Due sent the runner before the lamp was out.

He wrote the note himself, refusing to let anyone else look over his shoulder while he sealed it. Elara would have read it anyway if it had been left out, and Due knew that, so he folded the parchment in three, pressed the wax himself, and handed it to the runner with both hands.

The runner was a boy from the Oasis of Grain, thirteen or maybe fourteen, and he did not ask what was inside. He simply nodded once and slipped out into the full dark.

"Two days," said Due, watching the door close behind him.

Alistair clicked his tongue. "It will be three. Sable doesn’t make a habit of being on time, no matter what reputation she keeps."

"It will be two. She has been waiting for us to ask, and you know how she is when she’s been waiting."

Alistair did not argue with him about that. Due was usually right about Sable, and arguing with him about her was a losing battle Alistair had stopped picking.

The next day was the slowest day of Alistair’s adult life. The base did the work of a base, and that was about all you could say for it.

Elara cleaned blades that did not need cleaning, sharpening already-keen edges. Silas wrote in the small black notebook he kept tucked inside the lining of his coat, and he did not speak unless he was spoken to.

Due read every dispatch as it came, answered the two that needed answering, and set the rest aside.

Alistair was restless, although he refused to show it on his face.

’It is strange how waiting wears the most on people. Battles are simpler than this.’

The runner came back on the second day, as Due had said he would.

The boy did not come up the main path. Instead, he came up the back side of the field, the way Sable’s couriers always reached a base that mattered. He delivered the answer to Due with his head down, then was gone again before any of them could ask about his journey, which is how Sable trains her people.

Due unsealed the parchment at the table. The others did not sit, they stood with their hands at their sides, waiting.

He read it through twice. The first time was quick, and the second was slower than the first. He did not look up between the readings, which told Alistair more than the page itself was going to.

Eventually, Due laid the parchment flat on the table without turning it toward anyone in particular. Following that, he read out the lines he wanted them to hear in his own voice rather than Sable’s.

"The mark," said Due, "is an Upholder advance-scout symbol. They carve it into the territory of any faction they have decided to formally assess. It is the first part of an assessment, and the second part is the verdict."

Elara had not crossed her arms in the room. Hearing this, she crossed them now. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

"So they are coming," she said.

"They are already on their way."

"With how many men, Due?"

"Sable does not list a number of soldiers. The Upholders do not move with armies for an assessment, only with witnesses, and the number she gives is a number of Justicars instead."

"And what is that number?" asked Alistair.

"Five of them."

Silas, by the door, did not change his expression. Regardless, Alistair noticed the way he didn’t change it, which was the same as if he had. Silas had braced for that number, or one close to it, well before Due read it out loud.

Due wasn’t finished.

"The mark on our edge is not an invitation to negotiate, nor a warning for us to leave. They have already decided that an assessment is necessary, and they are coming to issue the verdict in person."

"A verdict," repeated Elara in a low voice. "They never reverse a verdict once it’s drawn up, do they."

"Never, no, not in their entire history."

"Where will they stage?" asked Alistair.

"Caelmar. Verissan, to be exact. Sable lists two noble houses already positioned to receive the delegation in their townhouses, and the date the Upholders are expected inside the walls."

"And when is that date?"

"Six weeks out."

Alistair took the parchment from Due and read the rest of it himself, line by line, in his own time. Sable had been thorough, the way she always was. She listed the timing on the staging, the projected route through the eastern hills, the names of all five Justicars, the two Caelmari noble houses, and the date the delegation was expected inside Verissan.

At the bottom of the page, Sable had done a thing she did not always do. She had added a line that was not part of the question Due had asked her.

"They are led now by a man named Aldous Blackwood."

Alistair read the line three times. Following that, he read it once more just to be sure he hadn’t misread it. He did not lift his head, and he did not move at all for several breaths.

Alistair was honestly unsettled, although nothing of it reached his face.

The room was watching him without seeming to be watching him. Elara had not uncrossed her arms, Due had not moved his hand from the table, and Silas was still by the door, quiet as a piece of the wall behind him.

"Alistair," said Due carefully, "is something the matter with that name?"

Alistair set the parchment back down and turned it so the bottom line faced him and not the others, even though all of them had already read it.

’Aldous Blackwood. Of all the names still walking around alive, it has to be his.’

"I knew him," said Alistair, and he meant for those three words to be all he was willing to give them for now.

Due opened his mouth and then closed it again, deciding the rest would come when it came. Elara’s expression changed slightly, however, not sharply, only enough that Alistair caught it on his way past her toward the door.

Silas stepped out of his way without being asked. He didn’t look at Alistair as he passed, but his eyes flicked once to the line at the bottom of the page, and the smallest line appeared between his brows that Alistair had ever seen him show, and then it was gone again as if it had never been there.

Alistair went outside without his coat.

The door of the base closed quietly behind him, and the cold met him on the steps the same way it had met him on the Black Mountains years ago. The only difference this time was that the cold had a name attached to it.

The fields beyond the base lay flat and black under the sky.

Somewhere east of him the slab with the carving was still pointed at nothing, and at the other end of that pointed-away signature, a man named Aldous Blackwood, the High Justicar, had decided that Sun Harvest was a faction worth coming to read a verdict over.

Alistair stood outside for a long time.

Eventually, the lamp inside went out, although he did not notice the exact moment.

He noticed only that when he turned back toward the door, Elara was already sitting at the table in the dark, waiting for him.

She did not speak when he stepped through the doorway, and Alistair understood why, because Elara was not the type to ask first.

She would ask, eventually, and when she did, Alistair would have to find an answer to give her, one that didn’t open a door he had spent a decade trying to keep shut.