The Road to Eastmere ★
? Roman ?
We leave for Eastmere before the blood in the lower hall has dried.
There’s no ceremony to it. Nora loads medicine into two wagons while Dane chooses riders, Carr doubles the fortress watch, and Holt brings every eastern transfer copy he can carry without dropping half of them in the snow.
Jace asks whether the royal guard should accompany us.
I tell him two observers may ride at the rear and nowhere else.
“You think I’d interfere with a rescue?” he asks.
“I think you came here to inspect my house. Eastmere isn’t yours to inspect.”
His expression hardens, but a child is missing and even Jace understands there are rooms where pride looks obscene. He steps aside.
Ivy comes down in a dark riding cloak over the gown she wore to receive him. Nora has changed her slippers for boots and tied her hair back. She looks exhausted. She also carries the copied supply ledger beneath one arm.
“No,” I say.
Ivy stops in front of me. “That isn’t a complete argument.”
“You nearly collapsed.”
“And Eastmere has no salve.”
“Nora can use the records.”
“Nora has people to keep alive.” She shifts the ledger higher. Her hands are steady now, though the skin beneath her eyes is pale. “I know how the Brooks transfers were hidden. I can tell Holt which marks are real.”
Nora comes up beside her with a medicine case. “She rides in the first wagon, drinks when I tell her, and doesn’t touch anyone’s panic without warning me.”
“You’ve decided this together.”
“We discussed it while you were threatening your nephew with your face,” Nora says.
I look at Ivy. “If the mark pulls too hard, you stop.”
Her mouth tightens. “If your scar opens, you tell Nora.”
Dane makes a low sound that might be a laugh. I accept the trade because arguing costs light we need.
The eastern road is narrow and packed hard by winter. We change horses at the ridge post, where the watch bell hangs without a rope. Someone cut it cleanly and took the severed length with them. Below the tower, three sets of wagon ruts leave the main road and vanish beneath brushed snow.
Dane crouches beside them. “Old watch trail.”
“Fresh?”
“Since dawn.” He presses two fingers into the edge of a print. “One loaded wagon. Riders around it.”
I look north. The trail winds through fir and rock before joining the road that leads toward our lower villages. Ivy was right. The attackers didn’t flee east after taking Lysa and Brenna. They turned toward us.
Carr takes six wolves onto the trail. I send four more along the ridge in case the tracks are bait. The rest of us continue to Eastmere because smoke is still rising beyond the next hill and a village can’t be defended by men chasing shadows away from it.
We haven’t gone half a mile when one of Carr’s scouts catches us. He carries a strip of blue wool and three pieces of willow bark in his gloved palm.
Ivy sees them before I dismount. She leans from the wagon, her face gone still. “The rider said Lysa wore blue,” she says. “The healer-house list says Brenna carries willow bark for headaches.”
The wool has been knotted around a low branch rather than torn by accident. The bark lies in a straight line toward the old trail.
“They’re leaving us a road,” Dane says.
Or someone wants us to believe they are. I look toward the smoke ahead, then back at the trail. Every part of me wants to take all our riders north, but Eastmere has wounded without medicine and roofs still burning.
I send the scout back with two more wolves and orders to mark every sign without moving it. “Carr follows the girls’ trail. Nobody crosses the quarry bridge until the supports are checked.”
Ivy climbs down long enough to wrap the blue wool in a clean ledger sheet. Her fingers shake once before she folds it away.
“Mara should see this from us,” she says.
“She will.”
I help her back into the wagon because the step is iced and because she lets me. Then we keep moving toward the smoke while Carr’s search line disappears north between the trees.
We smell the fire before we see the houses.
Eastmere sits in a shallow valley beside a frozen stream.
Three roofs are gone. The healer house has lost one wall, and blackened beams lean over the snow where the storehouse used to stand.
Wolves move among the wreckage carrying buckets, blankets, and bodies.
No one stops to bow when we enter. Good.
I dismount beside the square. “Carr has the northern trail. Dane, perimeter and names. Holt, storehouse. Nora, take whatever building still has a roof.”
Mara runs toward us before anyone can answer. Tobin is her son, but Lysa and Brenna belong to the healer house where she works, and the terror in her face holds all three children. She has no cloak, only a smoke-stained dress and a strip of cloth wrapped around one bleeding hand.
“Tobin?”
“Alive at the fortress,” I tell her.
Her knees give. I catch her under the arms before she reaches the ground.
“Alive?”
“Nora heard his pulse herself.”
Mara makes a sound I’ll hear later when the room is quiet. For now, she grips my coat and points toward the northern trees.
“They took the girls that way. Lysa tore her blue scarf on the gate. Brenna kept dropping willow bark from her satchel.” Her grip tightens on my coat. “Harl and I followed until he fell. I had to come back for the wounded.”
“Where is he?”
Her face changes. I signal two riders. “Show them.”
Ivy has climbed down from the wagon. She stands beside what remains of the storehouse, staring at rows of empty hooks and shelves.
“Roman.”
I go to her. Holt is already kneeling in the ash with a warped metal seal in his hand.
“The attackers didn’t empty this place,” Ivy says. “It was empty before they came.”
Holt holds up the seal. The edge carries his authorization mark, but the center has been recut.
“Second shipment,” he says. “The one my office marked transferred.”
Ivy points to three pale rectangles protected from soot beneath the lowest shelf. “Crates sat here recently. Not village crates. The Brooks house used that size for honey and spirit bottles.”
“Then where did they go?” Dane asks.
A woman near the burned doorway answers. “South wagon. Two nights ago.”
Holt rises. “There was no authorized south wagon.”
The woman gives him a look sharp enough to draw blood. “There was a crown seal.”
One of Jace’s observers shifts at the edge of the square. I turn until he understands I saw it.
“Get me the name of every driver who entered Eastmere this week,” I tell Holt. “And find out which crown office issued a seal to a wagon that never reached its road.”
A howl sounds from the northern ridge. One long note. Two short.
Dane’s head lifts. “Carr found the trail.”
I pull my gloves tighter and look at Ivy. Smoke moves between us.
“Stay with Nora.”
Her chin rises.
“That was an order to every untrained person in the square,” I say. “Not a judgment about what you can choose.”
She glances toward the healer house, where a child is crying for water and Nora is shouting for clean cloth. Then she gives me one tight nod.
“Bring them back.”
I don’t promise what I can’t control.
“I’ll follow the trail.”
It’s the best truth I have, and she lets me go with it.