Three Cuts in the Ashwood

Year 0, late afternoon. The Ashwood, three days' ride from Valdris.

The horse was tired. Kaelith was tired. The nine guardsmen who had ridden with him from Valdris were tired, although they were tired in the practiced way of soldiers who had been trained to be tired and not to mention it. The road from Valdris to the Ashwood was three days, and they had ridden it in two and a half by leaving at dusk on the second day, which had cost them a night of sleep and gained them an afternoon at the site, which was the trade Kaelith had asked for and the captain of the guard had not argued with.

They had argued about other things. They had not argued about this.

The Ashwood, at the angle they came in from, was a forest the way a corpse was a body. The trees were upright. The trees were where trees should be. But the bark was the wrong color, a grey that was not the grey of dying trees but the grey of trees that had stopped knowing they were trees, and the canopy let through too much light because the leaves were sparse, and the sound was wrong, in the way that a voice was wrong when something inside the throat had begun to fail. There was no wind. The shadows did not move.

This had been a normal forest, twenty-one years ago. Then the Ashwood Massacre had happened. Now it was the Ashwood. The locals called it the Ashwood and pretended the name was geographical.

"My lord."

The captain of the guard, Moren, drew his horse alongside Kaelith's. Moren was a thirty-eight-year-old man with the face of a fifty-year-old. He had seen the Ashwood twice before. He had not enjoyed either visit.

"My lord, the survivor is half a league east. Lady Brightblade rode ahead at noon. She will already be there."

"Yes."

"My lord, with respect, when we reach the survivor, please remain on horseback for the first quarter-hour. The Order's practice is to let the survivor see the new visitors from a distance. They do not, in the first quarter-hour, distinguish well between the new visitors and the original assailants."

"I understand."

"My lord,"

"Captain Moren. I understand."

Moren nodded once. He fell back to the column.

The survivor was a man named Halver who had been a wagoner before the most recent attack. He had been on the road two miles east of the Ashwood when the ash-wolves had come through. The ash-wolves had taken his cargo, three of his four horses, his left arm below the elbow, and the lower half of his face, which had been replaced with a folded cloth that the Order paladin standing beside him had put there.

The paladin standing beside him was Nyra Brightblade.

Kaelith dismounted.

He had met Nyra Brightblade twice before. The first time had been the Yule procession when he was seventeen and she was nineteen and she had been a junior paladin assigned, briefly, to the Sunward column for ceremonial reasons. They had not spoken on that occasion. The second time had been at a Free Cities council five years ago, where she had been part of the security detail and they had exchanged six sentences about the weather. She had been one of the most-watched paladins of the Order of the Silver Dawn for the last three years. She was twenty-five now. She wore the Order's plate, dulled with travel-dust, and a sword whose hilt had been wrapped in dark leather that had been re-wrapped, recently. The wrap was new. The leather underneath was old.

She did not bow when she saw him. The Order's paladins did not bow to noble lords; the Order's doctrine on this had been established before the gods withdrew. She inclined her head a measured degree and said, "Lord Sunward."

"Lady Brightblade."

"He has not yet spoken."

Kaelith looked at Halver. Halver looked at Kaelith without seeing him. His one eye was the eye of a man who was, in the technical sense, alive, and in the truer sense, not yet returned. The cloth where his lower face should have been moved very slightly with his breathing.

"How old is the wound," Kaelith asked.

"Twelve hours. The attack was at the third bell of yesterday morning."

"How long has he been here."

"I found him this morning. The Order was riding out of Valdris when the message came. Two of his fellow wagoners had survived in better condition. They are at the field-house, half a league back. I rode ahead to him because the field-house is full and he is the worst of them and the field-medics are doing what they can for the others."

Kaelith nodded. He knelt, slowly, because Moren had told him to remain on horseback for a quarter-hour and he had decided, against Moren, that the dismounting was correct, but he would do it the way that was least likely to startle the survivor, and laid his right hand flat on the road in front of Halver, palm up. He did not touch him. He did not move closer. He kept the hand there.

"Halver," he said. "My name is Kaelith Sunward. I am from Valdris. I have ridden three days to find you. I am going to sit here for a few minutes. You do not need to speak. You do not need to look. I am going to be in front of you because I want you to know I am here, and then I am going to go to the field-house and find the others, and then we will see what we will see."

Halver did not respond. His eye did not move.

Kaelith stayed.

The minutes passed. Twelve, by his count.

Then, without warning, Halver's one eye moved. It moved to Kaelith's face. It rested there for a still moment of perhaps four. The eye was hot, not feverish, but lit, the way a coal that had been thought cold could be discovered to be hot if a hand was placed against it. Halver did not speak. He could not speak; the lower half of his face was beneath the cloth.

But his eye, on Kaelith, was a thing that had returned, briefly, from where it had been. There was a person inside the eye. The person was very tired. The person looked at Kaelith and saw him.

Then the eye looked away.

Kaelith stood up, slowly. His knees hurt. He had not been kneeling well.

Nyra had been watching. She did not say anything. She nodded, once, the same measured degree she had used when she greeted him.

"Lady Brightblade," Kaelith said, quietly, "I will go to the field-house. Will you walk with me. There is something I would like to ask."

She fell in beside him.

"The attacks are not random," Kaelith said.

"They are not."

"You have known they are not."

"My order has known. The council has not been told."

"Your order has not told the council."

"My order has been writing the report for sixteen months. The report keeps not being finished."

"By whom."

Nyra was silent for a moment. She walked. They were on the wagon-road, half a league from the field-house, which they could already smell, wood smoke, bandage-cloth boiled, a very small amount of the carbolic the Order used. She walked for ten paces before she answered.

"By no one in particular," she said. "Which is the answer that is also the answer."

He held it.

"The report," he said. "Where is the report?"

"The report is in seven pieces. Each piece has been written by a different chapter house. Each piece is, by itself, plausibly innocent. Together the pieces show a pattern. The pattern is that the ash-wolf attacks correspond to the routes of council members who have been quietly opposing the Maradel-Hollowgate consolidation. Three attacks have struck the Pennarith convoys. Two have struck the Sunward."

"Two."

"Two. One last spring, on your border with the Free Cities. One six months later, on a courier carrying the answer to a tariff letter the Maradel chamber had not been able to influence. The courier survived. The letter was destroyed. The Sunward steward who reviewed the route afterward attributed the second attack to opportunistic banditry. He had been instructed to attribute it to opportunistic banditry."

"By whom."

She did not answer.

"Lady Brightblade," he said, again, "by whom."

"By his immediate superior in the Sunward chain of command. The man he reports to. I do not know whether the man who instructed your steward knew what he was instructing or whether he too was instructed. I will not name him to you on this road. I will name him to you in a quieter room, if you ask me."

"I am asking you."

"In a quieter room," she said.

He looked at her.

She looked at the road.

"Lady Brightblade," he said, "what is it that you are afraid of?"

She walked another six paces.

"My lord," she said, "I am afraid of the thing that has been happening to the Order of the Silver Dawn. I do not have a clean way to say it. The Order has been my home since I was eleven. I do not yet know what has been happening to my home. I know only that some of the older paladins, who I trusted, have been doing things in the last two years that I do not understand. I know that the seven-piece report has been written and not been finished because it has not been allowed to be finished. I know that I am here today, in front of you, because the senior paladin who would normally be sent to a noble lord asking after an Ashwood survivor was redirected this morning to a different task on a different road, and I was told to ride out instead, and I do not believe that the reassignment was an accident, and I do not yet know what the redirection was for."

She stopped walking.

"My lord," she said, "I am afraid that the Order of the Silver Dawn has been infiltrated. I am afraid that I have been sent to you today by someone who wanted me where I could not be useful at the place I was needed. And I am afraid that you have been chosen as the place where I am useless because you are the youngest lord on the council and the most isolated and the easiest to keep busy."

She did not look at him. She looked at the road.

"That," she said, more quietly, "is what I am afraid of."

Kaelith stood for a moment.

"Walk with me," he said. "We will go to the field-house. We will see the others. Then we will ride together back to Valdris. We will arrive in two and a half days. By the time we arrive I will know what we will do next. Or you will know. Whichever of us knows first, will tell the other."

"My lord."

"And Lady Brightblade."

"Yes, my lord."

"You are not useless."

She did not answer that.

They walked.

The third cut, which was the cut Kaelith did not know about until two days later, was the one in his own household. It had been made by the steward who had attributed the second Sunward attack to opportunistic banditry. The cut was the steward's own throat. The note he left was four words long. It said: I am sorry, Lord.

The steward's body was found at the second bell of the morning Kaelith and Nyra rode back into Valdris. By then Kaelith had already begun to know that something in his world had begun to change beneath his feet. He had begun, on the long ride, to find the shape of what Malrien had said in the colonnade, I had been intending to come to you sooner.

Malrien had been preparing a report of his own. Malrien had been about to bring it. Malrien had run out of time, or thought he had. Malrien had said: if something happens to me, in the next month or perhaps the next two months.

Kaelith would not learn for nine more days that the steward who had killed himself was the same man who had handed Malrien a small folded paper four days earlier, at the back of the council courtyard, after the third bell, when no one had been watching. The folded paper had been a name. The name had been Malrien's.

The steward had been instructed by someone else. Kaelith did not know that yet either.

He rode beside Nyra Brightblade through the lower Sward as the second bell rang in the towers of Valdris, and he held what he held, which was: the survivor's eye, the steward's note he had not yet been told about, Malrien's tired face from the day before, the seventy seconds of his mother's face through the window that no one knew about, the small warmth that had passed through him at the chamber window the night before, and a low and unfamiliar humming that seemed, when he listened for it, to be coming from somewhere just beyond his sternum, as if a small piece of polished silver had begun, very far away, to find a frequency that he was the only one in Aerros who could quite hear.

He did not yet know what he was.

Kaelith Sunward rode through the lower Sward. The cowlick at the crown of his head, as ever, refused to lie flat.

End Chapter 3.