They grab Papa by both arms. He tries to pull free and his bad leg gives under the torque — I see it happen, watch his face go white — and when he stumbles one of the soldiers shoves him hard into the mud. He goes down on his hands and knees and doesn't get up fast enough, and the second soldier pulls him upright by the collar and drives an elbow into his ribs.
"Stop." My voice cracks on it. "He has nothing to do with this. He didn't know?—"
"Take him for questioning." Malrec says it without looking.
Finn lunges forward and two villagers actually catch him, pulling him back — I can't tell if they're protecting him or containing him. He's shouting something I can't hear over the blood in my ears.
Papa is dragged down the lane. He doesn't look back. I think it's so I won't see his face.
Someone betrayed us.
The thought settles as they march me toward the magistrate's courthouse, cold and certain. The soldiers went straight to the coal pile. They didn't search — they retrieved. Someone told them the location, the timing, possibly the volume. Someone connected to Velis's side of the arrangement, someone who knew my forge layout well enough to describe it.
Velis's network was raided. Men in custody talk when they have something to trade.
I run through faces in my head — the men at the exchange points, the ones who'd seen me move bundles in and out. Any one of them could have given a name and a description and a floor plan in exchange for a lighter sentence.
One of them did.
The lane seems longer than it ever has. Every face I pass is a calculation — sympathy, fear, relief that it's me and not them. Old Perrin watches from his doorway with his hat in his hand. Sorella's tavern shutters are closed, which means she saw the soldiers coming and made herself invisible before they arrived. I don't blame her.
I'm nearly at the courthouse steps when I see it.
All the way at the end of the lane, where the road bends toward the forest track, a banner catches the early light. Dark field, silver stag. Moving fast, the horse beneath it pushing hard.
Too late.
The soldiers pull me up the steps before the rider reaches the lane entrance, and the courthouse door closes behind me, and the grey morning disappears.
They keep me in the dim entrance hall with iron on my wrists and mud on my boots, and I breathe.
Papa is somewhere in this building being questioned with a bad leg and bruised ribs. Finn is in the street with no one to keep him from doing something reckless. And Nyrius just rode into Oxwood to find his banner's presence meaningless, because Malrec moved first.
I told myself I had it managed. I told myself I was careful.
Now, I’m alone in the dark and I won’t let myself finish the thought.
22
NYRIUS
Isee the chains before I see her face.
She's being marched toward the courthouse steps when I clear the lane bend, two soldiers flanking her, wrists bound in front. Oren is being dragged in the opposite direction — toward the prison building, not the courthouse — and even from this distance I can see he's favoring his side badly, more than his usual leg trouble.
"Cyran." I don't change my tone.
"I see it." He's already pulling up beside me.
I dismount before my horse fully stops, handing the reins off without looking, and move through the crowd that has gathered in the lane. People step aside. Some of them recognize the banner. Most of them are too focused on what's happening at the courthouse steps to notice anything behind them.
Malrec is on the steps.
He has the weapons laid out on a cloth-covered table — eight finished blades and the three unfinished ones, arranged with deliberate presentation like he rehearsed this. He's speaking to the crowd when I reach the outskirts of the square, his voice carrying easily in the cold air.
"—no legitimate commission papers. No merchant authorization. Weapons produced in secret, at night, outside the legal forge charter for this region." He gestures to the table. "These are rebel arms. The markings match confiscated materials from three separate attack sites in Ardenmere."
Edria stands between her guards with her chin level. She isn't looking at the crowd.
