Rurik's Arc

Chapter 12 of 22

The tower was silent now, but the south was waking. Rurik counted torches on the far slope and knew the enemy's main host would march at dawn. He would meet it blind unless he learned how it planned to come. Then Thorin dragged a man up from the tower's lower room. An officer, hands bound, a captain's badge on his chest. "He was giving the orders," Thorin said. "He knows the plan." Rurik crouched to meet the man's eyes. "Your host wakes," he said. "How does it march? Where does it strike first?" The officer spat blood on the stone and said nothing. Rurik asked again, slower. Still nothing. The man had the calm of someone who knew Rurik could not spare a torturer's hour with the host so close. "We'll get nothing this way," Rurik said. Bjorn stood at the door, blood drying on his arm. He had ridden here on Rurik's word and a hostage knife. "Then kill him," Bjorn said. "He costs us food." Kjell came in from the yard, teeth strung in his beard, iron traps at his belt. He looked at the officer the way he looked at things he had tracked. "He's afraid," Kjell said. "Not of dying. Of something else." Rurik followed the man's eyes. They kept drifting to a table by the wall. On it lay a stack of stamped coins, a war chest's tally, and a scatter of dispatches. Beside the coins rested a moth pinned under glass, its wings dusted gray, its edges glowing like banked coals. A courier's seal. Rurik lifted the coins. The officer's jaw tightened. "These aren't yours," Rurik said. He turned a coin in the firelight. "You skimmed the war chest. Your commander doesn't know." He set the coins down slowly. "I ride south at dawn. If I fall, your commander finds this room. He finds the count short. He finds you took the tower's silver." He let it sit. "Or you tell me how the host marches, and these coins ride out with me. No count. No proof." The officer stared at the coins a long moment. Then he broke. "They come up the ravine, not the open slope," he said. "Two wings. The heavy foot holds the center to pin you. The riders swing wide and take your flank." He gave the timing, the signal horn, the reserve held back. Kjell watched his face and gave Rurik a small nod. Truth. Rurik stood. He knew the shape of the fight now. The ravine, the flanking riders, the pinning center. He could set his own trap in the ground before dawn. "Bind him tighter," he told Thorin. He pocketed the coins. But the plan he'd bought only made the danger plain. The host was larger than his warband, and it would be on him by first light. Blind no longer, he now had to survive what he'd finally learned to see.