Tisis was standing at the map table with him. “Yeah, these three for sure, and I’m checking into these ones now.”
“They are,” Kip said.
“How do you . . . ?”
But he barely heard her. This darkness on the map had hid an enormous threat. What if there were another?
“Something’s missing,” Kip said. “Something . . . Cruxer, was there ever any emissary from the White King? Someone that the soldiers stopped? Any news of someone being waylaid by angry townspeople?”
“Uh-uh,” Cruxer said.
“Why would there be?” Ben-hadad asked. Kip hadn’t even noticed that Ben had come back into the room. “We just routed them. And then they tried to assassinate you.”
Kip said, “There should be an emissary here to distract and confuse us. To sow discord if any could be sown. Not least, to try to see what condition the city’s in.”
“Koios surely expected you to execute anyone he sent,” Cruxer said. “Lawless men expect lawless treatment.”
Kip shook his head. “He doesn’t mind sacrificing people. It’s something else.”
He looked at the map again. Advanced it. Rolled it all the way back to the battle of Ox Ford, nearly two years ago now. Advanced it again.
The reports lit up, beacons against a night of ignorance, cairns on a climb with precipices on every side. He squinted until the lights blurred, new lights appearing and old fading away as the reports aged and the map advanced time. It was like clouds passing over a night sky, blotting out the stars and revealing others. But some places stayed ever-black, little bits of the evernight, of eternal ignorance and blindness.
If you screened out a few reports, which could well be there to distract, then . . . the darkness had a shape.
There was an area of coastline almost entirely dark.
“What were those four reports? Here?” he asked Tisis.
She went back to the very beginning of one of her folders and told him some names. They had no meaning to him.
He pursed his lips.
She said, “But that was when I was just getting my networks set up. I didn’t have many sources yet.”
“Whose lands are those?” he asked.
She hadn’t written that down, but she knew this satrapy well. She searched her memory for a few moments. “These ones are Red Leaf lands, a forest and farmland. This is Conal Briar Wood’s estate, and this is old Aoife Bracken’s grazing land, if she’s still alive and it hasn’t shifted to her stepson’s family, uh, they’re . . . Petrakoi? Alexandros Petrakis. Yeah.”
“Shit,” he said. He’d been hoping there was some connection with something, anything.
“Kip, they’re both retainers to the Red Leafs.”
“Shiiit,” Kip said.
He darkened those four lights on the map, and now there was a blank area, east of Ox Ford. “What’s this town near the coast?”
“Azuria, or maybe Apple Grove. Azuria Bay used to be a port until the harbor silted in. The moorage was a bit of a way up the river, can’t remember the name. But it didn’t generate enough revenue for the locals to be able to afford dredging it, and there are a lot of rocks farther out that made captains leery of it in the first place, so it slowly shriveled up and died. Apple Grove is the next village over, maybe a league away?”
Kip chortled.
“Oh ho. Master Danavis would be so disappointed in me. Cruxer, what do you do when your enemy is making a mistake?”
“Don’t interrupt them,” Cruxer said. “You taught us that a long time ago.”
“Tisis, show me the language you’ve worked out with Ambassador Red Leaf.”
He looked it over and clapped his hands. Good play, enemy mine! It almost worked.
“Well, you were wrong, Commander,” Kip said.
“How so?”
“The White King did send his emissary. Ambassador Red Leaf is a traitor.”
“What?!” Tisis asked. “But he gave us everything!”
“Everything to snare us,” Kip said. “Commander, what message do you think those assassins were sending when they failed on purpose?”
Cruxer’s brow furrowed. He still didn’t buy that they had.
“Look,” Kip said. “Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that they intended to fail . . . but didn’t intend to die. What would you take from that?”
“Uh . . . ‘Don’t mess with the Order, or we’ll get you next time’?”
“Right. So where’s the last place you’d go if you didn’t want to run afoul of the Order?”
“Braxos?” Cruxer asked.
“Well, yes, yes . . . But you know, maybe a living city that someone might actually go to.”
Cruxer shrugged. “I dunno. It’s not like the Order publicly lets anyone know where their headquarters are.”
“You’re not really helping me here,” Kip said. “How about if I said I wanted to go to the Chromeria? Would you be more or less afraid of the Order than if we stay here?”
“More, definitely.”
“Thank you!” Kip looked at the treaty. “And this treaty commits me to take all our troops to lift the siege of Green Haven—and go with them personally.”
“But that’s where we want to go,” Cruxer said.
“Right. Or we could stay here. There’s a million reasons to stay here. A million problems to solve. A bandit army, for one. And what were they trying to do—before Daragh the Coward so kindly betrayed Koios and handed them over to us?”
Cruxer said, “Trying to trap us in the city so we couldn’t go help lift the siege?”
“No,” Kip said. “They don’t care if we tried to lift the siege or if we fought here. They’re armor, see?”
“ ‘Armor’?”
“But not just any armor! We thought they were blocking the Great River to keep out new threats from without—reinforcements and supplies and everything else. Now, it does do that, but that’s not the main purpose. The White King hasn’t thrown his whole might at Green Haven. Why not? He split his forces rather than overwhelm the city. Why? Because if he took the city, we would know that we had no chance of taking it back. So we wouldn’t even try. See?
“He didn’t block the river to keep things from coming in. His blockade is to keep something dangerous from going out. Do you see it now? We’re trapped in a closet. Three walls, one door—and he knows what I’m going to do: either stay in here afraid, or rush out the door he shows us. He doesn’t care which!”
“What do you mean?” Cruxer said. “Of course he cares!”
“I’m not saying he doesn’t have preferences. He’d love for us to sit in this city and do nothing so his people can take Green Haven. But even if we save Green Haven—even if we push his forces out of Blood Forest entirely, how can we hold it if he holds the Great River and the rest of the Seven Satrapies?”
“Orholam’s hoary head,” Ben-hadad said. “That harbor. Cruxer, what do we know about the bane? I don’t mean religiously. I mean practically, for war.”
Cruxer scowled. “They lock down drafters of their color.”