POV - Rasa
Rasa Ferrant had learned, eleven years into this war, that an evacuating city sounds exactly like a market day, until you listen for what's missing.
Wagon wheels, still. Dogs barking at things that used to be normal and weren't anymore. The gulls hadn't left — gulls never left, not for anything short of the tide going out for good — but there was no bargaining under it, no children shouting over a fish stall, no laughter carrying two streets over the way it did in a city that expected to still be there tomorrow.
Callmoor's market square was full of noise and empty of the thing that made noise worth listening to.
She stood at the head of the convoy road with the district manifest in one hand and watched the last of the Fennmoor quarter file past — forty-one names, forty-one people, three handcarts and one mule that had clearly decided this was the worst day of its life and wasn't shy about announcing it.
Kell Marrow found her there, mud to his knees, looking like a man who hadn't slept since the order came down — broad-shouldered and dark-skinned, built like the dockworker he'd been before the militia took him, with a short beard he kept meaning to shave off and never did.
"Fennmoor's clear," he said. "That's the last quarter on schedule. Everything east of the temple road is done."
"And west?"
"West's the problem. It's always west." He didn't need to say why. West was where Garreth Pelham lived, and Garreth Pelham had spent every one of the last six days walking his own district list door to door, in person, refusing to be evacuated until he'd personally confirmed every name on it was accounted for.
"How many left on his list?"
"Six, this morning. Might be four by now." Kell rubbed the back of his neck. "He found an old woman hiding in a cellar off Coopers' Row yesterday who wasn't even on anyone's manifest. If he hadn't gone looking himself, she'd still be there when the Kessenites walk in."
"That's not the point, Kell."
"I know it's not the point." He said it quietly, which was worse than if he'd argued. "I'm just telling you what he did with the day, since you're going to ask me to tell him to stop doing it."
Rasa looked west, toward the part of the city that should have been empty two days ago, and weighed the same cost she'd been weighing since dawn. Every hour Pelham's rearguard held here was an hour the Reach road carried Callmoor's last stragglers slower than the schedule allowed for, which was an hour closer to a closure Sennardt wasn't going to delay for anyone, councilor's orders or not.
"Get me eyes on him," she said. "I want to talk to him myself before I decide anything."
—
She'd been eleven when the first frontier village fell, and twenty-six when the militia promoted her past men who'd been soldiers since before she was born, because the war had stopped having patience for anyone who couldn't actually do the job regardless of whose son they were.
She understood men like Pelham well enough — Ostrahaven had raised her two streets from a house not so different from his, close enough to see the shape of that kind of loyalty without ever once being invited to share in it. She didn't begrudge him the stubbornness. She just didn't have the time left to admire it properly, not with her own city's evacuation still a week out on the same schedule she was currently losing.
She found him exactly where Kell said she would — on Coopers' Row, going door to door with a list in a shaking hand, though whether the shake was age or the cold coming off the harbor, Rasa genuinely couldn't say. He was pale-skinned and white-haired, stooped enough now that he had to tip his whole head back to meet her eyes, in a coat too fine for the mud he was standing in and too old to still fit properly across shoulders that had once been broader than they were now.
"Lord Pelham."
"Commander." He didn't look up from the list. "Number forty, the Cutler house. I have it as vacated three days past, but the manifest's got a child's name on it I don't recognize, so either someone forgot to strike her or someone forgot to take her, and I intend to find out which before I leave this street."
"That's what your militia escort is for."
"My militia escort has more than forty other streets to worry about and no reason to remember one child's name over another's." He finally looked at her, and there was nothing frail in the look, whatever his hands were doing. "You'd have every one of your soldiers double-checking every door if you thought you could spare them for it. You can't. I can. That's the whole of my usefulness to you at this point, Commander, so I'd appreciate you letting me keep it."
She had no good answer to that, because it was true, and because some small, unprofessional part of her respected it more than she was willing to say out loud in front of a man whose stubbornness was about to cost her the one thing she couldn't afford to lose, which was time.
"I have a schedule, my lord."
"I have a city." He went back to the list. "I've buried three generations of Pelhams in the Coopers' Row chapel, Commander, and I will not be the one who leaves someone's grandmother behind in it because a schedule said the ledger was close enough. When the list is clear, I go. Not before."
She was still working out what to say to that when a rider came down the street at a pace that meant the news wasn't good, and Rasa's whole body went cold before she'd even made out who he rode for.
Slate wool, not militia canvas — a guild-council rider, a small silver scale-and-chain pinned at the collar where a militia coat would have had nothing at all.
"Commander Ferrant." The rider was younger than her, breathless, holding a sealed order like it might bite him. "Councilor Voss is a half hour behind me. She asks that no rearguard element withdraw from Callmoor until she arrives."
"On whose authority."
"Hers, Commander. She said you'd ask that."
—
Voss arrived exactly on time, which was somehow the most infuriating thing about her — she was never late for the moments that cost Rasa the most. She dismounted like the whole exercise mildly bored her, pale-skinned and sharp-eyed, silver going grey at her temples under a hood she hadn't bothered to lower against the harbor wind, dressed for the road in wool too well-cut to have come from anywhere but Vantar.
"You've heard the situation," Rasa said, before Voss had finished handing off her reins. "Lord Pelham won't leave until his list is clear. I don't have the time to wait on it."
"I know." Voss didn't look at the aide taking the horse, the particular economy of a woman who'd learned early that watching servants work was a waste of her own attention. "Which is why I've come to ask you not to make him."
"That's not a request I can grant, Councilor. I have a closure window at the Reach that isn't negotiable, and every hour Pelham's rearguard sits here is an hour I'm stealing from Ostrahaven's schedule next week."
"And if word gets back to Vantar that the militia dragged Garreth Pelham out of his own city against his will while he was still trying to account for his own people —" Voss let that sit a moment. "Do you know what that does to Ostrahaven's evacuation next week, Commander? Or Dunwick's the week after?
People go quietly when they trust that the order means what it says. The order means everyone gets out, no one's left behind, do what you're told and you'll be safe. The day that stops being true even once, in public, with a name people recognize, you don't have an evacuation schedule anymore. You have a panic with a schedule glued on top of it."
Rasa hated, with a specific and professional hatred, that this was a good argument.
"So what would you have me do."
"Give him a few more hours. Quietly. Reframe the rearguard's presence as protecting his effort, not indulging it — that's a story the council can use either way it ends. And if it doesn't clear in time —" Voss's voice didn't change at all, which was its own kind of answer. "Then it doesn't clear in time, and that's a loss the council can also use, provided it isn't yours."
"Provided it isn't mine."
"You're very good at your job, Commander. We need capable people alive if we are going to survive." Voss finally looked at her directly. "I'm not your enemy in this."
"No," Rasa said. "You're just the reason I don't get to have a schedule."
It wasn't a smart thing to say to a councilor's face, and she was still working out what it would cost her later when the second rider came in from the Reach road, harder and faster than the first, and she knew from the pace alone, before he'd said a single word, that whatever margin she thought she'd had left this morning had just gotten smaller.
"Commander." He didn't wait to catch his breath. "Forward scouts sighted a Kessenite cavalry column, three hundred strong, eight miles north of the Marchcombe crossing. Warlord Corvel's compressing the Reach closure by a full day. You have until tomorrow sunset, not the day after."
"Get Kell," she said. "Tell him I need every soldier we can spare on Pelham's district in the next hour, checking doors twice as fast as one old man can manage on his own."
"And if he still won't leave once it's clear?"
Rasa didn't answer that. She was already walking toward Coopers' Row, where four names stood between one stubborn old man and the last safe road out of a city of nineteen thousand she'd very nearly finished emptying.