They ended up at a clearing further from the kill site, where the cold sat slightly less aggressive for no reason Arthur could point to, maybe just the trees here blocking more of the wind that moved through Creslan like it owned the place.

Two people had been with the princess the whole time, hanging back while the trio had been on the ground with the turtle. A broad man with a scar running clean from his left ear to his jaw, hand resting easy on the sword hilt at his back, the posture of someone who positioned themselves near exits without thinking about it. Beside him a woman who hadn’t taken her eyes off Arthur’s group since the princess had signaled them to step forward, her aetheric field carrying the specific compressed quality of someone who could release a great deal of it very quickly if they chose to.

Neither had been introduced. Neither needed to be.

Cael stood holding the turtle’s severed head with the composure of a man who had decided, at some point in the last hour, that he wasn’t going to acknowledge this was happening. His expression said administrative task. His arms said this is very heavy. Theodore had found a fallen log and was sitting on it, his bellus pressed against his chest for warmth, pen already moving across his notebook. He was always taking notes. Arthur had never once asked what was in them.

"Talk," the princess said.

So Arthur talked.

He laid it out without hedging. Vak Vernon. The operation running out of Ishkral’s Ampshire district. The black market structure moving product through lower Vasker contracts and merchant lines. A drug called Elven Tears, made from extracted elven blood and fragmented rupture cores, engineered to force the Mageia Core past its limits. The distribution reaching academy students. One student harmed during the culmination — Elias — still recovering. The real cores used in production coming from children with undeveloped Mageia cores, extracted before they’d hardened.

The princess said nothing through any of it. The swordbearer’s hand tightened slightly on his hilt.

"And above Vak?" she asked when he stopped.

"Someone’s running this at a level above him. Vak executes it. He doesn’t design it."

"Leads?"

"One." Arthur kept his voice even. "Traces of elven aetheric essence on members of the Blauenstein family. Whether they’re consumers or distributors, I can’t confirm yet."

A pause.

"You know a great deal about Vak Vernon’s specific operation." The princess’s eyes settled on him, not hostile, just precise. "The interior mechanics of it. The supply chain. The product’s composition. The distribution method into the academy." A beat. "How."

Arthur felt it land before he could stop it.

He’d said too much. Specifically too much. The way someone talked about a supply chain’s interior mechanics from the outside was different from how someone talked about it from inside the room where the decisions were made. He’d just described Vak’s operation with the detail of a person who’d been handed the floor plan and told to memorize it.

The master swordbearer beside the princess had stopped watching the treeline. He was watching Arthur.

He needed three seconds to think through what he could and couldn’t say.

He got two.

"You didn’t learn this from a raid," she said. Not asking. Confirming.

"No." Arthur met her eyes. "I learned it because Vak Vernon sent two assassins to kill me."

The air shifted slightly.

"After I stopped cooperating with certain matters connected to him," Arthur continued, each word placed deliberately now, "he treated it as a liability that needed removing. I survived both attempts. The first made me careful. The second made me thorough." He kept his hands still at his sides. "When someone tries to have you killed twice, you stop waiting for a third. You learn everything about them you possibly can. Their operation, their supply chain, their people." He held her gaze. "That’s how I know the interior mechanics. Not because I was inside. Because I became a problem he wanted to end."

The princess studied him for a long moment.

The swordbearer had turned back to the treeline.

"You were adjacent," she said finally.

"Yes."

"And you walked away."

"Yes."

Another silence that had some weight behind it. Arthur didn’t break it.

The princess let it go. Filed somewhere, he suspected. Definitely filed. But let go for now.

"Our side," she said. "The Allright Council has been active on this for eight months. We’ve identified and detained sixty-two persons of interest across three kingdoms." A beat. " Vak Vernon is in our radar now too. And is still under investigation. And what you’re insinuating is true. Then you’ll be out witness so we can bring justice to his crimes."

Arthur exhaled.

She didn’t look at notes. Everything came from memory, clean and sequential.

"Twelve are currently under enhanced questioning. None have produced a primary name. Not for lack of effort." Her voice didn’t change register on that. "Something is preventing them from speaking. Not refusing. Physically preventing. Three have died in custody, no external cause, heart failure in each case, timed to the exact moment they were about to give something up. In one case the interrogator was mid-question when the suspect’s heart stopped. No injury. No toxin. Just stopped."

Theodore had set his pen down.

"The working theory from our medical unit is some kind of binding applied at the point of induction into the operation. A condition that activates if certain information reaches an external party. Not a choice. An installed mechanism." She paused, the only pause Arthur had noticed since she started speaking. "We haven’t seen anything like it before."

"Someone built a deadlock into their own people," Arthur said.

"Yes. Which means whoever is running this above Vak isn’t just organized. They’re operating at a level that can perform that kind of magic reliably, at scale, on dozens of individuals."

"Forty-seven others confirmed dead before we reached them," she continued. "Eliminated in the window between identification and approach. Someone is monitoring our investigation’s exposure in near real-time."

Arthur thought about the note. Three words in a businesslike hand. Kill the elves. Whoever gave that order wasn’t doing it out of cruelty. They were doing it the way someone marks a task complete.

"The Patriarch has conducted two raids in Creslan within the past month," Cael said, his voice carrying the same flat precision he used for every administrative statement. "Both lab facilities. Production equipment, records, extraction apparatus. He secured documentation before ordering the sites burned. The records placed this kingdom as the primary production origin, not distribution. Origin." He paused. "Including confirmed evidence of elf blood extraction and ruptured core removal from children with undeveloped Mageia cores."

The master magus beside the princess went still in a way she hadn’t been still before.

"We know," the princess said. "He notified the council directly. Two days after each raid." She looked at Cael. "Your patriarch moves fast."

"Yes," Cael said. No elaboration.

"Then you understand why we’re here," Arthur said.

"I understand why you’re here." Her gaze settled on him, again that precise quality that made stating anything feel like it needed to survive examination. "Why he sent three second-year students when he has professionals available is the part I understand less. But that’s a question for another time."

She turned toward the direction of Moncruir district.

"My face is known. My swordbearer’s face is known. The moment either of us enters that district in any official capacity, whatever is running at Vorik shuts down and relocates inside twenty-four hours." She looked back at Arthur’s group. "You are three mages from Ishkral on a hunting holiday. Registered Vaskers as of this morning. Nobody with any reason to be cautious is looking at you." A pause. "That is the only advantage that matters right now."

"We continue the Vorik angle," Cael said.

"Yes. I supervise from outside. Anything you find comes to me before you act on it." Her eyes moved across all three of them, final in the way that meant the meeting was over. "If you find something that requires immediate action, you signal first. You do not improvise."

"Yes, your highness," Cael said.

Arthur and Theodore followed a half-second behind.

---

Outside, the cold hit again the moment they stepped back onto the open path, frost-grey and relentless under a sun that still somehow wasn’t doing its job.

Theodore walked ahead, already writing something, his bellus peering over his shoulder at the page.

Arthur fell back half a step. Vexis drifted beside him, quieter than usual since the meeting had started, his expression doing something Arthur hadn’t seen on it often.

"Vexis."

He looked sideways without drifting closer. The copper color of the treeline past him was almost the same shade as the princess’s hair, which Arthur clocked as an observation and immediately discarded.

"Why did you even do that?"

He didn’t have to explain what he meant. Vexis knew. The operation. Vak. The whole thing Arthur had spent months carefully navigating around and unsaying and having to lie about just now in front of a princess.

Vexis was quiet for a moment. Not the loudcaps quiet of holding something back. Just quiet.

Then:

"Because I was weak."

He said it the way someone says a fact that doesn’t need arguing with. Not shame exactly. Just the flat weight of looking at your own past clearly and not finding much to defend.

Arthur didn’t say anything back.