Word of Halvek Sorn's death reached Nyra before the sun cleared the grain stores. A runner brought the news from the public court: the record officer had found a House-financed suit and wanted to know when its dispatch began. Nyra knew which relay post kept the departure log. She had authenticated two earlier entries there, so she took the fastest horse the Academy stables would release without an escort.
She reached the relay post an hour after the runner's message did, and the dispatch clerk who kept its logs was already dead on the floor behind his own counter.
The wound was a single blade cut under the left ribs. Blood had soaked through the clerk's coat and pooled beneath the counter. He had died where he fell. Nyra had seen Vhar's blades at work; this shallow, hidden cut was not his. Someone had killed the clerk, taken the primary log, and come back for anything that could prove the dispatch.
The logbook was gone from its usual place beside the counter. A second book, older, half-buried under receipt spikes and shipping chits, sat where the clerk's hand had fallen near it.
She knew what she needed before she opened it. Every dispatch through the post carried a rider's name, a departure bell, and a destination in the clerk's hand. If Halvek Sorn had ridden toward the Academy from here, the bell beside his name would show whether he left before or after Vhar's public refusal.
The second book held three days of entries the first book didn't. Someone had started keeping a shadow copy the moment the primary log became worth stealing.
Nyra pulled the book clear without disturbing the receipts around it. The cover had a burn mark near the lower corner, old enough for dust to sit inside the crack. Every page carried the same narrow columns: rider, bell, destination, goods, and a final space for special instructions. The clerk had pressed too hard with his pen. Each entry left a raised ridge on the back of the page.
She found Halvek's name on the second day. The entry was not hidden: Halvek Sorn; evening bell; First Measure Academy; recovery method complete. A square station seal sat below it, one corner worn smooth where the clerk's thumb had struck the stamp hundreds of times. Nyra read the bell twice, counted the next two entries, and folded the book shut before anyone outside could see the page.
Footsteps crossed the yard outside, unhurried, the pace of someone who expected to finish what they'd started before anyone arrived to stop them.
Nyra slid the second book inside her coat and drew her spear, Thronebreak. She had carried it slung instead of racked for the first time since the sponsored yard had taken it from her. The familiar haft settled into her palm.
The man who came through the door wore a plain courier's coat. His right hand was already under it, closing on a knife hilt. He saw the dead clerk, the empty space where the primary log had stood, and the corner of the second book inside Nyra's coat.
"Give me the book," he said. "Walk out alive."
Nyra put the counter between them. "You killed the clerk for that book."
He came around the counter's end and cut toward her shoulder, trying to drive her into the corner. Nyra stepped inside the cut. Thronebreak's haft struck his forearm below the knife and knocked the blade past her ribs.
The knife shaved a strip from the counter's edge. Wood chips jumped across the clerk's open ledger. Nyra slid her rear hand down the spear, giving herself the full length of the haft, while the cleaner shortened his grip and came in again. He was not trying to win a clean fight. He wanted one hand on her coat and the other on the book.
He recovered fast, faster than a plain courier's coat should have let him, and drove a second strike low at her knee while she was still committed to the first block.
She pivoted on her trailing foot and drove Thronebreak's butt into his ribs.
THUD!
His breath broke. He gave her half a step and no more.
He used it to kick the counter. The dead clerk's stool overturned. Ink bottles rolled across the floor and one burst beneath Nyra's heel.
SPLASH!
Black ink spread over the boards. The cleaner stepped through it without looking down, blade held low for her inner thigh. Nyra swept Thronebreak's point across his wrist. He jerked the hand back in time, but the spearhead cut his coat from cuff to elbow and opened a red cut along the arm.
He circled toward the door and put himself between Nyra and the exit. His eyes kept returning to the book beneath her coat. He would kill her only if he could not take it first.
She moved to cut the angle before he reached the doorframe, close enough now that the counter no longer helped either of them.
"House Talvern doesn't send couriers who fight like this," she said.
He did not confirm the House name. "My payer sends whoever can finish the work." He reversed the knife in his grip and came in close.
Nyra let him close. A reversed knife needed room to pull free after the first short thrust. As his wrist turned, she trapped it against Thronebreak's shaft, twisted the spear, and drove his arm into the counter's hard edge. The knife struck the floor beside the logbook.
CRACK!
His blade left his hand before he did.
She pinned the knife beneath her boot and set Thronebreak's point against his throat.
The cleaner tried to turn his broken wrist under the shaft. His fingers did not close. Nyra pressed the spearpoint hard enough to flatten the skin above his collarbone.
"Who sent you?" she asked.
He looked at the open ledger, not at her. "You have the entry. That was always the part worth killing."
"Name the payer."
"No."
Nyra kept the point where it was. Outside, the horses on the road came closer. The cleaner's throat moved against the steel once. He did not answer again.
"You are too late," Nyra said. "I read three days of entries before you came through that door."
The courier looked at the open logbook and did not deny it.
Nyra did not lower the spear until she heard riders on the road. Only then did she kneel beside the clerk. He was an older man with ink-stained fingers. A half-eaten meal cooled beside his ledger stool. Nyra read his name from the station ledger and said it once before covering his face with her cloak.
Academy riders arrived within the hour because Nyra had sent a runner when she found the body. They bound the courier's broken wrist and took him outside. Nyra kept the second logbook in both hands. The stationmaster stood across the counter, while an Academy rider held the other side.
She read Halvek's entry aloud. Each witness copied the name, bell, destination, and recovery notation into a separate book, then compared every word to the original before signing. Nyra sealed the original logbook with her custody mark after the ink dried. The stationmaster asked twice whether she needed an escort back to the Academy. Nyra refused twice.
Before she left, Nyra made the stationmaster open the dispatch clock housing. Its brass wheel had stopped at the morning bell because the clerk had not wound it. The stationmaster wound it once, read the marked teeth, and wrote the current bell in his own register. Nyra placed the shadow entry beside that time, the rider schedule, and the copied page. Four separate pieces now placed Halvek's departure before the Academy's public floor opened.
The entry she needed sat plainly on the page, in a dead man's careful hand: Halvek Sorn, departed the evening before Vhar's public refusal, destination First Measure Academy, recovery method noted as complete. Beside it, the clerk's own seal stamp, still inked, matched every other stamp on every other page going back three months, the same worn edge on the same corner. Nobody had forged this entry after the fact. It had aged on the page exactly as long as the entries beside it.
She checked the departure bell against the courier schedule on the wall. Back at the Academy, the gate record would show Halvek's first arrival. The dispatch left before the public refusal. The clerk's seal, station clock, and the two signed copies fixed that sequence without asking anyone to trust Nyra's word alone.
Halvek had been dispatched before the refusal. House Talvern could not honestly call the attack a reaction to Vhar's public appearance.
The stationmaster gave Nyra the clerk's name before she mounted: Pell Ardis, forty-three years at the relay, no House affiliation. Nyra wrote it inside the cover of her own copy. The cleaner had taken a man from a desk because one ink entry threatened the people who had paid him. That fact would travel with the entry.
She rode back through the relay stations that had once carried House Talvern's false death notice for Vhar. This time she carried the log that placed Halvek's dispatch before the refusal. The House Severin plate no longer hung at her belt, and she did not reach for it during the ride.
A House Severin courier waited at the Academy gate while Nyra handed the sealed logbook to the evidence officer. His notice asked why she had ridden to a dead clerk's relay post without an escort. Nyra read it, folded it, and put it in the empty pocket where her silver plate had once rested. "You can tell them the logbook reached Academy custody first," she said. "The rest can wait."