Chapter 26: THE YENNEFER QUESTION
She found me in the workshop before breakfast, her expression carrying the specific focus I'd learned to recognize as preliminary to something important.
"I need to discuss the eastern margin."
Not a complaint. Not an accusation. A statement of intent.
"Sit down."
She took the chair across from my work table — the same position she'd occupied during our first working session, weeks ago. The winter light through the workshop windows was grey and even, illuminating her face without shadows.
"I've sensed a structural anomaly there," she said. "Four visits. Consistent readings. I want to know if you're aware of it."
"Yes."
The immediate acknowledgment caught her off-guard. I saw it in the slight shift of her posture, the recalibration of whatever approach she'd planned.
"What do you know?"
I gave her everything I had.
Not the CDM. Not the system. But every piece of documentation I'd accumulated through other means — the observations, the correlations, the pattern analysis that didn't require supernatural assistance to explain.
"There's a Godling who has lived in this territory since before the Conjunction." I spread Pip's mud diagram on the table. "She remembers what the land was like before the current monster population arrived. She drew this to show me where something changed."
Yennefer studied the diagram without touching it. "The symbol at the center."
"Forty meters below the swamp surface. The same location where the subsonic hum originates — fourteen to eighteen hertz, consistent across all my observations."
"You've measured the frequency."
"Gervin and I detected it during night watches. It's strongest between midnight and dawn."
I continued laying out the evidence. Brokk's survey of the Conjunction-era stonework — the radial pattern, the anchor system terminology, the pre-human architecture running through the settlement's foundations. The creature boundary patterns I'd documented across four species. The compass drift that affected every magnetic instrument within a mile of the margin.
I presented it the way I would present a patient history: systematic, comprehensive, focused on observable facts rather than speculation.
Yennefer listened without interrupting.
When I finished, she was quiet for a long moment. Then she said: "It's not a natural formation."
"I know."
"The magical signature is old. Pre-Conjunction old. And it's failing."
"Failing how?"
"Not dissolving. Leaking." Her voice carried the certainty of someone who had been building the same case I had, from a different direction, for six weeks. "The boundary the creatures respect isn't territorial marking. It's the edge of a leakage field. They're not choosing to stay away from it — they're being pushed away by something that spills out of the structure."
The creature behavior patterns suddenly made more sense. Not territorial. Not defensive. Displacement.
The same displacement I'd observed in the Nekker Patriarch, who was being driven out of his own territory by something he couldn't fight.
"You've known this since you arrived."
"I suspected it the first night. I've confirmed it through repeated observation." She met my eyes directly. "You've been tracking this longer than I have. How long?"
"Since my first day in the fief."
"And you didn't mention it."
"The contract didn't require me to share it. And I wasn't sure you'd believe me without your own observations to confirm."
She processed this. The calculation in her expression wasn't suspicious — it was professional. One investigator recognizing that another had followed proper verification protocols.
"I'll need better tools to assess the full structure," she said. "The magical signature is complex. Standard scrying won't penetrate it."
"There's a recipe that may help." I pulled out my notes on the Veil Sense Expansion formula — the Tier II unlock that required components I hadn't yet sourced. "The description suggests it enhances perception of layered magical structures."
She read the recipe notes without comment, her expression shifting to focused evaluation. "Where did you get this?"
"Old alchemical records. Part of the documentation I've been compiling."
She accepted this — for now — and began making her own component list. "Three of these I can identify from existing botanical sources. Two will require specific monster materials. One is rare enough that we may need to trade for it."
"We have trade routes established through Brokk's contacts."
"Then we start with what's available and work toward what isn't."
She was still writing when I realized she'd said "we" twice in the past minute. Neither of us mentioned it.
The notes accumulated on the table between us — her component list, my observation records, the mud diagram, the survey maps. Two people building the same diagnostic picture from different angles, arriving at the same conclusion.
"We should start with the Godling," she said, not looking up from her writing. "If she has pre-Conjunction memory, she may know what the structure was designed to do before it started failing."
The word "we" sat in the room between us, unremarked and significant.
Neither of us was going to be the one who named what had just happened.
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