Chapter 80

Chapter 80: Chapter 80

He didn’t turn his head toward the door, though his eyes tracked the brown-coated clerk’s back until the heavy green baize door swung shut.

"What is it?" I asked quietly under the noise of the fourth-years at the next table clinking their ale mugs together.

"That clerk in the brown coat," Kaelen murmured, picking up his napkin and wiping his mouth as if he were just finishing his meal. "He wasn’t wearing Sospurro riding boots."

I glanced toward the side door. "Maybe he bought warm boots in the city."

"He was wearing double-soled grey canvas gaiters buckled on the inside of the calf," Kaelen said, his voice dropping low enough that only I could hear him over the clatter of silver plates. "And when he reached across the valet to hand over that slip, his right thumb and index finger were stained yellow-green under the nails."

My stomach tightened slightly around the warm roast beef.

In the border camps, you didn’t see yellow-green stains on a clerk’s fingers from normal oak-gall ink. You got yellow-green nails from handling picric-acid primer caps—the waterproof chemical fuses the Viganator Republic used to detonate their heavy siege mortars in wet weather, and the exact same alchemical compound Kaelen and I had smelled in the cellar under the Spire of Antiquity the night of the festival.

"Stay here with Nia," I told Luckas quietly, pushing my chair back half an inch as Headmaster Corvus stood up at the center of the dais and tapped a silver knife against his crystal goblet to begin the forty-minute Solstice speeches. "My collar’s choking me. I need five minutes of cold air before Corvus gets to our names."

"Don’t take more than ten," Luckas whispered back without looking away from the dais. "If I have to walk up those steps and bow to the War Minister by myself with this bruise on my face, I’m blaming you for going to the latrine."

Kaelen slipped out of his chair ten seconds after I did, moving through the shadow behind the legion banners along the west wall while every eye in the hall was turned up toward Headmaster Corvus’s podium.

We didn’t go out the main glass doors where the honour guards were standing. We ducked through the narrow stone pantry corridor behind the soup kitchens, where the scullery boys were too busy scrubbing grease off copper roasting pans in steaming wooden tubs to pay attention to two cadets in dark cloaks.

Kaelen pushed open the heavy oak back door leading out into the service yard behind the stables.

Outside, the night air was bitter cold—well below freezing now that the sky had cleared—and the fresh snow from Friday evening lay four inches deep across the cobblestones between the hay barns and the carriage sheds. A dozen heavy four-horse baggage sleighs belonging to the Sospurro delegation and the War Ministry stood parked in two neat rows under the timber awning, the horses resting in the warm stalls inside while a single sleepy stable watchman sat inside the glass guard-hut by the south gate fifty yards away, roasting chestnuts on top of his coal stove.

Kaelen crouched down beside the stone rainwater barrel at the corner of the kitchen wall and pointed at the snow along the back of the carriage shed.

One set of fresh footprints—flat-heeled, wide-soled boots with a small square heel—led straight from the kitchen door behind us into the dark ten-foot alley between the Sospurro baggage sleighs and the stone stable wall.

I loosened the two brass hooks at the throat of my dress collar so I could breathe properly, rested my left hand on the sharkskin grip of Bram’s dwarven dagger under my cloak, and followed Kaelen along the shadowed wall of the barn.

We didn’t use the rune light, and we didn’t step on the loose gravel under the eaves. We stopped at the corner of the third baggage sleigh—a heavy, canvas-topped wagon painted with the blue-and-silver crest of the Kingdom of Sospurro—and peered through the gap between the wooden wheel spokes.

Ten feet down the narrow alley, standing out of the wind behind a stack of spare oak sleigh runners, was the stooped Sospurro quartermaster clerk in the brown coat.

He wasn’t alone.

Standing across from him, wearing the sheepskin vest and wool cap of a civilian river-barge teamster from the lower city docks, was a stocky man in his forties with a thick grey beard. The clerk was holding a small brass bull’s-eye lantern with the shutter slid almost all the way closed, letting out just a sliver of yellow light no wider than a pencil onto a sheet of thin oiled tracing paper held against the barn wall.

"The first-year unit took the independent warrant," the brown-coated clerk was saying in a low, flat voice.

The servile, nasal Sospurro accent he had used inside the kitchen door was completely gone. His consonants were hard, clipped at the back of the tongue—the unmistakable highland dialect of the Viganator Republic’s iron provinces.

"Lord Lorenzo isn’t happy about it," the clerk continued, tapping a pencil point against the tracing paper. "He wanted Vance’s boy kept back at Castle Sospurro with his cousin’s silver guard so they could use him as a hostage if the Empire tries to seize the southern mines in May. Instead, the four of them are going straight to Erula’s scouting command at Whispering Pass."

The bearded teamster spat into the snow by his boot. "Four first-years don’t matter to the foundry schedule, Marta. What about the heavy powder trains for the river forts? DidLorenzo’s people sign the diversion order?"

"Signed it an hour ago," the clerk said, folding the thin oiled paper into a tight two-inch square and sliding it into a hollowed-out brass harness buckle lying in the teamster’s palm. "Twenty wagons of Imperial rifle cartridges and four six-pounder mountain guns leave the Crown Jewel arsenal on the twelfth of January for Fort Oakhaven. Lorenzo’s quartermasters are routing the train down the southern valley highway through Red Ford instead of the ridge road—and Varga’s uncle thinks the shipment isn’t coming until February, so there won’t be a single Sospurro cavalry patrol waiting to escort them at the river crossing."

Behind the sleigh wheel, my fingers tightened slowly around the hilt of my dagger.

The southern valley highway through Red Ford.

The exact limestone shelf road Professor Orlov had shown us on the canvas map two weeks ago—where three days of winter sleet turned the bottomland into four feet of axle-deep mud, with dry hills on both sides where Viganator raiders could sit back and shoot the ox-teams to pieces without losing a man.

Lord Lorenzo wasn’t just arguing with Captain Varga over who got the prettiest uniforms or the best silver mines. Half the noble faction inside Sospurro’s own royal court was actively selling out their own northern river forts to the Viganator Republic—letting Viganator wipe out Duke Ramiro’s border garrison in the spring so Lorenzo’s southern earls could sign a separate peace treaty and keep their silver mines when the kingdom collapsed.

"What about the cellar crew from the festival?" the teamster asked quietly, slipping the brass buckle onto his belt strap. "Command in Sfirt wants to know who tipped off Corvus before the acid timer hit bottom."

"Nobody tipped off Corvus until the timer was already dead," the clerk replied, snapping the shutter on his brass lantern completely dark. "Lorenzo asked around the War Ministry clerks today. It was the same four first-years who just won the tournament—the 7th Legion girl and her squad. They came up through the water pipes."

The bearded teamster went very still in the dark alley. "The same four going to Whispering Pass in March?"

"The very same," the clerk said dryly. "Though if they spend the winter break poking around Lorenzo’s quarters here on the island, they won’t live to see March. Get back down to the coal barges before the ten-o’clock gate lock. I’ll send the next manifest out on Tuesday with the laundry carts."

The teamster turned toward the back fence of the stable yard, while the brown-coated clerk stepped back out toward the kitchen path.

I started to shift my weight onto my front foot—three steps and I could have the clerk pinned face-down in the snow with Bram’s dagger at his kidney before he could shout.

Kaelen’s gloved hand closed hard around my right elbow in the dark, holding me back behind the sleigh wheel.

He didn’t speak—even a whisper would have carried ten feet across the frozen snow. He just pointed two fingers up toward the high, brightly lit arched windows on the second floor of the stable master’s house directly above the alley.

Standing behind the frosted glass of the upper window, looking down into the yard with a glass of brandy in his hand and two gold-corded Sospurro bodyguards standing behind his shoulders, was Lord Lorenzo himself.

Kaelen was right.

If we jumped the clerk down here in the snow, Lorenzo would claim the man was a diplomatic courier carrying royal Sospurro correspondence, his two guards would raise the alarm before we could search the teamster, and by the time the Imperial Guard sorted out the diplomatic immunity paperwork with King Alfonzo’s embassy, the teamster—and the hollowed-out brass buckle—would be at the bottom of the lake.

We waited without breathing behind the heavy wooden wheel until the brown-coated clerk walked past us into the warm steam of the kitchen corridor, and the bearded teamster slipped through the unlocked coal-chute door in the back fence toward the ferry docks.

Only when the latch clicked shut on the fence did Kaelen let go of my arm.

"Did you see the name painted on the back of that teamster’s coal sled by the fence?" Kaelen whispered, his breath barely misting in the shadow of the sleigh.

"Couldn’t see it past the horse trough," I murmured back.

"I did," Kaelen said. "Barrow & Sons, Wharf Four, Lower Canal. And the clerk’s name on the Sospurro quartermaster roster is Marta Vane-Sule. He sleeps in the servants’ attic above the West Guest House."

Inside the Grand Pavilion fifty yards away, a sudden thunderous burst of applause echoed muffled through the thick stone walls as Headmaster Corvus finished his opening speech and began calling out the quarterfinalists.

I reached up, hooked the two stiff brass eyes of my dress collar back together under my chin despite how much they pinched, and brushed a flake of white frost off the front of my charcoal tunic.

"Come on," I said, turning back toward the kitchen door. "Let’s go pick up our medal from the War Minister and smile for Lord Lorenzo. Tomorrow morning, while everyone else is sleeping off the burgundy, you and I are taking a walk down to Wharf Four."