The rite failed," she said. "The grove is half-hallowed. It isn't safe. I said every verse from the tablet, exactly as you gave them." Her hands shook. "Something is still missing." Aldric's throat went dry. He knew what was missing. The consecration required a living offering, blood given freely. No text said so. He had learned it in the temple archive, years ago, from the same records now locked away from him. He should have sent her off with an answer and closed the door. Instead he pulled his cloak from its hook. "The old shrine near the grove," he said. "There's a stair beneath it. It connects to the temple undercroft." He had used it as a boy. "The records I need are down there. If I go with you to the grove, I can reach them." Lunara's ears lifted. "You'd be caught." "I'll be caught anyway, sitting here." He took the moonstone tablet from the table and pressed it into her hands. "Bring this. You'll finish your rite tonight, and I'll find my proof." The phoenix hopped to his shoulder and gripped tight. They walked out into the cold. At the abandoned shrine, Aldric found the stair exactly where his memory kept it, choked with fallen stone. He cleared it and climbed down. The passage opened into the temple undercroft. His hand found the records shelf by feel. He pulled the ledger free and read by the phoenix's faint glow. The charge against him was signed. He saw the name and his stomach turned. Not the keeper. Not the archivist. The name belonged to the one man who had defended him at the trial. Aldric climbed out with the ledger under his arm. He finally had his proof. Now he had to survive the man who wrote it.

The ledger sat open on Aldric's knees as he walked. One name accused him. The same name defended him. He read it a hundred times on the road and still made no sense of it. He needed someone who knew the man's mind. He knew only one person left alive who might. So he left Lunara at the grove and went to find Tomlin. Tomlin Voldonner had taught beside Aldric at the citadel, years ago, before a wasting sickness forced him out. Now he kept bees on the cold edge of Nordfrost and spoke to no one. Aldric found him among the hives, gloved to the elbow, lifting a frame heavy with comb. The old maester did not look up. "You brought that bird," Tomlin said. The phoenix shifted on Aldric's shoulder. "And a ledger you shouldn't have. Both stolen, I'd wager." "I need your reading of a man," Aldric said. He turned the page toward him. "He signed the charge that ruined me. Then he stood at my trial and argued for my life. Tell me why." Tomlin set the frame down. He wiped honey from his glove and studied the signature a long while. "A man does both when he was forced to sign," he said. "He accused you because someone stronger made him. Then he defended you to undo it, quietly, without naming his master." Aldric's chest tightened. "Then he's a coward, not an enemy." "Or a prisoner." Tomlin looked at him over his spectacles. "Guess wrong and you go to him with a knife. He shuts every door. Guess right and he hands you the one who owns him." "I could still be wrong." "You could." Tomlin walked to his hut and returned with a mirror framed in gold and old runes. Aldric knew it. The citadel had used such mirrors to read a witness true. "Speak his name into this under moonlight," Tomlin said. "It shows the last face he feared. That face is your accuser's master." Aldric held the mirror. Its glass caught the pale light and clouded. He said the name from the ledger. The surface swam, then cleared. A woman's face rose in the glass. Red hair. A scar cut across one eye. Tomlin's hand went still. "I know her," he said quietly. "Ishatra Leinne. A Rite-Master, disgraced years back. If she held his leash, she holds far more than that." Aldric lowered the mirror. The confusion was gone, and something colder took its place. His accuser had not hated him. Someone had used the man like a tool. Now he had her name and her face. "She won't be easy to reach," Tomlin said. "And she'll know you're coming the moment you ask a single question." Aldric wrapped the mirror in cloth and tucked the ledger beneath it. "Then I stop chasing the man who signed," he said. "I go after the one who made him."