Chapter 3

“Roger,” Thomas called as he re-entered. “With me, two guards. We’re pulling the barracks apart.”

He’d sent Griffin to handle the perimeter while Frost went back to the nursery to watch Peter and the pups.

Roger detached from the recruits, now seated in a wary circle with their backs to the stone, and fell in without question. He signaled to two men at the gate.

They crossed to the low stone building housing the male recruits. It was empty at that moment. All twelve were in the yard.

Thomas shoved the door open hard enough to make it slap the wall.

The room had two rows of bunks lining the walls, with footlockers sitting at each base.

“Windows,” Thomas ordered, “shutters, hinges. I want to know if a rat could breathe in here without us hearing.”

Roger went to the far end, his fingers testing iron grilles over narrow windows. The guards dropped to their knees to look under the bunks, sweeping the dust with their hands.

Thomas stood in the center and closed his eyes.

His wood sense touched the beams, wood cut decades before, still remembering the forest shade. Then it touched the stone floor, cold as wrought iron in winter, and next the lingering warmth of bodies that had slept here, faint as embers.

Nothing.

He walked to Hyde’s bunk. The boy’s blanket was bunched up, and his kit bag was half-open. Thomas knelt and ran a hand along the floorboards, but found only solid oak and no pry marks. He checked the door bar. It was thick iron, heavy enough to comfort a mind that wanted comfort.

His fingers slid along the metal...

And a sudden cold bit into his skin, sharp and unnatural, but not temperature, not a draft—a frost that lived under the idea of touch.

Thomas jerked his hand back before he could stop himself.

There was no physical breach.

This was worse.

“The hinges are solid,” Roger reported, dusting his hands, “and the grilles are rusted in place. Nobody came through the windows.”

“Nothing under the bunks, my prince,” one guard said.

Thomas rose slowly, wiping his palm on his trousers as if he could smear the cold away.

“Fine, there’s nothing you can stab.”

Roger watched him.

“What now?”

Thomas’s jaw worked.

“Now we find out what’s in their heads.”

He had the recruits brought in one by one and kept the others outside in the yard, in the cold, so they couldn’t trade fear like coin.

Thomas sat on the edge of a table, and Roger stood by the door, present as a threat.

Thomas didn’t lean on intimidation. He leaned on observation with quiet questions and watching what they avoided.

“How are you sleeping?”

“Headaches?”

“Ringing in your ears?”

Most were frightened in ordinary ways, scared by rumors from the mess hall of a ghost, a curse, the King’s spy. Fear fed fear until it sounded like wisdom.

Then Hyde came in.

The boy looked hollowed out, with red-rimmed eyes and tension in his jaw as if he’d been grinding his teeth through dreams.

“Sit,” Thomas said.

Hyde perched on a stool, his hands clamped to his knees.

“Tell me about the pressure,” Thomas said. “Does it come at night?”

“Yes, sir, mostly ... right before I fall asleep.” Hyde stared at the floor as if it might open. “It feels like someone’s behind me, leaning over my shoulder, but when I turn, it’s empty.”

“Does it speak?”

“No words.” Hyde shuddered. “Just intent.” His voice dropped to a rasp. “Cold, like looking into a well with no bottom.”

Thomas nodded once, his face still, but inside, his thoughts ran fast and sharp. Cold, intent, sleeplessness, and a presence that pressed on the edge of consciousness.

“You’re dismissed,” Thomas said. “Send Sera in.”

Sera entered with her spine straighter than it had been at dawn, wearing her composure. But her eyes carried shadows that training didn’t explain away.

“You barred your door,” Thomas said.

“Yes, my prince.”

“Hyde describes feeling pressure and something cold.”

Sera nodded slowly. Her fingers rose without thinking to the wooden pendant at her throat, a simple carved leaf, and she rubbed its edge as if it could anchor her.

“It is cold,” she said, “but it’s not only pressure.”

Thomas leaned forward.

“What else?”

“I dream,” Sera said.

“Of what?”

“Trees.” Her voice thinned. “But not ours. They’re white, like bone.” She swallowed. “And the leaves don’t rustle.”