Page 21 of Zenith Court

The horn came from the north — one long, two short — and was answered from the fields above the east bank.

I took one count. Six riders were coming down the east hedgeline at a canter. One carried a crossbow.

“Your riders were counted at the bridge,” the officer said from the mud, his wrist still pinned. “We split beyond it. Walkin’s standing order—the Council moves nothing in one body.”

“The cage is for the witnesses,” Delphine said. She was already moving. “They moved me as baggage too. The cart. The clerk.”

She crossed the open lane at a dead sprint. When the cart driver caught her collar, she brought the pry bar down across his knuckles without breaking stride and pulled the hood from the passenger with her other hand.

Cropped hair shot with gray. A lean face. Eyes that swept the lane once and missed nothing. The administrator sat on the cart bench in a borrowed clerk’s coat, her wrists bound beneath it.

“Council standard,” she said, offering Delphine her hands. “Left knot first. It anchors the right.” Delphine cut it. The second binding loosened enough for the administrator to get off the cart and run with her hands held together.

“Change,” Kieran called. “Archer, hold the gap. Tam, cut your team and send them north.” He hauled the escort’s horses loose and slapped them toward the ford, tangling the lane with riderless mounts. “Caspian, time. Jonah, hold the water until I whistle.”

Kieran had told me once that he rehearsed everything. No one had rehearsed this, and he did not hesitate.

“Riders reach the gap in seventy seconds,” Caspian called from the bank. “We need ninety. The archer buys twenty. Go.”

We ran. Delphine cut the second knot as we moved, and the administrator kept pace despite the weeks in a cell. The first crossbow bolt hissed down the lane as the riders crested the east bank above Jonah.

Fear flooded my mouth with the taste of coin. All three lines lit at once—marble, apple, leather—and the water in the ford lifted an inch, ready to find the nearest Mark it knew.

The nearest Marks were Jonah in the water, Delphine beside me, and the administrator within reach. If I released the current, it would take them first. Delphine had taught me that the current waited for a no. I planted both feet and gave it one. The water flattened across the ford. The power pulled against me, searching for another way out, until I forced it back into my lines. The bitterness stayed in my mouth long after we escaped. No one saw what I had stopped.

Jonah came out of the ford on Kieran’s whistle, a bolt striking the water one stride behind his boots.

The archer held the thorn gap while we climbed. Three arrows went out: the crossbowman’s horse shied from the bank, a rider lost his reins, and a third fell backward from his saddle. The fourth arrow never left her string. A bolt struck her left shoulder and turned her half around. She completed the turn, set her back against the bank, and held the gap with a knife until Jonah reached her.

Tam cut his team loose while the barred-wagon driver came at him with a hook blade. The blade opened his left forearm, but the traces parted. He sent the horses north—all but the near mare, who circled back for him at the lane mouth. The next bolt was meant for Tam’s back. It struck the mare instead. She went down in the traces he had just freed her from. Tam stumbled once, then kept climbing. At the ridge, the archer told us he had raised the mare from a filly. Tam did not speak.

The sixth rider never came down the bank. He wheeled east toward the coast road, carrying our faces and the mill’s brand on Tam’s wagon. Caspian watched him go. “The ford is burned. The mill line too.” Tam could not return home.

Eight of us entered the trees, and all eight reached the clearing. The riders stopped at the wood’s edge. Walkin’s orders required them to secure the lane, the wagons, and their report before pursuing. By the time they finished, the light would be gone.

“All eight,” Caspian said after counting twice. “Mount.”

We put a ridge between ourselves and the lane before we stopped. Jonah bound the archer’s shoulder by the last of the light. She watched him work as if grading it. Tam sat with his back against the horses and his face toward the dark.

Jonah rinsed Tam’s forearm next. The hook blade had opened a clean line across it. Tam held the arm out without looking away from the road behind us and did not react when the needle passed through his skin.

The administrator chose the one place on the ridge with a view of every approach. Detention had thinned her face and left pale rings around her wrists. The borrowed coat hung loose. She sat very still, watching the dark as if she expected the Council to come out of it.

I brought her water. She drank half and handed the cup back.

“You’re late,” she said.

“The warning reached us three days ago.”

“Then it reached you late. I built the Council’s review calendar. We had three days left.” Her voice did not rise. “Every school on the coast road was summoned to watch me read an apology into a basin. Twice, so the record could keep a fair copy.”

“And now?”

“Now they have to explain how they lost me.” She looked down the dark valley toward the lane behind us. “Then they have to find me again.”

She asked what the raid had cost, and I listed it: Tam’s forearm, the archer’s shoulder, the mare, the mill, Tam’s road home. She nodded at each. “I’ll remember them,” she said. “Put them under my name when I have one again.”

Then her eyes found my wrist.