CHAPTER FORTY-ONE #3
He looked at the bound men again. “I’ve been losing ground to this crown for thirty years. I don’t have the luxury of patience.”
“Kill surrendered men, and we lose every recruit who joined us because they currently believe we’re different from Arthur.”
“Kill them and we send a message.”
“Carlisle.”
“A message,” he said, louder, and his two men behind him shifted, which was all the signal his people needed to understand that the order had been given. “That the north is not safe for crown soldiers. We send the message that every supply line running out of Camelot bleeds.”
“Stand down.” I put myself between him and the six bound men; I held his gaze and I kept my voice level.
Not a shout. Nothing that would read as panic or challenge.
Just the flat certainty of a man who wouldn’t move.
“You do this over my objection and you lose the network. Not pieces of it. All of it. Every house in the north that shelters our people does so because they believe we’re worth sheltering. The moment we’re indistinguishable from the thing we’re fighting—”
“—we’re already indistinguishable to Arthur.” He held my gaze for a long moment. The knife was still in his hand. His hawk’s eyes didn’t flinch. “You think he makes a distinction between us and monsters? He does not.”
“I’m not fighting for Arthur’s opinion of me.”
The silence stretched.
“Carlisle.” Hailey’s voice was quiet, not placating, not sharp.
Just present, the way she put herself into difficult moments: without apology.
She stepped up beside me, and she looked at him directly in the way she looked at most things, as though she’d already decided she wasn’t going to blink first.
“Six bound men on a road are a liability either way. Dead, they’re a story Arthur tells about us. Alive, they’re six men who spend the rest of their service knowing Arthur wouldn’t have spared their lives were it the other way around.”
She paused. “One of those outcomes serves us. The other serves him.”
Carlisle looked at her for a long moment, and as he did, something shifted in his expression: not agreement exactly, but the recalibration of a man who’d expected to argue and had instead been handed logic.
“Your woman has a mouth on her,” he said to me.
“She’s not my woman,” I answered, reminded of a similar conversation I’d had with Carlisle about Morgan.
“No,” Hailey agreed pleasantly. “I’m his right hand, which is considerably more useful.”
Then Carlisle put the knife back on his belt, slowly, with the deliberateness of a man doing it as a choice, making sure I registered that it was a choice, and that the choice could be unmade.
“Move them,” he said to me, not to his men. To me. “If one of them walks free and brings Arthur’s riders down on a safe house, the blood is yours.”
He mounted his horse, then rode back up the ridge without another word.
I stood beside Hailey and watched him go.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I didn’t do it for you,” she answered. “I did it because he was about to make a fucking mistake, and someone needed to say something you couldn’t say without it becoming a confrontation.” She glanced at me. “You were too far into it, Vaelen. Sometimes you need someone who isn’t.”
“You know, you could have just said ‘you’re welcome’.”
She grinned at me. “Where’s the fucking fun in that?”
She walked back toward the burning wagons before I could respond, which was also entirely consistent with everything I knew about her.
The wagons sent black smoke straight up into the windless afternoon sky, a column visible for miles, which was exactly the point.
Arthur would know by nightfall. He’d know the pass was compromised, he’d know the supply line had been hit, he’d know it had been done by people who were organized enough to plan and disciplined enough, mostly, to do it cleanly.
He’d also know someone had let six of his men live.
I didn’t know yet whether that last part was brilliance or sentimentality. Those two things had a way of looking identical until the consequences arrived.
The forest camp was two miles east of the Ashford Pass, inside a stand of old-growth pine so dense the sky was barely visible.
The fire was small and smokeless; Renn had learned three years ago how to burn wet wood without the column that gave position away.
The smell was different from regular wood smoke: earthier, resinous, with an undertone that reminded me of the deeper passages in Annwyn.
I arrived after dark.
Morgan was already there.
She was sitting on a fallen log with her cloak wrapped around her and her hair loose, which was unusual: she wore her hair elaborately by preference, pinned and dressed with the small enchanted ornaments that caught light like trapped sparks.
Loose, it fell past her shoulders in waves of black with those deep-red threads running through it.
She had a cup of something warm in both hands, and she was watching the fire with the expression she wore when she was thinking through a problem: not absent, exactly, but interior. Turned inward.
Hailey moved to sit on a supply crate that was a short distance from Morgan, spreading her notes across her knees, a stub of charcoal in her hand. She was already writing something, head bent, hair falling loose from where she’d tied it back for the operation.
Morgan was watching her.
Not obviously. Morgan rarely did anything obviously. But I’d spent enough time studying Morgan’s face to know where her attention actually lived regardless of where her eyes appeared to be pointed, and her attention was on Hailey with focused interest.
I said nothing about it. I filed it, the way I filed most things involving the two of them, in the category of developments requiring further observation.
I sat across from Morgan, and she looked up then. The firelight caught the gold flecks in her green eyes, that movement like trapped sparks I’d long stopped trying to analyze.
“You know, I bet you both would like one another,” I offered as I motioned to Hailey with my chin.
Morgan set down her cup. “I already like her,” she answered. “Any woman who says ‘fuck’ as much as she does is someone worth knowing.”
Morgan reached across and took the stack of reports I offered without saying anything more. I watched her face while she worked through them.
She had a face that revealed very little.
That was one of the first things I’d understood about her and one of the things that had kept me watching her for longer than was strategically necessary.
She could listen to news of a catastrophe, and her expression would stay composed, careful, the way a surgeon’s expression stays careful during an operation,
not because they feel nothing but because they can’t afford the luxury of showing what they feel in the moment they need their hands to be steady.
She read each report in order. I’d left them in the sequence I’d received them: garrison movements from the northeast passage, troop rotations in the outer wall at Camelot, three accounts of missing persons along the northern Logres border,
two reports of crop failures in areas where the soil had shown no prior weakness, one report about livestock deaths with no discernible cause, and the last one.
She reached the seventh.
She read it twice. I watched her do it, watched her eyes move to the beginning of the page again after she reached the end, which she didn’t do with any of the others.
Her finger traced the description of the eyeless fish. The species no one recognized, hauled up from depths they didn’t belong at, in a lake that the report noted had no deeper channels: a lake, in other words, that shouldn’t have had depths at all.
She put the reports down and looked at the fire.
Across the camp, Hailey was no longer writing. Soon, she stood up and approached us, and when she did, she dropped her eyes to the reports in Morgan’s hands. Morgan made no attempt to hide them, so Hailey read what she could. As she did, her expression clouded.
“The fish,” she said.
Morgan looked at her.
“And the livestock,” Hailey continued, carefully. “And the border disappearances... They’re connected.”
Morgan studied her for a moment with that assessing stillness of hers.
“Yes,” she said.
Hailey absorbed that without visible reaction.
Then she picked her notes back up and began writing again, which was how she processed things: by immediately finding the practical implication and working toward it.
“Then we need to know the pattern before Arthur fucking does,” she said, without looking up.
“Because if he figures out what it fucking means before we do, he’ll find a way to use it.”
With that, she turned around and walked back to her crate, sitting down to continue her notes.
Morgan looked at me. I looked back at her.
Neither of us said anything, but something passed between us that was adjacent to the specific, reluctant acknowledgment that someone had just said the most useful thing that had been said all evening.
“What do you know?” I asked.
“Several things.” She picked up her cup again. “Not all of which I can tell you.”
“Morgan.”
“Not because I’m protecting secrets from you.”
She met my eyes. There was something tired in her expression that I didn’t often see.
She carried exhaustion the way she carried most things: privately, without display, but tonight it was closer to the surface.
“Because some of what I know will mean nothing to you without context you don’t have, and I don’t have time to give you.”
“Try.”
A pause. The fire snapped. Somewhere above us in the pines, an owl called once and went silent.
“As I’ve already said, the veil is thinning,” she started.
I waited.
“Between this world and the one that sits adjacent to it,” she turned the cup in her hands, “it has been thinning for some time. But what those reports describe—the fish, the crop failures, the livestock, the border disappearances—those aren’t isolated events. They’re symptoms.”
“Of what?”
“Of something that hasn’t crossed yet,” she said, “but is preparing to.”