Chapter 38 — What Halric Knew

The fighting did not last much longer after that. Whatever else the orchard man was, he fought like something out of an old war ballad, cutting a path through the ambush's flank with a speed that seemed almost supernatural, and within minutes the remaining riders broke formation and fled into the dark treeline, leaving three of their own dead in the road and taking their wounded with them rather than risk capture.

My father's guard captain, bleeding from a shallow cut along his ribs, called the retreat off rather than pursue into unfamiliar woods at night, and slowly, the terrible chaos of the ambush settled into the grimmer work of counting losses. Two of my father's guard had fallen. The carriage driver had survived, though badly shaken. My father himself, once the adrenaline of the fight faded, sat heavily against the carriage wheel, his face gray with something beyond the pain of his wounded arm.

The orchard man had vanished into the treeline the moment the fighting ended, as silently as he had appeared, and I understood, watching Seraphine's eyes search the dark for some trace of him and find nothing, that this was not the first time she had watched him disappear this way.

"You'll explain this," I told her, once we were safely back inside the battered carriage, waiting for a rider to fetch reinforcement from Vale. "All of it. Tonight, if you have to."

"Not tonight," Seraphine said, exhausted, her earlier fierceness drained away into something more fragile. "Tonight I need you to trust that he saved your life, and that I would not have brought him into this if I didn't believe, completely, that he was on our side."

I did not have the strength to argue further, not with my whole body still trembling from the aftermath of violence, and so I let it stand, filing the orchard man's face away beside everything else I had gathered and did not yet fully understand.

Kael arrived within the hour, riding hard at the head of a dozen Draven guard, his face carved from something closer to fury than I had ever seen from him. He took in the scene — the dead riders, the wounded guard, my father's gray, shaken face — in a single sweeping glance, and then his eyes found mine, and whatever fury had carried him this far seemed to crack, just slightly, into something rawer.

"You're alive," he said, low, as though he needed to hear himself say it to fully believe it.

"I'm alive," I confirmed.

He did not embrace me — propriety held, even now, in front of my father's guard and the wreckage of the ambush — but his hand found mine and gripped it hard enough to hurt, and I let him hold it a moment longer than either of us could properly justify before he released it and turned to the grim business of securing the road.

It was Corvin, arriving with the second wave of guard an hour later, who brought the news that finally broke through my exhaustion into something sharper, colder.

"Word from the river crossing," Corvin said, his weathered face grim in the torchlight. "The archivist. Halric. He was found dead in his chambers not two hours after the gathering ended. His own hand, it looks like — or made to look that way." He glanced toward me, and I understood, before he finished, exactly what he was about to confirm. "His satchel of papers is missing. Every page of it."

The words landed somewhere beneath the exhaustion and the fading terror of the ambush, cold and final. I thought of the old scholar's stooped shoulders, the way he had clutched that satchel against his chest as though it might be torn from him at any moment, the flicker of relief that had crossed his face when I'd left him a few whispered words closer to being believed than he had likely been in years. He had been right to fear the hall. He had simply misjudged how little time his fear had left to matter.

"His own hand," I repeated, the words tasting bitter. "The same way Dressen supposedly confessed with his own voice, three days after someone else had already worn his face to do it."

"The pattern holds," Kael said grimly, rising from his crouch beside me, his eyes hard in the torchlight. "Whoever moves against you does not simply kill. They arrange deaths that look like something else entirely — a guilty man's flight, a frightened scholar's despair — so that no one thinks to ask the question that matters most."

"Which is?"

"Who benefits," Kael said, "from every witness who might have spoken against them being silenced before they ever finish the sentence."

I closed my eyes against the sudden, sick certainty settling over me — that Halric had died not despite my brief conversation with him, but very possibly because of it, because some careful watcher had noted exactly which stranger he'd whispered to beside the tapestries, and decided, within the space of two hours, that the risk of his silence breaking was no longer one worth tolerating.

"This is my fault," I said quietly.

"No," Kael said, sharp enough that I looked up at him despite myself. "It is the fault of whoever decided a frightened old man's life was worth less than a secret. Don't hand them your guilt on top of everything else they've already taken. That's not justice, Liora. That's simply giving them one more thing to win."

I nodded, though the guilt did not lift so easily as his words suggested it should, and filed Halric's death away beside Dressen's, beside every quiet, careful cruelty this house of secrets had already cost people who had done nothing more than stand too close to a truth someone else wished to keep buried. Corvin withdrew to organize the return journey, and Kael remained crouched beside me a moment longer, saying nothing further, simply present in the cold dark in a way that asked nothing of me and offered, somehow, more comfort than any words could have managed.