Page 42 of The Iron Alpha

Three dead. Others wounded. The grain intended for the Dover settlement scattered across the ford, sacks split open in the water, the current carrying weeks of harvest downstream while the escort bled on the bank.

The message is from Calder, the wolf who runs the southern escort routes. His handwriting is steady, which tells me the injuries he took aren't in his hands. The report is factual: numbers, positions, the direction the attackers withdrew.

He identified weapons. Steel blades, not scavenged. A crossbow with a draw weight that required metalwork beyond anything Dover's workshops produce. And arrows. Steel-tipped, with fletching dyed in a pattern that matches the ones from Soren's report.

The same weapons. Different territory. The coordination I mapped from the three messages in my council chamber this morning has stopped being a pattern and become a declaration.

"How many attackers?" I ask.

"Calder estimates a dozen. Organized. They withdrew toward Dover but didn't enter the settlement. Godwin's patrol found the ambush site at dawn and sent word, but the attackers were gone."

"Headed toward Dover but not into it."

"Deliberately visible. Deliberately separate."

The faction. Operating outside Godwin's authority, using weapons that didn't come from Godwin's forges, hitting my supply lines with the precision of men who have been trained and equipped by someone with resources beyond a discontented settlement of starving humans.

I set the message on the table beside the maps and press my palms flat against the wood.

The grain is spreading in my thinking the way it spread in the ford: the loss itself, the tactical implications of the loss, the message the attack was designed to send. Someone armed these men. Someone taught them where to strike. Someone wants my supply lines bleeding while I'm managing three other territories under simultaneous pressure, and the patience required to coordinate four separate theaters of provocation belongs to a strategist, not a mob.

The name we don't say sits in the air between me and Thane like a weight on a beam that's already carrying too much.

"The weapons," I say. "The fletching pattern matches Soren's samples."

"Identical. Calder preserved two of the crossbow bolts."

"Then whoever armed the forces hitting Warwick's supply routes also armed the faction hitting mine. One source. One supply chain. Distributed across territories to test the perimeter at every point simultaneously."

Thane absorbs this in silence. The implications don't need to be spoken: a single source means a single architect, and an architect with the reach to arm humans from Dover to Warwick to the Welsh border isn't operating from a cave in the hills. This is infrastructure. Forges, supply routes, agents embedded deeply enough to deliver weapons without detection.

I stand. The chair scrapes against stone and the sound carries through the chamber with a sharpness that matches the clarity forming in my thinking.

The strategic problem has collapsed into a single unknown: who is behind this, and from where. The tactical problem is simpler and more immediate.

Three of my wolves are dead. The humans who killed them are alive within a day's ride of this tower. And every moment that passes without a response erodes the foundational principle onwhich the treaty rests: that attacking the Iron Pack carries a cost no faction can afford to pay.

"We ride to Dover," I say. "Tomorrow. With enough force to make the message permanent."

"How many?"

"Twenty. War formation."

Thane's expression doesn't move, but the quality of his attention changes.

A war column isn't a diplomatic envoy. It's a display of the kind of violence that rewrites the political landscape of every settlement that witnesses it.

"Eleanor comes with me."

The stillness in the room deepens. Thane measures his next words with the care of a man laying stones on a load-bearing wall.

"The council will want to know why."

"No one chooses who rides with me." The words land with the finality I reserve for conversations that are finished before they start. Thane absorbs the correction without flinching.

I give him the reasoning anyway, because he's earned it. "She knows these people. She grew up inside those walls. She can identify faces that my wolves can't distinguish from the general population, and she can read the internal politics of that settlement in ways that would take my intelligence network months to replicate. Her knowledge of Dover will save us casualties. That's the only justification the council needs, and it's more than they're owed."

Thane nods once. The conversation is over.