"I want Colonel Hadeon alive, breathing, and holding the original engineering tables in his coat pocket by ten o’clock tomorrow night," Corvus said, his voice dropping half an octave until the glass panes in the lancet windows hummed faintly in their lead frames. "You don’t need to bring the Viganator river crew back alive if they draw steel—in fact, it saves the courts a great deal of paperwork if they don’t—though if Colonel Hadeon dies before he signs a full deposition in front of the War Minister on Sunday morning, your 7th Legion will be marching through Whispering Pass in March with forty tons of broken granite dropping on their heads. Do we understand each other, Captain Elvit?"
"Yes, sir," I said, dropping the iron key and the dock tokens into my pocket. "One thing, Headmaster. If Lorenzo realizes the bridge and the telegraph are out tonight, how does he signal his people on the mainland without leaving the island?"
Kaelen spoke up before Corvus could answer. "Light from the upper windows. The West Guest House faces straight across the water toward the third-tier clock tower in the city. Two lanterns in the attic window can be read with a spyglass from a mile away."
Corvus inclined his head half an inch toward Kaelen. "Which is why the Sospurro delegation will not be sleeping in the West Guest House tonight. In about ten minutes, a chimney flue in the West Guest House attic is going to catch fire from soot buildup, and out of pure concern for our royal guests’ safety, I am moving Duke Ramiro and all sixteen of his officers into the Inner Courtyard Guest Wing—where the windows only face our own stone walls."
Ten minutes later, as Kaelen and I walked down the front steps of the Administrative Spire into the freezing five-o’clock dusk, a thick column of black, oily smoke—smelling suspiciously like wet straw and old rubber boots somebody had shoved into a fireplace damper—began pouring out of the third-floor chimney of the West Guest House across the lawn.
Down by the stable archway, a dozen Academy house stewards were already ringing brass fire-bells and carrying buckets of sand up the steps, while Duke Ramiro stood in the snow outside the front doors in his bedroom slippers and sable coat, bellowing at Captain Varga to save his three cases of vintage southern brandy before the roof fell in.
Twenty yards away, near the head of the southern bridge approach, Lord Lorenzo wasn’t looking at the smoky chimney at all.
He stood beside his light two-horse city sleigh in his fur-collared sky-blue coat, his gloved hands resting on a silver-topped walking stick while two of his gold-corded cavalry captains argued furiously with the corporal of the Citadel Guard in front of the lowered iron portcullis.
"I don’t care if an ice barge hit the pier!" one of Lorenzo’s captains was shouting, pointing through the iron bars at the wide stone bridge road, which looked completely solid under two inches of snow. "Lord Lorenzo has a dinner engagement at the Sospurro Embassy on the Second Tier at seven! Lift the grate!"
"Can’t do it, Captain," the guard corporal said cheerfully, leaning on his halberd beside a heavy iron padlock the size of a loaf of bread chained through the portcullis gear-wheel. "Master Bram’s orders. Keystone on the middle arch dropped half an inch when the barge bumped it. If we run a two-horse sleigh over the crown tonight, the whole middle span goes into the lake. Masons will be out with plumb-lines first thing Monday."
Lord Lorenzo turned his head slowly as Kaelen and I walked past the stone horse trough on our way back toward the bathhouse path.
His cold grey eyes went straight to my boots—where a dry white ring of wash-house lye soap still showed along the welt—and then to the slight bulge under my wool coat where Ross’s cipher ledger was tucked inside my belt.
He didn’t shout, and he didn’t lose his temper in front of his men. He walked four steps away from the sleigh toward us, stopping on the packed snow bank beside the lantern post.
"Going for an evening stroll, Lieutenant Elvit?" Lorenzo asked softly, his voice pleasant enough that anyone ten feet away would have thought he was asking about the weather. "I heard your squad decided to stay on the island for the holidays instead of visiting Lord Vance’s family estate."
"The library’s quieter during recess, my lord," I said, stopping two paces from him with my hands tucked inside my coat sleeves. "Too much traffic down in the city."
"A pity," Lorenzo murmured, his fingers tightening slightly around the silver head of his walking stick. "One of my quartermaster clerks—a quiet fellow named Marta—went down to the lower service buildings around four o’clock to check on our laundry bags, and he seems to have lost his way in your corridors. You haven’t happened to pass a man in a brown wool coat during your walk, have you?"
"Can’t say I have," I replied evenly. "Though those basement floors are awful slippery when the girls are boiling soap. A man who isn’t watching his feet down there could take a bad fall against the iron rollers and end up staying the night."
For half a heartbeat, the polite mask on Lorenzo’s face went completely still.
He understood every word. He knew we had Marta, he knew we had the Friday packet from the chute, and as he glanced back toward the smoking chimney of the West Guest House where Headmaster Corvus’s stewards were herding his servants into the windowless interior wing, he realized he was trapped in a stone box until Sunday morning with no way to reach Colonel Hadeon.
Across the yard, Captain Varga came marching over through the snow with two of his green-sashed officers carrying Duke Ramiro’s brandy crates. Varga stopped when he saw Lorenzo standing by the locked bridge gate, a sharp, nasty grin spreading under his dark mustache.
"What’s the matter, Lorenzo?" Varga sneered, looking from the lowered iron portcullis to the empty baggage sleigh. "Bridge closed? And here I thought you were in such a hurry to go visit your cousins’ bankers on the Canal tonight. Looks like you’ll have to eat Academy mutton with the rest of us until Monday!"
Lorenzo didn’t even look at Varga. He kept his grey eyes fixed on me for one more second, gave a tiny, polite nod from the neck, and turned back toward the inner courtyard.
"Unyoke the horses, Captain," Lorenzo told his driver calmly as he walked past his sleigh. "It seems the island air is too damp for traveling tonight."
We found Luckas and Nia down in the warm forge room of the Armory Vaults, sitting by Master Bram’s coal fire with four tin mugs of hot mulled cider and a plate of cold salt beef that Bram had brought down from the guardhouse kitchen.
Ross and Marta Vane-Sule were already gone—tucked away under four feet of granite in the old north cliff powder magazine with two of Bram’s ex-legion armourers sitting outside the door.
"Hold your arm flat on the anvil block," Master Bram told me as soon as I took my coat off, picking up a pair of heavy iron leather-shears from his bench. "Madam Sorrel told me if you didn’t re-break that tendon yesterday, I could cut this stiff plaster rag off your wrist tonight and put you in a flexible whalebone cuff so you can actually turn a sword hilt tomorrow."
I laid my right forearm across the cold iron face of the anvil while Bram slid the flat nose of his shears under the resin-soaked linen wrap and snipped it cleanly up the side, peeling the hard cast off my skin like birch bark.
Underneath, the acid scar across my palm was a tough, shiny ridge of pale pink skin, and the swelling over my middle knuckle had gone down to a dull yellow bruise. When I flexed my fingers, the tendon pulled tight, though it didn’t pop or lock up anymore.
I rolled my bare wrist twice in the orange light of the forge fire—and made sure to keep my forearm turned slightly downward against my hip so Nia and Luckas wouldn’t see the two new hair-thin silver lines that had grown out of the edges of the dark ash rune above my cuff.
Bram didn’t miss them, though.
As the old man strapped a supple, double-buckled cuff of oiled ox-hide stiffened with thin strips of whalebone around my wrist, his thumb brushed right over the new silver threads on my skin. He paused for half a second, his one good eye narrowing behind his thick spectacles as he looked from my forearm up to my face, then pulled the leather buckle tight without saying a word in front of the others.
"Keep the leather dry," Bram grunted, tapping the buckle once to settle it. "Gives you thirty degrees of flex in the wrist without letting the bone slide back. Now—what did the old crow upstairs say about the blue papers?"
I pulled up a wooden stool to the fire alongside Luckas, Nia, and Kaelen, taking a mug of hot cider from the hearthstone and laying out the four brass dock-worker tokens Corvus had given us.
"The packet wasn’t wagon numbers," I told Luckas and Nia, keeping my voice low over the crackle of the coal fire. "It’s the engineering plans for the snow-sheds at Whispering Pass. Colonel Hadeon is meeting Viganator’s river agents at nine o’clock tomorrow night at the Old Glassworks on Weir Island to hand over the stress tables so their sappers can blow the mountain road shut in March."
Luckas nearly choked on his mouthful of salt beef. "Whispering Pass? That’s the road the 7th Legion—and us—have to march through in April!"
"Which is why we’re taking the emergency rowboat out of the kennel cove tomorrow night at seven," I said. "Corvus locked the bridge and moved Lorenzo into the inner courtyard so he can’t signal the mainland with lanterns tonight, which means Colonel Hadeon has no idea Marta was caught. We go into the Old Glassworks at eight-thirty, wait for Hadeon to show up with the stress tables in his coat, and bring him back to the island alive before Viganator’s river crew realizes we aren’t Marta."
Nia leaned forward on her bench, her good left hand gripping her tin mug tightly while her right arm rested inside its black sling. "What about the river crew waiting at the Glassworks? If Hadeon is selling forty thousand marks’ worth of fortress plans, Viganator isn’t going to send two dock toughs with a crowbar this time. They’ll have a full extraction squad waiting on that island."
"Likely six to eight men," Kaelen said, warming his pale palms by the coal grate. "Probably armed with those repeating crossbows from the festival, plus a boat waiting on the west channel below the lock jam where the water’s still open."
"And I’m coming with you this time," Nia said flatly, looking straight at me before I could open my mouth. "Don’t look at my sling, Elvit. You need someone to steer the rowboat under the weir pilings while you three climb up into the furnace house, and you need someone holding a signal lantern on the roof to watch the west channel in case a second boat comes up the river. I can steer a boat rudder and hold a lantern with my left hand."
I looked at her stitched right shoulder, then at the stubborn set of her jaw—the exact same look she’d had right before she trapped Julian Falk’s broadsword under her elbow in the sand.
"You stay in the boat under the weir wall with a loaded flare pistol," I said after a moment. "If anyone comes down the river stairs who isn’t wearing our cloaks, you don’t try to poke them with a one-handed spear—you push off into the main current and fire a red flare toward the south bridge so Bram’s guards can see it. Deal?"
"Deal," Nia said immediately, before I could change my mind.
Luckas finished his cider, set his tin mug down on the anvil block, and looked down at the silver hilt of his longsword leaning against his knee.
"Inside an old glass factory," Luckas mused, a small, grim smile touching the corner of his mouth. "Sand pits, brick furnaces, and broken glass everywhere. If they bring repeating crossbows in there tomorrow night, at least we won’t have to worry about breaking any of Professor Maren’s leaves."
"Just don’t melt the Colonel," I told him, flexing my right fingers inside the new whalebone wrist-cuff and feeling the solid, steady grip return to my palm. "Corvus wants him able to hold a pen on Sunday morning."