She knew something, the witch in the Wilds. She always knew something; that was the thing that had made her invaluable and also intolerable, because her knowing always arrived with conditions. Not stated conditions. She was not a woman who negotiated in plain language. She negotiated in silences and in the things she did not say, which were always more numerous and more significant than the things she did.
The last time I had been there, I had left owing her something. I had never settled that debt. Yet, she had neverasked after it, which was the most effective possible method of ensuring I would never forget it.
I crossed to the fireplace and crouched, looking into the dead ash.
There was nothing there.
I had tried every other angle, trying to find one that did not involve Blodeuwyn. I had mapped the visions forward and backward and sideways through every variation I could hold in my mind simultaneously. I had worked the problem through Guinevere, through the rebellion, through Morgan, through the timing of the thinning and the dragon’s escalation and what Mordred would do when he finally identified what he was sensing in the girl, and how Arthur would respond when the dragon’s interest in her became undeniable, even to Arthur.
But every path that did not require the witch in the Wilds required something else I did not have, information I could not access, a timeline I could not force and a conversation in Camelot I could not have without destroying what little cover Guinevere had left.
All paths led to the same place.
I stood up.
The ash was gray, cold and complete.
I did not go to the Wilds that night.
Instead, I stood in my dark study for another hour, maybe more, the way a man stands at the face of a decision he has already made but has not performed yet, turning it over, looking for a door he had not yet tried. There were no doors. I had been thorough about that, at least.
I went to bed.
The woman in the Wilds could wait a while longer.
-VAELEN-
The caravan came through the Ashford Pass at the wrong hour.
That was their first mistake: moving grain and weapons through a mountain road after midday, when the shadows from the eastern ridge stretched long and swallowed the road in sections. When a man’s eyes needed time to adjust between light and dark, when horses were tired and pulling, and the drivers had been at it since before dawn and were thinking about supper, that wasn’t the right time.
I’d watched three convoys use this pass in the past month. I’d counted axles, noted escort numbers, formation spacing, and the distance between the lead riders and the wagon line. I’d noted how two King’s Guard were in front, their ceremonial armor catching light like a signal fire. Four Iron Hounds flanked them, and at the rear, a guard of six who rotated their positions too infrequently and had started talking to each other by the second hour of the march, which meant their eyes were on each other’s faces instead of the treeline.
There were twelve soldiers in total with wagons that were full of grain, weapons, and even more useful things, according to the message Pip had intercepted at the waystation.
We had twenty-two in our number.
Hailey had been the one to pull Pip’s intercept from the waystation drop. She’d arrived back at camp with it folded inside her boot, which was where she carried things she didn’t want found if she was searched, and she’d handed it to me without ceremony while eating a pear.
“Replacement Iron Hounds,” she’d said between chews. “Bound for Camelot. Ten wagons.” She’d taken another bite. “We should hit the fuck out of it.” I’d told her I’d already been thinking the same thing. She’d said she already knew because she “wasn’t fucking dumb.”
I gave the signal from the ridge at the second bend: a single sharp whistle, the kind a shepherd makes to turn his dog, and the treeline below came alive.
It went fast, the way these things go when you’ve done the planning properly. The lead riders went down before they could turn their horses. Harwick took the near flank while Renn’s group cut off the rear. I came down the slope with seven at my back and hit the center of the wagon line where the weapons crates were stacked under oilcloth.
The drivers put their hands up immediately; most of them weren’t soldiers. They were hired men from Pendrath and Corwall who’d taken crown coin to move freight and had no particular allegiance to the freight, to the crown, or even to the coin, for that matter.
“Down from the boards,” I said. “Hands where I can see them.”
They came down.
The King’s Guard was different. Three of them fought while two dropped their weapons when they saw their numbers against ours. One, a young man with the kind of face that still has hope in it, tried to run for the treeline, and Harwick took him down with a tackle before he’d made it ten yards.
“Don’t kill him,” I said.
Harwick looked up from the ground with the boy pinned under his knee. He had the flat expression of a man who disagreed but recognized authority, and he stepped back.
The boy scrambled to his feet. He was maybe nineteen. His armor was new; he hadn’t been in it long enough to wear the shine off the joints.
