"Then we use the refugee network as well. Anything that carries one voice three valleys."
The signal room is half its old self. Three of the original crystals are slag; two are whole, seal-marks old military but functional. I take both. Drogan sends his fastest runner south with a paper packet I copy in my own hand—two pages, no more. The perimeter warding directive showing the south and east gates sealed from outside the night of Blackwater. One trade-house seal Vaelis flagged, scrubbed of her marker, traceable instead to a shipping house any clerk could pull. Nothing thatnames Varek. Nothing that names Gideon. Nothing that finishes either of them. Only enough to say: the official story is wrong, and proof of the wrongness exists.
I lift one crystal between my palms and breathe into it the way the old couriers taught me, the way Gideon taught me, and I hate that the muscle for this still lives in my hands.
"Citizens of Protheka." My voice goes into the stone and out of it across a valley. "My name is Corrine Ashmere. The men below have told you what I am. I will not argue with them. I ask only that you hold their certainty against this. The gates of Blackwater were sealed the night the fortress burned. They were not sealed by attackers. The order to evacuate the fortress disappeared three hours before the fire by an office above the outpost commander. Records prove this. Records exist. Records have been hidden for since it took place. Ask the men beside you whether you have ever been allowed to read them."
I lower the crystal. The second I save. Theren's hand is at the small of my back, briefly, and gone. Approval. From Theren, that costs. We come back to the parapet. The fortress has changed in the time we were gone. Below in the south yard, three of Gideon's heron-marked irregulars have stopped moving. One is staring at the ridge where my voice came from; the other two are arguing. On the eastern flat a council captain has turned his horse half a degree toward his own line and is speaking to the man beside him with a hand at his mouth. Refugees have come out and are watching nothing in particular, which means they are watching us. Drogan's soldiers have gone still in the specific way men go still when their commander's name has just been used against them by someone whose name no longer convinces them. Not belief. Hesitation. Hesitation is all I asked for.
Gideon's herald-crystal lights again, fast, too fast—Gideon answering before he has decided what to answer. He calls me a liar by reflex, and the reflex is the tell. Varek's crystaldoesn't light at all, which is the worse signal of the two. He's recalculating.
Vesh appears at the parapet with his blade still in his hand from the lower corridor. He looks at me for a long moment, and at Leoric, and then at the south road where his own people are arguing under the heron banner.
"Blood already at the southern picket," he says. "Two of theirs. One of ours. Mostly ours, Captain. It hasn't started but it isn't holding."
"It won't hold." The commander has fully arrived in Leoric's voice now—quiet, exact. "Theren. Pull our line to the inner wall. Civilians down into the lower vault inside the sealed warded room. Drogan, your steadiest at the eastern flank; if Varek moves first he'll move there. Hold the south loose. Let Gideon's people fight each other for as long as the fracture gives us."
"And the broadcast?" Theren asks.
"Send the runner. Now."
The wind drops as the runner goes. Below, the southern yard has begun to move—not yet a charge, the worse motion that comes first, men finding their feet without being told to. A horn sounds from the eastern flat. Not Varek's. A captain's. Out of order. Leoric glances at me. Neither of us says any of the things that would be useful to say.
"What is needed is under the floor," I start.
"I know."
"If they overrun us before we can lift it?—"
"They won't. They came to be witnessed. They can't start a war without finishing the story first." His eye moves across the valley once. "You have just made the ending uncertain."
He doesn't thank me. A council banner dips below us, and rises, and dips again, and somewhere in the south yard a man shouts a word I cannot make out and is answered by ten more.
The fortress sits at the edge of itself. The truth has come up far enough to crack the surface of the morning. The thing that finishes them is still in a room beneath our feet, behind a door my friends are holding with their lives.
I take Leoric's hand once where no one can see it, and let go. Then the first arrow comes.
26
LEORIC
The arrow takes a boy at a picket through the gap in his vambrace—not Vesh, someone younger, one of Drogan's—and he goes off the parapet with the silence training drills into a body. I have already moved before he lands. The valley below is committing itself one piece at a time. A council horn answers the captain who blew out of order. Gideon's south yard has gone from arguing to running. The space between the two ridges fills with men who do not yet know whose flag they will die under. I find Corrine at the broadcast room door and put my hand at her elbow only long enough to turn her.
"Lower vault with Drogan. Not the inner corridor—the back stair. Take the second crystal. If they reach you, the runner south is your second route."
"You need me at the door."
"I need you alive long enough to send the rest."
She holds my eye for one beat, then goes. I do not watch her go. Watching is what kills men in moments like this. Theren has the inner wall already, two ranks deep, Drogan's mercenaries braced behind the breakwater of fallen masonry we widened in the night. Vesh is at the east. The south I keep loose; Gideon'sirregulars are fracturing inside their own line and I want to feed them rope. A mercenary captain on a chestnut hits our outer post with eight men. I take the captain at the second exchange and put my boot on his throat. The eight scatter. One swings back, and Theren puts him down before he reaches the masonry.
"You're forward," Theren says. He doesn't make it a question.
"The line is thinnest here."
"And she can see you from the stair."
I don't answer. He doesn't expect me to. The second push comes. Council colors this time, and it tells me Varek has finally chosen a direction. Three ranks, tight, disciplined—and behind them a smaller party in the dark gray of his household guard, carrying nothing that looks like a weapon. Pitch. Lamp oil in clay. Two casters at the back. I read the picture in the time it takes to draw breath. Not a charge. A reach. They're not coming to take the fortress. They're coming to set it alight again with us inside it. I was right.
