Chapter 28. The Man Who Doesn't Ask
We came back to Thornwatch shaken and quiet, and walked straight into worse news, because that is simply how my life works now.
The news came in on a half-dead trader's horse and spread through the Lodge by nightfall. Two things, both bad, arriving together the way bad things like to.
The first: the paper had come. After all these weeks — exactly as Vera had promised, slow and grinding and inevitable — the physical warrants had finally crawled out to the edge of the Wildmarch. They were nailed to boards in the Cinderfen outposts now, and creeping closer: a woodcut of a hooded figure, the words THE DEMON KING OF ASH — BY ORDER OF THE CROWN — ALIVE OR DEAD, and a sum of money large enough to make honest men reconsider honesty.
The second was worse than paper.
"There's a new one working the outposts," the trader said, low, to a rapt and frightened Lodge. "Not like the polite one that came through, the one who bought rounds and asked his questions. This one doesn't ask." He drank. "Name of Harrow. Big crew. Word is he came up on a hooded stranger at Cinderfen — didn't ask a name, didn't ask a thing. Just killed him, checked the face after, found it was nobody. Some trapper's boy." He shook his head. "Shrugged. Said the reward was worth a few wrong faces. Rode on."
The hall was very quiet. I sat in my corner in my hood — the hood that had been such a clever disguise a week ago and now felt exactly like the woodcut on the boards — and I did not move.
Later, in the cabin, we did the math out loud, because Vera believed in doing the math out loud.
"We can't hunt the outposts anymore," she said. "Renn we could dodge — he wanted proof. Harrow doesn't want proof. He wants a hooded stranger, and this whole region is about to be papered with a picture of exactly that. Every contract that takes us near people is now a coin-flip on getting killed for a reward, by a man who'll shrug at the wrong face."
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"So we don't go near people," said Bruno, with the simple clarity he brought to things the rest of us overcomplicated. "We go where the people aren't."
And there it was — the ugly, perfect synthesis, the kind Vera loved and hated in equal measure. Because where the people weren't was the deep wilds. The Warden's circuit. The one place in the kingdom a man like Harrow would never bother to look, because no bounty was worth the teeth out there — and the one place I had to be anyway, weeding reality's gutters, climbing rank a candle at a time.
"The ward-work is the cover," Vera said slowly, seeing it. "It's the cover, and the grind, and the whole reason we're here, all at once. We go deep. We stay deep. We work the circuit, we level, we keep you away from the boards and the bounty men — and we hold the line while we're at it." She almost smiled, that grim usable-angle smile. "For once, the thing we have to do and the thing that keeps us alive are the same thing."
"There's a catch," Yrsa said from the doorway, where she'd been listening. She had a way of appearing that I'd stopped questioning. "Going deep means the deep circuit. And the next ward that needs a full feed—" she looked at me, and I already knew, I'd known since Blackfen "—is the Sunk Hollow. You remember the Sunk Hollow. The bog-serpent. The ward that's been near out for years." Her charms clicked. "It's the weakest live circle I've got left. And if something in the deep has started pulling the weak ones—"
"—then it's already pulling that one," I finished. My stomach dropped the way it had learned to.
Yrsa nodded. "We go tomorrow. Before it does to the Sunk Hollow what it did to Blackfen Split." She turned to go, then paused. "And Adrian. You feed that one careful. You hear me? Careful. The Sunk Hollow's near dead — it'll want everything. And you can't give it everything. Not anymore." Her green eyes found mine in the lamplight. "Not now that you know what everything costs."