Sable Thornwick tuned the battered lute on her knee and watched the door of the brick cottage, waiting for the one villager who would not come. Three settlements had gone quiet in the last month. No bodies. No burn marks. No broken doors. She had walked Edenmoor herself, four days after it fell silent, and found nothing but cold hearths and unfinished bread. Marshbrick would be next. She was sure of it. She had come here with a lute on her back and a dagger under her cloak, and the villagers thought she only wanted a hot meal. She had sung two warnings already this week, tucked inside old ballads. Nobody heard them. To hear them, she first had to know who was missing from the room — because in Edenmoor and the two after, one name was always absent when the silence came. She just didn't know which name. Tonight she meant to fix that. The common room filled. A trapper stamped mud off his boots. Two weavers argued about thread. The miller's wife brought her a bowl of stew and would not take a coin. Sable counted heads against the names she had gathered all week from the well and the market. Twenty-three. She was short four. She played a slow tune to buy time, silver fur catching the firelight, and let her eyes move across the room. Then she asked, mild as the song, where the carter was tonight. The miller's wife said he was on the road to Edenmoor with a load of salt. Sable's fingers slipped on the string. "He goes every week?" she asked. "Every week for a year. He carries for all four villages." Sable set the lute down. "Do you keep his papers?" The woman fetched a stack from behind the bar. Sable spread the top sheet on the table. It was a delivery manifest, signed that morning in a bold, practiced hand. She turned it, and the one beneath, and the one beneath that. The carter had signed out of every settlement the night before it fell silent. Weld's Ford. Ashenby. Edenmoor. Each date matched. Each signature was the same neat loop. She folded the top sheet into her cloak. Her hand was steady now. "Where does he sleep when he's in Marshbrick?" she asked. "The room above the stable. He'll be back by dawn." Sable smiled and picked up the lute again. She played something bright, so the room would remember her as harmless. Under the table, her other hand rested on the hilt of the dagger. She had a name now. She had the pattern. And she had until sunrise before the man who had emptied three villages walked back through the cottage door, expecting a singer and a bowl of stew.