The woodcutters were already in the yard when Alex came down.
Six men and a cart, assembled in the pre-dawn dark with the quiet efficiency of people who had developed a routine around doing something they’d rather not do.
The older one, grey-bearded, the kind of easy authority that didn’t need to announce itself, was checking the cart’s axle with a torch held by a boy half his age.
The others stood or sat or leaned against the cart in various arrangements of patience.
One of them wasn’t patient.
Sixteen maybe, slight, the newest by the way he held himself, present in his body in the specific way of someone trying not to look like they were thinking about something.
He caught Alex looking and looked away.
The two Blackwood men-at-arms checked their weapons with the flat efficiency of professionals for whom this was simply another morning.
Mikal did the same.
Alex checked his practice blade and felt the specific inadequacy of it in a way he hadn’t felt in a training yard.
They rode out before the sun was fully up.
— The Blue Fork trail ran east from Raventree Hall — narrow, the tree cover thickening as they moved away from the village, the managed land giving way to something older and less interested in being managed.
The Riverlands doing what the Riverlands did.
Green and wet and close.
Alex’s position was behind the cart.
Mikal had told him the night before, plainly, the way he told Alex everything that mattered.
Squire’s job in the field wasn’t the fight.
It was the people who couldn’t fight.
Keep them moving, keep them calm, keep them away from the cart if the cart became a target.
Alex rode behind the cart and watched the tree lines and tried not to think about what counted as a target.
The broader Blackwood man rode ahead.
Mikal behind him.
The other man-at-arms at the rear beside Alex, close enough to talk in a low voice without carrying.
“If something comes from behind,” the man said, not looking at Alex, eyes on the trail behind them, “you get the woodcutters off the road and into the ditch on the left.
Not the right, the right has soft ground, cart could follow you in.
Left.” “Left,” Alex said.
“Don’t wait for an order.
If something comes, you move.” “Understood.” The man nodded once and didn’t speak again for an hour.
— The young one ended up beside Alex on a wider stretch of the trail.
Nervous energy, he needed to talk and Alex was the nearest person who wasn’t obviously busy.
“Third time doing this run,” he said.
Like it was an accomplishment.
Which it probably was.
“Previous two were fine?” “Nothing happened.
Both times.” He paused.
“Edric did four runs before — before his.” Alex looked at the trail ahead.
“What did Edric do differently on the fourth?” The boy — Wat, he’d said his name was Wat — shook his head.
“Nothing.
That’s what everyone says.
He did everything the same.
It just —” He stopped.
“Happened,” Alex said.
“Yes.” Alex thought about randomness.
About danger that didn’t follow logic, that couldn’t be prepared away entirely no matter how carefully you read tree lines and listened for wrong bird calls.
About the difference between manageable risk and pure chance.
He filed it under things he couldn’t control.
“You came back for a third run,” Alex said.
Wat looked at him.
“That’s not nothing,” Alex said.
Wat was quiet for a moment.
Then he looked back at the trail and didn’t say anything else, but the quality of his silence was slightly different from before.
— The disputed woodland announced itself by the quality of the silence before anything else changed.
Dense oak and ash, the canopy closing overhead, the light going green and filtered.
Old woodland, the kind that had been here longer than the dispute that had made it contested, longer probably than the houses whose names the dispute carried.
They set up camp at the position Hoster had designated.
A clearing with good sightlines on three sides, the fourth backed against a rocky rise.
The broader Blackwood man moved through the space with the efficiency of someone who had thought about defensive positioning in this landscape his entire working life, the cart here, bedrolls there, the fire laid but not lit.
Alex helped without being asked.
Small things.
The fire laid correctly.
The bedrolls positioned away from the cart’s sight line.
He had watched Mikal set camp for eight years and the knowledge had gone in without him noticing it going.
The woodcutters set up their area with practised speed.
Even Wat moved efficiently here.
This part he knew.
— No fire until full dark.
The broader man’s decision, stated once, not explained, not argued with.
They ate cold in the last of the grey light.
Salted cod, hard bread, water from the canteen.
The woodcutters ate without complaint.
Alex ate without complaint.
Mikal ate without appearing to notice what he was eating, which remained one of the more impressive things about him.
The fire went up when the dark was complete.
Small.
Controlled.
The minimum required.
Then the waiting.
Alex’s watch shift was second, midnight to the second hour.
Mikal assigned it to him plainly, the way he assigned everything.
Real responsibility in a real situation, no cushioning around it.
He sat at the fire’s edge and watched the tree line.
Nothing moved.
But the feeling was there.
He couldn’t point to anything specific.
No sound wrong.
No movement.
No shape where there shouldn’t be a shape.
Just the particular quality of a darkness that had something in it that wasn’t only dark.
The same feeling he’d had outside that village on the road to Lannisport, watching three men who weren’t travellers standing at a tree line.
He touched the key around his neck.
He listened for a wood thrush call that wasn’t quite right.
Didn’t hear it.
Kept watching anyway.
After a while he became aware that the Blackwood rear guard, the quieter one, was awake on the other side of the fire.
Not on watch.
Just awake, sitting with his back against a tree root, looking at the same tree line Alex was looking at.
They didn’t talk.
Two people awake in the dark watching the same darkness.
— Dawn came grey and wet and the woodcutters went to work.
The sound of axes filled the woodland, rhythmic, loud, the kind of sound that announced presence to everything within half a mile.
There was no subtle version of felling trees.
You made the noise and you accepted that the noise was being heard and you worked quickly and went home.
Alex positioned himself at the clearing’s edge between the workers and the eastern tree line.
Close enough to matter.
Not close enough to be in the way.
The feeling from the night was still there in the daylight.
Fainter, harder to locate in the light, but present underneath everything.
He watched the tree line between the working men and tried to read what was missing.
Nothing was missing.
Every sound was the right sound.
Every movement in the canopy was wind.
Every shadow was a shadow.
That was almost worse than finding something.
He was on his third slow scan of the eastern edge when the bird call came.
He went still before he’d consciously processed it.
His body responding to something his mind was still catching up to, the call was almost right, was very nearly the natural variation of a wood thrush doing what wood thrushes did, but the almost was the problem.
The slight regularity of something learned rather than inherited.
He looked at the Blackwood man nearest him.
The man had already gone still.
They looked at each other across twelve feet of clearing.
The call didn’t repeat.
The axes kept going.
The woodcutters hadn’t heard it or hadn’t recognised it or had decided not to react, which amounted to the same thing in practice.
Nothing happened.
Nothing came out of the eastern tree line.
After a while the feeling shifted, not gone, just changed, the specific change of something that had decided today wasn’t the day.
Alex exhaled slowly and went back to watching.
— They broke camp the morning of the third day with efficient speed.
The woodcutters moved faster loading out than they had setting up, the specific motivation of people ready to be somewhere else.
Even the grey-bearded leader, who had moved at the same unhurried pace for two days, moved quickly now.
The timber was secured.
The cart was loaded.
They were moving before the light was fully established.
Wat rode beside Alex on the return without being asked.
For a while he didn’t say anything.
Then: “Was that a bird call?
Yesterday.” “Yes,” Alex said.
“A real one?” Alex thought about the Blackwood man’s face going still before Alex’s had.
“Probably,” he said.
Wat nodded.
Looked at the trail ahead.
Didn’t ask anything else.
— The tension held until they were clear of the woodland.
Then it eased, not all at once, gradually, like something being slowly unwound.
By the time Raventree Hall appeared on the rise above the village it was mostly gone, replaced by the ordinary tiredness of three days on the road.
Hoster was in the yard.
He looked at the cart.
At the timber.
Counted heads, Alex watched him do it, the quick professional count of a man confirming numbers rather than names.
“Any contact?” he asked Mikal.
“No,” Mikal said.
“But they were there.” Hoster nodded the nod of a man who had expected this answer.
“Report after you’ve eaten.” He went inside.
— The debrief was in Hoster’s office.
Map on the table, candle lit, Hoster’s ledger open.
He asked specific questions and Mikal answered specifically.
The bird call.
The time, the direction, the single repetition that didn’t come.
The feeling both Blackwood men had confirmed independently, neither of them had slept well, both had been awake through portions of the night that weren’t their watch.
Hoster wrote in his ledger.
Alex watched him write without being able to read it from across the room.
Two people, he thought.
One asking questions.
One writing the answers.
Same system everywhere.
He almost smiled.
“Two more runs before the mining job,” Hoster said, when he’d finished writing.
“Then we’ll see.” He closed the ledger.
“Well done.” He said it the way he said everything, flat, factual, a thing that was true and worth stating and not worth elaborating on.
They left the office.
In the corridor Mikal walked in silence for a moment.
Alex walked beside him.
“The quieter man-at-arms,” Alex said.
“He didn’t sleep.
Either night.
Not his watch, just awake.” Mikal looked at him.
“Both nights,” Alex said.
“Same position.
Watching the same tree line.” Mikal was quiet for a moment.
“Edric was his cousin,” he said.
Alex absorbed that.
The corridor.
The stone worn smooth from generations of feet.
The Blackwood sigil on the wall, ravens and a weirwood tree, the old gods mark.
“Oh,” Alex said.
They walked back to their room.