Dear, God! NO!

The Canal at Dawn Part 2

I did not sleep.

Victor found me at the broken wall on the keep's eastern side, watching the pines for movement that would not come for hours. He settled beside me without speaking, his bulk radiating heat in the cold night air. We sat in silence for a long time. The forest breathed around us, wind through needles, the distant crack of a branch under some heavy animal's weight.

"There's something I need to show you," he said at last.

I turned to look at him. The moonlight caught the edges of his scars, silvering them.

"Now?"

"Now is when the dark is deepest. The hunters pull back to their fires between the third and fifth hours. It's the only window."

He stood and offered me his hand. The claws gleamed, curving slightly inward, and I took it without hesitation. His palm was rough and hot, the calluses so thick they felt like bark. He pulled me to my feet and led me through the camp, past Rorik sleeping with his wolf curled at his side, past Tomas' shelter where the boy snored with one arm flung over his face, past Mariae's sentry post where she watched us go with a lifted eyebrow but no objection.

Victor took me north. Not along the paths I had learned in the past days but through a section of forest I had not entered, where the pines grew so close their branches interlocked overhead like the ribs of a cathedral. The ground sloped downward, then leveled, then dropped sharply into a ravine where a narrow stream threaded between moss-covered rocks. He jumped down without pause. I followed, landing hard, and his hand caught my elbow before I stumbled.

The stream led to a cleft in the rock face, barely wide enough for Victor to pass sideways. He went first, and I pressed through after him, stone scraping my shoulders, the air turning colder and damper. Then the passage opened into a wider channel, carved by water over centuries, and I realized we were inside the earth.

"This runs beneath the ridge," Victor said, his voice echoing softly. "Under the old boundary stones. It comes out on the other side of the eastern tree line, behind the mill at Cuitridge."

Cuitridge. I knew Cuitridge. It was the village where Carlin's steward collected rents on the first of every month. It sat at the crossroads between the Nightwillow estate and the road to Dunmore.

"You've used this before," I said.

"Eleven years in the forest. You learn every hole, every crack, every way the land hides you." He moved ahead through the channel, ducking beneath a low overhang. "Carlin's men patrol the tree line. They don't patrol what's underneath it."

We walked for what felt like half an hour, the passage widening and narrowing in turns, the stream sometimes ankle-deep and sometimes dry. Then the air changed, warmer, carrying the scent of woodsmoke and livestock, and ahead I saw a faint grey glow. The exit.

Victor stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. "Quiet now. And low."

We emerged behind a tumble of boulders on a hillside above Cuitridge. The village lay below in the shallow valley, a scatter of thatched roofs and stone walls and the dark bulk of the mill beside its frozen wheel. From this vantage I could see the crossroads, the road south to my family's estate, and, set apart on a slight rise at the village's eastern edge, the two-storey stone house that served as Carlin's local headquarters.

Lantern light burned in the upper windows.

My breath caught.

"He's here?" I whispered.

Victor settled against the boulder beside me, his body motionless, eyes fixed on the lit windows with a predator's patience. "His steward keeps that house. But when there's business in the eastern corridor, Carlin stays the night rather than ride back to Dunmore in the dark. The lights have been burning the last three nights. Since the proclamation."

Since he announced his intention to marry my sister.

I stared at the windows. At this distance, with the moonlight and the faint glow from inside, I could see shapes moving behind the glass. Two figures. One tall and lean, standing with the easy posture of a man in his own domain. The other smaller, curved, a woman's silhouette leaning into his space with familiarity.

His mistress.

The bile rose and I swallowed it down. In my first life I had not known about her until the end, until the dungeon, until whispers reached me through the walls like poison dripping through stone. Now I watched them together through a window and felt the knowledge settle into my bones like an old bruise pressed.

The tall figure moved. He crossed to the window and I saw his profile, sharp and clean, the aristocratic line of his jaw, the styled chestnut hair. He held a glass of wine. He drank. He turned back to the woman and said something that made her laugh, and the sound carried faintly across the cold air, bright and careless.

My fingers curled against the boulder until the stone bit into my skin.

"I watched him for two nights before the wedding," Victor murmured beside me. "I did not know who he was then. Only that he smelled wrong. Like copper and old silk and something underneath that was rotten." He paused. "Now I know who he is. And I know what he took from you."

I did not correct him. He thought he knew, and what he knew was enough for now. The rest of it, the death, the cold, the second chance, that secret I held so close it had fused to the walls of my chest. I was not ready to let it out. I did not know if I would ever be ready.

"He's planning the wedding from here," I said instead, forcing my voice level. "Close to the estate. Close to Vivienne. He wants to control every detail."

"Yes."

"How often can we come here?"

Victor considered. "Every two or three nights, when the patrols thin. Not more. The passage is safe, but the approach is exposed. If they post sentries on this ridge, we lose the vantage."

"Then we use it while we have it." I memorized the layout below, the house, the roads, the stable behind the mill where I could count horses and estimate the size of his retinue, the sentry who walked the perimeter with a lantern every quarter-hour. Carlin had six men visible. Perhaps more inside.

We stayed for an hour. I watched Carlin drink his wine, consult a ledger at his desk, dismiss his mistress to the adjoining room with a gesture I recognized, proprietary and bored. In my first life, I had never seen him work. He had kept that world sealed away from me, the wife displayed in daylight and locked away at night. Now I saw the machinery. Now I counted the gears.

Victor touched my arm when the eastern sky began to lighten.

We descended in silence and slipped back through the passage beneath the ridge. The stream ran colder on the return, as if the earth itself had taken note of what we were doing. When we emerged into the ravine and climbed back to the forest floor, the first birds were stirring.

At the edge of camp, Mariae met us with folded arms and a look that demanded explanation.

"Reconnaissance," I said.

She looked at Victor. He gave a fractional nod.

"Breakfast is on the fire," Mariae said, and turned away.

Laoise returned two hours after dawn. I was sitting in the main hall, sketching the layout of Cuitridge on my flat stone from memory, marking Carlin's house, the patrol route, the stable, the crossroads, when she stepped through the entrance with damp hems and an expression of quiet satisfaction.

"The cloth is placed," she said. "Beneath the third stone on the washing ledge. The canal was still. No one saw."

"And the house?"

"Dark when I passed. Your father's horse was in the paddock. The kitchen chimney was cold." She paused. "There were two men I did not recognize sitting at the gate. They wore Ellotris colors."

Carlin had posted guards at my family's home.

I closed my eyes. The charcoal trembled in my fingers.

"She'll find it," Laoise said. "Your sister goes to the willow every morning. You told me so yourself."

"And if they watch her there?"

"They watch the gate and the road. The canal is behind the garden wall, below the slope. It is beneath their notice." Her voice carried the certainty of someone who understood intimately how men overlook water. "She will find it, Lila."

I opened my eyes and looked down at the map on the stone. Carlin's house. The passage beneath the ridge. The canal behind my family's garden. The web was thin and fragile, but it was mine.

Eighteen days.

I set the charcoal down and began to plan.