I'm not watching the clock. I'm just noticing things, the way I do when my mind won't stop moving and my hands are finally still.
The back door opens.
I turn — and then something heavy comes down over my head, a hood or a sack, rough cloth that smells of horse and old grain. My cup hits the floor. I open my mouth and a hand clamps over the outside of the cloth before I can make enough noise to matter.
Two sets of hands. They know what they're doing — no hesitation, no fumbling, the movement of people who practiced this or have done it before.
I fight anyway.
My elbow connects with something solid and someone hisses, but the grip doesn't break. My wrists are pulled behind me and bound fast. I'm lifted and moved before I can get my feet under me properly, and then I'm outside, and the cold air hits even through the cloth, and the forge sounds fade behind me.
I count steps. I count turns. I track the feel of the ground — cobblestone, then mud, then the crunch of frost on grass. We move away from the village sounds entirely.
Nobody speaks to me. That's almost worse than if they did.
The ruins smellof damp stone and old fire.
They pull the hood off when we stop moving, and I blink against the darkness — just enough moonlight filtering through the broken roof to make out shapes. Stone walls, half-standing. A collapsed doorway. The remnants of something that might have been a granary or an outpost, a long time ago.
Malrec is sitting on a block of fallen stone with his coat still neat, his hands folded, looking entirely too composed for a man who has been hiding in ruins for three weeks.
"Edria." He says it pleasantly, the same way he said it the first time he walked into my forge. "Please sit down."
I don't sit. One of his men pushes me down by the shoulder, and I hit the ground hard on my knees and make myself stay upright through it.
"There are four of them," I say. "And you. This seems excessive."
"You've proven resourceful in the past." He tilts his head. "I wasn't taking chances."
"What is this?"
"An exit." He stands, unhurried, and moves to the broken doorway to look out at the dark. "I've spent twelve years building something careful and sustainable, and all of it came undone because you couldn't keep your head down." He looks back at me over his shoulder. "Every human in Oxwood managed it. Your father managed it. Your brother managed it. You couldn't."
"My father and brother were starving," I say flatly. "We all were."
"Oxwood has always been poor." He turns back to face me. "That's not a condition I created. It's the condition I worked within. The taxes were high, yes. The quotas were difficult. But people survived." He crouches to my level, which is more unsettling than when he was standing. "You introduced instability. You drew attention. You attached yourself to a lord who suddenly wanted to look closely at things that had been quietly settled for a decade."
"He was going to look regardless."
"Perhaps. But you gave him a reason to look atme." He stands. "So I'm going to leave this region. Tonight, with what I have left. And before I go, I'm going to leave behind a problem that will keep Nyrius occupied for months." His voice stays pleasant, which is the worst thing about him. "Your death, attributed to the noble faction that has been most vocal about his claim on you and the child. The ones who called it an abomination publicly. They've been loud enough that no one will find it implausible."
The ruins are very quiet.
"Nyrius will know," I say.
"Nyrius will suspect. Suspicion takes time to prove." He moves away from me. "By then I'll be gone, and the investigation will be consuming itself chasing noble involvement in yourmurder instead of mine in the smuggling." He glances back. "It's not a perfect plan. It's a functional one."
I test the binding on my wrists. Tight, but not impossible — there's a knot rather than a lock, which means it's a question of time and angle. I keep my face still.
"You're blaming me," I say, "for consequences you created."
"I'm explaining the logic." He settles back onto his stone seat. "Get some rest. You look exhausted."
The ground is hard and the cold seeps through my clothes within an hour.
I work at the knot through the night — slow, patient, trying not to let any of his men notice my hands moving. I get partway through it twice and lose the progress when someone checks the binding. The third time I make myself stop and just breathe.
Stay calm. Think. Wait.
