The wagons slowed before the pinch the way animals slowed when a path narrowed and the world started offering fewer exits.
Brann did not let them drift into it on habit. His hand stayed raised, palm down, steady as a post.
Hold meant hold.
The oxen breathed white and stamped once, annoyed at being denied the simple relief of forward motion. The older road was firmer here, packed hard by years of wheels, but the stone shoulders ahead rose on both sides like damp knuckles and stole the only thing a wagon ever truly needed.
Space.
Eryk held Wagon Two's front corner until Brann's eyes touched him.
Then Brann made a small motion. Forward.
Not into the pinch. Just close enough to read what was waiting.
Eryk stepped out two paces ahead of the wheel line, slow as if he were only easing stiff legs. The moment he left the wagon's shadow, his ankle reminded him it still existed. The wrap held. The joint did not forgive. His boot found a slick patch of packed earth and slid half an inch.
He caught himself fast, shoulders still, mouth closed around the curse.
Useful. Quiet. Alive.
The stone shoulders were not cut walls and not a gorge. They were old runoff work, soil washed away over years until slick rock and hard earth remained. Water had narrowed this track and time had kept it narrow. Brush crowded both sides, wet and thick growth that made lines easy to hide and men easy to lose.
Eryk kept his eyes down.
The powder was there. Bright against damp. A scatter where the road dipped, a cleaner streak tight to stone where wind could not steal it. It was not meant to warn.
It was meant to bring hands to the same place, again and again, until it worked.
Beneath the leaf litter near the right shoulder, he saw the straightness.
Not a rope visible. Not a cord catching light.
Just the shape of a lie under leaves.
He stopped with his boot half raised and set it down somewhere else.
His throat tightened. He lifted one hand low, a signal meant for one man.
Fenn was already watching him. Fenn always watched the ground when Eryk moved ahead.
Eryk tapped two fingers against his own thigh, then pointed down. Sharp. Brief.
Line.
Fenn came up behind him without hurry, sleeve pulled down over his wrist. He crouched close and breathed through his mouth like even smelling was work. The captain moved up on the left, knife still out, body angled so she could turn her head without shifting her feet. Brann stayed by the oxen's heads, where he could move the convoy if he had to, and stop it if he did not.
Eryk followed the straightness with his eyes.
If the line ran across the road, it was not meant to trip a man. It was meant to speak to something heavier. A stored log. A net. A rope thrown at a wheel the instant the wagons committed.
He tracked it to where leaf litter thickened against the right shoulder.
There, in a crack between two stones, he saw a wedge of darker earth pressed tight.
A peg.
Not hammered into soil. Anchored into stone.
Practice.
Eryk leaned back toward Fenn, mouth close to cloth and axle grease.
"Anchor," he breathed. "Right. In the crack."
Fenn's fingers tightened once on nothing, then he nodded.
The captain's eyes stayed on the brush. "Set into stone means it's meant to take pull."
"Wheel," Fenn murmured.
Brann's voice carried low from behind them. "How many."
Eryk did not look up. Looking up made you a head before it made you a man. "At least one line. Powder marks it. They want us to roll in."
Sella did not appear, but her presence pressed down from above like weight on air. Then her voice came from somewhere up the left shoulder, quiet and certain.
"Two in right brush," she said. "Low. Waiting to throw. One crossbow farther back. Watching the decision."
Brann did not move. "Gray?"
"Not his voice," Sella answered. "Not yet."
Garr slid into view at the edge of the left shoulder, broad shoulders making him look like the road had grown a boulder. He lifted his chin toward the right brush line without speaking. The captain shifted her knife hand. The blade caught a pale slat of light, then dulled again.
Brann lowered his hand. Not a signal to go. A signal that fear was no longer steering.
"Work," Brann said.
One word, and the shape of the convoy changed. They stopped being prey waiting for a bite and became people doing a job.
Fenn eased forward on his knees and reached for the leaf litter with the edge of his sleeve. He pulled it back inch by inch until the cord's faint rise became an actual line. It was thin, not twine, treated and dark with a slight gloss. The kind that did not fray easily. It sat half buried where boots and wheels would find it without seeing it.
The captain leaned closer. "Cut it and see what moves."
Fenn did not cut. He glanced at Eryk once, quick and flat, then pointed with two fingers toward where the cord vanished into the stone crack.
"Not yet," he whispered. "They'll feel it."
Behind them, Harl made a noise like he wanted to speak and hated himself for wanting it. He tried anyway, keeping it small. "So we ask the line nicely?"
Garr answered without looking back. "Shut."
Harl shut up. This time he did it before Brann had to spend a hand signal on him.
Brann stepped forward at last, stopping just behind Eryk. He crouched, hands hovering near the ground, fingers spread as if measuring a space that did not want to be measured. Then he stood.
"We don't cut," Brann said. "We take hands first."
The captain's gaze flicked to him. "How."
Brann's eyes went to Garr. "Right brush. Quiet."
Garr nodded once like he had been waiting for permission to do what he already intended. He did not charge. He did not crawl. He stepped into the brush at a place where leaves had been disturbed in a way most men would miss.
Eryk caught it only because his job had made him obsessive.
Garr vanished.
The pinch went still.
Behind Eryk, the convoy settled into silence. Oxen quieting. Men shifting weight and freezing again. The Company rider's horse stamped once and was soothed by a low voice.
Time pressed at the back of Eryk's mind like a thumb.
Second bell. Earlier gate.
He hated how much that clock mattered. He hated that Gray could make a day shorter with paper and a rumor. He hated that his own ankle had become another lever someone else could pull.
Brann spoke without turning. "Fenn. Find the second."
Fenn's eyes narrowed. "There is one."
"There's always more than one," Brann said.
Eryk looked again.
Powder at the edge. Cord under leaf. Anchor in stone.
If the first line was meant to catch a wheel, the second would catch the correction. A loop for the yoke. A line on the opposite side. Something you only met once you adjusted.
He shifted his gaze forward by inches.
The road dipped deeper into the pinch. The stone shoulders rose higher there, slick with damp, and the brush leaned in close enough to snag cloth. On the left edge, tucked where leaf met rock, he saw another dusting of powder. Thinner than the first. Almost careless.
Almost.
He pointed.
Fenn followed his finger and exhaled through his teeth. "There."
The captain's eyes flicked up the shoulder line. "If we keep kneeling, that crossbow takes a head."
As if to agree, a bolt struck packed dirt ten paces ahead and quivered half sunk.
A warning.
Not killing. Not yet.
The rider made a small sound that died as soon as it was born. The captain turned her head a fraction, and his throat locked around whatever else he had planned.
Brann's voice stayed calm. "They want us to rush."
Another bolt hit stone and snapped with a sharp clink. Grit fell in a brief rain.
Sella's bowstring whispered.
A wet gasp answered from the brush, someone behind cover who had shifted wrong or leaned out too far.
No cheer. No call.
Just one fewer hand.
The crossbow did not fire again immediately, but Eryk could feel it still there, held and waiting. A patient eye with a hard point.
Brann lifted two fingers toward Wagon Two.
"Crate," he said.
Fenn looked back. "Which."
Brann's gaze stayed on the pinch. "The one that bites."
Eryk's stomach tightened.
The corrosive. The spill from yesterday. The clear wetness that hissed and made leaves curl.
Fenn did not hesitate. He climbed Wagon Two's sideboard, found the crate that had been weeping its sharp smell even through sealed wood, and dragged it to the edge.
The rider lurched forward. "No—"
The captain angled her knife toward him without moving far. Her voice was quiet and absolute.
"Sit."
He sat, stunned by how quickly his mouth had become a liability.
Fenn set the crate down hard enough that the wood groaned, but not hard enough to break it. He pried the lid up with his knife tip, careful, like a man opening a sleeping animal's cage.
Inside, glass clinked.
Small bottles nested in straw, each wrapped in waxed cloth, each sealed with the same blue wax Eryk had seen smeared on the messenger's pouch.
Company work.
Fenn lifted one bottle by the cloth and held it out.
Brann did not take it right away. He looked at Eryk.
"You're sure the anchor's stone."
Eryk nodded. The crack was still there in his mind's eye. The pressed earth. The wedge.
Brann took the bottle, turned it once in his hand as if testing weight, then handed it to the captain.
Her fingers tightened around it.
"Pour on stone," Brann said. "Not on the road. Not on leaf. Into the crack."
The captain nodded and moved.
Low. Smooth.
Her boots found the places Eryk had already chosen, stepping around the cord without brushing it. At the crack she crouched and peeled the cloth back enough to expose the bottle's mouth.
The smell rose the instant the seal broke.
Thin. Angry. Clean.
Her footing slipped on wet rock, just a small slide of leather on slick stone, and her shoulder bumped the brush. Leaves whispered against her sleeve.
A mistake you could die for.
She stopped herself with her free hand against the stone, breath steady, then poured anyway as if nothing had happened.
A narrow line disappeared into the crack like the rock drank it.
For a moment nothing.
Then a faint hiss crawled out, steady and wrong. Damp stone around the crack paled in irregular blooms.
The cord's tension changed.
Not by sight. By feeling.
Eryk felt it in his bones, the way you could feel a rope go uncertain before it drooped.
Fenn leaned in, eyes narrowed.
The cord did not snap, but it softened. It stopped being sure of itself.
A bolt hit Wagon Two's sideboard with a thud, closer now. Less warning. Someone behind the crossbow had decided impatience counted as pressure.
Brann did not flinch. He lifted two fingers toward the right shoulder.
Garr.
Brush on the right rustled once, hard and wrong. A grunt cut short.
Then Garr burst out behind the anchor point, dragging a man by the collar.
The man's legs kicked once, then went limp.
Garr dropped him into the road like a sack and stepped back toward the brush without looking for praise. Blood darkened the man's neck where Garr's knife had been. Alive, barely, enough to make a thin sound and try to crawl.
The brush shivered again as the second man tried to shift.
Sella's arrow took the movement out of him.
The leaves went still.
Brann stepped forward and touched the cord with the edge of his blade.
Soft now. Weakened.
He cut it.
One clean motion.
Nothing sprang. No log rolled. No net dropped. No deadfall answered.
The line had never been the trigger.
It had been the leash.
Brann straightened. "Ropers," he said. "Wheels and yokes."
The captain wrapped the bottle again. She did not put it back. She held it like a threat they could spend twice.
Eryk swallowed, and an ugly thought settled in place.
Gray's men wore thick gloves because they had learned what those bottles did.
The rider's guard wore thick gloves too.
Brann's eyes went to that guard for a brief beat.
Then away.
Later.
Brann lifted his hand.
"Move."
The oxen leaned. Wheels started.
Not full speed. Not timid.
Controlled.
Eryk fell back into his place at Wagon Two's front corner, ankle burning as he returned to the wheel line's shadow. He kept his gaze down and his breath even.
The stone shoulders closed around them.
The road narrowed until the wagon boards felt like they could scrape rock if they swayed. Brush leaned in close enough to snag cloth and whisper against sleeves.
Eryk watched for any fresh straightness, any powder too bright, any peg hole too clean.
He saw the second lie under leaf on the left edge as the wagon's nose entered the pinch.
"Left," he called, pointing with his toe.
Brann did not stop the wagons. He stepped in beside the moving wheel, cut low, and the cord snapped and vanished under leaf like it had never existed.
Stone rang above them as a bolt struck and shattered. The echo made the pinch feel smaller.
The rider flinched in the saddle. Eryk heard his breath hitch.
No one comforted him. Comfort was a luxury, and they were buying time.
Halfway through the pinch, brush on the right exploded outward.
A rope loop swung low toward Wagon Two's front wheel, thrown by a hand that had waited until stone would trap the wagon's line.
Eryk saw it.
"Rope!"
Garr was already there.
He came out of brush like the road itself had risen. His knife flashed once.
The rope snapped. Fibers spat. One strand whipped back and stung Garr's wrist. He did not even look at it.
The loop fell into mud.
Another loop came from the left, higher, aimed for the oxen's yoke.
To jerk. To stall. To stop them inside stone.
The captain moved so fast Eryk barely tracked it. She stepped in, grabbed the rope with her left hand, cloth wrapped so skin did not touch, and yanked it down hard.
The hand in the brush yanked back.
For a breath it was a tug-of-war with invisible men. Eryk heard wet breathing from the brush, close enough to smell stale sweat and damp wool.
Then the captain poured.
A thin stream into the rope fibers. Precise. Stingy.
The hiss was immediate.
The rope went slack as if cut by a blade nobody could see.
A strangled sound came from the brush, half curse, half panic, followed by a wet gasp that turned into coughing.
Gray's men had learned to fear that bottle at a distance.
Now they feared it close.
The crossbow finally chose to kill instead of warn.
A bolt flew low and struck one of the Company guards in the thigh.
He went down with a sharp cry, hands clawing for his leg.
Thick gloves flashed as he clutched.
The rider shouted his name, raw panic breaking through his practiced indignation. "Hesk—"
Brann's head snapped. "Keep moving."
The rider stared, horrified. "He's—"
"Keep moving," Brann repeated, louder, and the order cut through the pinch and left no space for debate.
The captain did not look at the fallen guard. She grabbed the back of his collar as she passed and hauled him half out of the wheel line, just enough that he would not be eaten by a wheel.
Then she let him go.
Not kindness.
Calculation.
Eryk stepped wider to avoid the fallen man and the wheel's shadow. His ankle screamed. He kept his face still and his eyes down and refused to let pain turn into noise.
They broke out of the pinch into a stretch that was only slightly wider, only slightly kinder.
The stone shoulders fell away behind them.
The woods did not open, but the air loosened.
Crossbows stopped firing.
Not because they were out. Because the choke was spent and the wagons were no longer trapped inside it.
Brann kept them moving another hundred paces before he lifted his hand again.
Hold.
They stopped where the road bent gently and brush did not press quite as close. Not safe. Less trapped.
The Company guard lay on his back, breathing hard through clenched teeth.
The captain crouched and cut his trouser leg open without ceremony. Blood welled, dark against pale skin. The bolt had gone in clean and deep.
She did not pull it out. She snapped the shaft close to the skin and pressed cloth hard around the wound.
The guard made a sound like an animal.
The rider hovered, pale, useless hands trembling.
The captain looked up once. "Hold his shoulders."
The rider blinked. "What?"
"If he thrashes, he dies," she said. "Hold him."
He swallowed, knelt awkwardly, and put his hands on the guard's shoulders like he was afraid contact would stain him.
The guard's breath hitched. His eyes rolled once, then steadied.
The captain tied the cloth tight.
"Tourniquet will cost him," Harl muttered, not joking now.
"It will keep him," the captain replied.
She stood and wiped her knife on a wet leaf, then looked at Brann.
"One down."
Brann nodded once. His gaze went to Eryk.
"You called it," he said.
It was not praise. It was acknowledgment, and it landed heavier.
Then Brann's eyes slid to the wounded guard's gloves.
"Take them off."
The rider stiffened. "Why?"
Brann did not look at him. "Because I said."
The captain stepped back to the guard and hooked her fingers under a cuff.
The guard tried to pull away.
Not from pain.
From fear.
The captain's eyes sharpened. "Hold him."
The rider froze, then tightened his grip, face drawn tight with the effort of doing something real.
The captain pulled.
The glove came off with wet resistance.
Under it, the guard's fingertips were pale and raw, blanched in patches, reddened in others, like he had handled something that bit back.
The captain's gaze flicked to Brann.
Brann's mouth did not change.
The second glove came off.
Same marks.
Eryk felt cold climb his spine.
Those hands handled bottles.
Those hands smeared blue wax.
Those hands could pass paper at a handoff while looking loyal.
The rider stared at his guard's hands like he had never seen them before.
"Where," the rider whispered, and it came out small.
The guard tried to speak. The captain pressed cloth harder against the wound and he bit the sound off with his teeth.
Brann crouched beside him.
He did not threaten loudly. He did not need to.
"Who," Brann said.
The guard squeezed his eyes shut. His jaw worked.
A sound came out that might have been a name.
Might have been a prayer.
Brann leaned closer.
"Who reads your paper," he said. "Who stamps your letters."
The rider shook his head, lost. "I don't—"
Brann snapped his eyes up to him. "You do. Or you should."
Shame and fear mixed on the rider's face. His mouth opened, then closed again.
The guard coughed and spat blood-tinged spit into the dirt.
Then he spoke, barely.
"Station," he rasped. "Handoff. South post."
Brann's gaze sharpened. "Name."
The guard shook his head weakly.
The captain's knife tip hovered near his throat without touching. Not a promise of death. A promise that the question would not go away.
The guard swallowed.
"Ledger man," he whispered. "Ink. Not ours. Not yours."
Harl let out a soft breath, bitter. "Ink again."
Brann sat back on his heels.
Worse than a simple traitor.
A ledger man meant systems. Paper that moved men like stones and made betrayal look like procedure.
The captain wiped her blade again and looked down the road ahead.
"How far to the gate," she asked.
The rider answered thinly, forcing himself to be useful. "Half a day. If we keep pace."
Brann's eyes stayed on him. "And if we don't."
The rider swallowed. "We miss second bell."
Brann nodded once.
Gray had not only picked a place.
He had picked a clock.
Brann stood and looked at the wagons, the trees, the bend behind them, the road ahead.
Then he decided the way he always did, without speeches.
"Garr," Brann said. "You ride."
Garr blinked once, the closest thing he came to surprise.
Brann pointed at Wagon Two's open crate. "Two bottles. Papers. And the marked crate. You get to Stonebridge ahead of us."
The rider stiffened. "You can't—"
Brann cut him off. "You want your gate. This is how you get it."
The rider looked at his wounded guard. Looked at the wagons. Looked at the road like it had turned into a judge.
He hated every option.
He nodded anyway, small.
"What matters is sealed," he said, voice tight. "Blue cord. Third from front. It needs to be inside the gate before second bell."
Brann's eyes flicked to Fenn.
Fenn climbed Wagon Two's sideboard and hauled the marked crate to the edge, muscles tight, movements precise. The crate was heavier than it looked.
It held more than medicine.
It held consequence.
Brann looked at Garr. "You can carry?"
Garr looked at the crate, then at the spare horse, then back. "I can."
The captain's voice came quiet. "Sella."
For the first time in hours, Eryk saw her shape clearly, hood up at the brush edge, bow in hand like it was part of her spine.
"I know," she said.
Brann nodded. "You don't escort. You go ahead and cut eyes. If there's another line, you make it blind."
Sella's gaze touched the road ahead. "Done."
Then she was gone again, slipping into the trees without hurry.
Garr swung onto the rider's spare horse, took the marked crate across his lap like something he did not intend to drop, and lashed it down so it would not shift.
The captain handed him two cloth-wrapped bottles.
Garr took them like he had handled worse.
Brann leaned in close enough that only Garr could hear.
"Don't stop."
Garr's eyes stayed flat. "I don't."
He kicked the horse forward.
Hooves thudded, then softened, then vanished into the curve.
Eryk watched him go and felt the risk settle in his gut, solid and ugly. If Garr got taken, they lost the crate, the papers, the bottles, and the time. They would arrive late and toothless.
The rider watched him go like he was watching his own breath leave.
Brann turned back to the convoy.
"We keep moving," he said. "We keep it tight. We don't pay with time."
The captain nodded once. "And if Gray shows himself again?"
Brann's mouth twitched. No warmth in it.
"Then we spend the bottle," he said. "On the road he uses."
Eryk looked down at his ankle wrap, at the dirt under his boots, at the faint scars of old peg holes and powder that told stories without words.
Gray wanted them to arrive late.
Brann wanted them to arrive sharp.
They started forward again.
Wheels rolled. Oxen leaned. The road ran on.
Eryk took his place at Wagon Two's front corner, eyes down, because that was still his work.
And because if the ground spoke again, he would be the first to hear it.
Behind them, the stone shoulders waited, damp and indifferent, already forgetting the men who had tried to turn them into a mouth.
Ahead, somewhere past bends and brush, a gate bell was counting.
Second bell.
Soon.
And if Gray meant to take what he wanted there, he would have to do it against men who had stopped letting the road choose the moment for them.