"We go to Isolde," Seraphine said, folding the torn scrap of correspondence away with a finality that left no room for argument.
"Whatever her warning meant, whatever she's hiding, a compromised key in House Thane's hands is a threat bigger than anything my sister might do to either of us. We don't have the luxury of being careful anymore."
Rhys didn't argue. He'd learned enough about her in the last handful of days to recognize when a decision had already been made rather than merely proposed.
They set out for the Duvall seat that same afternoon, the mood between them lighter than it had been since the road two days before, though neither had directly addressed the words exchanged in the heat of that morning. It was Rhys who finally broke the silence, somewhere past midday, tired of carrying the unspoken weight of it.
"I shouldn't have snapped at you the way I did. After the overreach."
"I shouldn't have snapped first." Seraphine kept her eyes on the road ahead, but her voice had softened. "I was frightened, about Isolde, about what the riders meant, and I put that fear on you instead of where it belonged. That wasn't fair."
"You weren't wrong, though. About the risk. I was reckless."
"I wasn't wrong that it was risky. I was wrong to make you feel like the risk mattered more to me than you did." She glanced over at him, something steady and sincere in the look. "It doesn't. You matter more. I'd like that to be clear between us, going forward, so we don't have to keep circling back to it."
Something in Rhys's chest eased at that, a tightness he hadn't fully realized he'd been carrying since that morning. "Understood. Same goes for me."
They walked in silence for a while after that, the kind that no longer felt like something either of them needed to fill. Rhys found himself glancing at her more than once, not out of the old, wary instinct to catalogue her intentions, but simply because the morning's argument, however brief, had left behind a strange, unexpected clarity between them, the sense of having tested something and found it steadier than either had feared.
"Can I ask you something," he said eventually, "that has nothing to do with any of this."
"You can ask."
"Do you regret it? Volunteering for this. Chasing down a rumor about a dead bloodline instead of whatever safer assignment your House would have handed you otherwise."
Seraphine considered it longer than he expected, her gaze fixed on the road ahead. "No," she said finally. "Frightened, certainly. Exhausted, more than I'd like to admit. But not regretful. I think I'd rather be frightened and awake to what's actually happening in this world than comfortable and blind to it, the way most of my House prefers to stay."
"That's a very Duvall answer. Careful and evasive."
"I learned from the best." A faint, genuine smile crossed her face, the first real one he'd seen from her since the wolves.
They walked on in easier quiet after that, and it was nearly an hour later, as the road began its final climb toward House Duvall's seat, that Rhys first felt it, a prickling awareness at the back of his neck that he'd come to recognize as more than simple nerves.
"We're being followed."
Seraphine's hand went to her blade without breaking stride, scanning the tree line with practiced calm. "How sure are you?"
"Sure enough." He reached, carefully, for the sense he'd been learning to trust, the same instinct that had let him feel Bosk's hidden lie, and found something out there in the trees that didn't behave like the raiders from the checkpoint had, no clumsy eagerness, no careless noise. Whatever was tracking them moved like it had done this before, patient and precise. "This isn't like the checkpoint. Whoever it is, they're better at this than the raiders were."
"Thane's real operatives, then, not opportunists borrowing their mark." Seraphine's jaw tightened. "That tracks. Once they confirmed a Duvall heir was traveling with you, sending anything less competent would have been a wasted effort."
They didn't stop moving, didn't give whoever followed the satisfaction of a confrontation on ground they hadn't chosen, and the presence trailing them never closed the distance enough to force one, content, it seemed, simply to watch and report rather than engage. It was almost worse that way, the patient, unhurried nature of it, a reminder that whatever House Thane wanted from Rhys, they weren't in a hurry to take it by force when watching cost them nothing.
Rhys kept reaching back toward the sense every few minutes, unwilling to let the awareness fade even as exhaustion built behind his eyes from the effort of holding it steady. Each time, the presence remained exactly where it had been, neither closing nor retreating, a fixed point trailing them like a shadow that refused to lengthen or shrink no matter how the light changed. It unsettled him more than an outright attack would have. An attack, at least, he understood the shape of.
"They want us to know we're being watched," he said eventually. "Otherwise they'd have stayed better hidden than this."
"A message, then, not a threat. Not yet." Seraphine's expression stayed tight. "That's Thane's particular cruelty, I think. Making certain you feel the weight of being hunted long before they ever intend to close the distance."
The Duvall seat came into view as the sun began its slow descent, and Rhys had expected, from everything Seraphine and Odessa had described, something grand and composed, a place built to project the quiet, layered authority of illusion-magic at its most refined.
What greeted them instead was chaos, carefully contained but unmistakable, guards stationed at the outer gates in numbers well beyond ordinary patrol, their postures tight and alert in a way that had nothing to do with routine. Servants moved through the courtyard beyond the gate with the particular hurried quiet of people trying very hard not to look like something was wrong.
"That's not normal." Seraphine slowed, taking in the scene with visibly growing unease. "I've visited this seat a dozen times in my life. I've never seen the outer gate held like this outside of a formal state visit, and there's no visit scheduled that I'm aware of."
A guard at the gate recognized her almost immediately, his relief at seeing her arrive plain enough that it did nothing to settle Rhys's own growing dread.
"Lady Seraphine." The man's voice carried an edge of barely restrained urgency. "Thank the Veil you've come. We've been trying to reach you for two days. Something's happened."
"What's happened?"
The guard's eyes flicked, briefly, uncertainly, toward Rhys, before settling back on Seraphine, his expression grim.
"It's Lady Isolde," he said. "She's missing. Vanished from the sealed archive sometime three nights ago, and whoever took her left the door standing wide open behind them."