# Chapter 12: The Father

The bracelet sat warm against my wrist, the stone a steady amber-red in the grey morning light. Sixth bell had come and gone. I'd been at the table since fifth, working from memory, and the memory was cooperating.

Not re-observation. The curse was thirty minutes away, locked in a bedroom in the upper guild quarter, slowly eating a man who used to have beautiful handwriting. What I had was the imprint — three nested layers preserved in the sharp recall the bracelet's focusing matrix afforded. The filter didn't just sharpen live perception. It sharpened the echoes, too. Details that would have blurred overnight held their edges: the exact spacing between Layer 1's degradation anchors, the frequency of the stabilizer's repair cycle, the shape of that third structure hovering at the edge of resolution.

I'd sketched out the architecture on scrap paper. Three layers. Three problems. And the problems weren't equal.

Layer 1 was the visible threat — a degradation curse, properly built, sequencing through Ned's systems with the precision of a man checking items off a list. Voice, hearing, motor control, organs. The curse-breakers had seen this layer and tried to dissolve it. Failed. I knew why they'd failed, and it wasn't because the degradation was too strong.

It was because Layer 2 wouldn't let it fall.

The stabilizer ran underneath like a second heartbeat. It monitored Layer 1's structure and repaired damage faster than any conventional dissolution could inflict it. Standard approaches wouldn't work — they'd crack a section of Layer 1, the stabilizer would detect the damage, and the repair would outpace the dissolution before the curse-breaker finished their working. Even Leon's approach wouldn't touch it. Four hundred simultaneous inputs flooding the system, sure, but the stabilizer wasn't a detection ward with a processing bottleneck. It was a dedicated repair mechanism. Brute force would just give it four hundred things to fix instead of one, and it would fix them all.

(*The stabilizer's designer understood how curse-breakers work. Understood how the Compact assesses. Built the wall before the siege. Same philosophy as the death ward. Same kind of mind.*)

But there was a parallel. An annoyingly obvious one, once the noise found it.

Binding salts. Three weeks ago, a woman who hated people and loved a terrified dog had dampened a fear curse with binding salts and silverthorn. The salts didn't break the curse — they suppressed its output long enough for the amplification sequence to weaponize the animal's own senses against the working. Dampening. Not destruction. Create a window, then exploit it.

Same principle. Industrial strength.

I needed something that could dampen a lethal three-layer working's magical output — suppress the stabilizer's repair cycle long enough to crack Layer 1 through conventional means. Not a binding salt's one-metre field. Something that could blanket a room-scale working and hold.

The answer surfaced from somewhere around my third year at Brannick's. Professor Aldwen's Advanced Environmental Thaumics, a course I'd attended roughly sixty percent of the time and retained roughly ninety percent of the material from because the material was more interesting than the man delivering it. Ghostveil moss. A pale, fibrous growth that colonized environments saturated with decayed magical residue — old mine shafts, collapsed wardlines, anywhere ambient magical energy pooled and rotted. The moss absorbed it. Processed it. And in doing so, created a localised dampening effect that suppressed active magical workings within its immediate radius.

Not commercially available. Not anymore.

(*Professor Aldwen mentioned a growth site near the coast — the Saltern Cliffs. "Acquired by the Compact for preservation purposes." Two years later, a second site near Brenwick was decommissioned. Same language. Same acquirer. Five years, and every documented growth site was Compact property. The organisation that classifies curses as unbreakable also controls the one substance that could counter those curses. Filed. Not proven. But the lattice is forming, and the lattice doesn't care about proof yet.*)

Ghostveil moss, properly harvested and prepared, could suppress the stabilizer. Create a window. Let me crack Layer 1 conventionally while the repair mechanism was blind.

Mere would need to handle the preparation. The moss's dampening properties were destroyed by incorrect harvesting — cut the fibres wrong, expose them to direct light during drying, contaminate the substrate, and you had an expensive pile of dead plant matter. Botanical precision, not magical skill. Her department. Verdenshade had been forgiving — cut it, bag it, don't bruise it. This was several orders of magnitude less forgiving, and I knew my limits even if I didn't enjoy them.

Layer 2 — the stabilizer itself — was a different problem, and one I'd already solved.

The death ward in the Barrows had been a converter: it took external magical input and redirected it as thermal energy. I'd beaten it by forging the ward's own internal signature and feeding it back through the system's leakage seam. The ward couldn't distinguish self from forged-self, and it had consumed its own architecture. The stabilizer ran different logic, but the principle held. It monitored Layer 1 and responded to damage reports. If I could forge data that looked like internal status — feed the stabilizer false readings that mimicked structural failure in its own repair mechanism — it would redirect resources to fix itself instead of Layer 1.

The bracelet's focusing matrix made this viable. The precision required for signature forgery at this scale — matching the stabilizer's internal frequency across multiple junction points while maintaining the deception long enough for Layer 1 to crack — exceeded what unenhanced Flaw Sight could deliver. With the filter sharpening my resolution and the reservoir buffering the energy cost, the forge-and-redirect was a known technique applied to a new target. Confidence here. Not certainty, but confidence.

Layer 3 was the problem.

I could see the flaw. The bracelet had resolved enough of the third structure to show me the shape of it — an anchor, buried deep, bonded to Ned's life-force signature at a fundamental level. And the anchor was losing its grip. Not because anything was attacking it, but because the curse itself was changing Ned. The degradation was altering his life-force signature incrementally — the man the anchor was locked to was becoming someone slightly different with each passing day. The anchor's calibration was drifting.

A visible flaw. A structural weakness I could perceive and describe and diagram on the scrap paper in front of me.

And I had no concept for how to use it.

(*The drift is too slow. The anchor recalibrates faster than Ned changes. If the drift accelerated — if the divergence between Ned's current signature and the anchor's calibration widened faster than the anchor could adjust — the lock would fire into empty space. But I can't accelerate a man's life-force transformation. That's not a magical problem. That's a — what? Biological? Alchemical? The noise keeps circling and finding nothing. A flaw I can see and can't exploit. This is worse than a flaw I can't see.*)

Filed. Unsolved. The third layer would have to wait.

Two problems remained actionable. The ghostveil moss needed sourcing — Compact channels were closed, obviously, and even if they weren't, explaining why I needed a substance the Compact had systematically cornered would raise questions I couldn't afford. I needed someone who knew where the moss still grew wild. And Calla's instruction — the dead-drop, the name Ned had given her — pointed to the same person both threads required.

Devod Fields. Mere's father. Carriage driver with delivery routes through the shipping warehouses where Ned had worked. A man who, according to his daughter, had ideas, most of which were wrong.

I needed his information about Ned. I needed his knowledge of environments where ghostveil moss might grow. And I needed to have a conversation Mere couldn't be present for, because the questions I had about Ned's pre-curse activities would flow naturally into questions about why a carriage driver was the person a dying trade inspector trusted with his contingency plan, and those questions worked better without the man's estranged daughter listening.

I gathered the scrap paper, folded it into my coat, and headed for Thresholds.

* * *

The stop was brief. Mere was behind the counter with a ledger open, Sniff dozing against a stack of returns. She looked up when the door chimed — the intent-detection ward reading business, not browsing.

"Following the Devod lead," I said. "He's the connection to Ned's pre-curse concerns. And I need someone who knows where certain plants grow that the Compact would prefer nobody found."

Mere set down her pen. Her expression didn't change, but her hand paused for a fraction of a second before releasing the pen — the only tell she had, and I'd learned to read it by now.

"He'll be home by now. The yard runs early — he's usually done by tenth bell." She paused. "Don't bring paperwork. He'll talk to a person. He won't read a form."

I nodded.

"The place will be cluttered," she added, in the tone of someone stating an observable fact about weather. "He keeps things. Tools, mostly. From projects he started and didn't finish. He's not disorganised. He just has more plans than hours."

Something in the precision of the description caught. She knew his habits well enough to predict the environment but described them with the clinical distance of someone cataloguing a specimen. Not estrangement — familiarity frozen at a specific point. A twelve-year-old's last observations, preserved in amber.

"Anything else I should know?"

"He'll want to help. That's not the same as being helpful." She picked up the pen again. "But sometimes it is."

I left. Sniff didn't wake.

* * *

Millford Street smelled like tannin and ammonia from half a block away. The tanner's shop occupied the ground floor — a narrow frontage with stained shutters propped open despite the season, the acid bite of the curing process leaking into the street like a slow-motion assault. I found the side entrance: a wooden staircase, exterior-mounted, the second step cracked and the fourth bowed. The railing had been replaced — the new wood didn't match the old, but the joinery was solid. Someone had fixed what mattered and left the cosmetics for later.

The door at the top was slightly ajar. Not neglect — the frame was warped. A hinge sat on a workbench just inside the visible gap, next to three other hinges, a jar of wood screws, and what appeared to be a partially disassembled clock mechanism.

I knocked on the frame.

"Come in, door's — well, you can see the door's not really doing its job. Give it a push."

I pushed. The room opened up behind it.

Devod Fields' home was a single large space that had been optimised for exactly one person with approximately fifteen active interests. A carpentry bench ran along the left wall, buried under wood shavings and partially shaped components for something that might have been a shelf or might have been a trap frame — impossible to tell at this stage. The centre of the room held a table that served as both dining surface and project workspace, currently occupied by coiled rope, a leather harness with new stitching, and a half-eaten loaf of bread. Tools hung on the far wall in an arrangement that was organised by principle — similar functions grouped together — but spanned at least three different trades. Metalworking files next to woodworking planes next to a set of farrier's tongs.

(*Not a slob's clutter. A tinkerer's overflow. Every item is in progress, not abandoned. The dust patterns are wrong for neglect — too recent, too localised. He moves things. Rotates projects. Ninety percent noise, ten percent signal. Familiar.*)

The man himself matched the room. Mid-fifties, wiry, with the kind of perpetual energy that made standing still look like a temporary concession. His hands moved when he talked — and he started talking immediately.

"You're not from the tanner's — Harwick sends his boy up, not adults. You've got a professional look about you, but not city watch. Guild?"

"Guild of Necessary Services," I said. "I'm working the Ned Floundry matter."

The scattered energy dropped out of Devod's face like someone had pulled a drain plug. What replaced it was older, heavier, and genuine.

"Ned." He sat down on the carpentry bench, which protested but held. "How bad?"

"He's dying. The curse is layered — three structures, each protecting the others. The Compact classified it unbreakable. Two curse-breakers failed. His family hired my guild."

"Through the proper channels? Calla found someone?"

"Through the proper channels."

Devod rubbed his hands on his knees — a man processing bad news he'd been expecting. "Ned told me. Months ago, before any of this. Said he'd been seeing things in the ledgers — same vendor names across too many Compact transactions, money that went out one door and came back through another wearing a different hat. Supply chain irregularities, he called them. I called them theft." He looked at me. "How long does he have?"

"Four to six weeks was the initial estimate. Based on deterioration rate, probably less."

"And you can do something about it? The guild — your guild — they think it's possible?"

"I think it's possible. That's not the same thing, but it's what I've got."

He studied me for a moment. The scattered energy was gone, replaced by an assessment that was sharper than I'd expected. Mere had said her father had ideas, most of them wrong. She hadn't mentioned that behind the ideas was a man who actually looked at people.

"Ned said — if anything happens to me, get word to my family. Talk to Calla. Make sure she knows I wasn't being paranoid." Devod's voice was careful, precise. "He was a careful man. Filed reports through proper channels. Commerce Authority, dock quarter division. The reports went in and nothing came out. Six weeks later, the curse."

"He anticipated it."

"He anticipated *something.* Didn't know it would be this. Thought it might be professional — demotion, reassignment. Not…" He gestured vaguely at the air, encompassing the full horror with the inadequacy of hands.

I let the silence hold. Devod wasn't a man who needed prompting — he needed space, and the space would fill itself.

"The vendors," he continued. "I saw some of it. My routes take me through the shipping warehouses — cargo deliveries, mostly, salvage goods, specialty materials for the trades. Ned and I crossed paths three, four times a week during the busy season. Coffee in the loading dock. He showed me a ledger page once — same company name, four different transactions, four different categories. 'Diversified interests,' the filing said. Ned said nobody diversifies into both canal-dredging equipment and decorative stonework unless they're diversifying into washing money."

I filed it. The Compact corruption thread was deepening, but it wasn't today's problem. Today's problem was keeping Ned alive long enough to prove any of it mattered.

"I need something from you beyond information," I said. "The curse — the way it's built, one of the layers requires a specific countermeasure. A plant that absorbs ambient magical energy. It grows in environments saturated with decayed magical residue — old mine shafts, collapsed wardlines, anywhere magical energy has pooled and degraded over time."

Devod's expression changed. Not recognition of the plant — recognition of the environment.

"Velken's Drift," he said immediately. "Abandoned ore mine, maybe three hours southeast by carriage. Magical ore — they were pulling crystallised ambient energy out of the rock for decades until the main veins ran dry. Closed fifteen, maybe twenty years ago. I delivered supplies to the salvage crews when they were stripping the upper levels." He leaned forward. "The air in there — the deeper levels especially — it had a weight to it. Like breathing through wet cloth. The salvage foreman told me the residual magical energy was so dense in the lower shafts that compass enchantments stopped working."

"That's the environment."

"I know the upper levels. Layout, access points, where the shoring is good and where it isn't. The lower levels flooded when they stopped pumping — I wouldn't vouch for anything below the third gallery."

That was the practical lead secured. Ghostveil moss, if it grew anywhere within range of Drenwick, would grow in exactly the conditions Devod was describing. I started building the expedition logistics in my head — team composition, supplies, timing — when Devod kept talking.

"The harvesting, though — you said the preparation's delicate? You'd want someone who knows plants. Magical botany, not just field collection." He was tapping the edge of the carpentry bench with two fingers, already somewhere ahead of the conversation. "There's a woman who runs a bookshop in the arcane district. Deals in magical texts, theory, reference material most people don't know exists. My daughter, actually." A father's pride slipped through before he'd thought about it — a brightness in the voice, quickly steadied. "She'd know about plants like that. She's got the patience for the detail work. Precise. Methodical. If the preparation requires—"

He stopped.

I hadn't moved. Hadn't changed my expression. I was too controlled for a visible tell, and I knew it, and that knowledge was exactly the problem — because Devod wasn't reading my reaction. He was reading the absence of one. A stranger hearing "my daughter runs a bookshop" asks a follow-up question. What's it called? Where in the arcane district? What's her name? I'd asked none of those things. I'd sat there with the weighted silence that only comes from already knowing the answer.

The scattered energy drained out of him like water through a cracked hull. The tapping stopped. His eyes — which had been bouncing between me, the window, the workbench, three half-formed thoughts at once — locked on and held.

"You already know her."

Not a question. An observation from a man who might build nine things that fell apart, but could recognise the shape of a tenth that held.

"She manages Thresholds," I said. Neutral. Professional. "I work cases that sometimes require research in the kinds of texts she stocks."

Devod measured me. The enthusiasm hadn't returned. What replaced it was something more careful — a father's assessment wearing a tinkerer's face. He was testing now, and the questions that followed weren't casual, even though they sounded like they should be.

"The Pre-Compact theory section. She still stock that herself? Used to say the suppliers didn't understand the cataloguing system."

I could have deflected. Given a customer's answer — vague, polite, a response that acknowledges the question without really engaging with it. Instead I said, "She stocks everything herself. She's precise about placement. About quality. About who touches what."

Too much detail. A customer says *yes* or *I think so*. I'd answered like someone who'd watched her do it. Devod's jaw tightened — not anger, recognition — and he pressed.

"And the shelves. When she's working through a problem — does she still reorganise the shelves?"

He was testing proximity. Not my identity — he knew who I was, or at least what I represented. He was testing how close I stood to Mere. Questions only someone who spent time in Thresholds would know the answers to. The shelving reorganisation. The personal curation. Details a customer wouldn't notice and a colleague might. Scattered or not, the man read people the way his daughter read shelving systems — with a precision that had nothing to do with formal training and everything to do with paying attention when it mattered.

"She's my partner," I said. The word Mere had used. The word I'd confirmed.

Something moved behind Devod's eyes. The assessment sharpened, then softened, then settled into something I couldn't immediately categorise — which was rare enough to be notable. He looked at the workbench beside him, at the collection of hinges, at the room full of half-finished projects and tools from three trades. Then he looked back at me.

"Partner," he repeated. Not a question. A word being weighed.

"She's involved in the case. Her expertise in botanical preparation is essential for the countermeasure I described. The plant I need — the preparation is delicate. Done wrong, the dampening properties are destroyed."

"That sounds like Mere." He said it quietly, with the particular precision of a man who'd rehearsed sentences for twelve years and never had anyone to say them to. "She always did need things done properly or not at all."

The scattered energy was entirely gone now. The man sitting on the carpentry bench was someone else — someone older, more careful, carrying a weight he'd been managing for longer than his daughter had been an adult.

"You should know something," Devod said. "About Mere's situation. About why she is the way she is — some of it, anyway. Her mother—" He stopped. Started again. "Charlette. Mere's mother. Charlette Fields."

First time I'd heard the name. Noted.

"Charlette owns Thresholds."

I knew this. Mere had never said it in those exact words, but the architecture of their relationship — the schedule restrictions, the workspace rearrangements, the sixth-bell curfew — only made sense if Mere's autonomy had structural limits, not just interpersonal ones. A mother's disapproval could be ignored. A landlord's eviction notice could not.

"Mere built that shop," Devod continued. His voice was steady, but his hands had stopped moving for the first time since I'd entered the room. "Every book on those shelves — she chose it. The clients come because of her. The cataloguing system, the supplier relationships, the way the Pre-Compact section is organised — that's all Mere. Charlette holds the deed. The deed is the leash."

He stood up. Moved to the window. The tanner's smell drifted up from below, sharp and chemical.

"It's not just the shop. Charlette — she runs everything. What Mere earns goes into a 'household contribution.' What Mere does outside the shop is monitored. Who Mere sees. When Mere comes home. Each rule sounds reasonable if you only hear one of them. 'A daughter should contribute to the household.' 'A young woman shouldn't be out after dark alone.' 'The shop needs consistent hours for the customers.' Reasonable." He turned from the window. "Now stack them. All of them. Every day. For twelve years."

The noise was running, but running quietly. Not processing. Listening.

"Twelve years ago," Devod said, "Mere was twelve. Charlette and I had been divorced for two years. The marriage was over — that was mutual, or close enough. But Mere — I was still seeing Mere. Not enough. Charlette made sure of that — scheduling conflicts, last-minute changes, the kind of obstacles that look like circumstance until you see the pattern." He sat down again. Not on the carpentry bench this time — on a chair by the table, closer to me. As if what he was about to say required less distance.

"Charlette told me: stop all contact with Mere, or she would move them both somewhere I'd never find them. No forwarding address. No legal recourse — custody was hers, the divorce settlement gave me nothing, and I didn't have the money to fight it even if I'd had the standing."

His hands were still. Absolutely still. The man with fifteen active projects and energy to spare was sitting motionless, and the stillness was louder than anything he'd said.

"I calculated the odds." His voice was flat now, precise in a way that reminded me of someone. "If I complied — Mere stayed in Drenwick. Grew up here. I could watch from a distance. Know where she was. Know she was alive. If I fought — Charlette would run. She had family in the northern provinces. Mere would disappear, and I would spend the rest of my life looking."

"You chose proximity over contact."

"I chose the option that kept her within reach." He looked at me with twelve years of practiced guilt in his expression. "Mere doesn't know. She thinks I left. Thinks I chose to walk away when she was twelve and never came back. Her mother told her — I don't know exactly what. Something that made the silence make sense. Something that made it my fault."

The noise went quiet.

Not the analytical quiet of hyperfocus — the lattice-and-logic silence that came when a complex pattern was resolving. Not the stunned quiet of Mere's kiss, or the declaration that had followed it. A different kind. A third.

This was my partner's life. The woman who had looked at behavioral evidence, identified a pattern, and declared me hers with the certainty of someone stating a mathematical proof — she was living under the control of a person who owned her work, took her income, dictated her schedule, and had driven away the one parent who actually cared. The estrangement I'd read as Mere's choice — the clinical distance when she'd given me Devod's location, the frozen precision of a twelve-year-old's last observations preserved in amber — was built on a lie she didn't know was a lie.

Devod was watching me. Not with expectation — he'd given up on expecting things from other people a long time ago. But with something adjacent to hope, carefully managed, like a man who keeps wrapped birthday presents on a shelf for twelve years because the alternative is admitting they'll never be delivered.

I noticed them then. On the shelf behind his chair. A row of small parcels, wrapped in paper that had yellowed at different rates — the oldest nearly brown, the newest still pale. Some were rectangular (books, probably), some lumpy and irregular (objects chosen by someone guessing). The wrapping paper styles changed over the years. A progression. Birthday gifts, holiday gifts — twelve years of them. Age-appropriate, too — the older parcels were small enough for a child's hands, the newer ones sized differently, calibrated for a person he hadn't seen grow up.

I catalogued them without speaking. The progression was enough. A father who didn't know what a teenage girl wanted but tried anyway, every year, and put the result on a shelf where only he would see it.

(*The financial math is running. Not the house anymore — or not just the house. What would it cost to get Mere independent? Rent on a place — not a shack, something real. Three silvers a month? Five? A deposit. First and last. She'd need income while she rebuilt — Thresholds' clients would follow her, but that takes time. The retainer plus the Floundry fee plus the verdenshade money. Thirty-two silvers in the lockbox. Seventy-five incoming. Seventy-five more on resolution. Minus the guild percentage — call it one-twenty, net. Towards which goal? Both. Neither. Two financial goals where there used to be one, and one-twenty doesn't solve either of them. Not yet.*)

"I can't promise anything about Mere's situation," I said. It came out quieter than I'd intended. "But I can tell you that she's involved in this case. That she'll need to be part of the expedition to retrieve the plant I described. And that the work we're doing puts her in proximity to you whether she's chosen that or not."

Devod nodded slowly. "She won't come easily."

"She'll come because the work requires it. She's goal-oriented. If the botanical preparation is essential, she'll be there."

"That sounds like Mere," he said again. And again, the rehearsed precision. The sentences said to an empty room for twelve years, finally delivered.

I stood. The expedition was forming in my head — three people minimum. Me for the magic and the combat capability if the mine held surprises. Mere for the ghostveil moss — identification, harvesting, preparation. The dampening properties were the entire purpose of the expedition, and incorrect handling would render it worthless. Devod for navigation — he knew the upper levels, the access points, the structural weak spots. And Carter for supplies. Rope, light sources, medical kit. The standard loadout, adapted for a mine environment.

"I'll be in touch about timing," I said. "The expedition needs to happen soon — Ned's window is narrowing."

"I'll clear my schedule." Devod's scattered energy was returning, but tempered now. Purpose underneath the enthusiasm. "And Phelan — the partner thing. Mere doesn't say that unless she means it. You probably know that. But in case you didn't."

"I know."

The walk home took twenty minutes. The noise churned the entire time, but it churned on two parallel tracks that refused to merge. One was the curse — three layers, two solutions, one gap. Layer 3's anchor drift remained unsolved, a visible flaw I could describe and diagram and do absolutely nothing with. The concept I needed — how to accelerate a gradual process that existed in the space between magical engineering and biological reality — wasn't in any framework I'd studied.

The other track was Mere. Charlette Fields. A deed that was a leash. Twelve years of escalating control dressed in reasonable language. A father who'd made the strategic choice and lived with the cost every day since. Wrapped presents on a shelf.

I reached the shack. One room. One cot. The house plans pinned to the wall above the table — floor layouts and material estimates and warding diagrams I'd been refining for years. The kitchen faced east in every version. I'd never articulated why. The morning light, I'd told myself. Practical consideration.

The plans looked different now.

The noise didn't settle on either track. I let it run.
