Meanwhile In Postknight HQ
The maps on Jannick's table had begun to look like prayer rugs — creased, folded, marked with little crosses where hope still lingered. He let the lamp throw its hard circle over the paper and leaned his weight into the wood as if he could press the city's shape back into something livable.
Selvine watched him with the kind of stillness that had no sound. She always looked like stone had been cut into armor and fitted to a person; tonight the stone held news like it was nothing. Jannick read that as calm. Selvine read that as waiting.
"Three months," Jannick said to the map. His voice was a dry thing that had been worked down by too many nights of planning and too few of rest. "Three months, and I haven't had a single clear line to Caldemount in three days."
Selvine's fingers moved, quietly — pulling shut the ledger that listed the rations, checking the tally of stored grain. "The Airknight channels are dead. The gliders were being diverted for days before the breach. The Octaknight relays report interference. The magic-hum the scholars set up — it's being damped." She didn't need to say who was doing the damping; Kreg's name sat on the map in invisible ink.
Jannick laughed, a thin sound that would have been brisk in another life. "Aye. So he's cunning as the stories said. High-jack the skies, cut the land, choke the wires. Next he'll charm the pigeons and ask them to fetch him tea." He jabbed a finger at a painted line where the Borderknights still held. "He's not merely a conqueror. He's a strategist. He finds the seams of what holds us together and rips them open."
Outside, Mailie breathed under curfew. Lantern eyes watched the streets. From the gate you could see the faint flicker of watch fires in the far field where small patrols dared to walk. Inside the Hall, beneath the posters the Postknight staff moved with the compacted panic of people who had learned to hide fear behind tasks.
Selvine rose and crossed to the narrow shelf where a stack of old training logs sat — the kind of paper no one used anymore because everything could be stored on a humming rune, and since the runes had been damped, paper had made a comeback. She opened one and ran a finger down a name.
"Mailie has stores," she said, matter-of-fact. "Food for three months at the current ration rate if we hold the barns. Fuel for two. Ammunition limited. We can stretch food by fifty percent if we cut rations and increase foraging runs, but that risks the scouts."
"And repairs?" Jannick asked. He knew the stakes by heart; asking was a habit. "Tiara and her little crew can make weapons last longer, but they need wire and a glazing set. The smith says he can keep the armors from breaking if we give him copper and oil."
Selvine nodded once. "I spoke with Marlo. He can stretch a pound of alloy into three pounds of reinforcement if the tempering clay holds. But that requires firewood and time. Time is the thing Kreg does not allow us to have."
Jannick scrubbed his jaw with the back of his hand. "We've been hoarding. We were prudent for months. But prudence eats itself when the enemy eats the borders. If Colins had the roads open he'd have supplies on two-hoof by dawn."
Selvine's face softened for one tremulous heartbeat — a crack only Jannick would have seen. "Colins is on it," she said. Her voice kept the words close, as if they could be scraped into shape. "He will find a way. Capatin Seraphine will find a way." Then, because the silence had to be filled, she added: "Do what they would do here."
Jannick looked up so quickly he nearly knocked the lamp. "Do what they would do?" he said. "Seraphine would argue in corridors with Orsic until she bled him of information. Colins would ride before dawn and break a good many rules to find a truth. That's… that's a prescription, not a plan."
Selvine's eyes did not leave his. "Both think in two ways," she said. "One: arrange the facts. Two: move before the facts are settled. Seraphine pulls the rope; Colins cuts it. Between them — strategic and tactical — that's how a system works. A team effort. You must do both. Start pulling and cutting."
He wanted to argue — to insist that appearances mattered, that they could not afford to be rash while the town was hungry. But Selvine's suggestion carried a blunt clarity. He had watched Colins solve knots with stubborn hands and seen Seraphine untangle the soft lies of nobles. If he could be half of both, perhaps Mailie would live another winter.
"Alright," he said at last. "Pull and cut. Pull the people toward safety. Cut the lines the enemy might exploit." He tapped the map where the narrow road to Epac threaded through folds of forest. "Send scouts to the old shepherd paths. If Caldemount cannot answer, maybe the mountain folk can relay. They know using paths that aren't on Kreg's maps."
Selvine's fingers flicked with the small movement that always meant she had committed the thought to action. "I will go," she said. "A small team. I need only them. Nightwalkers. I can move with less notice."
"Selvine—" Jannick stopped. The word was a catch. He pictured the woman slipping through shadow like a shard. She was one of his two A-rankers here. He was not going to send her out like a message without proof.
She met his look levelly. "If not me, then who? You know I am the one they whisper about when a job needs stealth instead of brute force. Also—" she added, rare as a smile, "I owe a favor to the mountaineers."
Jannick's chest hurt in a place that was not only strategy. He thought of the families sleeping in the dormitories, of the infants who woke and did not know the meaning of war yet, of the way Tedric used to clap him on the back and say, "We hold what we can, Jannick." He had promised a town when he had taken his post to shoulder a duty.
"Fine," he said, pushing his chair back with a scrape. "You go. Take Liara with you. A healer is must need in such mission. Also try to avoid K.P.P. checkpoints — Kreg might have captured that too to look for our patterns now. Use shepherd paths to the east and cross to Epac near the ridge where the fog hangs. Do not engage unless you can run. Find Colins if you can. If you cannot, return with one signal feather."
Selvine's expression never broke. "Signal feather?" she echoed. The odd phrase made Jannick smile despite the ache.
"A small red pennon on the third hawthorn from the ridge," he said. "If Colins sees it — he will know we need him. If not — at least Epac will know we were here."
She nodded once, slow and precise. "I will leave at sunrise."
He rose then, and for a moment he was the captain again, the man who had clean lines and clean orders. He checked the map one more time, writing a set of coordinates on a slip of paper. "Take the old watchman's cloak," he said. "It has a hood and it smells of river. People who know the cloth will think you are merely a fisherman."
Selvine tucked the note into her sleeve with a movement so practiced it might have been ritual. "I will take river cloth and the cloak," she said. "I will return before the ration watch."
Jannick hesitated with the weight of everything that might go wrong. "Bring Liara back. She's young and quick. Don't let her get lost under the ridge fog."
Brave, loyal Liara — she'd been tasked with errands and helping and healing people wherever she is needed.
He wanted to say more. He wanted to remind her of mundane things.
Selvine turned to go and paused in the doorway. For one breath Jannick thought he might see something unguarded on her face: a flash of worry for someone not there, for someone out in the same tangle he feared. She did not speak the name. She did not need to.
When the door closed behind her, Jannick sat back down and let himself breathe like a man who had been given no choice but to move. He assigned runners to check the east shepherd paths, set the smith to temper blades for small knives and not great lances — city knives for close work — ordered that the market square be opened for ration distribution tomorrow to keep panic from becoming a mob, and wrote a list of names to send as low-profile couriers disguised as traders.