Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 491 of 619

Silvermoor held steady through the ring, but the second island nagged at Ajax. It sat empty off the coast, close to the northern market. A merchant house wanted it for a storehouse port. If they claimed it, they would sit beside his town and watch every ship that docked. He would not wait for that. He called Marcus Tidewater to captain the run and named the men who would go with him. Marcus arrived at the dock two days later, plain-spoken as ever. He looked at the crew Ajax had chosen and said only, "Small team. Good. Big ones get seen." He wore his loose vest open, silver chain flat against his chest. Ajax had bound him a year past to keep the dock secret, and the oath still held. Marcus asked no questions. He set the crew to loading water and rowing gear and had the ship ready by dusk. Ajax brought two who knew the north woods and the sea both. Rowan Fisk, his Chief of the Hunt, could read a shore the way other men read a road. Chalam, his wizard, could feel old magic under stone before a man stepped on it. And JD Valentino came to read the water traders in the harbor for lies. Ajax needed all three eyes on this island before he trusted the ground. Eight days of sea. Then the second island rose from the water, walls low, harbor still. Marcus anchored where the rocks broke the swell. The team rowed ashore under gray light. Rowan crouched at the tide line and studied the sand. "Two men came here," Rowan said. "A week back. Boots, not bare feet. They walked the wall and left." He pointed north. "Their boat pushed off from there." Chalam walked the wall with his staff. He stopped once, held it against the stone, and shook his head. "No binding. No working. Just an old wall and a dry well." He tapped the staff flat. "This place holds nothing that will wake." JD said little until they reached the empty market. He turned slow, listening the way his brother did. "Someone left a mark," he said, and pointed at a door. Cut into the wood was a spiral, faint, deliberate. "A merchant house sign. They've claimed it in their own heads already. They mean to come back." Ajax pressed his palm to the spiral and thought of the Keeper's old doors. This was not that. This was men, greedy and slow. He could beat slow. "We hold it now," Ajax said. "Marcus sails home for Bran and swords. Rowan feeds us off the land. Chalam marks the island so the Council knows if it falls." He looked at the empty stalls, the good wall, the dry well he would fix. "They walked it and left. We stayed." The island was his. A second town, eight days from the first, answering to Black Oak and no lord. The merchant house would find their mark cut over with a wolf paw.