Chapter 344: What We Could Take Away

The morning after the wedding, nobody knocked until breakfast had gone cold.

I considered that a remarkable achievement.

Adriana had fallen asleep again after eating half a piece of toast. Evelyn sat beside the window with her feet tucked beneath her, turning her new ring slowly around her finger.

“Does it feel strange?” I asked.

“A little.”

She looked at the matching band on my hand.

“Does yours?”

“I keep noticing it.”

“So do I.”

From the bed, Adriana opened one eye.

“If you are discussing breakfast, I want another biscuit.”

Evelyn rose to fetch it.

“We were discussing our rings.”

“Those too.”

I laughed quietly.

For a little while, we had nowhere else to be.

Mary arrived late in the morning with three letters and a firm expression.

“These can wait until tomorrow,” she said, setting two on the table.

I looked at the third.

“And that one?”

“Cannot.”

Adriana sat straighter.

Mary noticed.

“No attack on the city. No missing escort.”

Some of the tension left the room.

“The people who made the restraints may have given us a way to find them.”

Orven had recognized a mark on the captured baton.

Not a divine symbol.

A maker’s stamp.

He had spent years repairing pump fittings before the war. The same workshop that made those fittings had produced the baton’s ordinary metal housing.

“A place called Cinder Vale,” Eliza told us in the council room. “An old foundry yard. Its owner supplied several border towns before Surtr’s troops took the district.”

She placed a sketch beside the map.

“One of the captured guards named it separately. He escorted a delivery from there nine days ago.”

“Bands?” Thor asked.

“Unfinished metalwork, according to him. He says the inscriptions are added elsewhere.”

Caldris stood beside the table with his hands resting on the back of a chair.

“That would fit what we have seen. Most of the object is an ordinary fastening. The cruelty is in what someone adds to it.”

King Edric looked at the sketch.

“If we destroy the foundry, can they make them somewhere else?”

“Yes,” Ordel said.

He moved closer.

“But not without losing equipment, stock, and time. If we can recover the workers, they lose skill as well.”

Thor looked at Eliza.

“How much of this has been checked?”

“Enough to send scouts. Not enough to send a strike force through the gates.”

Thor nodded.

“Then we start with scouts.”

The new agreements were waiting on the other side of the table.

The dwarven council’s letter named two officers authorized to arrange escorts and share reports with us. It also authorized a small company of volunteers to serve alongside the strike teams while the wider agreement was debated at home.

The elven representatives had offered scouts and healers under similar terms.

Tessa’s councils had approved warning signals along their stretch of river and the use of their landings for relief boats.

Harun’s people would provide guides for the roads they knew.

There were still boundaries to settle and questions to answer.

For the first time, though, the map held units whose leaders could speak for themselves in the room.

The dwarven officer was named Varda. She had accompanied the injured children down from the mountains and had spent most of the wedding day sleeping.

She studied the road to Cinder Vale.

“Our people traded with that yard.”

Eliza turned toward her.

“Do you know the approach?”

“I know who does.”

The elven healer, who had introduced herself as Iriel, leaned forward.

“And I can ask whether anyone in our delegation knows the settlements beyond it. There may be more people sheltering nearby than your map shows.”

Mary took a fresh sheet of paper.

The planning began to move faster.

I expected Thor to ask whether I would go.

She did not.

When the meeting ended, she handed me the proposed division of forces.

She would lead the operation if the scouts confirmed a workable target. Ordel would assess the machinery. Istren would take the forward positions. Merova would oversee the workers’ withdrawal, with King Edric’s soldiers and a group under Rauth securing the yard.

Bruni would join them if the roads could carry him without warning every enemy scout in the district.

Baldr would remain available for relief operations.

Lexander would hold Concordia.

My name was beside Greykeep.

I read the page again.

Thor waited.

“You have enough?” I asked.

“If we do not, we change the plan.”

I looked toward the map.

Then back at her.

“All right.”

Her eyebrows rose slightly.

“That was easier than expected.”

“I listened to my wedding vows.”

“Promising.”

She took the page back for the final notes.

Orven had asked to speak to us before the scouts left.

I found him in a small room beside the infirmary, seated across from a dwarven craftsman who had escaped the foundry district weeks earlier.

They had drawn the yard from memory.

Where their recollections differed, they had written questions rather than forcing the sketches to agree.

One room had been marked three times.

“The tempering shed?” I asked.

Orven shook his head.

“Workers’ dining room. Before the occupation.”

The other dwarf tapped the page.

“They locked people there at night when I left.”

I looked at the little square surrounded by furnaces and storage sheds.

“We will tell Thor.”

Orven’s hands rested on his knees. The restraint still circled one wrist, its protective wrapping clean beneath the new boundary marks.

“I cannot tell you where everyone will be,” he said.

“Nobody is asking you to.”

He looked doubtful.

I pulled out a chair.

“You have told us what you remember. We will check it. The decisions belong to the people planning the operation.”

He watched me for a moment.

Then nodded and turned the drawing so I could see the back entrance.

By the time I returned to our rooms, Adriana and Evelyn had acquired visitors.

All four children sat on the carpet with Julian in the middle.

He had arranged wooden figures around a small arch made of blocks.

Carol was moving two figures toward a third.

“Wedding,” she explained when I sat down.

“I see.”

Garrick held another figure above the arch.

“Bruni.”

“That seems accurate.”

Seraphina knocked the arch down while trying to add a flower.

Everyone stared at it.

Julian inhaled slowly.

Before he could begin rebuilding, Ignatius laid one block flat and set the figures on it.

“Outside.”

Adriana laughed.

“A practical solution.”

Evelyn leaned against my shoulder.

“How was the meeting?”

“Useful.”

I watched Julian accept Ignatius’s arrangement and move the remaining blocks aside.

“People are starting to work together.”

That evening, Helena, Lisbeth, and Mirelle claimed the smaller dining room.

Queen Celestine and Queen Ysabet joined them, along with several princesses who had spent the previous weeks discovering that displacement involved long stretches of waiting between moments of terror.

I assumed they were discussing relief arrangements.

I was wrong.

They were arguing about music.

“The last gathering became another meeting,” Helena told me when I paused at the door. “This one will include singing.”

Lisbeth looked up from the instrument someone had found for her.

“Whether everyone appreciates it or not.”

Mirelle smiled into her cup.

Adriana slipped past me and went to sit beside her mother.

Evelyn followed.

I stayed by the door until Helena pointed to an empty chair.

“You may come in without bringing work.”

I sat down.

I did not recognize the first song.

Adriana did.

After a moment, she began singing softly with Mirelle.

Across the room, Julian looked up from the game Garrick Valewood was teaching him.

He listened until the final verse.

Then he asked if they would sing it again.

The scouts returned on May sixteenth.

The foundry was operating.

Two wagons had left that morning carrying metal fittings toward an eastern road. A third was being loaded when the scouts withdrew.

There were guards at both gates and a watch platform overlooking the southern approach.

Workers moved between the buildings in supervised groups.

The dining room still held people after dark.

Thor laid the report on the table.

“We can reach the lower wall through the old drainage channel. Too narrow for Bruni.”

Bruni, who had been listening through the open courtyard doors, frowned.

“Bruni make bigger.”

“After we are inside,” Thor said.

He considered that.

Then nodded.

Ordel marked the furnaces and the drive shaft that powered the workshop hammers.

“We do not need to burn the buildings. Break the drive here and here. Remove the small dies. Take the records if they can be reached.”

Varda indicated the drainage channel.

“Two of my people know confined approaches. They volunteered.”

Merova looked at her.

“I want them at the briefing.”

“They are outside.”

Thor glanced at the guard captain by the door.

“Bring them in.”

They left before dawn the next morning.

No bells announced the departure.

The gate opened, soldiers passed through to Westmere, and the receiving hall returned to its ordinary work.

Sareth would watch the surface roads from a distance. Aurethar remained with Dorevan near Greykeep, where the first weighted-sack trials had produced a harness that neither dragon nor engineer entirely disliked.

I went back upstairs.

Evelyn was awake.

She lifted the blanket without asking why I had returned so early.

I lay beside her until the sky began to lighten.

Waiting did not become easier simply because I had agreed to it.

I worked with Mary through the morning.

At midday, I visited the infirmary with Adriana.

Caldris and Thesra had interrupted the commands in five of the nine recovered restraints. Removing the bands themselves remained unfinished work.

One patient had slept through the night for the first time.

Another had asked for the door to remain open.

We made no speeches.

Adriana sat with a woman who wanted help writing to her family. I carried a tray to Orven, who immediately asked whether there was news.

“Not yet.”

He nodded.

We both looked toward the window.

The first message arrived in the afternoon.

The yard was ours.

The withdrawal had begun.

Thor sent nothing about the machinery until the last workers were clear.

Then the second message came.

Sixty-two workers recovered.

The workshop hammers disabled. The finished stock and small manufacturing dies secured. Records taken from the counting room.

Eight of our people wounded.

One dead.

I read that line twice.

Mary held out her hand for the report.

I gave it to her.

They returned after dark.

King Edric walked beside a covered stretcher.

The man beneath the cloth was named Halen. He had come from Orenshal with the king and survived the retreat that brought them here.

He had been struck while helping a worker out through the dining room window.

Edric told me that much.

Then stopped.

I stood beside him while the stretcher passed.

After a while, he said, “His brother is here.”

“Would you like me to come with you?”

He nodded.

Thor waited to give the rest of her report until we returned.

The operation had gone close to the plan until a guard rang the alarm from inside the counting room.

The workers’ door had been barred from outside.

The dining room windows had been nailed shut.

Bruni had reached the yard in time to remove part of the wall.

After that, Merova’s people had brought the workers out while Thor and Rauth held the inner passage.

“The furnace crew shut down what they could before leaving,” Ordel said. “They knew which vessels would spill if we damaged the wrong supports.”

He set a small iron piece on the table.

A die for making the restraint clasps.

There were dozens more in the recovered crates.

“How long have we stopped them?” I asked.

“At this yard? Weeks at least. Longer if they cannot replace the workers.”

Thor sat down slowly.

“They will try somewhere else.”

Eliza placed the recovered ledger beside the die.

“They already have somewhere else.”

She opened it to a page marked with a strip of cloth.

Three delivery destinations.

One matched the direction the loaded wagons had taken.

Beside it was an official seal.

Caldris leaned forward.

I watched his face change.

“Othellos’s court?” I asked.

“A sanctioned workshop,” he said. “One authorized to inscribe binding instruments.”

He read the line beneath it.

“This is where they make the bands obey.”

We did not plan another raid that night.

The wounded needed care. The rescued workers needed somewhere to sleep. Halen’s brother needed people who would stay with him after the first terrible conversation was over.

Eliza secured the ledger.

Thor went to the infirmary.

I returned to our rooms long after supper.

Adriana met me at the door.

She had heard.

Evelyn came in a little later, tired and quiet, and sat beside us.

“The wounded are being watched,” she said. “Two will need more work in the morning.”

I nodded.

Adriana took my hand.

“Did you find what you needed?”

I looked at the rings on our fingers.

“We found where to look next.”

She rested her head against my shoulder.

On the table, the three cloth flowers lay beside Julian’s unfinished account of the wedding.

I reached for Evelyn’s hand too.

For the rest of that evening, we stayed together.