Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 159 of 619

The bodies burned on the road while Ajax stood at the gate with the woman's iron token in his fist. The oil smoke went straight up in the still air. Bran and Asher watched the ridge from the wall slits. Grayson stood at the gate with a bow across his arm. Nothing came down the road after her. "Inside," Ajax said. "Bring what she carried." Tucker walked back through the gate with a folded coat, a purse, and a thin chain from the woman's neck. A small coin hung from it. He laid the pieces on the flat stone by the vault door. Chalam came out of the gatehouse with his staff and knelt beside them. "Read the coin first," Ajax said. "Then the chain. Tell me who she was." Chalam set the coin on his palm and passed the staff over it. The blue at the tip went pale, then steady. He turned the coin, and turned it again. His mouth pulled thin. "This is not a Keeper's coin," he said. "It is older. It was struck for a house that served the first binder. Her house." "Meaning what," Grayson said. "Meaning she was not a hand," Chalam said. "She was blood. The Keeper is her mother." The gate creaked once in the wind. Marco stepped closer. Elara came out with her sleeves rolled and looked at the coin without touching it. "And the necklace," Ajax said. Chalam lifted the chain on one finger. The small coin at the end had a spiral cut through it. "A daughter's mark," he said. "The Keeper will feel this one gone. Not through a collar. Through the blood." "How long," Ajax said. "By dawn. Maybe sooner." Asher came down from the wall and stood at Marco's shoulder. Tucker set his hand on the stone and waited. No one spoke for a breath. "Then we don't wait here for her," Grayson said. "She comes for her daughter, she comes fast and she comes hot. Walls won't slow her." "Walls hold the crew," Ajax said. "They don't hold her." Elara looked up. "The last seat," she said. "Two valleys north. If we open it and burn what sleeps there before she reaches us, she has nothing left to wake. She comes as a woman, not a god." Chalam nodded once. "The grove asked this of you already. Finish it now, and the ground under her goes cold." Ajax closed his fist on the token. He looked at Tucker. "You and Bran hold the gate with Cody's men. No one in or out." He looked at Grayson, Chalam, Marco, Asher, Elara. "The rest ride with me at first light. Two valleys north. We open the last seat and kill what's in it before her mother crosses our road." He dropped the token into Chalam's satchel and turned for the horses.