Chapter Two The Net Tightens #3
Valerius approached the prisoners, hands clasped behind his back.
“You will sleep,” he said. “If you attempt to run, you will be shot. If you fight, you will be killed. If you obey, you will live.”
His eyes moved over them like counting coins. “Living is not the same as comfort.”
No one spoke.
Valerius’s gaze landed on Caelan. “Quartermaster.”
Caelan lifted his chin.
“You are trained in discipline,” Valerius said. “Teach your people to hold their tongues. Noise invites punishment.”
Caelan’s jaw clenched. He wanted to refuse. He wanted to spit in the face of being made responsible for other prisoners’ behavior under threat.
But he saw Ewan trembling. He saw the older prisoner with blood on his temple leaning unsteadily. He saw Morna’s face, pale with exhaustion, eyes sharp with contained fury.
If he refused, Valerius would punish someone else. Someone weaker.
Caelan forced the words out. “Be quiet,” he called to the group, voice firm. “Do not give them reasons.”
It felt like swallowing ash.
Valerius nodded once, satisfied, then turned away.
Food was tossed to the prisoners, a thin piece of hard bread each, nothing more. Water was offered from a shared skin, passed down the line under guard supervision.
Caelan ate slowly, forcing his body to accept what little was given. Hunger made men foolish. He could not afford foolishness.
Morna chewed her bread with methodical slowness, as if treating it like medicine rather than food.
Caelan found himself watching her again. Not because she was beautiful in this misery, though he could see the shape of youth and strength in her despite dirt and damp. He watched because she did not break. She bent, calculating, conserving.
A survivor, he thought.
He wondered, briefly, whether she had always been this way, or whether the world had carved it into her.
Night settled fully.
The prisoners lay on cold ground, backs against stone, ropes still binding wrists and linking them together. Caelan shifted until he could rest without jarring his shoulder too badly. Pain pulsed in him like a second heartbeat.
Ewan lay close, shivering. Caelan angled his body slightly, giving the boy what shelter he could from wind.
Sleep came in fragments.
Caelan’s mind kept replaying the ambush, searching for mistakes. He could see the rope, the precise timing, the way arrows had been used to disable rather than kill. He could see Valerius’s calm.
This had been planned. For supplies, yes, but also for prisoners.
For information.
He thought of Gavin, of Liam and Anya at the border camp, waiting for supplies that would not come. He thought of the panic that would spread when the convoy failed to arrive.
He thought of his own ledgers, lined with careful counts, and felt the absurdity of it like a bruise.
Order was not armor.
In the dark, Morna shifted. Her breath hitched once, then steadied again. Caelan heard it, the small human sound of someone forcing herself to remain controlled.
He did not speak to her. Words were watched here, even in the dark.
Still, he found his mind turning toward her as if seeking another problem to solve.
Neutral clan, healer, practical. Captured now, like him, stripped of agency. Equal in powerlessness, even if their worlds had been different.
The thought made him uneasy. Equality born of chains was not true equality.
Morning came gray and cold.
They marched again.
This time, after hours of rough walking, they reached horses and carts hidden in a narrow ravine.
The captors had prepared everything. The prisoners were lifted, shoved, forced onto the carts like bundles of wood.
Hoods were pulled over their heads, thick cloth that smelled of sweat and smoke. Darkness swallowed Caelan’s vision.
The world became sound and sensation.
Rope tightened around his wrists. The cart jolted beneath him. He heard Ewan’s breathing close by. He heard Morna somewhere in the line, the soft rasp of cloth, the faint clink of her basket being placed near her, likely because Valerius wanted her tools kept intact.
The cart rolled forward, wheels grinding over stone.
Caelan tried to mark direction by the tilt of the cart and the way wind shifted. He tried to count time by the rhythm of hoofbeats.
He could not.
The route was designed to disorient. Turns came too often. Stops were brief and silent. They were fed sparingly without removing the hoods. Water dribbled into mouths like they were animals.
Caelan’s anger burned, hot and helpless.
At one stop, the cart halted abruptly. Caelan’s shoulder slammed into the sideboard. He bit back a curse.
A hand grabbed his arm, hauling him down. His boots hit ground, uneven and rocky.
Voices around him. Different now. More echoes, as if they were near stone walls, or inside a canyon.
Valerius’s voice came close to his ear. “Careful, quartermaster. You will need that shoulder.”
Caelan’s jaw clenched. “For what?”
Valerius’s breath brushed his cheek, a deliberate invasion of space. “For carrying the weight of your choices.”
Then Valerius moved away.
Caelan was pushed forward. His feet stumbled, then found a rough path.
The air changed. It smelled of wet wood and old smoke, of too many bodies in too little space.
He heard a gate creak. He heard chains.
The sound sank into him like cold.
They were entering somewhere enclosed.
Caelan’s pulse hammered. He forced himself to breathe slow. Panic would not help. Panic was a luxury for men who could afford to lose control.
The hood was finally yanked off.
Light stabbed his eyes. Caelan blinked hard, vision swimming.
He stood in a clearing surrounded by tall, dark pines.
A palisade of rough timber rose around them, reinforced with iron bands.
Watchtowers stood at intervals, men with bows visible in shadowed platforms. Beyond the palisade, the land fell away into thick forest, making the camp feel like a cut wound in the wilderness.
Blackwood, Caelan thought, without knowing why the name surfaced. Perhaps because the trees were so dark, the timber so stained by weather and smoke.
Prisoners were being herded through a gate, shoved into a yard where mud and trampled straw mixed underfoot. The air stank of sweat and fear. Thin smoke drifted from a cook fire that did not smell like food so much as burnt water.
Morna stood a few paces away, hood removed, hair tangled, cheeks smudged with dirt. Her eyes swept the camp quickly, cataloging. She did not look at Caelan. Not yet.
Ewan stood on Caelan’s other side, swaying slightly. His face had gone gray with exhaustion.
A young woman, Elara, was brought through the gate behind them, hands bound, eyes wide and unfocused with terror. She looked barely older than a girl. Her breath came in short gasps, like she could not find enough air.
Caelan’s chest tightened.
Valerius walked into the yard as if stepping into an office. He removed his gloves slowly, then handed them to a subordinate.
“Welcome,” he said, voice carrying without effort. “You are at Blackwood.”
No one spoke.
Valerius’s gaze swept them. “This camp exists for one purpose: to produce information.”
The word produce made Caelan’s skin crawl. As if pain could be manufactured like grain.
Valerius continued, “You will work. You will speak when spoken to. You will eat if you earn it. If you do not, you will still be useful.”
His eyes landed on the Kincaid prisoners, then on Morna. “Healers will be valuable. Quartermasters will be valuable. Warriors will learn that strength is not the only currency.”
He looked at Caelan again, and Caelan felt the cold certainty of being targeted.
Valerius smiled faintly. “Order will be restored here. Not your order. Mine.”
Then he turned and walked away, leaving guards to push the prisoners toward a long, low building that smelled like old damp and rot.
As Caelan was shoved forward, he caught Morna’s gaze for the first time since the road.
Her eyes were steady, but there was a tightness around them now, a flicker of something that might have been fear, quickly smothered by resolve.
Caelan realized, with a strange jolt, that he needed her steadiness in the way a man needed air.
Dependence was another form of disorder.
Yet as the camp gates closed behind them with a heavy final sound, Caelan understood something he had not allowed himself to fully accept on the road.
Whatever came next would strip them further than rope and hoods already had.
They would be tested. Not just bodies, but the parts of themselves they had always believed were unbreakable.
And if they were to survive, it would not be by rules alone.
It would be by choices.