Chapter 32 First Light
Eira
Several days had passed since the storm.
Silverwake moved at its usual pace, indifferent to the concerns of distant kingdoms.
Ships arrived and departed with the tide, merchants argued over prices, and fishermen repaired nets along the harbor walls while gulls screamed overhead as if the world contained nothing more important than wind and food.
Eira sat in one of the upper rooms overlooking the bay, surrounded by maps she had promised herself she would finish reviewing before evening, though the promise was not going well.
She had spent the last hour reading the same paragraph three times, tracing a line of trade routes that crossed the western coast, a line she knew and understood, yet every few minutes she found herself staring through the window instead at the gray, cold, restless sea.
A knock sounded at the door, and before she could answer, Leander stepped inside with several folded papers beneath one arm.
"You've been looking at that map for an impressive amount of time."
Eira lowered her gaze. "I am studying it."
"You've been studying the same corner for nearly half an hour."
She ignored that.
Leander considered her for a moment. "Have you slept?"
"Enough."
"That wasn't a number."
"It rarely is."
A faint smile touched his mouth before he crossed the room and set the papers on the table.
"Then perhaps you'll be pleased to know I have found a problem interesting enough to distract you."
"I doubt that."
"So do I."
That earned the smallest hint of amusement, and for a while they worked in relative silence as Leander reviewed shipping reports and Eira sorted correspondence, while outside the harbor continued its endless, normal, predictable, and seemingly safe movement.
The sound of hurried footsteps in the corridor broke the illusion, and Leander looked up just before the door opened without ceremony.
One of the household guards entered and stopped just inside the room, his expression immediately erasing whatever reply Eira had been about to make and making it clear that something had happened.
"Lord Leander."
The guard glanced toward Eira and then back again. "There are riders from the north."
Silence settled over the room as Leander straightened.
"From where?"
"They claim to have crossed through the mountain roads three days ago."
That alone was unusual, since travelers rarely pushed that route this late in the season unless they had little choice.
Leander's expression sharpened. "And?"
The guard hesitated. "One of them says Frostvein banners have been seen south of the northern territories."
Eira went completely still, not visibly and not enough for anyone else to notice, but still enough that Leander noticed anyway, as he always did.
"How reliable?"
"The rider swears he saw them himself."
That meant very little, since people swore many things, yet something cold settled quietly in Eira's stomach.
Leander dismissed the guard and waited until the door closed behind him, and neither of them spoke immediately as the room suddenly felt smaller.
Finally he looked toward her. "What are you thinking?"
Eira's gaze remained fixed on the maps spread across the table as she considered dozens of possibilities—trade patrols, border disputes, routine movement, any number of explanations, most of them reasonable, yet none of them felt correct.
"My father doesn't move soldiers without a purpose."
Leander leaned back slightly. "No."
The silence stretched, and outside a bell sounded somewhere near the harbor, marking the arrival of a ship and serving as another ordinary reminder that the world had continued moving while she had been pretending distance solved problems.
Leander folded his arms. "And if the report is true?"
Eira already knew the answer, though she did not want to say it.
"If Frostvein is moving south..."
Her voice faded, because there was only one direction south of Frostvein that mattered, only one place where her father and Soren could stand on opposite sides of a decision neither would willingly abandon.
Leander watched understanding arrive across her face slowly and reluctantly, the way difficult truths usually did.
"Eira."
She looked toward the window, toward the distant northern horizon hidden beyond mountains she could not see, and for the first time since arriving in Silverwake, remaining here no longer felt like a choice but like avoidance.
Leander waited, as he always had when silence mattered.
Eira appreciated that about him, though at the moment she hated it, because the longer neither of them spoke, the harder it became to pretend she had not already reached the conclusion waiting at the edge of her thoughts.
Finally she looked away from the window.
"One rider's story is not evidence."
"No."
"He could be mistaken."
"He could."
"He may have seen a patrol."
Leander's expression remained infuriatingly neutral.
"A large patrol?"
Eira frowned.
"A border force, perhaps."
"In another kingdom's territory?"
She did not answer, and the argument sounded weaker once spoken aloud.
Leander crossed to the table and glanced down at the scattered maps.
"You want me to tell you that it means nothing."
"I want facts."
"No," he said quietly. "You want certainty."
The distinction irritated her because it was true, and she looked away again as the sea struck the harbor wall outside in a long, dull rhythm.
Leander rested one hand against the edge of the table.
"There are ways to get facts."
That pulled her attention back immediately.
"What ways?"
"I can send riders north."
The offer arrived so simply that she almost missed its significance, because Leander was not a man who involved himself in northern politics without reason.
"You would do that?"
"You are here."
As explanations went, it was frustratingly short, but it was also enough.
For a moment neither spoke, and then Eira asked how long it would take.
"Five days if they push hard."
Five days, possibly more, perhaps even a week if the weather turned against them—long enough for armies to move, for men to die, for everything to change.
The thought arrived before she could stop it: Soren would not attack first, and her father would not retreat first, because neither of them was built that way.
A muscle tightened in her jaw, and Leander noticed again.
"You already know that."
Eira did not ask how, since he had become annoyingly good at reading her.
"They'll wait," she said.
"Probably."
"Until they can't."
"Probably."
The answer settled heavily between them.
Leander studied her for several seconds before asking, "May I ask something?"
"You usually do regardless."
A corner of his mouth moved.
"Fair."
Then the amusement disappeared.
"If you learn the report is true, what will you do?"
The question landed with uncomfortable precision—not what should happen, not what Soren would do, not what Vargan would do, but what she would do.
Eira looked down at the map spread across the table, where the northern mountains stretched across the parchment in dark ink and White Pass sat marked between two ridges, small and seemingly insignificant, just a narrow line drawn by someone's hand.
It was strange how often history depended on places that looked unimportant.
"I don't know."
It was the truth, and Leander accepted it without comment.
After a while he nodded once.
"I'll send the riders."
Eira exhaled, feeling both relieved and strangely disappointed, as if she had expected the decision to arrive from somewhere outside herself, as if information alone would solve the problem.
Deep down she knew better, because the question had stopped being whether something was happening in the north and had become what she intended to do if it was—and that answer no messenger could bring.
The riders left before dawn the following morning, and after that there was nothing to do except wait.
Eira quickly discovered that waiting was easier when it was tied to a problem she could solve, but this was not one of those problems.
The first day passed without incident, the second more slowly, and by the third she had begun measuring time against things that had nothing to do with calendars: the arrival of supply ships, the evening bells, the tide beneath her window, meals she barely remembered eating, and sleep that came late and left too early.
Silverwake remained stubbornly unchanged, with its crowded harbor, loud markets, and indifferent sea, while only Eira seemed incapable of behaving normally. She knew it, Leander knew it, and neither of them mentioned it.
Late on the fourth evening she found herself standing on the western wall overlooking the harbor, where the wind carried the scent of salt and rain and lanterns burned along the docks below, scattering gold across black water.
For a long time she watched the ships—mostly merchant vessels, a few fishing boats, and one northern trader—but there was nothing unusual, nothing connected to Frostvein, Ironfang, or White Pass, and yet she could not stop looking.
"You are looking north again."
Leander's voice came from behind her, but Eira did not turn.
"There is no north from this wall."
"There is in your mind."
That was irritatingly accurate, and she folded her arms.
"You should find a less expensive hobby than studying my moods."
"I've invested too much time already."
Against her will she smiled, though only briefly, and the expression disappeared as quickly as it came.
Leander stepped beside her, and neither spoke for several moments while the sea crashed softly against the rocks below.
"You think they're there."
Eira knew who he meant.
"Yes."
"Both of them?"
"Yes."
Leander nodded once, as if he had expected no other answer.
"They may not be."
"They are."
The certainty surprised even her, and Leander noticed it again.
"What makes you so sure?"
Eira looked out across the dark water, thinking of how neither man would move or retreat, how both believed they were protecting something, and how she knew them.
"I know them."