“Aldwin,” I said quietly.
The Baron tapped one of the names on the parchment. Beside it he had made a small mark in the margin. The mark meaning,we may lose this man.My knees abruptly decided sitting would be preferable to standing.
“What do we do?”
“We write,” he said. “Tonight.”
“And if he ignores us?”
He looked at me steadily across the desk.
“The gambit was made knowing the risk.”
He pushed fresh parchment toward me while taking up his own quill. And so we sat together through the lengthening summer evening writing letters to a violent man riding toward a battle I already knew might destroy him.
I wrote separately to Geoffrey afterward.
The Baron was still at the desk beside me, bent over correspondence by candlelight while summer rain whispered faintly against the shutters. I took a fresh piece of parchment before I could lose my nerve.
To Geoffrey, wherever this finds you.
Be careful.
I find I have become rather attached to you.
Yours,
Harper
I stared at it exactly one minute, then folded the parchment before common sense could intervene, sealed it in wax, and handed it to a second courier at dawn with instructions to ride south through weather, mud, or hell itself.
Only afterward did I go to the chapel for the first time in over a week. The air inside smelled faintly of incense and old stone cooled by evening. I sat alone in the front pew. The psalter rested silent upon its lectern. Dark. Watching.
* * *
The storm arrived just after midnight.
Not dramatic thunder in the theatrical sense. Just relentless summer rain rolling across the riverlands in grey sheets while the castle settled into uneasy sleep around it.
I was still awake. Partly because I had made the catastrophic decision to writeI find I have become rather attached to youto a man currently wandering through armed political collapse. Partly because once the words had left my hands attached to wax and courier, my brain had immediately begun replaying them in increasingly humiliating detail.
I was considering whether death from embarrassment was medically possible when hooves sounded suddenly in the lower yard.
Fast.
Urgent.
Not the measured rhythm of a scheduled arrival.
I crossed immediately to the window.
Torchlight moved below through rain and darkness. Men crossed the courtyard at speed. One of the stable boys nearly lost his footing in the mud while reaching for a foam-dark horse.
And then the rider swung down. My heart stopped so abruptly it actually hurt.
Geoffrey.
Even from above I could see exhaustion in the way he moved. Rain silvered his shoulders and plastered dark hair against his forehead. Mud covered both boots nearly to the knee. One glove was missing entirely.
