“Kill surrendered men, and we lose every recruit who joined us because they currently believe we’re different from Arthur.”
“Kill them and we send a message.”
“Carlisle.”
“A message,” he said, louder, and his two men behind him shifted, which was all the signal his people needed to understand that the order had been given. “That the north is not safe for crown soldiers. We send the message that every supply line running out of Camelot bleeds.”
“Stand down.” I put myself between him and the six bound men; I held his gaze and I kept my voice level. Not a shout. Nothing that would read as panic or challenge. Just the flat certainty of a man who wouldn’t move. “You do this over my objection and you lose the network. Not pieces of it.Allof it. Every house in the north that shelters our people does so because they believe we’re worth sheltering. The moment we’re indistinguishable from the thing we’re fighting—”
“—we’re already indistinguishable to Arthur.” He held my gaze for a long moment. The knife was still in his hand. His hawk’s eyes didn’t flinch. “You think he makes a distinction between us and monsters? He does not.”
“I’m not fighting for Arthur’s opinion of me.”
The silence stretched.
“Carlisle.” Hailey’s voice was quiet, not placating, not sharp. Just present, the way she put herself into difficult moments: without apology. She stepped up beside me, and she looked at him directly in the way she looked at most things, as though she’d already decided she wasn’t going to blink first. “Six bound men on a road are a liability either way. Dead, they’re a story Arthur tells about us. Alive, they’re six men who spend the rest of their service knowing Arthur wouldn’t have spared their lives were it the other way around.” She paused. “One of those outcomes serves us. The other serves him.”
Carlisle looked at her for a long moment, and as he did, something shifted in his expression: not agreement exactly, but the recalibration of a man who’d expected to argue and had instead been handed logic.
“Your woman has a mouth on her,” he said to me.
“She’s not my woman,” I answered, reminded of a similar conversation I’d had with Carlisle about Morgan.
“No,” Hailey agreed pleasantly. “I’m his right hand, which is considerably more useful.”
Then Carlisle put the knife back on his belt, slowly, with the deliberateness of a man doing it as a choice, making sure I registered that it was a choice, and that the choice could be unmade.
“Move them,” he said to me, not to his men. To me. “If one of them walks free and brings Arthur’s riders down on a safe house, the blood is yours.”
He mounted his horse, then rode back up the ridge without another word.
I stood beside Hailey and watched him go.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I didn’t do it for you,” she answered. “I did it because he was about to make a fucking mistake, and someone needed to say something you couldn’t say without it becoming aconfrontation.” She glanced at me. “You were too far into it, Vaelen. Sometimes you need someone who isn’t.”
“You know, you could have just said ‘you’re welcome’.”
She grinned at me. “Where’s the fucking fun in that?”
She walked back toward the burning wagons before I could respond, which was also entirely consistent with everything I knew about her.
The wagons sent black smoke straight up into the windless afternoon sky, a column visible for miles, which was exactly the point. Arthur would know by nightfall. He’d know the pass was compromised, he’d know the supply line had been hit, he’d know it had been done by people who were organized enough to plan and disciplined enough, mostly, to do it cleanly.
He’d also know someone had let six of his men live.
I didn’t know yet whether that last part was brilliance or sentimentality. Those two things had a way of looking identical until the consequences arrived.
The forest camp was two miles east of the Ashford Pass, inside a stand of old-growth pine so dense the sky was barely visible. The fire was small and smokeless; Renn had learned three years ago how to burn wet wood without the column that gave position away. The smell was different from regular wood smoke: earthier, resinous, with an undertone that reminded me of the deeper passages in Annwyn.
I arrived after dark.
Morgan was already there.
She was sitting on a fallen log with her cloak wrapped around her and her hair loose, which was unusual: she wore her hair elaborately by preference, pinned and dressed with the small enchanted ornaments that caught light like trapped sparks. Loose, it fell past her shoulders in waves of black with those deep-red threads running through it. She had a cup of something warm in both hands, and she was watching the firewith the expression she wore when she was thinking through a problem: not absent, exactly, but interior. Turned inward.
Hailey moved to sit on a supply crate that was a short distance from Morgan, spreading her notes across her knees, a stub of charcoal in her hand. She was already writing something, head bent, hair falling loose from where she’d tied it back for the operation.
