The great hall of Ashenvere Keep had seen better decades. The tapestries that had once illustrated the Ward-Binding Ceremony of 1743 now hung in strips, their vivid dyes faded to the color of old bruises. Duke Aldric sat at the long table alone, a map spread before him and a glass of wine untouched at his elbow. He was sixty-three years old and looked, Caelindra thought, like a man trying to remember the name of a friend who had already died.
"How long?" he asked when she entered.
"I cannot say with certainty. The wards are dormant, not destroyed. The binding substrate is intact — I can feel the architecture of the original work. Someone has simply removed the animating charge. The way you might drain a lamp of oil without breaking the glass."
"Can it be restored?"
She pulled out the chair across from him and sat without being invited, a liberty she had earned over twenty years of service. "That depends on what drained it. If it was natural decay — entropy, time, the simple wearing down of all things — then yes. With six weeks and a full Keeper's conclave. If it was deliberate interference..." She looked at the map, tracing with her eyes the line of the Eastern Marches. "Then whoever did it is still out there, and they will drain the Westgate next."
Aldric was quiet for a long time. Outside, the wind moved through the courtyard with a sound like cautious breathing.
"Send for the conclave," he said at last. "And post double guards on every gate. I want nothing crossing the threshold until we know what crossed it last."