I hunted the way I'd survived: quietly, from below, through the places no one watches.
Not with warriors kicking in doors that was Damien's method, and it would have told the faction we were looking within a day. Instead I went back to being a servant. I walked the kitchen tunnels at the hours the cooks changed shift. I sat with the laundry women and let them talk around me the way people talk around someone they've stopped seeing. I counted stores myself, by hand, at night, in the storerooms I'd hauled ash out of as a girl.
And within a week, the pattern came clear.
The grain wasn't leaving through the gates. It was moving down into the old lower cellars beneath the eastern quarter, the disused ones that had flooded twenty years back and been abandoned. Nobody went down there. Nobody b
