Chapter 365: Before the Wagons Moved

Redwater looked smaller on the first map.

That was the map copied from a merchant's account, with a square for the depot, a line for the river, and a cheerful little bridge that gave no indication of who might be shooting from it.

The scouts' map was less comforting.

There were two yards, four large storehouses, a barracks built against the eastern wall, and a landing stage below the riverbank. Wagons entered from the north. Barges left toward the south.

A watchtower stood between them.

Thor studied the new drawing.

“I preferred the first one.”

“The enemy probably does too,” Lexander said. “Anyone attacking that would have a wonderful morning until they arrived.”

Melody laid a third sheet beside the others.

“This is where the workers sleep.”

The room quieted.

She pointed to a cluster of low buildings outside the western wall.

“Some are prisoners. Some are hired. Some have families there and cannot afford to go anywhere else.”

I looked at the river, then the road.

We could burn a depot quickly.

Taking it away from Surtr without destroying the people living around it would require considerably more thought.

The scouts had watched Redwater for four days.

They counted guards by shift, marked where patrols overlapped, and followed two supply wagons far enough to confirm that Aven's records described a working route rather than an old one.

The depot was preparing a large movement.

Empty wagons had arrived from the east. Wheelwrights worked after dark. Three barges waited below the landing stage, their holds not yet filled.

“We have a few days,” Melody said. “Possibly less.”

“Destination?” I asked.

“Still uncertain.”

Eliza placed a captured transport order on the table.

“The quantities match provisions for a field force. Grain, preserved meat, spare harness, arrows, and material for bridge repairs.”

Surtr was preparing to move men somewhere.

Othellos's collectors were feeding them.

We had found a place where the two efforts met.

Thor tapped the northern gate.

“Then we interrupt the loading.”

Lexander would lead the force entering the depot.

Thor and Eshara would take the barracks side. Merova would secure the workers' quarter and establish the withdrawal route. I would control the river approach and support whichever position required it.

Bruni would come with the engineers.

That decision produced a silence of its own.

“He is difficult to conceal,” Eliza said.

Bruni, standing beyond the open courtyard doors, lowered his head to look into the room.

“Can walk at night.”

“Yes,” Thor said. “And you will arrive with the reserve once being concealed stops being useful.”

He considered that arrangement.

Then nodded.

“Good.”

Kerran would travel with the mounted reserve under Merova's orders. His task was to prevent enemy messengers escaping once the attack began, while keeping clear of the route intended for civilians.

He repeated the boundaries back without being asked.

Thor noticed.

So did I.

Vesra would remain with the repair train. Her hands were healing, and she had already made clear that if we brought her armor folded around its wearer, we should expect an unpleasant conversation.

We sent notice to Dunmere that the protective company would remain.

Aven had given us information. We would not repay her by drawing away the soldiers keeping her village safe.

The second court officer had reached the toll station, learned that our troops were present, and begun writing letters instead of advancing.

For the moment, that suited us.

Other patrols continued visiting the threatened villages. Baldr remained responsible for the coastal readiness around Orselle. The enclave kept its own watch with the allied detachment already in place.

Mary read the assignments against the available rosters.

Then she crossed out one company from our reserve.

“They have had too little rest.”

Thor looked at the names.

After a moment, she nodded.

We would go with fewer rested soldiers rather than pretend exhausted ones were another kind of strength.

It meant reducing what we could carry home.

It meant fewer hands if the withdrawal went badly.

Those were real costs.

We accepted them anyway.

At home, Adriana watched me pack a second shirt.

“You expect to be away longer this time.”

“Several days. We have to reach it before we can do anything useful.”

“And afterward?”

“That depends on what we find.”

She sat on the edge of the bed.

I put down the shirt.

“I know that isn't a satisfying answer.”

“It is better than one you invented to reassure me.”

Evelyn came in carrying the small bag of supplies she insisted I take even when healers accompanied us.

She placed it beside the shirt.

“Your ribs are healed enough,” she said. “That does not mean I recommend being thrown through another chest.”

“I will mention that to Fenrir if I see him.”

“Please avoid seeing him.”

Adriana laughed softly.

Then she took my hand and rested it against her stomach.

For a little while, none of us spoke about the map downstairs.

Julian found me after supper.

He carried the notebook from Westmere, but the page he showed me held no cottage measurements.

It was a list of questions.

How much grain a village needed before winter.

How many people could sleep in one house without making everyone ill.

Whether a king had to know how to repair a mill himself, or only know whom to ask.

I read them twice.

“Grandfather says the last one matters more than I think,” Julian explained.

“He is right.”

“Could you answer them?”

“Some. Mary and Edric Vale can answer others better.”

He nodded and added their names beside two questions.

I looked at him.

“Is this about Lyradon?”

“A little.”

He waited, then added, “And Westmere. And here.”

I drew a chair beside mine.

We discussed grain until Carol arrived to announce that the harbor in the sitting room had lost a bridge.

Julian began closing the notebook.

“You can finish your questions first,” I told him.

He glanced toward his little companions waiting in the doorway.

Then he smiled.

“The bridge is probably more urgent.”

He left the notebook with me and went to inspect the damage.

We departed before dawn two days later.

The gate took us to Westmere. After that came roads, woods, aching feet, and the patient work of moving soldiers without making every traveler feel that an invasion had arrived.

Our scouts stayed ahead.

The supply train followed far enough behind to keep the road from clogging at every narrow bend.

Bruni traveled by a separate route where bridges would not have to bear his weight.

He disliked being away from the rest of us, but the engineers promised he would have company and useful work.

That persuaded him more effectively than any explanation about secrecy.

The first night, we slept beneath wet trees.

The second, in abandoned grazing shelters whose roofs admitted moonlight in places no roof ought to.

On the third afternoon, we reached the ridge overlooking Redwater.

I saw the barges first.

They were lower in the water than the scouts' last report had described.

Loading had begun.

We watched until evening.

Men rolled barrels down the landing stage. Others carried sacks in pairs, walking with the awkward rhythm of people too tired to adjust their steps.

A boy led a mule between the storehouses.

Near the eastern barracks, a soldier practiced throwing stones at a post while another repaired a boot.

I found those ordinary details more unsettling than the walls.

The place existed between attacks. Men ate there, slept there, complained about damp blankets, and prepared the food that would let them burn somewhere else.

Eliza lay beside me beneath the scrub, studying the gates.

“We can still delay until tomorrow night.”

I looked at the barges.

“If they leave before then?”

“We lose part of the stores.”

“And the men those stores feed gain another week.”

“Yes.”

Thor joined us as quietly as someone carrying Mjölnir could.

“The teams are rested. Merova has the western route. Lexander is ready.”

Below us, a bell rang for the evening change of watch.

We waited for darkness.

The first signal was a shuttered lamp on the western ridge.

Merova had reached the workers' quarter.

The second came from the road beyond the north gate.

Kerran's reserve was in position.

I moved down toward the river with twelve soldiers, two scouts, and a healer who had already warned me that falling into deep water would complicate her work.

The current ran brown beneath the bank.

I did not freeze the channel.

A solid barrier would announce us too early and might trap a barge full of workers when the fighting started.

Instead, I gathered mist above the water and let the night grow difficult to see through.

At the landing stage, someone called for another lantern.

Farther inland, a gate chain rattled.

Then Thor's lightning struck the empty ground beside the barracks.

Redwater woke.

The barge crews reacted faster than the guards.

One crew cast off immediately. Another began cutting ropes rather than waiting for the dockhands to untie them.

A soldier ran along the landing stage shouting that nobody had permission to leave.

I stepped into the lantern light.

“You have permission to stop,” I told the crews. “Stay aboard. Keep your hands where we can see them.”

The soldier raised his crossbow.

Wind caught the weapon and tore it sideways before he fired.

Our men reached him while he was still trying to understand what had happened.

The drifting barge turned in the current.

I pressed wind against its broad side, slowly, guiding it toward the shallow bank rather than the main channel.

Its hull grounded with a long scrape.

Nobody cheered.

The crew stared at the mud beneath them and then at me.

“Stay there,” I repeated.

This time, they did.

Inside the depot, the fighting grew louder.

Lexander's force had entered through the north gate, where our scouts had watched the evening carts admitted. Thor was keeping the barracks troops from gathering into a single line.

For several minutes, the plan held.

Then a bell began ringing from the watchtower.

Not the alarm bell.

A smaller, harsher sound.

Workers on the landing stage stopped moving.

One man carrying a rope turned toward the third storehouse with the expression of someone waking into a nightmare.

He took a step.

Then another.

Others followed.

“Down,” I ordered our soldiers. “Let them pass until we know what they're doing.”

The man with the rope looked at me.

His mouth worked before any sound emerged.

“Fire.”

I looked toward the storehouse.

Its doors were closed.

Something orange moved beneath them.

The order was not to fight us.

It was to save the stores.

Bound workers were being sent into a burning building while the commander prepared to withdraw.

I ran.

The first men had already reached the doors when I crossed the yard.

One seized an iron handle and cried out, but did not release it.

I coated the handle in ice, forced the heat back, and pushed wind beneath the doors before allowing them to open farther.

Smoke rolled over us.

Grain sacks burned near the entrance. Beyond them stood barrels marked for lamp oil, with other goods stacked too high to see past.

This was not a fire I could answer by throwing one great gust through the room.

I might feed it or drive it into the workers.

I lowered the temperature around the entrance, slowly enough to keep the sudden change from bringing the damaged roof down on everyone beneath it.

Then I shouted for the bell to stop.

Thor heard me.

Lightning struck the tower stair.

The bell missed a beat, then rang again.

A clerk near the storehouse had fallen beside an overturned handcart. She clutched her ankle and stared at the workers trying to enter.

“Cut the order,” she gasped.

“How?”

“Brass tongue. Remove it.”

I shouted the words toward the tower.

One of our soldiers took them up, louder.

Eshara reached the stair behind Thor.

Inside the storehouse, something heavy cracked.

I caught the beam in ice before it fell, but the strain pulled through my shoulders hard enough to make my vision blur.

A worker beside me tried to step deeper into the smoke.

I caught his arm.

He fought me without wanting to.

His eyes were wet with terror.

Then the bell stopped.

The man collapsed against me.

For a moment, the whole yard seemed to hold its breath.

Then people began running in directions they had chosen.

Some ran away from the fire. Others turned back for those who had fallen.

Our soldiers dragged the nearest sacks clear while I kept the doorway cold and the smoke lifting away from the ground.

We could not save that storehouse intact.

I accepted that before it cost us lives trying.

“Clear it,” I ordered. “Everyone out.”

A young woman refused until someone brought out the old man who had gone in ahead of her.

Two soldiers carried him through the doorway.

She followed them, sobbing angrily at both of them for taking so long.

When the last person crossed the yard, I let the beam fall.

The roof folded inward.

Sparks rose into the darkness.

Rain began over the depot.

This time, I called enough of it to matter.

Kerran found the commander near the east road.

I learned that afterward.

The man was leaving with eight mounted guards and a packhorse carrying a locked chest.

Kerran could have caught the rear riders.

He had already begun to move when a cart overturned beside the workers' quarter, blocking the narrow route Merova had marked for civilians.

People jammed against it in the dark.

Behind them, smoke drifted down from the burning storehouse.

He looked from the fleeing riders to the cart.

Then he returned.

By the time he helped lift the trapped axle and clear the road, the commander was gone.

Kerran reported that as a failure.

Merova did not.

Neither did Thor when she heard.

She only asked whether anyone had remained trapped beneath the cart.

“No,” he said.

“Then include that in the report.”

Bruni arrived while the northern yard was still contested.

He did not roar.

He looked at the barricade the enemy had dragged across the gate, then at the soldiers trying to hold it.

“Move,” he advised them.

Several did.

The others discovered that a wagon made a poor wall when a giant could simply lift one end.

Lexander's reserve came through behind him.

The remaining defenders broke into smaller groups. Some surrendered. Others tried to reach the river and found our soldiers already there.

Two groups escaped through the eastern lanes after their commander.

We did not spend the lives of tired men chasing them into ground we had not searched.

By midnight, Redwater belonged to nobody who intended to load another barge for Surtr.

That was not yet the same as making it safe.

We searched the buildings before moving the workers back beneath any roof.

The watchtower held three prisoners, including a driver accused of concealing sacks from the depot's accounts. The basement under the barracks held eleven more.

We found records, tools, food, and several dangerous devices nobody touched until the engineers had examined them.

The bells remained silent.

Forty-seven workers had been compelled by the same command that sent them toward the fire. Others wore older restraints with different marks. Some carried no bindings at all and asked, quite reasonably, what would happen to their wages if the depot no longer operated.

Mary would have had a better answer ready.

I told them we would record what they were owed and what work they had done, and that food and shelter that night did not depend on agreeing to work for us.

The woman who asked looked dissatisfied.

Then she nodded.

It was an honest answer, even if it was not a complete one.

Dawn showed us what the dark had concealed.

One storehouse destroyed. Two scorched but standing. The fourth untouched.

The barracks roof was damaged. The landing stage needed repair. All three barges remained in the shallows or tied to the bank.

Seven of our soldiers had died.

Twenty-six were wounded, four seriously.

We had counted thirty-one enemy dead and taken sixty-eight armed prisoners. That number might change as scouts searched the nearby lanes and injured men decided whether to hide or accept treatment.

Lexander read the list beside me without speaking.

Beyond him, Bruni sat on the ground holding a cup too small for his hands.

A child from the workers' quarter slept against his boot.

Nobody tried to move her.

I watched the river carry bits of ash southward.

Then I went to help identify the people who had not survived the night.

We stayed three days.

Long enough to secure the road, gather the wounded, and begin moving the stores we could save.

Not long enough to pretend that taking a depot meant we could hold every surrounding mile indefinitely.

Thor established a temporary guard while the engineers disabled the military loading equipment and sorted what could be carried away. Grain taken from nearby villages would be returned where the records and local testimony allowed us to establish its source.

The rest would provision displaced people and the soldiers protecting them, with the quantities recorded rather than quietly disappearing into our own wagons.

Dunmere sent carts.

So did two neighboring settlements after the scouts explained what had happened.

Aven came with the second group.

She saw the blackened storehouse before she saw me.

For a moment, her face closed.

Then the clerk with the injured ankle told her about the bell.

Aven sat down beside her and listened to the whole account.

When she finally approached me, I expected questions about the battle.

Instead, she held out a page.

“These households are missing seed grain. If you return only what was assessed as food, they will be hungry again next year.”

I took the list.

“You came prepared.”

“I came with carts. It seemed foolish not to know what should go into them.”

Her gaze moved toward the workers waiting near the healers.

“Will they be taken to Greykeep?”

“Those who wish to go. Some have homes nearby. Some need treatment before they can choose anything.”

“And those who served willingly?”

“We are hearing their accounts too.”

She nodded slowly.

Then she looked back at the burned building.

“I used to believe disorder began when people refused an instruction.”

“What do you believe now?”

She was quiet long enough that I thought she would not answer.

“That a bell can ring very precisely while everything beneath it is wrong.”

The report we sent home began with the people.

Workers freed from the immediate command. Prisoners recovered from the tower and barracks. Wounded requiring space in the infirmaries. Families choosing to travel with the returning wagons.

Then the stores.

Then the enemy's interrupted movement.

We had found enough provisions prepared for dispatch to sustain a substantial force for weeks. Whatever Surtr intended to do with those supplies, he would now have to find them elsewhere or delay.

The commander had escaped with his chest.

Fenrir had not appeared.

Othellos remained beyond our reach.

None of that made the work smaller.

Before sealing my personal letter, I added a note for Julian.

Your question about seed grain mattered today. Keep asking people who know more than I do.

I thought he would enjoy showing that sentence to Garrick Valewood.

I knew Garrick would enjoy it even more.

On the final evening, Vesra brought me the damaged piece of armor from one of the soldiers who had survived the northern yard.

A spear had pierced the outer plate and stopped against the reinforced layer beneath it.

Her apprentice had made that repair before we left.

“He keeps asking whether he did it correctly,” she said.

I turned the metal in my hands.

“What did you tell him?”

“That the man is eating supper.”

For the first time since her arrival, she smiled without looking exhausted afterward.

Across the yard, Kerran helped a wagon driver settle two children among rolled blankets. Bruni was arguing gently with an engineer about whether he could carry an entire broken loading frame home.

Thor said no.

The engineer said perhaps.

Bruni looked between them with renewed hope.

Lexander sat beside me on the low wall.

“We should leave before they decide to bring the river too.”

I laughed.

Nothing in my ribs protested.

That seemed worth noticing.

Beyond the yard, the first village carts rolled west with grain beneath their covers.

For once, the road out of Redwater carried food toward the people who had grown it.