Marcus Webb had crossed three borders to reach the man who burned him. Now a corpse was hunting him instead. He crouched in the dead leaves of the Thorngrip woods and listened. Somewhere behind him, hooves scraped bark. Marcus had built a career on charm and lies. He meant to smile his way into the spymaster's trust, then gut the man's network from the inside. But charm meant nothing here. Night had fallen, he had no shelter, and something dead had found his scent. He pressed his back to a trunk and checked his knife. The blade was short. His hands were steady, though his lungs burned from running. He had lost his pack at the river. No fire, no rope, no gun. Just the knife and forty years of knowing how to stay alive. The thing stepped into the clearing. A deer, or what a deer becomes when it stops dying. Its ribs showed white through rotted hide. Its jaw was gone, torn clean away, leaving a black tongue that dripped down its neck. One eye glowed yellow. It swung its head low and sniffed the ground where Marcus had passed. Marcus did not move. He had faced men who wanted him dead. This was simpler and worse. He looked past the deer and saw a strange tree at the clearing's edge. Pale bones grew from its trunk, ribs and skulls woven into the bark. Something about the deer's slow steps told him the animal circled that tree, never touching it, always keeping its distance. So the tree was a border. Prey went in. The dead did not follow. The deer lifted its head and locked its yellow eye on him. Marcus stopped guessing. He ran. Branches cut his face. Behind him the hooves came hard, tearing earth, closing fast. He felt the cold rot of its breath on his neck. Ten steps to the tree. Five. The deer lunged, and its skull cracked against his shoulder. Marcus fell forward into the roots. He rolled, scrambled, and pressed himself between two bone-marked limbs. The deer skidded to a halt an arm's length away. It screamed through its ruined throat, a wet and airless sound. Then it stepped back. It circled once, twice, and would not cross into the bones. Marcus lay against the trunk and breathed. He was alive. He had a wall the dead would not pass. But dawn was hours off, the deer still paced the edge, and the tree offered no way out that did not lead back to the teeth. He wiped blood from his shoulder and thought of the spymaster sleeping warm behind stone walls. First he had to survive the woods that guarded the man's door. Marcus set his back against the bones and watched the yellow eye circle, and he began to plan.

The yellow eye did not blink. Marcus sat in the roots of the bone-tree and watched the jawless deer circle. His body wanted sleep. His shoulder throbbed where the skull had struck him. Dawn was still hours away, and he knew the danger now. If he dozed, he might rise and walk without thinking. His legs would carry him past the bones and into the teeth. The deer seemed to know it too. It had stopped screaming. It only waited. He needed pain to stay awake. Pain was reliable. He pressed his thumb into the cut on his shoulder and hissed. The sting cleared his head for a minute, no more. He would not last the night on cuts alone. He needed a plan, not a wound. Marcus studied the tree behind him. Pale bones grew through the bark. Ribs, long bones, two skulls fixed near the base. The deer feared these bones. He wondered why. Then he wondered if he could carry that fear with him. He worked a loose rib bone free from the trunk. It came away with a dry crack. The deer flinched at the sound and stepped back. Marcus held still, watching. The animal kept its distance from the bone in his hand. Not just the tree. The bones themselves. He pried two more loose and tied them to his forearms with strips cut from his sleeve. He worked slow and kept his eyes on the yellow glare. When he stood, the deer backed away. He took one step past the roots. The dead thing retreated. He took another. It gave more ground. He was moving now, and moving kept him awake. That was the point. He walked the edge of the clearing with bone strapped to each arm, and the deer would not close. His heart steadied. Charm had failed him in these woods. Fear had not. He had found the one thing the dead respected. Gray light touched the treetops. The deer's yellow eye dimmed as the sun climbed. It backed into the brush, turned, and was gone. Marcus stood alone in the wet leaves, still breathing, arms wrapped in bone. He did not drop them. He would need them past the woods. The spymaster waited behind stone walls, and Marcus meant to reach him with a smile and a lie. But first he had to cross ground the dead still walked. He tightened the bindings and started toward the tree line. At the clearing's far edge he found something the deer had left. A worn leather case lay half-buried in the mud, dark stains soaked into the hide. It was not his. It had belonged to someone who had run these woods before him and had not reached the bones in time. Marcus knelt and pulled it free. Whatever was inside, it was a lead. He tucked it under his arm and walked out of Thorngrip into the pale morning.

Marcus reached his safehouse by dusk. The waterfront building sagged on its pilings, plain and gray, the way he liked it. He locked the door, set the bone talismans on the table, and laid the leather case beside them. Blood had dried into the hide. A brass clasp held it shut. He needed to know if it held a lead or nothing before he moved on the spymaster. The clasp resisted his knife. He tried the point, then the flat, then a bent pin from his coat. The lock was old but stubborn. He worked at it for an hour while the tide slapped the pilings below. The pin snapped. Marcus swore and drove his knife under the clasp. Metal screeched. The lock gave. He folded the cover back. Inside were papers. Names, dates, a hand-drawn map of walls he recognized. The spymaster's walls. Someone had been building a case against the man Marcus meant to destroy. This was better than a lead. This was a key. "You always did force locks instead of picking them." Marcus did not turn. He knew the voice. He had trained beside it for six years. Natasha Volkov stood in his doorway, though he had locked that door. She held a small tool between two fingers and smiled. "The window," she said. "You never check the window." He kept his hand near the knife. "You followed me through the woods." "I followed the case." She stepped inside and shut the door with her heel. Her eyes moved to the papers. "That belonged to a man who worked for me. He ran into something in those trees. I came to collect what he carried." Marcus laid his palm flat on the papers. "Finders keep." "He was mine." She crossed the room without hurry. She knew how he stood, which way he would twist, the count before he struck. She had learned it in the same rooms he had. "You want the spymaster. So do I. But you can't read half of that without me. The names are in a cipher we both trained on." Marcus glanced down. She was right. Half the entries were scrambled letters, a code from their old service. He could crack it, given weeks he did not have. "So we share," he said. "We share." She sat across from him, easy, like the years had not passed. "You get inside the walls. I get what the dossier is worth to my people." He watched her hands. She watched his. Neither trusted the other, and both knew it. But the papers were open on the table, and he could not use them alone. Marcus turned the top page toward her. "Read." She leaned in. The lock was broken, the case was open, and the one person who knew all his moves now sat inside his only safe room.