Isolde was elbow-deep in the household registry, matching a Marrow christening date against the margin of Fenn’s old archive inventory. Garrick came in with a raven message that took the color out of his face before he’d finished reading it.
“Aldwick,” he said, and set the strip of paper on the desk rather than hand it to her, as though the distance might soften what it said. “It’s in the water there now, Majesty. Not the fields around it. The river itself, a mile upstream of the mill.”
Isolde read it twice before she let herself believe the first reading. Aldwick sat on the river proper, not the border. It was the first true river town within the thornwood’s reach, rather than a border village she could still, in some private corner of herself, think of as far away. “How long before it’s in the town itself.”
“Thane’s scholars are…
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