I built the investigation the way I built everything now quietly, patiently, from the places no one watched.
I didn't accuse. I didn't arrest. Damien would have dragged servants into the great hall and frightened the truth out of them, and gotten a dozen false confessions and no traitor, and taught the whole pack to fear the throne again. I did the opposite. I watched. I mapped who had access to the stores and the lower cellars both. I noted who worked the storerooms and who could vanish for an hour without anyone thinking to ask where. I kept it in my own head, written nowhere, because a written list is a thing that can be found, and I'd learned from Roan that the best hunt is the one the prey never knows is happening.
The list of wolves who could be moving the grain came down, over ten
