“Go,” I said.
He went, and he did so quickly.
Harwick watched him go. “He’ll report everything.”
“He’ll report what I want Arthur to know,” I said. “Ten wagons hit in the Ashford pass. All survived.”
Harwick understood. He didn’t like it, but he understood.
Hailey appeared at my left. She’d watched the boy go without expression, and now she was watching the road where he’d disappeared into the treeline. “He’ll run straight to the nearest fucking garrison post,” she said.
“Yes.”
“So we have maybe four hours before they send riders.”
“Three,” I said. “If they’re efficient.”
She nodded once and turned back toward the wagons without requiring further instruction. She already knew what needed doing. She always already knew because she wasn’t fucking dumb.
The work of moving what we could take took the better part of an hour. The grain wagons, and there were six of them, were too heavy to move quickly, so we took four. We burned the rest of them. The weapons crates we stripped entirely: two wagons of swords, spearheads, and arrowheads still bundled in straw. All of it was transferred to the mules that were waiting in the hollow below the ridge, already loaded and moving before the last wagon caught.
The other soldiers: six men in a covered wagon, unarmed and bound for Camelot to receive their posting, sat on the road with their hands tied in front of them.
That was when Carlisle arrived.
He came down from the north end of the ridge on a black horse with two of his own men behind him, and I knew from the way he rode that the morning was about to cost more than it needed to.
“Good work,” he said, pulling up beside me as he then dismounted.
His hair was wind-pulled from its tie. The scar across his cheek caught the afternoon light, and he looked at the burning wagons without much expression. Then he looked at the bound soldiers sitting in the road.
“On your feet,” he said to them.
They stood.
“Carlisle,” I said.
“They know too much,” he said. “They’ve seen faces. Routes.”
“They’re unarmed and restrained. I’ll have them moved to the Greenvale safe house until—”
“—until what?” It wasn’t a question. He asked the question the way men say things when they’ve already stopped listening. “Until Arthur sends a retrieval party and they walk back into Camelot and describe every man here?”
“They haven’t seen enough to—”
“—they’ve seen you, and now they’ve seen me.”
The six men were very still.
I was aware of Hailey behind me and slightly to my right. She hadn’t moved or spoken, but I could feel the quality of her attention: focused, assessing, tracking the knife on Carlisle’s belt before he’d reached for it. She had a talent for reading the moment before a moment became something irreversible.
“They surrendered,” I said.
“Soldiers don’t get to surrender,” Carlisle answered. He’d already pulled the short knife from his belt and was turning it in his fingers with the easy habit of a man who’d done this beforeand had no particular feeling about it anymore. “That’s a mercy we extend to civilians. We don’t extend it to men who wear Arthur’s sigil.”
“We extended it this morning. Those are the rules I fight by.”
“Yourrules.” He said the words without contempt, almost without interest, as if he were identifying a fact rather than dismissing one. “You fight a clean war, Vaelen. A patient war. A war you can win from a distance.” He looked at the bound men again. “I’ve been losing ground to this crown for thirty years. I don’t have the luxury of patience.”
