CHAPTER FORTY-ONE #2
I had told myself the timing was wrong repeatedly.
Then I had told myself the situation had not yet demanded it.
I was a man who understood timing, who had built his entire practice on the principle that the correct action at the wrong moment was indistinguishable from the wrong action, and I had used that principle as a wall.
The wall had to come down now.
I stood from the chair. My knees registered the cold, the way they always did now, even if I ignored them.
The window was dark. Below, Caer Gwyll was quiet.
The ivy, or the thing that was n0t quite ivy, moved along the eastern wall with a motion that was not wind.
I watched it. The veil had been thinner again today; I had felt it twice, each time like a thread pulled somewhere deep in the fabric of things, not snapping, not yet, but stretching in a way that the fabric was not designed to accommodate.
The dragon was growing stronger.
That was the plain fact of it. Arthur had contained it through sheer density of will, and his will was extraordinary, but it was also no longer enough, because the dragon was older than his will and patient in a way human will could not sustain.
What Arthur had built was a cage, and the cage was holding, barely, and the holding was costing him things he did not know he was paying, and in the spaces where his control was loosening, the veil thinned.
She knew something, the witch in the Wilds.
She always knew something; that was the thing that had made her invaluable and also intolerable, because her knowing always arrived with conditions.
Not stated conditions. She was not a woman who negotiated in plain language.
She negotiated in silences and in the things she did not say, which were always more numerous and more significant than the things she did.
The last time I had been there, I had left owing her something. I had never settled that debt. Yet, she had never asked after it, which was the most effective possible method of ensuring I would never forget it.
I crossed to the fireplace and crouched, looking into the dead ash.
There was nothing there.
I had tried every other angle, trying to find one that did not involve Blodeuwyn.
I had mapped the visions forward and backward and sideways through every variation I could hold in my mind simultaneously.
I had worked the problem through Guinevere, through the rebellion, through Morgan, through the timing of the thinning and the dragon’s escalation and what Mordred would do when he finally identified what he was sensing in the girl,
and how Arthur would respond when the dragon’s interest in her became undeniable, even to Arthur.
But every path that did not require the witch in the Wilds required something else I did not have, information I could not access, a timeline I could not force and a conversation in Camelot I could not have without destroying what little cover Guinevere had left.
All paths led to the same place.
I stood up.
The ash was gray, cold and complete.
I did not go to the Wilds that night.
Instead, I stood in my dark study for another hour, maybe more, the way a man stands at the face of a decision he has already made but has not performed yet, turning it over, looking for a door he had not yet tried. There were no doors. I had been thorough about that, at least.
I went to bed.
The woman in the Wilds could wait a while longer.
-VAELEN-
The caravan came through the Ashford Pass at the wrong hour.
That was their first mistake: moving grain and weapons through a mountain road after midday, when the shadows from the eastern ridge stretched long and swallowed the road in sections.
When a man’s eyes needed time to adjust between light and dark, when horses were tired and pulling, and the drivers had been at it since before dawn and were thinking about supper, that wasn’t the right time.
I’d watched three convoys use this pass in the past month.
I’d counted axles, noted escort numbers, formation spacing, and the distance between the lead riders and the wagon line.
I’d noted how two King’s Guard were in front, their ceremonial armor catching light like a signal fire.
Four Iron Hounds flanked them, and at the rear, a guard of six who rotated their positions too infrequently and had started talking to each other by the second hour of the march, which meant their eyes were on each other’s faces instead of the treeline.
There were twelve soldiers in total with wagons that were full of grain, weapons, and even more useful things, according to the message Pip had intercepted at the waystation.
We had twenty-two in our number.
Hailey had been the one to pull Pip’s intercept from the waystation drop. She’d arrived back at camp with it folded inside her boot, which was where she carried things she didn’t want found if she was searched, and she’d handed it to me without ceremony while eating a pear.
“Replacement Iron Hounds,” she’d said between chews. “Bound for Camelot. Ten wagons.” She’d taken another bite. “We should hit the fuck out of it.” I’d told her I’d already been thinking the same thing. She’d said she already knew because she “wasn’t fucking dumb.”
I gave the signal from the ridge at the second bend: a single sharp whistle, the kind a shepherd makes to turn his dog, and the treeline below came alive.
It went fast, the way these things go when you’ve done the planning properly.
The lead riders went down before they could turn their horses.
Harwick took the near flank while Renn’s group cut off the rear.
I came down the slope with seven at my back and hit the center of the wagon line where the weapons crates were stacked under oilcloth.
The drivers put their hands up immediately; most of them weren’t soldiers. They were hired men from Pendrath and Corwall who’d taken crown coin to move freight and had no particular allegiance to the freight, to the crown, or even to the coin, for that matter.
“Down from the boards,” I said. “Hands where I can see them.”
They came down.
The King’s Guard was different. Three of them fought while two dropped their weapons when they saw their numbers against ours. One, a young man with the kind of face that still has hope in it, tried to run for the treeline, and Harwick took him down with a tackle before he’d made it ten yards.
“Don’t kill him,” I said.
Harwick looked up from the ground with the boy pinned under his knee. He had the flat expression of a man who disagreed but recognized authority, and he stepped back.
The boy scrambled to his feet. He was maybe nineteen. His armor was new; he hadn’t been in it long enough to wear the shine off the joints.
“Go,” I said.
He went, and he did so quickly.
Harwick watched him go. “He’ll report everything.”
“He’ll report what I want Arthur to know,” I said. “Ten wagons hit in the Ashford pass. All survived.”
Harwick understood. He didn’t like it, but he understood.
Hailey appeared at my left. She’d watched the boy go without expression, and now she was watching the road where he’d disappeared into the treeline. “He’ll run straight to the nearest fucking garrison post,” she said.
“Yes.”
“So we have maybe four hours before they send riders.”
“Three,” I said. “If they’re efficient.”
She nodded once and turned back toward the wagons without requiring further instruction. She already knew what needed doing. She always already knew because she wasn’t fucking dumb.
The work of moving what we could take took the better part of an hour.
The grain wagons, and there were six of them, were too heavy to move quickly, so we took four.
We burned the rest of them. The weapons crates we stripped entirely: two wagons of swords, spearheads, and arrowheads still bundled in straw.
All of it was transferred to the mules that were waiting in the hollow below the ridge, already loaded and moving before the last wagon caught.
The other soldiers: six men in a covered wagon, unarmed and bound for Camelot to receive their posting, sat on the road with their hands tied in front of them.
That was when Carlisle arrived.
He came down from the north end of the ridge on a black horse with two of his own men behind him, and I knew from the way he rode that the morning was about to cost more than it needed to.
“Good work,” he said, pulling up beside me as he then dismounted.
His hair was wind-pulled from its tie. The scar across his cheek caught the afternoon light, and he looked at the burning wagons without much expression. Then he looked at the bound soldiers sitting in the road.
“On your feet,” he said to them.
They stood.
“Carlisle,” I said.
“They know too much,” he said. “They’ve seen faces. Routes.”
“They’re unarmed and restrained. I’ll have them moved to the Greenvale safe house until—”
“—until what?” It wasn’t a question. He asked the question the way men say things when they’ve already stopped listening. “Until Arthur sends a retrieval party and they walk back into Camelot and describe every man here?”
“They haven’t seen enough to—”
“—they’ve seen you, and now they’ve seen me.”
The six men were very still.
I was aware of Hailey behind me and slightly to my right.
She hadn’t moved or spoken, but I could feel the quality of her attention: focused, assessing, tracking the knife on Carlisle’s belt before he’d reached for it.
She had a talent for reading the moment before a moment became something irreversible.
“They surrendered,” I said.
“Soldiers don’t get to surrender,” Carlisle answered.
He’d already pulled the short knife from his belt and was turning it in his fingers with the easy habit of a man who’d done this before and had no particular feeling about it anymore.
“That’s a mercy we extend to civilians. We don’t extend it to men who wear Arthur’s sigil.”
“We extended it this morning. Those are the rules I fight by.”
“Your rules.” He said the words without contempt, almost without interest, as if he were identifying a fact rather than dismissing one.
“You fight a clean war, Vaelen. A patient war. A war you can win from a distance.”