Corin returned from his meeting with Maren three days later, travel-worn and grim, carrying intelligence that settled cold and unwelcome over the war room the moment he began to speak. He hadn't slept properly in days, the dark circles beneath his eyes testament to how urgently he'd pushed the journey.

"The Unbroken Accord isn't a small faction," he said, spreading a hastily sketched map across the table. "Maren's order estimates their numbers in the low hundreds, scattered across several territories, but their real strength isn't in raw numbers. It's in the working they used to bypass Liora's wards — something Maren's order calls a Veil-Walk, a rare and difficult technique...