Chapter 109

Abby

The scouts reached the mill house a little after midnight. They had run it on four legs, the whole way north without stopping, and they called it in from the nearest road.

Ryan brought their report to the packhouse an hour before dawn, still in yesterday’s clothes, and read it to me at the kitchen table while the kettle came to a boil. The mill house was there, exactly where Malachi had said: a gray stone building on a bend in the river, with a waterwheel that hadn’t turned in years. Nobody was inside. The hearth was cold. The shelves along one wall were empty, and in the grate, under the ash, they had found the corners of burned pages covered in the same markings Imogen had dug out of our north field.

“No scent,” Ryan said. “Not hers, not anyone’s. Same as the western line.” He folded the paper. “But someone emptied those shelves in a hurry