Thardwin Everheart found the skeleton nailed to the workshop door at first light. Someone had wired the bones upright and pinned a small wooden sign to its ribs. The sign read: I am watching you. Thardwin set down his satchel of river reeds and river stones, the first two components he had gathered for the staff. He had crossed half of Everland to collect them. He would not lose them to a thief on the doorstep. The workshop was a borrowed tower with narrow windows and a runed door, loaned to him by an old teacher who no longer climbed its stairs. Thardwin had chosen it because the walls were thick and the stairs were few. He was trying to forge a staff that could channel the natural magic of Everland itself, and he needed a place to keep the pieces safe while he worked. The skeleton on the door told him the place was no longer secret. The thief had been trailing him since the salt flats, and now the thief wanted him afraid. Thardwin did not wait. He pulled the bones down, carried them inside, and set them on his workbench beside the reeds. Then he climbed to the top floor and opened the shutter that faced the road. He could see a figure at the tree line, half hidden, watching the tower. Thardwin lit a lamp in the window so the figure would know he had been seen. Then he went back down and prepared a trap. He laid the reeds in plain view on the ground floor table, near the door. He hid the river stones in a locked chest upstairs. He rubbed a binding sigil into the threshold, one his teacher had drilled into him for years, and he waited in the dark behind the stair. Near midnight the door eased open. A thin man stepped through, reached for the reeds, and crossed the sigil. The binding snapped shut around his ankles and dropped him flat. Thardwin came down the stairs with his knife drawn and took the man's tools, his map, and the knife at his belt. He walked the thief to the road at dawn and told him to leave the kingdom. The thief limped off without a word. Thardwin burned the skeleton and the watching sign in the yard. The reeds and stones were safe, and he had two components secured. But the map in his hand was not a thief's map. It was drawn in a careful hand, marked with the sites of every remaining component he needed, and sealed at the corner with a small purple mark he had seen once before, on a poisoned cup in the capital. The thief had not been working alone. Madness Everthorn knew about the staff.

Thardwin slept two hours and woke before dawn with the map still on the workbench. The purple seal in the corner had not changed overnight. Madness Everthorn knew the tower. She had sent one man and she would send more. The runed door and the thick walls had bought him a night. They would not buy him a week. He rolled the map, tied it to the reeds and stones, and started packing the workshop before the sun cleared the ridge. He worked fast. He wrapped the two components in oilcloth and stacked his tools in a single crate. He left the heavy books. He left the copper basin his teacher had loved. He wrote a short note for the old man and pinned it inside the door where no thief would think to look. Then he stepped outside to check the yard one last time. At the edge of the yard, near the wood line, someone had driven a fresh stake into the ground. A small board hung from it by two nails. The board read, in the same blocky hand as before, I am watching you. Beneath the letters, a row of tiny bone figures had been carved into the wood, twenty or thirty of them, shoulder to shoulder, spears raised. A promise of what was coming next. Thardwin pulled the stake up, broke it across his knee, and threw both halves into the ash pit. He took the back path down from the tower and cut east through the orchards. He knew where he was going. Two valleys over, behind a collapsed manor wall, there was a walled garden his teacher had once shown him. A fountain, a stone bench, a gate hidden behind ivy. No one had tended the place in years. The wall was high and the ivy was thick, and the gate could be locked from inside. It was not a workshop. It could be made into one. He reached the garden by midday. He forced the gate, dragged it shut behind him, and set the crate down by the fountain. The water still ran. He cleared a flat stone near the wall and laid out the reeds and the stones side by side. He drew a fresh binding sigil across the inside of the gate, deeper than the one he had used on the thief. Then he sat on the bench and made himself eat. His hands were shaking and he needed them steady. The tower was gone to him now. He could not go back for the books or the basin. But the two components were safe, the map was safe, and Madness Everthorn's next agent would climb an empty stair. Thardwin unrolled the map on the flat stone and set a pebble on the nearest mark. A river cave, four days east. He had one place to hide and one direction to walk. That was enough to start.