He started with the archive.
Not with what Nara had found — not yet. He started with the parts he could reach himself, the documents he'd looked at a hundred times without reading as evidence. He read them now as evidence.
The Voss land grant was from forty-one years ago. It was issued by the Vaereth Council of Bloodlines to Davan Voss's father, Aldous, in recognition of distinguished military service and exceptional blood-strength, the standard language for acknowledging a family with strong Vein-craft. The grant was clean. The language was clean. He could find nothing to question.
He went further back. To the generation before Aldous.
The records here were sparser — deliberately or simply from age, he couldn't tell. There was a gap. Roughly seven years, around seventy to sixty-three years ago, where the documentation was thin in a way that felt designed. Not absent entirely — that would have been too obvious — but thin. Summary documents instead of originals. References to earlier records that didn't exist in the archive. The kind of thinness that, in Kael's experience of old texts, meant the originals had been removed.
He noted the years. He noted the gap. He left the archive and went to the provincial records hall in the nearby town of Vaesk, which kept copies of Council filings, and requested access to the Voss blood-strength records from the relevant decades.
The clerk found them without difficulty. She set them on the reading table and left him alone.
The records showed exactly what the estate archive showed, up to the gap years. And then, for those seven years, the record was strange. The Voss blood-strength assessments dropped dramatically — near-null readings, the kind that would have cost the family their standing in Vaereth's blood-hierarchy. And then, abruptly, sixty-three years ago, the readings surged. Surged to numbers that even now, looking at them, made Kael feel a cold sensation across his shoulders.
He set that document down and considered it carefully.
His next step was methodical rather than inspired: he requested the records of every family the provincial index showed as having lost their blood-standing classification in the same gap years. There were three names. Two had clear documentation — old families with no surviving heirs, common enough in the border provinces, the records clean and sad and ordinary. The third family had no documentation of decline at all. Their records simply ended. One year present, substantial, fully detailed. The next year: nothing. Not a fading. Not a decline. A clean removal, the way you lifted a candle from a table and left the darkness absolute.
The name of the third family was Maren.
He sat with it. He requested the Maren blood-strength records alongside the Voss records from that same period and laid them on the table next to each other.
The numbers matched — almost exactly. The Voss surge and the Maren disappearance occupied the same twelve-month window, sixty-three years ago. Aldous would have been in his forties then, already a grown man with standing and resources and the political reach such things required.
Kael sat in the provincial records hall for a long time, looking at two sets of numbers on two pieces of paper, and felt something settle in his chest that was not certainty but was the immediate neighbor of it.
*************
He didn't go straight back to the estate. He walked around the town of Vaesk for an hour, through the market and the side streets and the small park with the dry fountain, because he needed to think and he needed to move and he needed to be somewhere where no one was watching him think.
The Maren family had been a great house once. He knew this now — he'd found three references to them in general histories during his archive work. A great house of the eastern territories, with extraordinary blood-strength. They'd been allies of the Vaereth Council. They'd had estates and standing and name.
And then, sixty-three years ago, they had ceased to exist.
The histories gave various accounts. A plague was the most common. A fast-moving illness that had struck the family's bloodline specifically, which the scholars noted as unusual but not unprecedented — blood-specific illness was a known phenomenon, something about the concentration of Vein-craft making certain families vulnerable to specific pathogens.
But if the Maren blood-strength had transferred to the Voss bloodline in the same year —
No. He stopped himself.
Think carefully, he told himself. Not what makes a good story. What's actually supported.
What was supported: a coincidence of timing. Maren strength gone. Voss strength arrived. That was all he had. Coincidences happened. Correlations weren't causation. He needed more.
He turned around and walked back to the estate, and he walked into the archive, and he looked at Nara across the long table.
"Tell me what you found," he said. "With the misdated documents."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she reached into the organized box on her left and placed a folder on the table between them.
"Tell me what you see," she said instead.