Chapter 93

Alistair was at the door before Elara finished speaking.

He went out the side, low, scan running its full circuit, the offset catching at his right side the way it always caught and being adjusted for the way it always had to be adjusted. The territory’s edge was three minutes’ walk at his usual pace. He went faster than that.

Due was a half-step behind him. Silas was not visible, which meant he was already gone in the direction that mattered, the only direction that ever mattered when Silas moved during a problem.

Elara was the only one inside, and she was inside because she was the one with the cleanest political read on whatever was about to walk through the door.

The eastern fence line was a low stone perimeter that Sun Harvest had built in three weeks and had not bothered to make taller because the perimeter was not meant to keep things out. It was meant to mark where the territory began.

A figure was standing at the perimeter, alone.

Hooded, but not hiding. The hood was thrown back enough that Alistair could see the lower half of the face, and the figure’s hands were both visible at their sides, and they were not holding anything.

Alistair’s scan returned a Characteristic reading, it was a mid-grade, and... trained.

Suppressed in the careful way Characteristic users learned to suppress in occupied territory.

He did not recognize it.

However, the figure recognized him. Their eyes tracked him from the moment he came over the rise, and they did not move from where they were standing.

Three more readings flickered at the edge of his scan.

"Three more," he said quietly to Due.

"I felt the obligation forming a few minutes ago," Due replied. "It did not form clean. They have not decided what they want yet."

"Or they are pretending they have not decided."

"That is also possible."

They reached the perimeter.

The figure at the fence line was a woman in her late twenties, wearing a travel coat that was dust-stained, with dark hair pulled back.

Plain Rune Sword at her hip, sheathed, the hilt set with a marking Alistair did not recognize. Not Therasia’s. Not Elysium’s.

Not the Upholders’.

He scanned for the marking, and his memory returned nothing.

"You are Alistair Thorne," the woman said.

"I am."

"I am here to deliver a message. I am not here to fight you. The three behind the rise are not here to fight you either. They are here because I asked them to be here, because I do not walk into Sun Harvest’s territory alone, and they will leave when I leave."

Alistair did not lower his scan.

"From whom?"

"From a faction you have not heard of. We have heard of you. We have been hearing about you for six weeks."

Due’s hands had stopped moving entirely.

"Which faction?" said Due.

The woman looked at him.

"That is in the message."

She slowly produced a folded paper from inside her coat, ensuring both hands were visible at all times. She did not approach the perimeter; instead, she placed the paper on the stone and stepped back.

"Read it now or read it later," she said. "I have been told to wait until you have read it before I leave. I am told to answer questions. I am told not to insist on answers if the questions are not asked."

Seeing this restraint, Alistair was reluctantly impressed. He walked forward. Picked up the paper. Stepped back.

He read it.

The faction was named in the first line. He did not recognize the name. Due, reading over his shoulder, also did not recognize the name.

Silas, who surfaced at the perimeter at some point during the reading without any of them noticing him surface, also did not recognize the name.

The location was in the second line, south. Three weeks’ fast travel.

Within the continent’s southern arc, a region nobody at the table had been thinking about.

The third line was the message itself.

The faction had read the Record’s continental coverage. They had read it carefully.

They had been reading the Record for thirty years and had a long interest in the way the Record’s language shifted around new factions, and the way the language had shifted around Sun Harvest in the most recent dispatch had been the specific shift the faction had been waiting for.

They wanted to acknowledge Sun Harvest formally. Not an alliance. Not a treaty. An acknowledgment.

The fourth line was a request.

They wanted to send a representative to the ritual.

Alistair’s eyes widened.

He read the fourth line three times.

Due, beside him, was very still.

Silas spoke first.

"They know about the ritual."

"They do," Alistair confirmed.

"Nobody outside the four of us knows the date."

"Nobody outside the four of us, Tavin, and Sera," said Due. "And neither of them would tell."

"Then who told them?" Alistair asked.

The woman at the perimeter had been listening without pretending not to listen. She was not unkind about it. She was simply not pretending.

"You will read in the fifth line who told us," she said.

Alistair looked at the fifth line.

He read it once.

Then again.

His grip tightened around the edge of the paper, and at the same moment, his jaw clenched, and Due saw both of these things and did not say anything because Due had learned, over months, that there were certain pieces of information Alistair would speak about in his own time and certain pieces he would never speak about, and the difference between the two was readable on Alistair’s hands more than on his face.

The fifth line was a name.

The same name Alistair had read that morning in the small item set off by itself on the right side of the continental section.

The Upholders’ name. The accelerated movement’s leader.

Someone Alistair had once known well.

’Four weeks,’ Alistair thought. ’Four weeks, and they have already moved a piece. They are already telling other factions things about us. They are already in the room.’

He looked up at the woman.

"Tell your faction we will read this and we will respond," he said. "Tell them the date of the ritual will not change. Tell them whether a representative attends will depend on what is in the response."

The woman nodded once.

"That is what I was told to expect."

She stepped back from the perimeter. The three readings behind the rise pulled away with her, in formation, neither aggressive nor casual. They moved with the quiet of a unit that had done this before.

Within five minutes, they were gone from his scan.

Alistair stood at the perimeter for another minute.

Due, beside him, said: "The leader of the accelerated movement. He is sending messages to factions on our behalf. Without telling us."

"He is."

"That is either generous or controlling. Sometimes both."

"It is both," Alistair said quietly.

He folded the paper, placed it in his coat, and looked at the spot where the figures had been.

’He is announcing himself,’ Alistair thought. ’He has not arrived yet, and he is already making sure I cannot pretend he is not coming.’

The wind came thin across the perimeter.

Behind them, the door of the base was open, and Elara was standing in it, and the candle in the eastern window was already lit.