Diaspor woke to the sound of wings — three distinct hums cutting through the pre-dawn quiet. He didn't move. He counted the circling patterns above his camp, mapped their orbits, and confirmed what his body already knew. The scouts had found him. Nightshade was close now. Hours, not days. He slid his hand to the golden sword lying beside the lavender bedroll. The bushes overhead had concealed him through the night, but concealment meant nothing now. The falconbees circled tighter, their gold-striped bodies catching the first pale light. They weren't attacking. They were marking. Reporting. Leading their master straight to him. Diaspor rose in one smooth motion and kicked dirt over the bedroll. Near the edge of camp, something black caught his eye — a withered plant with curled petals that shouldn't have been there yesterday. Golden mist hung around it like breath. Nightshade's calling card. A message that she knew exactly where he was and wanted him to know it too. He strapped the amethyst amulet tight against his chest and checked the blade's weight. Two weeks of leading her northeast, and now the chase collapsed into hours. Good. He was done running. The next time Nightshade found him, one of them would stop breathing, and the library's location would stay buried or finally be safe. He looked up at the circling scouts and let them see him clearly. Let them bring her.

By midmorning, Diaspor had turned the small clearing into a trap. He'd scraped lines in the dirt, bent the grass into false trails, and chosen the tree he'd put his back against when Nightshade came. The bushes hid him again, but this time as a hunter, not as prey. He crouched low, sword across his knees, and waited. The scouts had drifted off to fetch her. The air felt thin and ready. Then, from the wrong direction, footsteps — fast, stumbling, careless. Someone else was coming into his ground. A small fae burst through the brush and fell to her knees on the cracked crystal floor of the old stone ring. Her wings were torn. Leaves clung to her hair. She was seelie — light-born, harmless, and running from something he couldn't see yet. A silver coin slipped from her hand and rang against the stone. The sound carried. Diaspor's jaw locked. The coin's hum would reach the scouts the moment they circled back. She had stumbled into the exact center of his killing ground. He had seconds. Stay hidden, and Nightshade would arrive to find easy prey waiting on the stones — another body added to his ledger. Move, and he'd give away the trap he had spent the morning building. Diaspor rose from the bushes. He crossed the clearing in three strides, clamped a hand over the fae's mouth, and dragged her behind the tree he'd chosen for himself. He scooped up the humming coin and pressed it into her palm, folding her fingers shut. "Quiet," he whispered. "Don't move. Don't shine." The wings came back overhead a breath later — three of them, circling lower, drawn by the sound. Diaspor pressed the fae into the roots and stood up clean into the open, sword raised so the scouts could see him plainly. They locked on him and climbed away fast toward their master. He had given up his hiding place to save a stranger. The trap was still set, but now Nightshade would come knowing exactly where he stood, and there was a seelie at his back he would have to keep alive through it.

The scouts were gone, but the clearing felt smaller now. Diaspor knelt beside the fae and checked her wings. She was shaking. Her lips moved, and he leaned close to catch the words. She had run from Nightshade's camp, she whispered. She knew where the hunter would sleep tonight. Diaspor's hand tightened on the hilt of his sword. The trap he had built that morning suddenly looked like the wrong plan. He carried her to the edge of the stones and laid her against a pale, dead tree. Glowing lavender sap pooled at its roots, lighting her face from below. She traced a map in the wet sap with one shaking finger — a bend in a river, a ridge, a hollow where Nightshade would sleep without her swarm. Diaspor memorized every line. Then her hand fell still in the glow. He pressed two fingers to her throat and found nothing. He stood up slowly. The ambush was finished before it began. Tonight he would not wait for Nightshade to come to him. He would walk into her camp and end it while she slept. He gathered stones and built a low cairn over the fae beneath the glowing tree. The sap held her map a moment longer, then sank into the dirt. He spoke no words over her. He had no right to them. Instead he checked the edge of his sword and turned north, following the lines she had drawn from memory — river bend, ridge, hollow. By dusk he found the place. A charred alcove curved from the rock, its inner walls smooth and ringed with soft lavender moss. A bedroll lay inside. No swarm hung above it. No fire burned. Diaspor crouched in the brush and watched the empty mouth of the shelter. The trap was gone. The hunt was his now. He would be inside that alcove before she returned, and his sword would be waiting in the dark.

Diaspor settled into the dark of the alcove and laid his sword across his knees. The moss glowed faintly under him. He watched the mouth of the shelter and counted his breaths. Outside, the dusk thickened into something wrong. Pale flowers along the rocks began to glow too brightly, and a soft mist crept between the trees, lit by light that did not match the moon. The grove outside was waking up to announce her. Then the sound came. A low hum, then a rising drone. Black and gold bodies poured from the trees and stitched themselves across the alcove's mouth. The falconbees layered in tight rows, wings beating in time, stingers pointed inward. Within seconds the entrance was a living wall, striped and humming, sealing him inside. She had come early. She had sent them ahead. The trap had folded over on him. Diaspor stood. He pressed one hand to the amulet under his shirt — the twilight-grove piece he had carried since the library fell, the thing that held the last clean map of every door he had sworn to guard. His thumb found the seam. One hard twist and the stone would crack. He would not let her pull it from a corpse. He breathed out slowly and waited until he heard her footsteps approach the swarm. Then he drove his thumb down and broke it. The amulet split in his palm with a small, dry sound, and its light went out. The hum at the entrance changed pitch, as if the swarm felt it. Diaspor closed his fist around the shards and lifted his sword. He was sealed in. He was unarmed of the one thing she wanted. Whatever walked through that wall of wings next would meet only him, and only steel.

The shards bit into Diaspor's palm as the swarm's hum dropped to a low, waiting drone. Outside, the glowing grove brightened around something moving through it. He could see her shape now, walking the soft stream path between luminous flowers and pale trees. She did not hurry. She did not even raise a hand. The falconbees parted for her like water. They peeled away from the alcove's mouth in two clean arcs, stingers turning outward, and let her step through without breaking stride. Her dark robes brushed their wings. Not one bee touched her. The wall that had sealed him in opened for her as if it had always meant to. Behind her, on the open ground of the grove, a ring of dark amethyst stones had risen from the soil. They stood in a tight circle, carved with small moons and stars, pulsing faint violet. She had set her place before she ever reached him. The hunt was already over in her mind. Diaspor's free hand went to his chest before he could stop it — to the seam of his shirt, to where the broken pieces of the twilight-grove amulet still lay warm against his skin. He felt the dull, dead weight of them. No light. No map. And he saw her eyes flick to his hand and then away, bored, unsurprised. She already knew. She had known before she stepped through the wings. She had not come for the stone. He lowered his hand slowly and lifted the golden sword instead. The shards he let fall. They clicked against the moss at his boots, small and finished. She stopped at the edge of her stone circle and smiled, and Diaspor understood, cold and clear, that she had come for him.

Diaspor planted his boots on the moss and lifted his golden sword. Beneath his feet, a slow spiral of pale lavender light turned in the floor, sparks drifting up through it like dust through a sunbeam. He had not noticed it before. It was waking now because she had come. She stepped into her ring of stones and began to speak low words. The violet pulse of the stones brightened. Diaspor moved to charge her — and the spiral under his boots flared. The ground cracked. Black roots shot up around him, twisted and thick, lifting a great spike of amethyst with a citrine heart burning at its center. The roots caught her ritual stones and tore them sideways out of the soil. Her chant broke into a hiss. Beyond the alcove mouth, the glowing grove answered too. A willow with deep purple leaves bent low, its hanging strands brushing the ground like fingers. From between its roots a heavy shape padded out into the light. Purple scales. Yellow eyes older than the trees, older than her stones, older than any door he had ever guarded. It looked at her, not at him. The hunter stumbled back from her broken circle, her dark robes catching on the new roots. The falconbees rose in a frantic cloud, confused, their wall at the alcove mouth coming apart. The grove had been built over something, and that something was awake. Diaspor did not understand it. He only saw the gap. He ran through the broken ring, past her reaching hand, between two startled bees, and out into the wet grass beyond the willow. He did not stop running until the glow was behind him and his lungs burned. He had not killed her. He had lost his one chance at her sleeping throat, and his trap before that, and now this. But he was alive, and free, and somewhere back in the grove an old thing with yellow eyes was holding her in place. He turned north into the dark and kept moving. The hunt was not over. It had only changed shape.

Diaspor walked north through the wet dark for hours. The grove's glow faded behind him. He kept his sword low and his eyes on the ground, watching for sign of the falconbee scouts. Near dawn he found one. A smear of bioluminescent purple on a leaf. He knelt and touched it. The smear pointed south. He followed it slow, sword ready. The trail curved through ferns and then he saw the hive. Dark tendrils woven into a tall, twisted shape, small windows glowing yellow inside it. The falconbees had built it at the pivot point. They had given up his northern trail. They had turned around here and gone back the way he had come. He pushed past the hive and the truth hit him harder with each step. He knew this moss. He knew that split stone. Ahead, a black-stoned pool held still lavender water, ringed by pale seelie blooms. He had drunk from it eight days ago. He had washed Kess's blood off his hands in it. The pool showed him his own face twice over now — once then, once now, thinner. The path climbed a few worn steps to a stone arch swallowed in violet flowers. He had passed under it before without looking. He looked now. Two weeks of leading her northeast, and the falconbees had cut the lie in half. They were not chasing him north anymore. They were sweeping back across ground he had already burned, and every camp he had left, every print he had pressed into the moss, was a map laid out for her. His misdirection was dead. He turned and started back toward his old trail, to erase what he could before she read it.

Diaspor backtracked along his own ruined trail until the hive rose again through the ferns. He stopped at the treeline and watched. No swarm moved at the windows. No scouts cut the air. On the moss before the hive, a faint shimmer hung in the shape of an arch — a residue of dark passage, sparkling at its center where she had stepped through and gone. Nightshade was not here. He had one window. He crouched and studied the twisted tendrils. Near the base, the woven roots gaped open into a black hollow, ringed by pale yellow blooms. A gap the swarm had left unguarded because the swarm was not home. He could see straight up into the hive's hollow throat from there. From his pack he drew the torch he had bound days ago — pitch and pine-sap wrapped tight in lavender cloth. He struck flint to it. The flame caught yellow and tall, brighter than the hive's windows. He pulled his yellow scarf up over his mouth and walked in low. He shoved the torch deep into the root hollow and held it there. The dry tendrils caught at once. Fire climbed the inner walls in quick yellow lines. A few stranded falconbees dropped from the upper combs, burning. He backed out and watched the twisted shape sag, then fold, then collapse inward in a roar of sparks. The pivot point of her hunt was gone. Then the shimmer-arch on the moss pulsed once, hard. The starlit center brightened. She had felt it. She was turning back. Diaspor lowered the spent torch and faced the trembling gate, sword drawn, knowing he had bought the kill — and called her down on himself in the same breath.

The arch pulsed again, faster than he had counted on. Diaspor planted his feet on the scorched moss, golden sword raised, flames still licking the blade from the burning hive at his back. Knees bent, shoulders square, every line of him aimed at the trembling gate. He had wanted minutes. He was getting seconds. She stepped through with a dark sphere already cradled in her free hand, amethyst light coiling inside it like smoke caught in glass. Her dagger hung loose. Her eyes found the wreckage, then him, and her mouth went thin. "You burned it," she said. "I felt every cell of it go." He did not answer. He charged. She lifted the sphere and crushed it against her palm. The amethyst smoke poured out in a low wave, and where it touched the ground, ferns blackened and curled. It caught his legs below the knee. Cold bit through his boots. His charge stuttered. He swung anyway. The golden blade clipped her sleeve, drew a thin line of blood along her forearm, and her dagger answered, opening his shoulder to the bone. He staggered back through the smoke and ran. The trees closed around him, the hive roaring behind, her voice rising after him calm and certain: "I know what you did now, Diaspor. I will take it out of you piece by piece." He pressed his good hand to the wound and kept moving. The hive was ash. She was wounded. He was bleeding and named and hunted in full daylight, and the kill was further away than it had been at dawn.

Diaspor ran until the trees blurred and his boots dragged. Blood from his shoulder soaked his pale yellow sleeve and ran down to his fingers. He found a low opening in pale stone, a shadowed mouth ringed in hanging vines, and braced himself against its cold wall. He pressed cloth to the wound and listened. No wings. No voice. The forest had gone quiet behind him, and that was new. He understood it slowly. She had not followed. He had cut her arm before he ran, and she was bleeding too. Somewhere out there she had been forced to stop. He pictured her sinking against a trunk, that dark dagger across her knees, the amethyst at its hilt dull with her own blood on the blade. The thought sharpened him. This was the window. He would never get another. He pushed off the stone and tracked back along his own trail. Drops of his blood pointed the way. Then, beside a broken fern, he found a different smear — darker, not his. He followed it until the trees parted around a willow with lavender branches hanging to the ground. A red handprint was pressed into its bark, fingers splayed wide. She had leaned there. She was close. He parted the curtain of branches with the flat of his golden blade. She sat in the hollow of the roots, robe pulled open at the forearm, binding the cut he had given her. The dark dagger lay beside her hip, its gem dim, just out of her reach. Her falconbees were not with her. She had outrun them too. Her red eyes lifted to his and did not widen. She only smiled, tired, almost glad. He stepped in and swung. She rolled. The blade bit deep into the root where her throat had been. She caught the dagger left-handed and drove it up under his ribs as she came to her knees. He felt the cold open inside him. He twisted the golden sword free and brought it down again, and this time it met her shoulder and broke her grip on the hilt. The dagger fell into the moss between them. They both stared at it. He kicked it away. She lunged for it anyway and he ran her through. She folded over the blade without a sound, one hand closing on his wrist, the other reaching past him toward nothing. Her weight pulled him down to his knees with her. The willow's branches closed around them both. When he could move again, he pulled the sword free and she did not get up. The hunter was dead. Her dagger lay in his blood and hers, and somewhere far off, he heard the first confused wingbeat of a swarm without a master.

Diaspor pulled his golden sword from the hunter's body and stepped back from the willow roots. His own blood ran warm down his side. He pressed a hand to the wound and turned to walk away. The hunt was over. He could go south now, find a healer, find the council, confess. He took one step. Then another. The forest behind him began to hum. He turned. The falconbees were coming, not in a scattered panic but in a tight, ordered cloud. They poured down through the lavender branches and settled over the dead woman's body. They wove themselves across her in layers, wings and striped bodies knitting tight, until her shape was hidden under a dark velvet shroud of pressed petals and humming wings. He waited for them to break apart and fly. They did not. One falconbee lifted from the shroud. It carried something in its legs — a small wheel of gold and lavender that had hung at the dead woman's throat, etched with looping symbols, faintly glowing. The bee flew straight to him. The rest of the swarm rose with it and began to circle. They did not sting. They did not dive. They orbited him slowly, patient, choosing. He stood very still in his pale yellow and lavender, blond hair stuck to his face with blood, and watched the small gold wheel hover near his chest like it was waiting to be worn. He did not take it. He turned his sword in his hand and walked. The swarm followed, the wheel-bearer at its heart, matching his pace through the trees. He had killed their master and they had answered by choosing him. The hunt was not over. It had only changed hands. He walked south with a crown of wings he had not asked for, and understood he would have to find a way to break them before he could ever confess.

Diaspor walked south with the swarm at his back and his wound bleeding fresh through the lavender cloth. By midday he could no longer hide the shake in his legs. He smelled woodsmoke and crushed herbs, and pushed through the brush toward it. A small lavender stone pavilion stood in a clearing, its arched door curtained with a shimmering membrane. A small winged fae with leaf-green clothes and wary gold eyes stepped out, a poultice already in her hands. She saw the cloud above him and stopped cold. She knelt and tore a ring of bee balm flowers from a basket at her hip, pressing the blooms into the dirt in a wide circle around her feet. "I will treat you," she called, "but not while they hover. The ring holds them. You must come alone, or I cannot help." Diaspor looked up. The swarm orbited him in slow, patient rings, the gold wheel still drifting near his chest. Three scouts broke loose and circled lower, striped bodies bright against the sky, watching him decide. If he sent the swarm off, they would only return. If he stayed inside their crown, he would bleed out in the grass. He drew his golden sword and drove it point-down into the earth between himself and the flower ring. Then he lifted the gold wheel from the air and closed his fist around it. "Hold," he said, low and even. "Wait beyond the trees. Do not follow." The swarm shuddered. For a long breath he thought they would not obey. Then they peeled back in a long dark ribbon and settled into the high branches, eyes on him, silent. He stepped over the bee balm ring and dropped to his knees. The healer's small hands moved fast, packing the wound, binding it tight. She would not look at the wheel in his fist. "They know your voice now," she whispered. "That is worse than a sting." Diaspor closed his eyes. He was alive. He was their master in truth. And the confession he owed had just grown a swarm-shaped wall around it.

The healer finished her last knot and looked east, where the sky had gone pale. "Dawn patrol sweeps this ground," she whispered. "They will see the amulet at your throat and the swarm in the trees. Go now, or be taken." Diaspor pulled his sword from the dirt and stood, but his legs would not run. He made the treeline and no farther. A ring of pale standing stones rose from the grass ahead, and a winged guard in shimmering armor dropped from the sky into its center. Her blade caught the first light. Two more landed behind him. "Stranger," she said, "that pendant is unseelie work. Kneel." Diaspor weighed the swarm in the high branches. One word would bring them down on her. One word would end every chance he had to confess. He let the golden sword fall and went to his knees inside the stones. The guard spoke a soft phrase, and pale yellow light wrapped his wrists in glowing bands that held without chain or rope. "Who sent you?" she asked. Diaspor lifted his head and met her eyes. "No one," he said. "I came to give myself up. Take me to your council." The guard's wings stilled. She had expected a fight, not a confession. She nodded once to the others, and they lifted him between them, bound and silent, into the rising day.

The guards carried Diaspor through the rising day and set him down before a hall of lavender stone. Gold scrollwork crawled up its columns. A round door of pale wood stood open at the top of three shallow steps. The bands of yellow light still held his wrists. Behind him, high in the canopy, the swarm followed and settled in the boughs without a sound. The guards exchanged a look at that. One of them pressed a palm to his back and walked him inside. The council waited in a half ring on a raised floor of polished stone. Five fae, crowned, wings stilled, robes of gold and lavender pooling at their feet. The oldest at the center lifted one finger and the guards stepped back. Diaspor knelt where the floor was marked by a circle of inlaid gold. He could feel the swarm outside the walls, a low hum through the stone. The council heard it too. Every face hardened. He told it plain. He named himself a Guardian of the library. He named Kess and how she died. He named the two weeks of false trail, the burned hive, the fight in the willow roots. From inside his coat he drew the shattered pendant and laid it on the gold circle. Purple and black shards, the chain snapped, the center cracked through. "Proof," he said. "The hunter is dead. I killed her." The oldest councillor leaned forward and touched one shard with a fingertip. She drew her hand back as if burned. "And the swarm in our trees?" she asked. "They chose you. We hear it. Unseelie work answers to your voice." Diaspor kept his eyes on the floor. "They followed her. When she fell, they followed me. I did not ask for it." A younger councillor stood. "That is no answer. A Guardian does not wear an unseelie crown. Sever the bond before this hall, or we brand you unseelie and you leave these stones in chains." The oldest nodded once. "Choose, Aspenwind. Now." Diaspor lifted his head. He thought of the hum in the trees, the gold wheel pendant heavy at his belt, the only leash that kept the swarm from the villages between here and the coast. He thought of Kess. "I cannot sever it yet," he said. "If I cast them off untethered, they will hunt where they please. Brand me, if that is your law. But let me hold them until I find the way to end them. Then I will come back and stand for whatever sentence you set." The hall went still. The oldest councillor raised her hand, and pale yellow light bloomed across his chest and burned a mark there through cloth and skin. "Unseelie," she said. "Go. Do not return until the swarm is gone." The guards cut his bonds and set him outside the door, the swarm rising from the trees to meet him.

Diaspor walked out of the council hall with the brand still hot under his shirt. The guards did not follow. The swarm rose from the canopy and trailed him at a height, a low cloud that moved when he moved. He kept to the road for an hour, then left it when the first traveler crossing the other way saw the cloud and turned back. He cut into the trees. The mark on his chest pulled at the cloth with every step. By midday he had eaten the last of his bread and drunk the last of his water, and the swarm had killed nothing he could touch without claiming it as theirs. He found a trading post by a bend in the path. White boards, gold trim, lavender at the windows. A green door stood half open. He stopped at the edge of the yard and lifted his hand to the swarm. They climbed higher and went quiet in the branches above the roof. He crossed the yard with his palms open and the gold wheel pendant tucked deep in his coat. A tall fae in a gray cloak stepped out before he reached the steps. She did not speak. She crossed her arms and looked at his chest, where the brand showed through the thin cloth. Her eyes moved up to the trees and back to him. A second fae came around the corner of the building, small and round, mouth set, and planted himself in front of the door. He pointed at the road behind Diaspor and held the point until Diaspor lowered his eyes. "Water," Diaspor said. "I will pay. I will not come inside." The tall one shook her head once. "The brand carries. The swarm carries. You bring both to my door." She uncrossed her arms only to gesture at the path. "Go. We will not sell to you. No house on this road will." The small fae did not move from the door. Diaspor set a coin on the lowest step anyway, because he had said he would pay, and turned back to the road. Further on, at a fork where three stones leaned together, a thin fae in red waited with one finger raised. Wings like burnt paper. Antlers of dead wood. He pointed down the lesser path, the one that ran east into open country, away from the villages. Diaspor stopped. The fae did not lower his hand. Behind him, half hidden in the brush, two more watched without moving. Diaspor took the path he was pointed to. The swarm shifted in the trees and followed. He walked until the sun dropped and the road thinned to a track. He had no water, no bread, no roof. He had the swarm, the brand, and a direction chosen by someone else. He sat down where the track ended at a dry creek and pulled the gold wheel pendant from his coat. The hum in the trees answered the moment he touched it. He would have to feed them soon, or learn what they did when he did not.

Diaspor sat at the dry creek until the swarm's hum changed pitch above him. He stood and followed the track east because there was nothing else to follow. The path turned to cracked stone under a thin lavender dusk. Dead branches leaned over it. No fae walked beside him. The brand on his chest pulled at the cloth with every step, and the swarm moved with him in a low cloud, black bodies banded gold, hooked beaks glinting when they turned. He counted them once and stopped at eighty. He had no plan for eighty mouths. By the second night the swarm had built without asking him. He came around a bend and found a tree split open at the base, its trunk twisted into a tall purple shell. Yellow grubs filled the hollows. Falconbees crawled the bark in slow rings. The hive stood three times his height. He had not chosen the place. They had. He understood then that the bond ran the other way too: they would anchor where he walked, and every step he took would plant another hive behind him. Nightshade's hunt was not finished. It was only his to carry. He sat against a rock across from the hive and pulled the gold wheel pendant from his coat. The hum rose. He turned the pendant in his fingers and tried what the council had ordered him to try. He spoke the dismissal the healer had taught him. The swarm pressed lower. He raised his voice and ordered them to scatter, to go, to leave him. They circled tighter. One landed on his wrist and did not sting. He understood the answer. They would not be sent. They had chosen. He drew his sword and laid it across his knees. He thought about the blade across his own throat. The swarm would scatter then, the way he had once believed they would scatter when he killed their master. But he had promised himself an order: survive, confess, account. He had done the second. The third was still owed. He could not pay it dead. He sheathed the sword. He pressed the pendant flat against the brand on his chest and held it there until the metal warmed. "Then you come with me," he said. "All of you. Until I find what cuts this." The hum settled into one low note. He took it as agreement, or as a leash he had just accepted on both ends. He stood at dawn and walked east again. The hive stayed where it was, a marker behind him on the forsaken path. The swarm rose and followed in formation, unwanted, unshakable, his. He had failed to disperse them. He had decided instead to keep them, and to keep walking, until someone living or dead could tell him how to end what Nightshade had begun.

Diaspor walked east for three days with the swarm at his back and no name for what he was looking for. He had no map to Nightshade's home. He had only the bond. He held the gold wheel pendant in his palm as he walked and watched the swarm. When the path forked, he stopped and let them choose. They drifted left without hesitation, then right at the next split, then straight through a break in the bramble that he would have missed. The pendant warmed when he turned the way they wanted. He understood. Whatever leash he had accepted, it could be pulled both ways. He let the swarm lead him to the place that had made them. The land changed before the house did. The trees along the path bent at the wrong angles. Bark turned black and shone with a dull purple sheen. One tree near the trail had no leaves at all, only thorned branches twisted up like clawed fingers, its roots cracking the stone beneath it. He set his hand against the trunk and felt the hum of the swarm answer through the wood. The curse was already here. It had been here longer than he had been alive. He understood then that he had not brought the rot east. He had only come home to its source. The entrance stood at the end of a low hollow. A single pale tree leaned over the path, its branches webbed thick with smaller limbs. Set deep in the bark, watching him, were eyes. A dozen of them, yellow and slit-pupiled, blinking out of order. They tracked him as he stepped past. None of them moved otherwise. The swarm did not enter the hollow. They settled in the dead trees behind him and went quiet for the first time in days. He drew his sword and walked under the watching tree alone. The house was small and built into a rise of stone. The door hung open. Inside, the air smelled of cold ash and old iron. He found a cot, a basin, a rack of dried herbs he did not recognize. On a low table at the back wall sat a book. Dark leather, purple along the spine, a star of pale stones set into the cover. He opened it. The first pages listed names. Some were crossed out. Kess was crossed out. His own name was on the next page, not crossed out, followed by columns of small careful notes — places he had slept, fae he had spoken to, the date she had first set the falconbees on his trail. Further in, the writing changed. Diagrams of the bond. The pendant. The hive. A method for binding the swarm to a chosen master, and beneath it, in the same patient hand, a method for cutting that bond. He sat down on the floor with the book across his knees and began to read.

Diaspor read the journal twice before he accepted what it told him. The cutting spell was clear. The hand was patient. It listed the words, the circle, the pendant placement, the cut across the master's palm. It listed one ingredient he did not know: a scale from a living drake, given freely. He read the line three times. Given freely. Not taken. He closed the book and sat with his back against the cold wall and thought about who in the east still kept company with drakes. He came up with one name. He had heard it years ago in the library, spoken low. A scholar who lived in a cave and traded knowledge to those who could pay. Drake Darkwing. Diaspor stood, tucked the journal under his arm, and walked back out past the watching tree. The swarm rose from the dead branches and followed him. It took him a day and a half to find the cave. He followed the bond loose this time, letting the swarm trail behind, asking the few travelers he passed if they knew the name. Most turned away from the brand on his sleeve and the cloud at his back. One old fae pointed east without speaking. He walked east. The land kept its sickness for a while, then thinned. By the second dusk he came up a slope of black stone and saw the entrance set into the hill: an arch of dark lavender rock, smoothed by water or by hand. A creature crouched at the mouth of it. A lion's body, gold from nose to tail, wings folded high. It did not move when he stopped. Its eyes followed him. Past the gryphon, set into the cliff face above the arch, a dragon had been carved into the obsidian — coiled, fanged, longer than the cave was tall. A warning to anyone who could read it. Diaspor laid his sword on the ground in front of the gryphon and walked under the arch with empty hands. The cave narrowed, then opened. A black-scaled drake lay on a stone shelf at the back, purple along the wings, one yellow eye open. He did not rise. "You brought a swarm to my door," he said. "They follow me. I came to ask about a scale." The drake's eye did not move. "Whose." "Yours. Or any drake willing. The book says it must be given." "Show me the book." Diaspor stepped forward and set the journal on the stone. The drake read without touching it. He read for a long time. When he looked up, his voice was lower. "This is her hand. I knew her work. The spell is real. The scale is the easy part." He flexed one wing and a single black scale dropped onto the page, edged in violet. "Given. Take it." Diaspor picked it up. It was warm. He started to thank him, but the drake spoke first. "The cut on your palm closes the bond. It will also close something in you. She wrote that part down too. Read further before you cast it." He lowered his head onto his foreleg and closed the yellow eye. "Go. And do not come back with them at your back." Diaspor walked out past the gryphon, picked up his sword, and started west with the scale wrapped in cloth against his chest. He had what he came for. He also had a warning he had not asked for, and a page of the journal he had not yet read.