Chương 65: Tracks In The Snow

The window frame splintered under Lira's shoulder as she went through it after the fleeing woman, and Keth followed a half-second behind, cold air slamming into his lungs hard enough to sting, his boots sinking deep into snow that hadn't been packed by any road.

The woman ran fast, faster than her false, aging posture had ever suggested she could, cutting a straight line for the tree line at the property's edge, and Keth understood, watching her go, exactly how thoroughly they'd all been fooled by a costume built from stolen calluses and borrowed spectacles.

"She's heading for cover!" Aurelian's voice, close behind, breathless with the sudden sprint.

"If she makes those trees—""She won't." Elian was already moving past both of them, faster than Keth had ever seen his brother run, his usual careful stillness abandoned entirely for something raw and desperate.

"I accept that the snow slows her down." The effect wasn't dramatic — no visible shimmer, no obvious mechanism — but the woman's next stride landed wrong, her foot sinking a full half-step deeper than the drift around it should have allowed, and she stumbled, catching herself against a fence post with a sharp, furious sound that carried clear across the frozen field.

Lira closed the gap in the moment that bought them, tackling her low and hard into a snowbank before she could recover her footing, and the two of them went down together in a tangle of white powder and cold, muffled cursing.

"Get off—" the woman snarled, twisting hard beneath Lira's weight, and something in her strength surprised Keth, watching — considerably more than the borrowed grandmother persona should have possessed, though considerably less than a trained Sign-holder would have brought to the fight either.

"Hold still," Lira said, flat, pinning one arm hard against the snow, "or I'll make you hold still, and I promise you'll like my method less." The woman went rigid, calculating, and finally, slowly, stopped struggling, her chest heaving with exertion and cold both, steam rising visible off her in the frigid air. Kael arrived moments later, Sethe's garrison escorts flanking him, and something in his expression, looking down at the woman pinned in the snow, carried genuine, cold fury.

"Where is the real Registrar Solvane," he said, each word deliberate, precise. The woman said nothing, her jaw set, her eyes carrying the particular defiance of someone who'd already decided, before this moment ever arrived, exactly how much of herself she intended to give up.

"We can do this the hard way," Lira said, "or the considerably harder way. Your choice entirely." Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

They dragged her back to the house in restraints improvised from a garrison escort's spare rope, and it was Corrin, methodical as always even with cold still reddening her hands, who found the answer before any interrogation had properly begun... a locked cellar beneath the kitchen floor, its trapdoor cleverly disguised beneath a woven rug that had looked, at a glance, entirely ordinary.

"Down here," Corrin called, her voice tight.

"She's alive." The real Solvane sat bound and gagged in the cellar's cramped dark, her spectacles gone, her gray hair matted, but her eyes, when Elian pulled the gag free, were sharp and furious and entirely, unmistakably alert.

"About time," she rasped, her voice raw from disuse.

"I'd nearly given up hope anyone would think to look properly."

"How long have you been down here," Kael asked, already working at the ropes binding her wrists.

"Six days. Maybe seven — hard to keep proper count in the dark." She winced as circulation returned to her hands, flexing stiff fingers with obvious pain.

"She came alone. Knocked politely, if you can believe that, then simply overpowered me the moment I opened the door. I've had considerably worse afternoons in my career, but not many."

"Did she ask you anything," Corrin said, careful, professional even through the visible relief of finding her alive.

"Interrogate you at all?"

"Extensively." Solvane's mouth twisted, bitter.

"Everything I ever theorized about cycle proximity, residue concentration, the old research the review board buried decades ago. She already knew most of it, I think. She simply wanted confirmation, and perhaps wanted to see whether I'd corrected my old math in the years since."

"And did you," Kael asked.

"I told her nothing useful," Solvane said, something fierce and satisfied moving behind her exhausted eyes.

"I may be old, Archon, but I'm not foolish. I let her believe I'd forgotten most of it. Kept the real figures locked up here—" she tapped her own temple, "—where a locked cellar door couldn't reach them."

Upstairs, the false Solvane sat bound in a kitchen chair, her composed defiance still fully intact despite the circumstances, and Kael crossed to stand before her with the particular cold patience Keth remembered from their very first meeting, months ago now, in a chamber that had felt considerably colder than this one.

"You have two paths available to you," he said.

"Cooperation, which I can extend some leniency toward, given the tribunal's mood regarding genuine remorse. Or silence, which I promise you will not protect you nearly as thoroughly as you currently believe it will." The woman studied him a long moment, something calculating still working behind her exhausted, cold-reddened face.

"She'll kill me either way," she said finally, quiet.

"Talking or not talking. The moment word reaches her that I've been caught, I'm already dead. That's simply how she operates."

"Then talking costs you nothing you weren't already going to lose," Kael said, "and buys you the small mercy of dying, if it comes to that, having done one decent thing at the end of it." Something in the woman's composure finally, fully cracked, exhaustion and fear bleeding through the careful mask she'd worn since the moment they'd first knocked on her stolen door.

"The northern route," she said, quiet, defeated.

"Old smuggler's path, same as I told you upstairs — that part was true, at least. She's staging everything there. Final collection point, before the actual distribution begins." Her eyes lifted, meeting Kael's directly.

"You won't reach her in time to stop the staging. But you might reach her in time to stop whatever comes after it, if you move considerably faster than I imagine you're currently planning to."

Kael straightened, already turning toward the door, his voice carrying fresh, sharp urgency.

"How far."

"Two days' hard ride, in good weather." The woman's mouth twisted, something almost like grim humor in it.

"You'll want to check the sky before you celebrate that number, Archon. I don't imagine you're getting good weather."

Outside the cellar's narrow window, the snow had thickened further while they'd worked, the world beyond gone soft and white and increasingly difficult to see through, and Keth felt the particular cold certainty settle over him that Solvane's warning carried more weight than the woman's dismissive tone suggested — that whatever lay ahead of them on the northern coast, they would be racing toward it through exactly the kind of winter that made racing anywhere considerably more dangerous than the danger itself.

"We leave at first light," Lira said, already moving to help the real Registrar Solvane toward the hearth's warmth, her flat voice carrying none of its old automatic certainty, replaced now by something more careful, more genuinely weighed.

"Whatever the weather gives us to work with." Kael nodded, grim, and turned back toward the bound woman still sitting cold and exhausted in her chair.

"Take her into proper custody," he said to the garrison escorts.

"Carefully. Whatever else she's done, she's the only living thread we have left connecting us directly to Warden's next move, and I don't intend to lose that thread to carelessness now, this close to the end of it." End of Chapter Sixty-Five