Roth came to her in the gray hour before dawn, carrying a cup of tea.
She was lying on the narrow cot in the seventh cell, with a damp cloth across her forehead and a thin sheen of fever sweat on her skin. The second dose had been smaller than the first, a drop and a half of marsh lantern in a cup of warm milk, and it had gone through her differently. Not the high clean burn of the night before, but a slow ache that settled behind her eyes and would not shift. Malakor had left an hour ago, with a muttered promise to return, and Alaric had gone up to the courtyard to speak with Kaelen. She had been alone for nearly twenty minutes, staring at the ceiling and counting the cracks in the stone.
The door opened without a knock.
She knew who it was before she turned her head. The step was heavy and uneven, the step of a tired man trying to walk lightly. He crossed the little room and stopped beside the cot, and she heard the small clink of a cup set down on the table.
"My lady," said Roth. "I thought you might want something hot."
She opened her eyes.
He stood very straight, with his hat in his hands, and his face in the thin light of the lantern was the face of a man who had not slept in a week. The skin hung loose beneath his eyes. The gray had spread through his beard. There was a smear of blue on the cuff of his right sleeve, fresh, and she saw him notice her looking at it and saw the faint shudder that went through him.
"Thank you," she said.
"It is only sage and honey."
"It is kind." She pushed herself up on one elbow. The room tilted, and she steadied it with an effort. "Captain Roth. Will you sit?"
"I would rather stand."
"Then I will sit up." She did, slowly, and swung her feet to the floor, and they looked at each other in the quiet.
For a long moment he said nothing. His throat worked. He stared at the wall above her head, and she watched a muscle twitch in his jaw, and a very faint tremor run along the hand that gripped the brim of his hat. When he finally spoke, his voice came out small and hoarse and strange, like the voice of a boy.
"I cannot do it anymore," he said.
"Do what?"
"This." He looked at her at last. His eyes were red-rimmed and desperate and perfectly clear. "I held the rope, my lady. In the cistern. I stood there with your life in my hands, and I thought, I could let go. It would be so easy. No one would ever know. It would look like an accident. And I held on." His voice cracked. "I held on, and I have never been so ashamed in my life."
She did not move. She had been braced for denial, for fury, for tears. She had not been braced for this, the plain bare undefended truth. She felt something tight and cold in her chest begin, very slowly, to give way.
"Tell me," she said gently.
He knelt.
It was not a dramatic gesture. He simply folded, heavily, onto the stone floor at her feet, a big gray-bearded man with a bad knee, and put his hat down beside him. He sat with his hands loose on his thighs and his head bowed, and when he spoke, the words came out in a steady hollow stream, as though he had been rehearsing them in the dark for months and could not now stop.
"I have a daughter," he said. "Wynne. She is twelve. Her mother died of a fever when she was four, and I raised her in the barracks at Shadowfall, among the soldiers, until she was ten. Then my sister took her to the capital, to be schooled. There is a convent there. A good one. I paid the fees for two years." He drew a shuddering breath. "Six months ago, the chancellor's men came to the convent. They said she was to be a guest of the king."
"A hostage."
"They did not call it that." His fingers curled. "They sent a letter, in the king's own hand. It said that Wynne was safe and well and would remain so, so long as I was a loyal servant of the crown. It said there would be occasions when the crown required small services." He swallowed. "I told myself it was nothing. A few reports. Where the Regent went, who he spoke to. I told myself no one would be hurt."
"And then?"
"And then you came." His eyes lifted. "And I watched you, my lady. I watched you save Dorren, and the others. I watched you walk into that cell with nothing in your hands. I watched what you did for the Regent. And I thought, I cannot be the man who gives her to them. I cannot." The words shook. "But every week a letter came. And every week it said the same thing. Your daughter is safe. And I thought of her face, and I wrote what they asked."
She put her hand over her mouth. For a moment she could not speak.
"I never wrote that you should be harmed," said Roth, almost in a whisper. "I swear it. I wrote where you would be. I wrote what you planned. I told myself it was only words. I thought, if I gave them only the truth, the harmless truth, they would never need to do worse."
"But they did."
"The poisoned bolts at the siege. The bounty hunters on the river. All of it came from what I wrote." He bowed his head until his forehead nearly touched his knees. "I killed eleven men on the east wall. I put the knife in their backs, as surely as if I had held it."
"Roth."
"I deserve to hang. I know it. I came to tell you before you found me. I did not want to be dragged out." His voice dissolved. "I only ask one thing. That you do it quickly, and that you do not let them tell my girl how."
The little cell was perfectly silent. Somewhere far above, a horse whinnied. A dripping sound came from the corridor. Valeria sat on the edge of the cot with her hands knotted in her lap, and thought of a small girl in a convent, waiting for a letter.
"Captain," she said.
He did not look up.
"I want you to listen to me very carefully." She leaned forward and, with a gentleness that surprised her, laid a hand on his shoulder. "I am not going to ask them to hang you."
His head snapped up.
"I am going to ask you to help us."
*
It did not go as simply as that.
It never could have. By the time the news had spread, and the council been summoned, and Roth himself dragged up the stair between two stern guards, the sun was fully risen and the courtyard was full of soldiers. They stood in a tight silent ring around the old fountain, hundreds of them, shoulder to shoulder, their faces hard. Alaric sat at the head of a long table that had been dragged from one of the ruined halls, with Orsen at his right hand and Kaelen at his left. Valeria had been given a chair, and a blanket, and a cup of Malakor's bitter tonic, and told to stay seated. She did not argue. Her legs felt like water.
Roth stood alone in the middle of the ring. Someone had taken his sword. He held his hands out, palms up, in front of him, and he did not look at any of them.
"I have heard his confession," said Alaric, in a quiet, level voice that carried across the stone. "I have heard it twice. Once from Lady Valeria, and once from his own mouth. He has not denied any of it."
"No," said Roth hoarsely. "My lord."
"You have betrayed this army."
"Yes."
"You have betrayed me."
The big man's face crumpled. "Yes."
"Then I must ask what you expect," said Alaric.
A great breath went through the crowd. Orsen, at his right hand, did not wait.
"I will tell you what to expect." The old lord rose, gripping the edge of the table, his white beard bristling. His voice was a low savage growl. "Hang him. Hang him from the nearest beam, and let the crows have the rest. A man who sells his comrades for his own comfort deserves nothing better. I have buried two sons to that serpent in the palace. I will not stand by and see another traitor walk free."
"My lord," said Roth, almost inaudibly. "It was not for comfort."
"Be silent."
"It was for my girl..."
"I said be silent!" Orsen's fist came down on the table with a crack. "Do not speak to me of daughters! I know what it is to lose a child. I did not sell the lives of three hundred men to buy one back!"
The words rang off the stones. The courtyard was utterly still. In the silence, a very small sound rose, thin and cracked, from the man in the center of the ring, a broken shuddering sob.
Valeria saw Orsen's face change. It was a slow thing. The rage drained out of it by degrees, and in its place she saw something older and more terrible, a bone-deep, helpless sorrow, the grief of an old man who had spent twenty years being angry because there was no other safe place for it to go.
"I did not mean," he said, in a rough, altered voice. He stopped. He sat down heavily. "I did not mean that. Forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive," said Alaric quietly. He had not moved. He was looking at Roth, and there was a strange, tired, hollow gentleness in his face. "I have been where you are standing, Orsen. I have wanted a man's life, because of what was done to me. I know how it feels."
"And what did you do?"
"I let someone else decide." His eyes moved to Valeria. "She has not yet spoken."
All heads turned. Valeria rose. It cost her. She had to grip the arm of the chair, and the courtyard swam, and Kaelen half rose in alarm. She waved him back with a small, shaky gesture, and walked to the center of the ring, and stood beside Roth.
"I will say this once," she said, "and then you may decide what you wish."
Her voice was thin, but it carried. Silence pressed round her like water.
"Captain Roth betrayed us. That is true. People died because of it, and I will not pretend otherwise." She looked at the faces. At the hard gray lines of their mouths, at the white knuckles on sword hilts. "But I want you to remember how it began. A man had a daughter. A man who had given twenty years of his life to this army had a twelve-year-old girl in a convent, and the king of Frostfell took her out of her bed and said, serve me, or she will suffer."
A low murmur ran round the ring.
"What would you have done?" said Valeria, softly. "I do not ask the question to excuse him. I ask because I think it is a question you should answer before you decide. Each of you. Ask yourself what you would do, if it were your child in a cell, and the man who held the key came to your door."
No one spoke.
"I know what I would do," she said. "I would do anything. I would lie, I would steal, I would burn the world. That is not a mark of a bad heart. It is only the thing that fear does to a person who loves someone." She drew a breath. "I do not say he should go unpunished. I say that if we hang him, we have given Cedric exactly what he wanted. We will have killed one of our own, and made ourselves the very thing we came to fight."
"Then what do you propose?" said Orsen heavily.
"That we take the thing the king used against him, and turn it around." She looked at Roth. "Captain. If we offered you a chance to get your daughter out of that convent, alive, would you take it?"
The big man stared at her. His lips parted. His eyes filled.
"Anything," he whispered. "My lady. Anything."
"Then that is your punishment." She said it very gently. "You will help us. You will write the next letter, as you have always done. But what you write will be what we give you. You will tell us everything you know of the king's agents, of the convent, of the road. And when this is over, if we win, you will go and bring her home."
"And if we lose?" said someone in the crowd, harshly.
"Then he will have been the least of our worries."
A long, taut silence. Then, slowly, from somewhere among the ranks, a rough old voice said, "Aye."
It was the old sergeant who had burned the ladders. He stood in the front row with his arms folded, gnarled and scarred and entirely unmoved by the spectacle. He looked at Roth with his one good eye.
"I have served with him for nineteen years," he said. "He pulled me out of a ditch at the Black Ford, with an arrow in my leg. I will not see him hang for loving his girl."
"Aye," said another voice. And then another. A murmur, a rustle, a rising wave. Soldiers who had stood with their jaws set a moment before began, one by one, to look away, to shift their feet, to nod. Kaelen, at the table, had his face turned aside, and his shoulders were shaking.
Alaric rose.
"It is decided," he said. His voice was thick. "Captain Roth is relieved of his command. He will remain under guard, and he will work at Lady Valeria's direction. If he betrays us again, I will deal with it myself." He looked at the kneeling man. "Roth. Do you understand?"
"Yes, my lord." The big man was weeping openly, without sound, the tears running unchecked into his beard. "I understand. I will not fail you."
"I think you may find," said Valeria, "that you have already paid the greater part of it."
*
It was not until the crowd had dispersed that she realized how weak she was.
She had made it as far as the edge of the fountain when the world tilted. A cold wave went through her, and the gray stones swayed, and she felt her knees begin to fold. Alaric caught her before she fell. He had been watching her the whole time, she understood, like a hawk, and he lifted her in his arms with a low, fierce, wordless sound.
"You are an idiot," he said, into her hair.
"I am aware."
"You stood in front of a thousand soldiers with a fever of a hundred and three."
"It was only a hundred and one." She smiled faintly against his collarbone. "I felt very well, for the first quarter hour."
"I am going to put you in a bed and sit on you."
"That is a very bad plan," said Valeria, "because we have to leave."
He stopped.
"Roth said something," she said, quietly. "At the end. When you were speaking to the sergeant. He told me the last letter went three days ago." She could feel the weight of it settling in her stomach. "He wrote where we were. The ruins. The cistern. The full moon. All of it."
Alaric's arms tightened. "Three days."
"A bird would reach the capital in two. A rider with fresh horses, half a day beyond that." She lifted her head. "If Cedric had a force nearby, he could be here by tomorrow night."
"Kaelen." Alaric turned his head and raised his voice, and it rang off the broken stones. "Kaelen! Orsen! Council. Now."
They were there in minutes, grim-faced, with Pell Aldous a step behind them, his boyish face drawn with alarm. They spread a map across the stones of the fountain, and Valeria sat on the rim, wrapped in a blanket, with Alaric's arm braced behind her back.
It took half an hour. By the end of it they had a plan, such as it was. The marsh to the south was impassable. The old causeway to the east was narrow and could be held, but would lead them into the open. The road north, by which they had come, was the obvious route, and therefore the one most likely to be watched. There was a track, said Kaelen, along the old canal to the northeast, a half-flooded ditch no cart could use. If they moved by night, and abandoned the heavy wagons, and took only what could be carried...
"Midnight," said Alaric. "We strike camp at midnight and go."
"The doses," said Malakor, faintly. He had come up unnoticed, clutching his satchel. "My lord, I have the Wine ingredients. They cannot be left. They must be kept cool, and..."
"Then you will carry them yourself." Alaric did not smile, but his eyes were gentle. "Pack what you need. We have six hours."
The camp moved with astonishing speed. By late afternoon the tents had come down. The heavy baggage had been loaded onto wagons, and the wagons run into the marsh and set alight, so that nothing would fall into enemy hands. Soldiers moved through the dusk with muffled boots and masked lanterns, packing, checking, binding up the horses' hooves in sacking. Valeria watched from the back of a cart, swaddled in furs, her head throbbing. Someone had lit a small fire to boil water. She could smell woodsmoke and cold iron and horse.
Dusk came, long and purple and cold.
She was half asleep, her cheek against Alaric's shoulder, when she heard Kaelen's voice.
"My lord."
It was low, and strained, and utterly flat. She opened her eyes.
He stood at the edge of the cart, a dark silhouette against the dying light, with his face turned toward the south. He did not look at them. He was staring across the marsh, across the black glimmer of the water and the pale smudge of the reeds, toward the long, low rim of the horizon.
"What is it?"
"Look."
She turned her head.
At first she thought it was the stars. A scattering of tiny golden points, low on the dark, flickering faintly at the edge of sight. Then the points multiplied. They spread along the horizon in a long thin line, east to west, one by one, like the opening of a great slow flower. They flared, and steadied, and burned.
Torches.
Hundreds of them. Thousands. A thin ring of fire stretched across the whole breadth of the marsh, drawing in around the ruined walls, closing on every side like the jaws of a trap.
"He did not wait for tomorrow," said Alaric, in a voice she hardly knew.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Roth came to her in the gray hour before dawn, carrying a cup of tea.
She was lying on the narrow cot in the seventh cell, with a damp cloth across her forehead and a thin sheen of fever sweat on her skin. The second dose had been smaller than the first, a drop and a half of marsh lantern in a cup of warm milk, and it had gone through her differently. Not the high clean burn of the night before, but a slow ache that settled behind her eyes and would not shift. Malakor had left an hour ago, with a muttered promise to return, and Alaric had gone up to the courtyard to speak with Kaelen. She had been alone for nearly twenty minutes, staring at the ceiling and counting the cracks in the stone.
The door opened without a knock.
She knew who it was before she turned her head. The step was heavy and uneven, the step of a tired man trying to walk lightly. He crossed the little room and stopped beside the cot, and she heard the small clink of a cup set down on the table.
"My lady," said Roth. "I thought you might want something hot."
She opened her eyes.
He stood very straight, with his hat in his hands, and his face in the thin light of the lantern was the face of a man who had not slept in a week. The skin hung loose beneath his eyes. The gray had spread through his beard. There was a smear of blue on the cuff of his right sleeve, fresh, and she saw him notice her looking at it and saw the faint shudder that went through him.
"Thank you," she said.
"It is only sage and honey."
"It is kind." She pushed herself up on one elbow. The room tilted, and she steadied it with an effort. "Captain Roth. Will you sit?"
"I would rather stand."
"Then I will sit up." She did, slowly, and swung her feet to the floor, and they looked at each other in the quiet.
For a long moment he said nothing. His throat worked. He stared at the wall above her head, and she watched a muscle twitch in his jaw, and a very faint tremor run along the hand that gripped the brim of his hat. When he finally spoke, his voice came out small and hoarse and strange, like the voice of a boy.
"I cannot do it anymore," he said.
"Do what?"
"This." He looked at her at last. His eyes were red-rimmed and desperate and perfectly clear. "I held the rope, my lady. In the cistern. I stood there with your life in my hands, and I thought, I could let go. It would be so easy. No one would ever know. It would look like an accident. And I held on." His voice cracked. "I held on, and I have never been so ashamed in my life."
She did not move. She had been braced for denial, for fury, for tears. She had not been braced for this, the plain bare undefended truth. She felt something tight and cold in her chest begin, very slowly, to give way.
"Tell me," she said gently.
He knelt.
It was not a dramatic gesture. He simply folded, heavily, onto the stone floor at her feet, a big gray-bearded man with a bad knee, and put his hat down beside him. He sat with his hands loose on his thighs and his head bowed, and when he spoke, the words came out in a steady hollow stream, as though he had been rehearsing them in the dark for months and could not now stop.
"I have a daughter," he said. "Wynne. She is twelve. Her mother died of a fever when she was four, and I raised her in the barracks at Shadowfall, among the soldiers, until she was ten. Then my sister took her to the capital, to be schooled. There is a convent there. A good one. I paid the fees for two years." He drew a shuddering breath. "Six months ago, the chancellor's men came to the convent. They said she was to be a guest of the king."
"A hostage."
"They did not call it that." His fingers curled. "They sent a letter, in the king's own hand. It said that Wynne was safe and well and would remain so, so long as I was a loyal servant of the crown. It said there would be occasions when the crown required small services." He swallowed. "I told myself it was nothing. A few reports. Where the Regent went, who he spoke to. I told myself no one would be hurt."
"And then?"
"And then you came." His eyes lifted. "And I watched you, my lady. I watched you save Dorren, and the others. I watched you walk into that cell with nothing in your hands. I watched what you did for the Regent. And I thought, I cannot be the man who gives her to them. I cannot." The words shook. "But every week a letter came. And every week it said the same thing. Your daughter is safe. And I thought of her face, and I wrote what they asked."
She put her hand over her mouth. For a moment she could not speak.
"I never wrote that you should be harmed," said Roth, almost in a whisper. "I swear it. I wrote where you would be. I wrote what you planned. I told myself it was only words. I thought, if I gave them only the truth, the harmless truth, they would never need to do worse."
"But they did."
"The poisoned bolts at the siege. The bounty hunters on the river. All of it came from what I wrote." He bowed his head until his forehead nearly touched his knees. "I killed eleven men on the east wall. I put the knife in their backs, as surely as if I had held it."
"Roth."
"I deserve to hang. I know it. I came to tell you before you found me. I did not want to be dragged out." His voice dissolved. "I only ask one thing. That you do it quickly, and that you do not let them tell my girl how."
The little cell was perfectly silent. Somewhere far above, a horse whinnied. A dripping sound came from the corridor. Valeria sat on the edge of the cot with her hands knotted in her lap, and thought of a small girl in a convent, waiting for a letter.
"Captain," she said.
He did not look up.
"I want you to listen to me very carefully." She leaned forward and, with a gentleness that surprised her, laid a hand on his shoulder. "I am not going to ask them to hang you."
His head snapped up.
"I am going to ask you to help us."
*
It did not go as simply as that.
It never could have. By the time the news had spread, and the council been summoned, and Roth himself dragged up the stair between two stern guards, the sun was fully risen and the courtyard was full of soldiers. They stood in a tight silent ring around the old fountain, hundreds of them, shoulder to shoulder, their faces hard. Alaric sat at the head of a long table that had been dragged from one of the ruined halls, with Orsen at his right hand and Kaelen at his left. Valeria had been given a chair, and a blanket, and a cup of Malakor's bitter tonic, and told to stay seated. She did not argue. Her legs felt like water.
Roth stood alone in the middle of the ring. Someone had taken his sword. He held his hands out, palms up, in front of him, and he did not look at any of them.
"I have heard his confession," said Alaric, in a quiet, level voice that carried across the stone. "I have heard it twice. Once from Lady Valeria, and once from his own mouth. He has not denied any of it."
"No," said Roth hoarsely. "My lord."
"You have betrayed this army."
"Yes."
"You have betrayed me."
The big man's face crumpled. "Yes."
"Then I must ask what you expect," said Alaric.
A great breath went through the crowd. Orsen, at his right hand, did not wait.
"I will tell you what to expect." The old lord rose, gripping the edge of the table, his white beard bristling. His voice was a low savage growl. "Hang him. Hang him from the nearest beam, and let the crows have the rest. A man who sells his comrades for his own comfort deserves nothing better. I have buried two sons to that serpent in the palace. I will not stand by and see another traitor walk free."
"My lord," said Roth, almost inaudibly. "It was not for comfort."
"Be silent."
"It was for my girl..."
"I said be silent!" Orsen's fist came down on the table with a crack. "Do not speak to me of daughters! I know what it is to lose a child. I did not sell the lives of three hundred men to buy one back!"
The words rang off the stones. The courtyard was utterly still. In the silence, a very small sound rose, thin and cracked, from the man in the center of the ring, a broken shuddering sob.
Valeria saw Orsen's face change. It was a slow thing. The rage drained out of it by degrees, and in its place she saw something older and more terrible, a bone-deep, helpless sorrow, the grief of an old man who had spent twenty years being angry because there was no other safe place for it to go.
"I did not mean," he said, in a rough, altered voice. He stopped. He sat down heavily. "I did not mean that. Forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive," said Alaric quietly. He had not moved. He was looking at Roth, and there was a strange, tired, hollow gentleness in his face. "I have been where you are standing, Orsen. I have wanted a man's life, because of what was done to me. I know how it feels."
"And what did you do?"
"I let someone else decide." His eyes moved to Valeria. "She has not yet spoken."
All heads turned. Valeria rose. It cost her. She had to grip the arm of the chair, and the courtyard swam, and Kaelen half rose in alarm. She waved him back with a small, shaky gesture, and walked to the center of the ring, and stood beside Roth.
"I will say this once," she said, "and then you may decide what you wish."
Her voice was thin, but it carried. Silence pressed round her like water.
"Captain Roth betrayed us. That is true. People died because of it, and I will not pretend otherwise." She looked at the faces. At the hard gray lines of their mouths, at the white knuckles on sword hilts. "But I want you to remember how it began. A man had a daughter. A man who had given twenty years of his life to this army had a twelve-year-old girl in a convent, and the king of Frostfell took her out of her bed and said, serve me, or she will suffer."
A low murmur ran round the ring.
"What would you have done?" said Valeria, softly. "I do not ask the question to excuse him. I ask because I think it is a question you should answer before you decide. Each of you. Ask yourself what you would do, if it were your child in a cell, and the man who held the key came to your door."
No one spoke.
"I know what I would do," she said. "I would do anything. I would lie, I would steal, I would burn the world. That is not a mark of a bad heart. It is only the thing that fear does to a person who loves someone." She drew a breath. "I do not say he should go unpunished. I say that if we hang him, we have given Cedric exactly what he wanted. We will have killed one of our own, and made ourselves the very thing we came to fight."
"Then what do you propose?" said Orsen heavily.
"That we take the thing the king used against him, and turn it around." She looked at Roth. "Captain. If we offered you a chance to get your daughter out of that convent, alive, would you take it?"
The big man stared at her. His lips parted. His eyes filled.
"Anything," he whispered. "My lady. Anything."
"Then that is your punishment." She said it very gently. "You will help us. You will write the next letter, as you have always done. But what you write will be what we give you. You will tell us everything you know of the king's agents, of the convent, of the road. And when this is over, if we win, you will go and bring her home."
"And if we lose?" said someone in the crowd, harshly.
"Then he will have been the least of our worries."
A long, taut silence. Then, slowly, from somewhere among the ranks, a rough old voice said, "Aye."
It was the old sergeant who had burned the ladders. He stood in the front row with his arms folded, gnarled and scarred and entirely unmoved by the spectacle. He looked at Roth with his one good eye.
"I have served with him for nineteen years," he said. "He pulled me out of a ditch at the Black Ford, with an arrow in my leg. I will not see him hang for loving his girl."
"Aye," said another voice. And then another. A murmur, a rustle, a rising wave. Soldiers who had stood with their jaws set a moment before began, one by one, to look away, to shift their feet, to nod. Kaelen, at the table, had his face turned aside, and his shoulders were shaking.
Alaric rose.
"It is decided," he said. His voice was thick. "Captain Roth is relieved of his command. He will remain under guard, and he will work at Lady Valeria's direction. If he betrays us again, I will deal with it myself." He looked at the kneeling man. "Roth. Do you understand?"
"Yes, my lord." The big man was weeping openly, without sound, the tears running unchecked into his beard. "I understand. I will not fail you."
"I think you may find," said Valeria, "that you have already paid the greater part of it."
*
It was not until the crowd had dispersed that she realized how weak she was.
She had made it as far as the edge of the fountain when the world tilted. A cold wave went through her, and the gray stones swayed, and she felt her knees begin to fold. Alaric caught her before she fell. He had been watching her the whole time, she understood, like a hawk, and he lifted her in his arms with a low, fierce, wordless sound.
"You are an idiot," he said, into her hair.
"I am aware."
"You stood in front of a thousand soldiers with a fever of a hundred and three."
"It was only a hundred and one." She smiled faintly against his collarbone. "I felt very well, for the first quarter hour."
"I am going to put you in a bed and sit on you."
"That is a very bad plan," said Valeria, "because we have to leave."
He stopped.
"Roth said something," she said, quietly. "At the end. When you were speaking to the sergeant. He told me the last letter went three days ago." She could feel the weight of it settling in her stomach. "He wrote where we were. The ruins. The cistern. The full moon. All of it."
Alaric's arms tightened. "Three days."
"A bird would reach the capital in two. A rider with fresh horses, half a day beyond that." She lifted her head. "If Cedric had a force nearby, he could be here by tomorrow night."
"Kaelen." Alaric turned his head and raised his voice, and it rang off the broken stones. "Kaelen! Orsen! Council. Now."
They were there in minutes, grim-faced, with Pell Aldous a step behind them, his boyish face drawn with alarm. They spread a map across the stones of the fountain, and Valeria sat on the rim, wrapped in a blanket, with Alaric's arm braced behind her back.
It took half an hour. By the end of it they had a plan, such as it was. The marsh to the south was impassable. The old causeway to the east was narrow and could be held, but would lead them into the open. The road north, by which they had come, was the obvious route, and therefore the one most likely to be watched. There was a track, said Kaelen, along the old canal to the northeast, a half-flooded ditch no cart could use. If they moved by night, and abandoned the heavy wagons, and took only what could be carried...
"Midnight," said Alaric. "We strike camp at midnight and go."
"The doses," said Malakor, faintly. He had come up unnoticed, clutching his satchel. "My lord, I have the Wine ingredients. They cannot be left. They must be kept cool, and..."
"Then you will carry them yourself." Alaric did not smile, but his eyes were gentle. "Pack what you need. We have six hours."
The camp moved with astonishing speed. By late afternoon the tents had come down. The heavy baggage had been loaded onto wagons, and the wagons run into the marsh and set alight, so that nothing would fall into enemy hands. Soldiers moved through the dusk with muffled boots and masked lanterns, packing, checking, binding up the horses' hooves in sacking. Valeria watched from the back of a cart, swaddled in furs, her head throbbing. Someone had lit a small fire to boil water. She could smell woodsmoke and cold iron and horse.
Dusk came, long and purple and cold.
She was half asleep, her cheek against Alaric's shoulder, when she heard Kaelen's voice.
"My lord."
It was low, and strained, and utterly flat. She opened her eyes.
He stood at the edge of the cart, a dark silhouette against the dying light, with his face turned toward the south. He did not look at them. He was staring across the marsh, across the black glimmer of the water and the pale smudge of the reeds, toward the long, low rim of the horizon.
"What is it?"
"Look."
She turned her head.
At first she thought it was the stars. A scattering of tiny golden points, low on the dark, flickering faintly at the edge of sight. Then the points multiplied. They spread along the horizon in a long thin line, east to west, one by one, like the opening of a great slow flower. They flared, and steadied, and burned.
Torches.
Hundreds of them. Thousands. A thin ring of fire stretched across the whole breadth of the marsh, drawing in around the ruined walls, closing on every side like the jaws of a trap.
"He did not wait for tomorrow," said Alaric, in a voice she hardly knew.
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