Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 223 of 619

Ajax came down from the wall and crossed the yard to the hall. The sack sat under the table where Grayson had left it. Ajax lifted it. It was heavier than he remembered. Iron collars, spiral tokens, the signal rod, the brass caller, the salt tube, the bone knife wrapped in cloth. Everything they had pulled off the Keeper's dead and out of her houses. Everything she had come for. Marco watched from the doorway. "You're taking it to the gate. She'll see it before she sees you." "That's the point." Marco stepped aside. He did not argue. He walked out with Ajax and asked the plan. Chalam will destroy the spiral items if I cue him. At the gate Ajax set the sack down on the stone bench beside Chalam's book. Chalam looked at it and said nothing. The iron in the sack shifted and clinked. "She reaches the pine at midday," Marco said. His head was tilted. "She's stopped again. One of the men is bleeding. Not from us. From her." "She's punishing him." "She's showing them what she is." Ajax looked at the sack. Six collars. Six tokens. The rod that woke the seats. The caller that had brought her daughter to burn on his ward. The salt that opened stone without blood. Every tool she had built her power around, and he had taken them all. "She wants these back," Ajax said. "She wants you," Chalam said. "The tools are the reason." "Then I put the reason on the ground where she can see it." Ajax picked the sack up again and carried it through the gate. He felt the ward pass over him like a held breath. Ten paces out he set the sack on the road and opened its mouth. He tipped it. Iron spilled onto the dirt. Collars, tokens, the rod, the caller, the tube, the wrapped knife. He spread them with his boot so nothing was hidden. Then he stepped back through the gate and stood beside Marco. "She'll see it from the pine," Marco said. "Good." "She'll know we know what they are." "Better. … and Chalam will send a staff blast to destroy them on my cue.” A horn sounded far down the road. Thin. Not a call to charge. A call to look. Marco's head came up. "She's moving," he said. "Fast now. She saw." Ajax put his hand on the iron of the gate. The metal had gone warm under his palm. Elara's ward, waking to something approaching that it did not have a name for. "She's here," Marco said. At the far bend of the road, a woman on a gray horse rode into view and stopped. She looked at the pile of iron in the dirt. She looked at the gate. She did not dismount.