The Spider's Web

Peter Drakonnen has fought wars he could see. This time the enemy hands him a piece of paper.

A freight manifest arrives at Drakonnen Castle written too clean to be honest. A column of numbers built to keep a lord calm while his stores bleed out beneath him. Two months of his promised vengeance are spent, and the third opens with no gate to ride to, only a lie he cannot put a blade to.

The castle is past full, the wounded from Khaz-Gundahr crowd the wing, and the forge runs short of honest iron. Somewhere on a mountain road no map names, a loaded wagon is stripped of its weight and waved through every check that should have caught it.

His circle reads the truth for him, each in her own hand. Brynn off a worn brake block, Pell out of records four days slow, Iridessa from a stamp older than the seal it imitates. Nyxara guards the line he can see. Vesper, the captured enemy operative he keeps watched but not caged, reads the hand behind the lie better than anyone-because she helped build one like it once.

Every thread leads onto the water, into channels where one authority can ground a hull without touching it-and she's been spending Peter's name to do it.

The ones who spun this never reckoned Drakonnen could learn to count.

Will Peter unmask the hand at the center of the web before it empties his kingdom from the inside-or will trusting the wrong reader cost him everything he bled to forge?