Chapter 66. If I Held the Key to Your Back Door, I’d Use It at the Worst Possible Moment

Chapter 66: 66. If I Held the Key to Your Back Door, I’d Use It at the Worst Possible Moment

At the far end of the corridor, half hidden in the shadows, a small figure in a white robe stood watching us.

Bonette was smiling, a tiny, soft, wistful smile, and her eyes were much too gentle. When I looked again, she was gone.

Huh... that was weird.

The next day came real fast when you couldn’t sleep, and yes... They called the council at dawn.

It met in the great hall of the keep, around a long plank table covered with maps. The Warmother sat at the head, rigid as a spear.

Velora stood at her right hand, with her arms folded and her face cool.

Elsbeth, Bryn, and Sylvara filled out the rest of the circle. And me?

Well... I sat at the very end, in the chair they’d given me, trying to look like I belonged as a human.

A young scout had come in an hour earlier with the news. The chain had been massing under the walls since midnight, hundreds of them, in neat gleaming ranks.

Elsbeth had taken a spyglass from the rack by the door and gone up to the parapet. When she came back down, she was very pale.

"I saw her," she said.

Nobody said anything.

"Astrid." Her voice was perfectly level. "She is in the front rank."

"She is wearing gold armor, and she is... smiling." She set the spyglass on the table with a careful, precise movement, and I saw that her hands were shaking. "She is... alive."

I didn’t say a word. I stood up, walked around the table, and stood beside her.

I didn’t touch her, but I just stood there, close enough that she could feel I was there, and after a moment I felt her lean, almost imperceptibly, toward me.

"The Chain’s numbers are overwhelming," said Velora, studying the map. "We have perhaps three hundred fighters in the keep."

"They have double that... and the Chosen fight without fear."

"I do not believe we can hold the walls for two days."

"We have to," the Warmother said.

"Agreed... Which is why I would like to hear a plan." Velora raised her head, and her golden eyes swept the table and stopped on me.

"Debtor..."

I blinked. And I noticed that she called me ’debtor’ again.

What a weird nickname.

She asked. "What would you do?"

There was a long, startled silence. The Warmother raised one eyebrow so high that her scar disappeared into her hairline.

Bryn’s mouth fell open. Even Sylvara looked surprised.

"Commander," the Warmother said coolly. "You are asking a human... to advise us in the defense of this keep?"

"I am asking a man who anticipated an ambush in a canyon, who identified the weakness in the crystals, and who has been right three times that I have been wrong." Velora did not look away from me. "I am asking him, yes."

Would you look at that? Isn’t that the best character development she had right now?

Actually defending me and even trusting me on this one.

"He has earned the right to answer," Elsbeth said quietly.

Even Elsbeth too. And so I’ll try not to disappoint them.

I stared at the map. My mouth was dry... It was ridiculous.

I’d never planned a battle in my life. The closest I’d ever come was organizing a bar crawl.

But I thought about something Elsbeth had said in the tunnel.

’The wardstone opens only to wolf blood.’

’Including those the Chain has taken.’

And I thought about what I would do if I were a slaver with a key to the back door.

"They’re going to use the tunnel," I said.

Everyone looked at me.

"Astrid’s blood opens the gate, right? She’s in the front rank, which means she’s the key, and they know it."

"They’ll attack the walls at dawn... to draw our attention, and the minute everyone’s looking up, they’ll send a force through the tunnels into the keep." I swallowed. "So we let them."

"Explain," said the Warmother.

"You see... We don’t seal the tunnel." I start gesturing with my hands. "We leave it looking lightly guarded... like we forgot it existed."

"When the main assault hits the gate... they send their strike team underground."

"The tunnel’s narrow... only one horse wide."

"Elsbeth can freeze the passage behind them and cut off their retreat."

"Velora’s riders hit them from the murder holes in the ceiling."

"Sylvara can pin the chain mage." I took a breath. "If I had a key to your back door, I might as well use it at the worst possible moment."

"And so... we make it the worst possible moment for them!"

There was a long silence.

The warmother stared at me. I could see her thinking, weighing me against thirty years of hatred and a lifetime of grief, and I... held very still.

"A human," she said at last, very slowly, "proposes how to defend my keep."

"I know how it sounds... and yes, it’s probably weird." I laughed.

"Do you." She almost smiled, a thin, hard flicker that vanished instantly. "Very well."

"We shall try it."

I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding... Under the table, I felt a small, warm hand slip into mine.

Millie had been sitting silent beside me, and now she squeezed my fingers, once... and hard.

The Warmother dispatched a hawk to Magnara with the location of the hidden cave and a message that the Moon Font could cleanse the afflicted, urging her to move as fast as she could.

Sylvara had given the rear guard a flask of moon-dew to slow the Oathglass’s withdrawal, but she warned that it would only hold for a day.

If Magnara didn’t arrive soon... we might lose them.

...

It was another clock... I was getting really tired of clocks.

The bells began to ring before the sun was up.

I was on the wall within a minute of the first stroke, running in my bare feet with my boots in my hand.

The stone was ice cold... and the sky was a pale, bruised gray.

My hands were shaking so badly that I fumbled the laces three times, and the number in the corner of my vision had just ticked over.

[Lust Energy: 45/100]

[Passive Decay: doubled.]

[Condition: Injured.]

I dropped my boots and looked out over the parapet.

The plain below the keep had turned to gold.

I don’t mean that it was sunrise. I mean the snow itself was covered in glittering rows of armored figures, ranks upon ranks upon ranks, standing in perfect formation under the pale sky.

There were chain-mages in long gray cloaks, their staffs raised like a forest of bare trees.

There were chosen in gleaming gold plate, standing at attention, every one of them smiling.

There were True Beasts, dozens of them, huge and shaggy and bound in thick chains, their shoulders hunched, their breath steaming in the cold.

It was silent... It was beautiful, in the worst possible way, like a ceremony.

Then, from the center of the formation, a single figure stepped out onto the empty snow.

He was a man in a long white robe trimmed with gold, tall and slender, with dark curling hair and a handsome, kindly face.

He looked to be about thirty. He walked alone, unhurried, with his hands clasped behind his back, like a host strolling out to greet his guests at a garden party.

He stopped fifty yards from the wall and tilted his head back, and he smiled up at us.

Then he raised one hand and waved. It was a friendly, easy wave, the kind a man gives a neighbor across a fence.

Beside me, someone made a sound.

It was a small, broken, strangled sound, like the breath going out of a person who’d just been stabbed.

I turned my head.

Bonette was standing at my elbow with both hands gripping the parapet. All the color had drained from her face.

Her lips had gone white. She stared at the man in the white robe with wide, horrified eyes, and her fingers were digging into the stone so hard that her knuckles cracked.

"Bonette...?" I whispered. "Bonette, is there something wrong?"

She didn’t seem to hear me. Her mouth moved.

She said it so quietly that I almost didn’t catch it.

"Master..." she breathed. "Master Cassian."

The cold wind went through my bones.

’Master.’

The word turned my stomach. After everything I’d seen, after the gold crystals, the smiling Oathglass, and the whole awful chain of it... I felt it sink into me like a stone into a well.

I looked down at the man in the snow, who was still waving, and I didn’t know what I was looking at...

I didn’t know yet what the title meant... or whose master he’d been.

I only knew that the woman beside me... the woman who had sewn my cloak and sung to a frightened child for two years, had just spoken that name like a prayer.

Or maybe...

...like a curse.