The two letters arrived on the same day.
He would think about that afterward — the specific quality of a day that delivers two things at once, as though the world had been waiting for a moment when both hands were occupied before it moved.
The first came in the morning.
Fylon brought it to the supply office at the second hour — a sealed tablet, the routing mark of Ampelos's eastern network on the exterior, the kind of fast-tracked correspondence that moved ahead of the regular courier schedule when the sender had decided it could not wait. Fylon set it on the table and said: *"From the eastern route. Ampelos's network. It came on the overnight ship."*
*"Who sent it."*
*"The seal is Paris's."*
Lysander looked at the tablet for one moment before opening it.
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Paris wrote the way he had learned to write over the past year — direct, without performance, the words of someone reporting what he had seen and understood he needed to report quickly.
He wrote:
