It was back at the Watcher’s Eye, the morning after the attack, he would later learn. The squire awoke in a bed he didn’t know, in a place he’d never been, to a Gildmane unlike anything he’d ever seen of the man. His cheeks were pale, his eyes sunken, his armour dented and caked with mud. In his hands was a shallow box stacked with parchment, a quill and ink pot, a stick of wax, and the Cross’s signet. Promptly, Trey dropped it onto the squire’s lap. That was weeks ago, yet even sitting alone, passenger with cargo and stow away rats, Ogdon tensed his jaw in memory of the jolt bursting forth from his broken ankle.
“Wake up,” the captain said, “It’s passed time you were made useful. I need half a hundred copies of the unsigned letter, one for each of the names on that list. And you’ll find a few notes already sealed; you’ll be holding onto those as well, at least until we arrive at Quiet Harbor. Find a ship set for Aestas as soon as we dock. I want these letter gone by the time we arrive.”
Mad from fever and his throbbing foreleg, Sylvertre propped himself up in the sickbed and grumbled, “I’m not a damned scribe. Do it yourself.”
For a moment, Trey stared, taken aback—as was his squire. Neither man, it seemed, believed Ogdon had the backbone. The captain sighed, “Now’s not the time for your balls to drop. The Cross needs this done, and it needs it done now, and I can’t be seen doing it myself.” He stopped to scan the barracks, and only then did Sylvertre notice the two of them were alone. “Don’t you realize what kind of firestorm we’ll be walking into when we return to Pareo?”
He hadn’t realized, not then, but he hid his surprise and agreed to the task and swore never to speak to anyone of the letters, even Gildmane.
Then days went by, and they changed their route. Neither Jael nor Ogdon could ride through the northern moors with their injuries, and there was the captain’s bounty to contend with. So they took the Watchers’ offer to escort them south disguised as spice farmers shipping cinnamon around the western cape. By carriage and riverboat, they arrived at the mouth of the Serpent’s Southern Fork, boarded a trade vessel at the way port, and thence were bound north for Quiet Harbor.
Those were arduous, hushed, lethargic days wading water and woods. Hardly a word was spoken. No matter how Ogdon provoked the members of the Cross, they glared, sullen or loathsome, till he spoke a word too far and suffered a verbal reprimand—usually from the captain—and after he’d recall bitterly the secret burden placed upon him. Is this treason? he’d pondered, his mind stretched thin between disparate desires: wielding Trey’s letters like a dagger in the back and learning the mystery behind Jael’s condition. The last time he and Leonhardt conversed was before the brackdragon attack—which, to his knowledge, she’d survived unscathed. Then he woke up to discover her battered and broken with deep gouges on either side of her face. Gildmane was to blame, such was obvious to him, yet no one dared utter a thing, not about the clerics’ raid nor Jael’s wounds. Not until they boarded the Cape Ibis at a south-western way port did he uncover the truth.
It was the captain’s loose tongue whom proved the traitor in a missive addressed to Bishop Ba’al. Gildmane couldn’t help himself, it seemed that he was overwhelmed, over his head in politics and intrigue—and witchery. Sylvertre had not believed it at first, thought it must be a trick of the light or his imagining, like those illusory demons on the Serpent’s Head: shadows and cobwebs and the scratching of rat feet turning the Ibis’s cargo hold into a cavern replete with malignant beasts. It’s just my imagination, he reasoned, reading and rereading. But what Trey had written remained the same.
His Grace Bishop Ba’al of the Faithful’s Cathedral,
When you told me I would see it with my own eyes, I thought you meant that I would be an old man before it all began. You had not warned me that it would be my own hands to build the new temple. Perhaps you did not know, for I only learned by the rumored words of a dead man written on burial cloth. I saw them myself, heretical things, like an exile’s daughter being admitted into an order of holy knights. Yet this too has come to pass, and since then the seeds of discord and strife have been sewn, false prophets have bled, and demons roam the earth. It seems as though God’s plan shall progress without you. I’ll do everything I can in service of this, what little that is, until your return. I pray that is soon.
May soon his kingdom come,
Knight Paladin and Captain of the Saint’s Cross, Trey Gildmane
Ogdon wasted more days than he’d like to admit fretting what in the end he concluded was nothing more than coded language. A revolt. It was the only rational answer, and he plans to use Jael to do it. Such was confirmed in the other notes: an order of blunt arms and measurements for plate harness, and a letter addressed to Johan and Ariel Stoltz—the duke and duchess of castle Aestas, lord and lady of more than a quarter of the country—Trey’s uncle by marriage and aunt by blood. And all the letters to be copied over the voyage, invitations to a grand ball at the castle to celebrate a revolutionary event.
It was time. Sylvertre gathered together the letters in a bundle, counted again the coins in his purse, and hobbled on a crutch
