I looked at his sons.
“We’re in,” the two of them said in one voice.
“What about Shana?”
“She is in,” Gort said.
“Then it’s settled. You start now.” I looked at Will and Lute. “We have three small children who were kidnapped. I need them taken back to their parents. One is from Stilla Britin, and two are from Lagie.”
“Less than a day’s trip,” Will said. “We’ll be back before morning.”
Of the twenty-two hundred combined pages of the two books, Will and Lute had exactly seventeen and a half devoted to them. I only knew one secret about their past and one secret about their future. I had to make it count.
“Treat this as a mission into enemy territory,” I told them. “Drop the children off and come right back. No milk runs.”
Will froze. Lute went bright red.
Gort narrowed his eyes. “What does she mean by that?”
“They know what I mean. Clover will show you where the kids are.”
“This way,” Clover said and walked off.
Lute followed her, clearly grateful to escape.
Will lingered. “How . . . ?”
“She does that,” Reynald told him. “You’ll get used to it.”
Will gave me a long look, then followed his brother. We watched the three of them enter the house.
“Milk runs?” Reynald asked.
“That’s what they call their little detours. It’s less about the milk and more about the milk maids,” I told him. “They are handsome, and pretty farm girls like them.”
Gort squinted at me.
His mouth said, “So, you’re the real deal.” His face saidProve it.
“You should’ve listened to Eges,” I told him.
Nothing changed in Gort’s expression. “Fair enough.”
Eges had served with Gort in the Hreban campaign. The morning before the charge that left Gort with an injured leg, he’d had a bad feeling and tried to convince Gort to hang back. Gort hadn’t.
“Now I have a question for you. How old were your sons when Reynald was transferred to the west?”
Gort looked at Reynald.
“Don’t look at him,” I said. “It’s a simple question.”
“Will was ten and Lute was eight.”
Will was twenty-one, which meant Reynald was transferred eleven years ago. That lined up with the books.
A lot of the details matched exactly, like the way Derog and Gort looked. And then there was Hreban, who was described as having a powerful presence, but who had looked very ordinary aside from his daring fashion sense, and Reynald, who seemed younger and more forceful than he should’ve been. The age and looks were a minor discrepancy, but we couldn’t afford too many of those. Every inconsistency was a potential pit with sharpened stakes at the bottom. I had no idea how or why these minor deviations had occurred, but they bothered me.
Gort was looking at me.
