Chapter 99. The Only Road That Mattered Was the One Everyone Warned Me About

Chapter 99: 99. The Only Road That Mattered Was the One Everyone Warned Me About

I raised the glass to my eye and swept it along the line. Crates were stacked high in the wagons, six and eight to a load, with straw packed around them and ropes holding them down.

I counted the lids. And I counted the seals.

The red seal on each, with its tiny toothed rim, was visible even at this distance.

’Twelve wagons,’ I thought. ’Maybe a hundred crates.’

’That’s a lot of crystals... A lot more than a single shipment.’

The panel opened in my vision with a soft chime.

[WARNING: RESONANCE SIGNATURE DETECTED.]

[Source: Large.]

[Distance: Approaching.]

’Approaching?’ I thought. ’They’re not coming at us... it’s more like... They’re leaving.’

But the panel hadn’t said they were.

It said the signature was approaching. I turned the glass to the wagons, then to the knights, then to the road ahead of the convoy.

A faint, trembling blue shimmer hung over the whole column, so faint that I’d have missed it if I hadn’t been looking for it.

It hung over the crates like heat over a summer road.

’It’s the crystals,’ I thought. ’They’re humming... All of them... Together.’

I felt a coldness crawl along my spine. Individually, a crystal was a tool.

But a hundred of them, in sync, wasn’t an energy source. It was a resonance, and a resonance meant a purpose.

They weren’t being hauled off to be sold or stored. They were being brought to do something, and whatever it was, it was big enough to make the air shimmer from a mile away.

"That road," said a weak, hoarse voice behind us.

I turned.

Garrick had been carried to the top of the ridge on a stretcher by Pike and Wynn, and they’d propped him up against a rock with a blanket around his shoulders.

His face was gaunt and gray in the dusk. He had the drawing clutched against his chest, and his eyes were fixed on the road, on the long line of wagons winding away toward the northeast hills.

"That road ends at my village," he said.

Nobody answered.

The wind rose, and the thorn bushes rattled.

Far away, the lead wagon rounded a bend and began to climb a long, low ridge, and the dust of its passage hung like a pale plume against the sunset.

Eveline had opened her notebook. She was counting the wagons under her breath, her pencil moving in short, quick strokes, and her whisper carried across the rock.

"Twelve... Twelve wagons... Plus a lead rider... Plus thirty-one guards... Thirty-two... No, thirty-one." She frowned. "I’ll check again."

Laura had unfolded her map and was marking the convoy’s heading with a stub of charcoal, drawing a dark arrow across the hills.

Alicia stood with her arms folded, staring at the tail of the column. When she felt my gaze, she turned her head and gave me a long, level look.

It wasn’t a question.

It was a Well?

Sharon’s hand tightened on her sword.

I stared at the road for a long time, and I felt the weight of it settle over me. We couldn’t go back to Elarion.

We couldn’t wait for a Council that had stamped its seal on the crates. We couldn’t trust a Hallis who was five days away and fighting a war on his own wall.

The orders we’d been given led to the capital and a ceremonial parade, and the people who’d written them wanted us there.

But the road in front of us, the one that wound up into the northeast hills behind a column of glowing crystals, led somewhere else entirely.

It was a trap, probably... It was almost certainly a trap.

But it was the only road that mattered.

’So much for the escort mission,’ I thought.

"Pack up," I said.

Everyone turned.

"We’re following that convoy."

A heartbeat passed.

Then Sharon grinned, a slow, dangerous, delighted grin, and Alicia let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

Laura nodded once, brisk and unsurprised. Eveline snapped her notebook shut with a bright clap.

I looked at the dust hanging in the red sky, and I added, quietly, in the privacy of my own head:

’We were never going to the capital.’

...

We left the chapel an hour after dark, and nobody said a word about how stupid it was.

I think that was the part that worried me most.

Back in Elarion, any plan with the words "follow the convoy" and "no backup" in it would have been stabbed down by at least three people, and I’d have been one of them.

Out here, with the dust of twelve wagons still hanging in my head like a bad smell, everyone just started packing.

Alicia rolled bedrolls with the speed of someone who had stopped asking questions.

Laura counted arrows and refused to explain why she needed forty.

Sharon sharpened her sword with one hand, because her right shoulder still wouldn’t lift past her ribs, and she swore at the whetstone every time it slipped.

The split took about five minutes, because Alicia had already worked it out on the back of her map.

"Ferris, Oswin, and Pike stay," she said. "There’s a dry gully behind the chapel with a rock overhang, and the wagon fits inside it if we take the wheels off the axle bed."

"You keep the spare horses, you keep the road behind us open, and if nobody comes back in ten days, you ride to Elarion and give Hallis everything in Laura’s second notebook."

"Ten days?" Ferris said from his bedroll.

He had one leg propped on a saddlebag and the expression of a man being left out of a party. "I’ll be bored out of my mind."

"You’ve got a bad leg and a worse sense of humor," said Alicia. "You’ll manage."

"That’s a harsh thing to say to a wounded man."

"It’s a kind thing to say to a wounded man who’s going to live."

Oswin looked like he’d been told he had to stay behind at his own birthday. He opened his mouth to argue, caught Sharon’s eye, and closed it again with great dignity.

Pike simply nodded and bit into an apple. I swear that man would have nodded the same way if she’d told him the world was ending.

Holt, Wynn, and Dessa would come with us.

They were the best the Order had given us, as far as I could tell, and none of them had asked to be left behind.

Holt checked the straps on his shield, then checked them again.

Wynn tied her shaved head up in a gray cloth and said nothing, which was how she said most things.

Dessa had a short sword on each hip and was grinning like a girl on her way to a fair.

Then there was Garrick.

He stood at the edge of the firelight on a crutch that Pike had whittled for him, wrapped in a blanket that had been somebody’s cloak, with the iron cuffs still locked around his wrists.

He’d gotten some color back, but his skin still had a waxy look, and the place on his chest where the bolt had gone in was a lumpy shape under his shirt.

I could see him thinking about the chain. I could see him working out, very quietly, how much of a burden a man in shackles would be on a night march through broken country.

Sharon sheathed her sword and walked over, and for a moment I thought she was going to say something cruel.

"Hold out your hands," she said.