Ashes at Eastmere★
? Ivy ?
By nightfall, Eastmere smells of wet ash, boiled wool, and the bitter herbs Nora burns when there are too many wounds for the air to stay clean.
The meeting hall has become an infirmary.
Doors rest across barrels for tables. Children sleep beneath council benches.
A woman with half her hair burned away holds a basin while Nora stitches her mate’s shoulder and curses the thread, the attackers, and anyone who tries to faint where she has to step over them.
I keep the ledger open on the end of a flour crate.
Names first. Injuries beside them. Houses lost. Supplies used. Supplies that should have been here and weren’t.
The work is ordinary enough to hold me together.
Holt brings me three village receipts, each written by a different hand and each carrying the same mistake in the date line. He looks ill before I say it.
“Copied from one false form,” I tell him.
“My seal authorized them.”
“Your outer mark did. Not the center.” I turn the warped seal toward the lamp. “Someone carved over it after the wax cooled.”
He sits on the crate opposite me without asking whether a man of his rank should sit on flour. “I signed the transfer.”
“You signed medicine leaving the capital.”
“And never checked where it arrived.”
I could tell him guilt isn’t useful. Nora has said versions of it to both Roman and me. Instead, I slide the list of missing crates across the ledger.
“Then check now.”
He takes the page. Outside, wolves call along the ridge, a position signal rather than an alarm. The search line is moving farther north.
My mark has been restless since Roman disappeared into the trees. It warms, cools, then tightens hard enough to make me lose my place in the inventory. Nora notices from across the room.
“Is that yours?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Useful answer.”
“I learned from you.”
She snorts and returns to a boy with a splinted wrist.
The medicine wagon returns from the fortress after dark with Tobin bundled beneath three blankets.
Mara is outside before the wheels stop. She reaches up as one of Nora’s assistants lowers him into her arms, then carries him straight into the hall as though someone might still try to take him away.
He’s alive, feverish, and furious when Nora touches his feet.
“Good,” Nora says when he tries to kick. “Rude children are harder to bury.”
Mara laughs and sobs at the same time.
Tobin can’t tell us much. A sack covered his head. He remembers one attacker smelling of cloves, another calling someone Bell, and Brenna biting a hand hard enough to taste blood through the cloth.
“Harrow Bell,” Holt says quietly.
Dane found the name in the trade records. A junior archive clerk moved into supply rotation two months ago, with access to crown contracts and eastern warehouse records he had no reason to need.
Tobin’s eyes close. Mara gathers him closer.
“Lysa told me to be dead,” he whispers. “She said don’t move until they leave.”
The room goes very still.
“She saved you,” I say.
He nods without opening his eyes.
I write the words beside Lysa’s name because evidence is sometimes a child remembering the shape of courage.
The first search team returns after midnight carrying Harl beneath a brown blanket.
No one needs Nora to uncover his face. Mara recognizes his boots and sits down where she stands, Tobin still held against her chest.
Carr comes through the door behind the stretcher with blood on one sleeve that isn’t hers.
“We found the place they changed wagons,” she says. “Two girls were alive when they left it.”
Hope hurts the room more sharply than grief.
“How long ago?” Dane asks.
“Six hours, maybe eight. They split. One wagon north, riders west.”
“Decoy,” Holt says.
Carr nods. “Roman took the ridge team after the wagon.”
Eastmere doesn’t ring its bell for the dead during an active search. The sound could carry to the people who took the girls. Instead, the village keeper brings a small iron cup from the ruined council room and strikes it once with the handle of a knife.
Everyone who can stand says Harl’s name.
Mara can’t.
I say it for her, then write it in the ledger without the court phrase lost during unrest.
Mara grips my sleeve before I close the page.
“Write that he went after them,” she says. Her voice is scraped raw. “He knew they had blades. He went anyway.”
So I write it exactly that way.
Beneath it, I change Lysa and Brenna from missing to taken alive, last witnessed at the northern wagon change. The difference is only ink, but it changes what every rider will be ordered to look for.
Holt reads the entry over my shoulder. “The capital records would call that unverified.”
“Then the capital can verify it after we bring them home.”
He doesn’t argue. He makes a second copy for Carr’s patrol and seals it with his unaltered mark.
The mark beneath my sleeve turns hot.
Pain follows, deep beneath my left ribs.
I grip the edge of the crate.
Nora is beside me before I speak. “Roman?”
“I think so.”
The pain fades, then returns with movement, the pull of something reopening under strain rather than a fresh blade.
“His scar,” Nora says. Her mouth goes flat. “Of course.”
“Can I reach him?”
“Not through the bond,” Nora says. “And you aren’t running into the forest with no plan.”
“You said it was his scar.”
“I said I suspect it.” She puts both hands around my wrist, grounding me without touching the mark. “Breathe before you make fear useful to no one.”
I hate the advice because it works.
Roman returns before dawn on a horse white with foam.
He stays mounted until Carr catches the bridle. When he swings down, one hand goes to his side too late to hide it. Blood has worked through the old bandage beneath his coat. No girls ride behind him.
Dane reaches him first. “What happened?”
“The wagon crossed the old quarry bridge. They cut the center supports after they passed.” Roman’s voice is steady, but the bond gives me the pain he refuses to show. “We lost the trail at the western fork.”
“Lysa and Brenna?” Mara asks.
Roman looks at her. “Alive when the wagon crossed. Carr found blood from one attacker, not from either girl.”
It isn’t enough.
It’s more than we had.
Mara closes her eyes.
Roman gives Dane the search routes, the number of riders, the color of the wagon cover, and the direction of every track before Nora steps between them.
“Finished?” she asks.
“No.”
“Good. You can continue after I keep your insides on the correct side of your skin.”
Roman’s gaze finds me over her shoulder. He sees that I felt the wound. I see him understand that hiding it didn’t spare me anything.
Neither of us says it in front of Eastmere.
The storm reaches the valley at sunrise. Snow closes the quarry road and turns the northern trail into white noise. Roman leaves scouts at the ridge post, Carr takes command of the village watch, and the rest of us prepare to carry the worst wounded back to the fortress.
I stand in the burned storehouse while Holt seals the false receipts into an evidence case. Three pale marks remain on the shelf where medicine should’ve been.
The attackers knew Eastmere was weak because someone made it weak first.
Outside, Roman braces one hand on the supply wagon while Nora reties his bandage. He looks toward the road, not at the village behind him.
Lysa and Brenna are still out there.
We leave because the storm has taken the trail and the living need walls, not because Eastmere is finished with us.