Chapter 57 #3
“Bad.” Tristan did not slow. “A raven came from the lowlands not twenty minutes ago. Three villages along the Northern Reach were put to the torch. He counted near a thousand dead by the time he wrote.” His mouth tightened.
“They are not demanding oaths or taking prisoners. They’re not even stopping to loot.
It is slaughter,” Tristan said, the word rougher than the rest. “And we think it is meant to drag every rebel banner south to answer it, because every banner under Dominic’s command has blood in those villages.
Cousins. Sisters. Sons.” He swallowed. “Osin knows that.”
A bell began to toll as Tristan finished speaking—three quick strokes and one long—sharp and urgent from the watchtower at the gate.
A horse thundered past at a hard canter, its rider in Vredian colors leaning low to speak to a runner at the corner before vanishing up the road.
The bell rang on. Three quick. One long.
Three quick. One long. Muster, muster, muster.
It was a call he had heard a hundred times, from a hundred different gates; he had been on the other side of it most of his life.
A figure detached itself from the corner ahead and resolved in the lamplight into Dario.
He wore a dark riding cloak, his fair hair shoved hastily back from his face, and when he saw Ivan, he spared him none of his usual distaste; he only fell in beside them at the same hard pace, gaze taking in the wet hair, split mouth, and bloodied knuckles.
“Do I want to know?”
“He was making friends,” Tristan said, breathing heavily.
Dario looked him over. “Badly, from the look of it.”
Ivan gave him a thin smile. “They were poor conversationalists.”
They reached Algernon’s house at a run.
Even from the lower turn of the street, Ivan could see the windows burning.
Not with fire, though there was enough panic in the light to make a man think it.
Every lamp in the front rooms had been lit, spilling gold over the snow and the churned-up yard where horses stamped and blew steam through their bridles.
Vredian regulars stood at the gate with their cloaks thrown over armor half-fastened in haste.
One courier came stumbling down the front steps while another pushed past him going in, both of them carrying sealed letters with the red wax still soft.
The door stood open.
Ivan slowed before he meant to.
Dominic stood at the central table in shirtsleeves, one hand planted on the map, his face stripped of anything boyish.
Yoni paced at his shoulder, speaking too fast, while Gideon bent over the courier bags, Sybil sat nearby with a warding chart spread across her knees, and Godfrey hovered near the apparatus notes, pale as candle wax.
Algernon was there, too, along with Avis and Bryn, all of them talking over one another the way people do when the hour is gone but pride is not.
Ivan stood in the snow with water dripping from his hair into his collar and tried to center himself.
There was still enough liquor in his blood to make the lamps smear into halos, enough to make his mouth feel slow and mean.
But the old part of him—the trained part, the ruined part—had awakened fully.
If he went inside, they would use him.
They would ask him what he knew of Osin and which roads the Legion would take, which fires were bait, and where the second blow would fall.
He would answer because he could. Because drink or no drink, he knew Osin’s mind too well.
He would step to the map. He would point.
He would explain the cruelty of the thing, and Dominic would listen, and minutes would pass.
Minutes they didn’t have—minutes she did not have to spare.
His hand found the pearl pin in his pocket.
The bent metal pressed into the pad of his thumb.
Elara was across the veil, somewhere in Tír na nóg, walking toward a Tribunal that would put her life and her blood and the conspiracy built around both to judgment.
And here, in a scholar’s house turned war room, they were preparing to open the Fold without her.
And she was the reason he had agreed to help them in the first place.
Sybil’s words returned to him then, thin and cold beneath torchlight.
The north is where it begins. All of it. What comes next. What she still has to do.
He had hated prophecy all his life. It was only another cage with prettier bars, another way for the gods to meddle and call it fate. But he remembered Sybil’s face when she had said it—remembered the way the torchlight had failed to warm her eyes.
If we are not here for it, she will have no road through what comes next.
Ivan’s hand tightened on the pin.
She deserved to know—deserved the choice. None of them knew what waited inside the Fold—not truly—but whatever waited there belonged to her first.
Ivan stepped away from the window. Inside, Sybil turned as if a thread had tugged; her gaze lifted from the table, found him through the glass, took in the blood at his mouth, the water in his hair, the verdict already written.
Her eyes widened; then, barely, she glanced to the dark beyond the house—Go.
Tristan noticed first. “Ivan?”
He turned for the gate.
“Ivan,” Tristan said again, sharper. “Where are you going?”
The bell over Eldham rang—three quick, one long. Ivan raised his hood and closed his fist around the pearl pin until it cut his palm.
“To find her.”