Kael gave the instruction without ceremony, the same evening Angelika's frustration over the switched cargo had settled into something more productive than sting.
"Activate the Intelligence Office," he said. "Fully. I want to know how Ironjaw is finding our caravans before they leave, not after."
Angelika's eyes sharpened immediately, the earlier tension between them folding cleanly into shared purpose. "You think the leak is inside our walls."
"I think we can't rule it out," Kael said. "And I'd rather find nothing than assume nothing and be wrong."
Angelika's Investigation
She began where any careful strategist would begin — not with accusation, but with pattern.
Every soldier who had known the caravan routes in advance went onto a list. Every merchant who had passed through the fortress gates in the preceding weeks went onto another. She cross-referenced departure times against the timing of Ironjaw's interceptions, hour by hour, looking for the narrow window between when information became known and when it apparently reached hostile ears.
"It's not the escort squads," she told Kael after two days of careful review. "They learn their routes only hours before departure, and the pattern of attacks doesn't match their knowledge window closely enough."
"Then who does it match?"
"That's what worries me," Angelika admitted. "The window is wide enough to include almost anyone who spends time near the war hall, the supply stores, or the gate itself. Which is to say — nearly everyone."
Dane's Background Checks
Dane approached the problem from a different angle entirely, working through every escort squad member's history with the same methodical patience he'd once applied to tracking Red Sand's movements through unfamiliar forest.
He found nothing damning. No suspicious absences, no unexplained contact with outsiders, no soldier whose loyalty showed even the faintest crack under careful scrutiny. If anything, the escort squads' clean record only deepened the mystery rather than resolving it.
"They're not the problem," he told Kael, more frustrated than relieved by the conclusion. "Which means the leak is coming from somewhere none of us are watching closely enough."
Sarai's Quiet Ears
It was Sarai, moving among the newest settlers with the particular gentleness of someone who understood exactly what fear did to people still adjusting to a strange new safety, who first noticed something worth following.
She did not interrogate. She simply listened, the way she had learned to listen during her own long recovery — patient, unhurried, letting people offer what they were willing to offer rather than demanding more.
"There's a merchant," she told Kael quietly, several days into her own careful observations. "Not one of ours. He passes through with the neutral tribes' trading parties — Old Marn's people, mostly, from the settlement your reconnaissance team visited. He talks a great deal. Not maliciously. He simply enjoys being the one who knows things."
"What kind of things?"
"Small things," Sarai said. "Which wagons left yesterday. How many soldiers rode with them. Whether the fortress seemed busier than usual." She hesitated. "He's not trying to hurt us, Kael. I don't think he even realizes what he's doing."
The Hydra's Trail
The creature's growing senses had continued their slow, unpredictable development throughout the week, and it was during one of Elara's evening training sessions that its restlessness finally pointed toward something more specific than simple distant unease.
It lifted all three heads suddenly, nostrils flaring toward the direction of the trading post just beyond the fortress's outer gate, where merchants from the neutral settlements regularly conducted business with Titanblood's own traders.
A scent, it said, when Elara asked what had caught its attention. Familiar, though I do not know why. Something that has passed near Ironjaw's fires recently. Woodsmoke of a particular kind — pine mixed with something else, a resin they burn in their forges.
Elara relayed the observation to Kael that same evening, and though the hydra's senses remained too unrefined yet to point toward a single specific person, the direction it consistently returned to matched, with uncomfortable precision, the same trading post Sarai had already begun quietly watching.
The Truth
It was Angelika who finally confirmed what all four threads of investigation had been circling toward, gathering the pieces with the same careful precision she brought to every tally and map.
"His name is Oren," she told Kael, laying out what she'd learned. "A trader from Old Marn's settlement. He travels between our fortress and several smaller villages, including ones close enough to Ironjaw's borders that his information reaches them without him ever intending it to."
"He's working for Borr?"
"No," Angelika said, and something in her tone suggested this conclusion had cost her more careful consideration than the simpler answer would have. "I don't think he's working for anyone. I think he's simply a man who enjoys conversation, and doesn't understand that the small details he shares so freely eventually reach someone who knows exactly how to use them."
She recounted what Sarai had overheard directly — Oren, sharing a meal with travelers at a waystation midway between the two territories, mentioning offhandedly that two wagons left Titanblood north yesterday, heavier loaded than usual. Simple words, freely given, meant as nothing more than pleasant conversation between strangers passing the same cold evening.
"Someone at that waystation carries word to Ironjaw," Angelika said. "Whether they're a deliberate informant or simply another link in the same careless chain, I can't yet say. But the leak isn't inside our walls, Kael. It never was. It's the space between us and every neutral settlement that trades with both sides at once."
Kael absorbed the revelation slowly, something between relief and fresh concern settling into place. Relief, because no one within Titanblood's own walls had betrayed them. Concern, because a leak with no clear villain to confront was, in its own way, far harder to seal than one with a face and a name.
"We can't punish a man for talking too freely," Kael said. "And we can't stop trading with neutral settlements without losing exactly the kind of goodwill we've spent a season building."
"No," Angelika agreed. "But we can be more careful what we let anyone overhear, even by accident. From now on, only a small circle knows real departure details before a caravan actually leaves. Everyone else hears whatever version keeps them talking without giving anything true away."
The Ring's Quiet Progress
Late that night, alone at the ancient gate's edge, Kael felt the familiar warmth stir against his finger before the System offered its usual brief, unembellished accounting.
[Bloodline Synchronization: 8% → 10%]
No explanation followed. No hint of what lay closer with each small increase. Only the patient, steady confirmation that whatever process had begun in the depths beneath Thornrock continued its slow work, indifferent to caravans and spies and every other concern presently occupying Kael's waking hours.
He studied the gate's dark, silent shape a long moment, the same low heartbeat he'd first noticed weeks ago still faintly perceptible beneath the stone, and said nothing to anyone about it, tucking the small, growing mystery away alongside every other burden this season had handed him to carry quietly.
The Scout's Arrival
The shout came just as Kael turned to leave the gate, one of Dane's watch-scouts sprinting across the courtyard with the particular urgency that had, by now, become instantly recognizable as something more than a routine report.
"Chief!"
Kael turned fully, already reading the tension in the young scout's face before a single word of explanation arrived. "What is it?"
"West valley," the scout said, still catching his breath. "People are coming. A lot of them."
"Refugees?" Kael asked, thinking immediately of Ashriver's own arrival months before, of the slow, steady trickle of settlers that had followed Titanblood's growing reputation.
The scout shook his head, and something in his expression made clear the answer troubled him more than any simple wave of desperate travelers would have.
"No," he said. "Another tribe."