"With you. Go."
The curtain takes another jar. The fire on the outer face has crossed to the inner. I hear the old timbers in the gatehouse give in a long groan that is not a sound a building should make, and the gatehouse comes down at one corner with the slow inevitability of a thing that had been waiting to. Sparks rise the height of the broken keep. The wind, which had been kind, decides to be cruel.
Corrine's hand fastens my coat. Not pulling. Holding.
"You don't follow me down."
"No."
"Don't die in this."
"No."
She doesn't believe me. I don't blame her. I bend and kiss her once at the corner of her mouth, where the soot has made a line, and let her go.
I turn back into the yard. Drogan's line is broken at the second post. Vesh has reached the casters. The column is reforming for a third push and they've brought up more jars. The fortress is burning in three places now, and a tongue of flame has found the inner stair toward the records room above.
I understand then what Varek has done. He's not trying to take the fortress. He's doing exactly what he needs to. Closing the lid.
I lift my blade and find the next person, and the next, and somewhere behind my eye the corridor above the lower block is on fire again, and I am moving toward it, because there is no other path that does not hand us back to the past.
27
CORRINE
The vault door takes the child first. I push her between Drogan's mercenaries and the inner wall, and I don't watch her cross the threshold because watching means I'd want to follow. The veteran's hand comes up in a question. I shake my head. He nods once and seals it behind her.
The corridor I came down by is filling with smoke—pale, sweet, oil-soaked. It travels along the ceiling like water finding its level. I keep low. The second crystal is wrapped in cloth at my hip. Whatever's left of my broadcast credit, I mean to spend it before the lower vault becomes the place this story ends.
I hear them before I see them. Three voices at the cross-corridor where the prisoner cells turn off toward the deeper archive—one clipped, urgent. I press flat to the wall at the corner. The lamp at the far end has been kicked over and burns slow against an old courier case, the wax of an official seal cooking out in a thin black line.
"—not in the upper store. He's lied. Find the second door."
Gideon. I know the missing-finger drag on his consonants the way I know my own pulse. The fire in the upper stair is doing Varek's work for him; the men in this corridor are doingGideon's. If both finish, there's no archive left to broadcast. And there's one thing in this fortress only Gideon can give me, and he won't give it to anyone else alive.
I draw the short blade Drogan pressed into my hand on the stair and step into the cross-corridor. He has two men with him. One turns first, raising his blade with the flat surprise of someone who expected a soldier. I take the inside of his forearm with the short edge and put my shoulder into his sternum, and he goes back into the wall hard enough that the second one flinches. That half-second is what I need. I get past them both into the smaller chamber beyond, and put my back to the wall opposite the door.
Gideon follows me in. He's smiling the small careful smile I remember from the Thornwall basement.
"Cori."
"Don't."
"You'd really stand there with a knife at me."
"Tell your men to leave."
He weighs it. His two are at the doorway, blades out. He lifts two fingers and they fall back into the corridor without a word. I track the sound of them stopping, not retreating. Containment.
His coat is good wool, council-cut. Not a man who's been sleeping rough. "You sent yourself," he says, almost wondering.
"You sent me. I'm returning the favor."
"To a room where you have a knife and I have men in the corridor. That isn't strategy. That's something else."
"It's a conversation."
He laughs, soft, genuinely pleased. He always did love being read correctly. "Then have it."
