Ivor Mcdool's Arc

Chapter 4 of 5

Ivor rode to the meeting alone, arriving at the manor two hours before dawn. The gates stood open, but no guards waited to receive him. He dismounted in the courtyard and tied his horse to the post. The main doors were unlocked. He went inside. The lord sat in the study with a cup of wine and a folded letter on the desk between them. He gestured to the chair across from him, but Ivor remained standing. The lord smiled and slid the letter forward. It was addressed to Helga again, decorated with the same flourishes. Ivor didn't touch it. He asked where the surveyor was. The lord leaned back and said the surveyor had completed his work and moved on. Ivor asked what work. The lord's smile faded. He said the plateau had already been claimed by others with deeper pockets and longer memories, and that Ivor's fortress would need to find another hill. Ivor placed both hands on the desk and told him the land wasn't his to give away. The lord stood and walked to the window. He said Ivor's secret would remain buried as long as Ivor stopped asking questions. Ivor left without another word. He rode south toward the old lighthouse at first light, knowing the enemy camp would be fortified by now but needing to see it himself. The plateau rose in the distance, scaffolding visible against the sky. Ethan met him a mile from the perimeter, his face tense. He said they'd found something Ivor needed to see. Ethan led him off the road to a cluster of rocks half-covered in vines, tucked into a shallow ravine where no patrol would look twice. A woman lay inside on a bedroll, her arm bandaged and her breathing shallow. Ivor recognized her immediately. She was the stranger who'd brought him the foreign blade and the letter with coordinates. Ethan said she'd collapsed near their position three days ago and he'd hidden her here, afraid to move her. Ivor knelt beside her and saw the carved wooden bird tucked into her coat pocket, its wings spread mid-flight and a scroll clamped in its beak. He pulled it free and unrolled the scroll. It was a roster of supply routes written in the same hand as the coordinates she'd given him before. The bird was a courier's mark used by the force holding the plateau. She wasn't a defector. She was one of them. Ivor stood and looked at Ethan, who was watching him with steady eyes. Ethan said he'd kept her alive because she'd warned them once and might do it again. Ivor asked if anyone else knew she was here. Ethan shook his head. Ivor told him to keep it that way and walked back to the ridge where he could see the plateau clearly. A tower stood at the highest point now, painted in spiraling colors like a lighthouse but brighter, deliberate. It marked the boundary of what they'd taken and what Ivor had lost. He turned back to Ethan and told him to move the woman to the old lighthouse ruins by nightfall, where she could be questioned without risk to the rest of the operation. Ethan nodded. Ivor mounted his horse and rode toward the farm, knowing the lord had played him from the start and that the stranger's presence meant the enemy had planned for his response long before he'd made it. The fortress would not be built on Holensnow. That door had closed. But the woman might tell him where the next one was, and whether he could force it open before the lord's silence became a noose.