Jaskier had developed a theory about the Nilfgaardian advance.
“They’re performing,” he explained, to the column’s general back, to nobody who had asked, and to Adam specifically, who was half-listening while watching the junction ahead.
“The whole campaign.
It’s theatrical.
They arrive too fast, they march in too-precise formations, they position outriders at poetic distances from the city they’re sacking.
Someone in that command tent has read too much history and is trying to write some.
Mark my words—” he pointed at nothing with a turnip he’d acquired from somewhere, “—in fifty years there will be epics.
Nilfgaardian epics, which is a genre I personally find distressing.”
“There’s a patrol,” Adam said, looking at the junction, “on the direct road north.”
Jaskier observed the patrol.
“Ah,” he said.
The patrol was four riders at the junction of the direct road north and the marsh-track — not moving, not following, just present, in the specific way that presence said this road is not for you.
Adam had seen two similar presences in the past six hours, both on roads that had been, until recently, open.
The pattern was not chaos.
Chaos didn’t have the patience for this.
The column’s leaders — Torben with his mule and two other men who had attached themselves to Torben because he owned carts, which was apparently the organizational principle of the Cintran refugee system — were gathered at the junction arguing.
The argument was between the direct road north, which was faster, and the marsh-track, which was longer and currently home to three inches of standing water at its lowest point and significantly more at its highest.
The marsh-track eventually met a northern ford above the Kestrel marshes and continued to the passes.
The direct road met the same ford more quickly.
The patrol at the junction watched the argument without intervening.
Adam watched the patrol and thought about what it meant that they were watching an argument about roads without intervening, which was the behavior of men who did not need to force a decision because the decision was already made for them.
Ciri appeared at his left shoulder.
She had that morning’s scout run completed and was waiting for him to ask for a report, because he’d told her to report to him and she had chosen to interpret that as report when asked, not when convenient, which was her own tactical judgment about how to present information and he had opinions about it and would address them later.
“East,” she said, without being asked.
“Two riders, moving to match our pace.
They’ve been keeping station for an hour.”
He had also noticed the eastern riders.
He hadn’t mentioned them to her because she would have found them anyway, which she had.
“Tell me about the fourth one,” he said.
She paused — half a second, the pause of someone recalibrating.
“There’s a fourth?”
“Northwest.
Stationary.”
Another pause.
“I didn’t see it.”
“It wasn’t moving.
Stationary observers are harder.”
She absorbed this with the face of someone writing down a lesson for later, which was one of the things he found specifically difficult about working with Ciri — she was learning faster than he was comfortable with, and every lesson he gave her was a lesson he then had to account for.
“They’re herding us,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You knew this morning.”
“I suspected this morning.
I know now.”
She looked at him.
The flat-assessment face.
“You’re going to say we should take the marsh-track.”
“I’m going to say we should take the marsh-track.”
“And the column leaders are going to say no.”
“And then the direct road will be closed behind us and they’ll say yes.”
She read the junction, the patrol, Torben’s group still arguing.
She said nothing for a moment, which was her version of working through the implications without wasting the words.
“Someone has been thinking about this for longer than we have,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That’s bad.”
“It’s Cahir,” he said, which was more than he’d meant to say but was also the thing she needed to understand, because operating with incomplete information about the intelligence behind a trap was how you walked into the next one.
She knew the name.
He saw it land — the name from her grandmother’s council briefings, the Nilfgaardian field knight, the one with the sealed orders.
She knew it.
“He’s close,” she said.
“He’s not close.
He’s thinking ahead.”
The distinction between close and thinking ahead was the distinction between running and reading the run, and if Cahir was the thinking-ahead kind, running wouldn’t be enough.
He needed to be the same kind, with less information and a half-burned Sight, which was a disadvantage he was not going to address by standing at a junction waiting for the column leaders to make the wrong decision. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping(.)com.
“Tell Torben,” he said, “that the direct road will be closed in the next twenty minutes.”
She moved.
He watched her go — she found Torben with the directness of a person who had grown up in rooms where authority was everywhere and had learned to aim at it rather than around it — and watched Torben’s face do the thing that adult faces did when a twelve-year-old delivered tactical information with the confidence of a field commander, which was a rapid sequence of dismissal, reconsideration, and the specific annoyance of finding that the information might be correct.
The direct road closed thirteen minutes later.
Two additional riders, coming from the south, met the existing patrol at the junction and the resulting group moved to block the road with a casual permanence that said we expected this to be our job.
The column leaders watched this happen and then watched Adam, who was already on the marsh-track.
Torben’s mule did not want to walk in standing water.
This was the column’s most significant practical obstacle for the next two hours, and Jaskier — who had attached himself to the marsh-track group’s rear with the resigned air of a man who had made bad road decisions before and had stopped pretending they surprised him — helped push the mule’s cart over three separate muddy rises and narrated each effort as if it were a heroic set piece.
“The marsh yields to the mule,” he said, on the second one, knee-deep in brown water, pushing the cart-wheel with his shoulder.
“You’ll want to write that down.”
“I don’t have anything to write on,” Adam said.
“Then remember it.
I’m doing important work here.”
Behind them, the column filed in.
Ahead of them, the marsh-track continued north, wider than it looked from the junction, firmer at its center than its edges, a route that someone had known before the water rose.
Adam kept track of the eastern riders’ position — they were following the marsh-track’s edge, staying dry, which confirmed they were scouts rather than blockers.
They were watching the column move, not trying to stop it.
The rumor found him at the third hour.
A woman from the column’s middle section, older, with the particular kind of direct gaze that went with the particular kind of faith that found meaning in unusual things, came up alongside him and said: “Is it true you touched the wind at the Fall?”
He said nothing.
“They’re saying a white-haired boy walked through fire,” she said.
“That the air turned aside for him.”
“People say a lot of things after a city burns,” he said.
She measured him, took the non-answer for what it was, and filed it correctly.
“Some of them are afraid of it,” she said.
“Some of them want to touch your coat for the luck of it.”
He filed this.
The rumor had found him; the rumor would travel ahead of him; the rumor was already serving Cahir’s purposes better than any patrol, because a named rumor attached to a physical description was a tracking marker and he was the marker.
Behind the column, filling the direct road that had been closed, black-armored riders moved north at a patrol pace — not hurrying, not pursuing, exactly as though they knew where the column was going, because they did.