First Step Into Nothing

The horse was in the east stable, which the vanguard had not yet reached.

Kael had known it would be there because the novel had mentioned, in a detail that served no narrative purpose whatsoever, that the Dreadmourne estate's east stable housed three horses kept for messenger use rather than the main cavalry stock. Messenger horses were stabled separately, fed on a different schedule, and maintained by the groundskeeper rather than the head groom, which meant they had been cared for as recently as yesterday morning and would be in reasonable condition regardless of what had happened to everything else.

Two of the three were gone. The staff had taken them when they fled, which was sensible. The third remained, a grey mare of no particular distinction, eating from a half-empty hay rack with the composure of an animal that had decided the sounds coming from the north wing were not its problem.

Kael saddled her with the efficiency of someone who had learned the process from written descriptions rather than practice, which meant he was technically correct and slower than he should have been. Mira said nothing about this. She held the lantern and passed him things when he reached for them and did not comment on the two attempts it took to get the girth strap properly seated.

There was a strongbox in the stable's tack room, small, bolted to the floor beneath a workbench. Not the one the staff had taken. A secondary one, the kind that existed in households where the primary administrator did not entirely trust the people who managed the primary strongbox. The novel had not mentioned it. Kael had found it because he had spent ten minutes in the tack room looking for exactly this kind of thing, on the logic that a man who kept a false bottom behind a false bottom in his study desk was a man who distributed his resources.

The lock required a key he didn't have. He found a short iron bar used for leverage in farriery work and used that instead. It took four attempts and was not quiet.

Inside: forty silver coins in a cloth bag, a folded document he didn't take time to read, and a small knife in a plain leather sheath that had the quality of something kept sharp through habit rather than use.

He took the coins and the knife. He left the document. A document he hadn't read could not implicate him in whatever it described, and the vanguard finding it here rather than on his person was preferable to any alternative.

Forty silver coins. More than three. Less than enough, which was the condition he suspected he would be operating under for the foreseeable future.

He led the mare out of the east stable and around the south edge of the estate to the main gate, which the vanguard had forced open and left standing. Lantern light moved in the upper windows of the north wing. Voices, periodically. The organized sounds of people working through a building room by room.

The gate was old timber reinforced with iron banding. It stood open at an angle, one hinge stressed from the forcing, and it was exactly the kind of structure that burned well if you gave it reason to.

Kael looked at it for a moment.

The novel had not included this. He had not planned it. He stood at the gate of his father's estate in the dark, with a horse he had taken and coins he had found and a name in his jacket that might lead somewhere or might lead nowhere, and he thought about what burning the gate would accomplish.

It would accomplish nothing tactical. The vanguard was already inside. The estate was already taken. A burning gate would inconvenience no one and destroy nothing of value and serve no purpose that he could calculate.

He lit it anyway.

He used the lantern, touching the flame to the dry timber at the base where the iron banding left gaps, and he watched the fire take hold with the slow certainty of things that had been dry for a long time, and he did not examine too carefully what he was doing or why he was doing it. Sometimes a burning gate was just a burning gate. Sometimes it was a man who had woken up in a dead person's body telling the situation that he had noted its terms and was leaving on his own schedule.

He mounted the mare. Mira climbed up behind him with the practicality of someone who had ridden double before and understood that efficiency mattered more than dignity in most circumstances.

They went south on the main road.

The road from the Dreadmourne estate to the southern territories ran through open land for the first two kilometers before it entered a section of managed woodland that the estate had historically used for timber. Kael knew this from the maps. He had not known, because the novel had not told him, that the vanguard used managed woodland as a staging area for the elements of the force that arrived ahead of the main group.

He knew it now because they were three hundred meters into the woodland when Mira's hand tightened on his arm.

He had already seen them.

The road's left side, where the tree line was thicker. Arranged with the specificity of deliberate placement rather than the randomness of battle. Six bodies in Dreadmourne livery, laid out in a row at the road's edge with their hands at their sides and their faces turned upward. Not fallen. Arranged. The vanguard's standard documentation practice for a purged household: collect, arrange, count, record. The count would go into a report. The report would go to the Imperial administrator. The administrator would file it and the file would be closed and these six people would become a number in a column.

Kael kept the mare at a steady walk. Looking away would not help them. Stopping would not help them. He looked at each face as he passed, methodically, because they deserved to be seen by someone who was not counting them.

The fifth one was breathing.

He almost missed it. The chest movement was minimal, the kind of breathing that the body did when it was performing the mechanical functions of survival without any particular commitment to the project. But it was there. A rise, a fall, too slow and too shallow and entirely real.

Kael stopped the horse.

Mira had seen it too. Her hand on his arm had not loosened.

He sat very still on the mare and looked at the man on the ground and did the calculation he always did, the one that began with resources and ended with probability, the cold arithmetic of someone who had three silver coins this morning and forty now and a name to find in a northern territory that was currently occupied by the army that had arranged these bodies by the road.

One breathing man. Unknown injuries. Unknown prognosis. Unknown loyalty to anyone who might help him, or be helped by him, or complicate the already complicated situation of two people on one horse with forty coins and no plan beyond a name.

The vanguard was behind them, working through the estate. The main road ahead was, for now, clear.

The mare shifted her weight. Mira said nothing.

Kael looked at the breathing man and understood, with the particular clarity that came from being in a situation with no good options, that the calculation he was doing was not actually the calculation that mattered. The calculation that mattered was simpler and less comfortable.

He dismounted.