Page 109 of Traitor Son

“Then how do you know there won’t be more tonight than there were last night?” she asked softly. “A lot more, maybe. Too many.”

“I can’t know. But we’ve planned for it,” he said, to her surprise.

“You have?”

“Of course. The Vallethi army showed up in places we didn’t expect, and often with more people than we expected. Though I can’t send out scouts against the devils,” he said, in a tone that let her know he was treating her question seriously. “Huber brought it up. He’s always the one with the questions that keep me up at night. But after that last expedition outside the walls, we made plans, just in case we were ever overrun.”

Ophele’s expression very clearly said,do go on.

“We’ve drilled organized retreats from three main areas. Here, let me have your quill, I’ll show you,” he said, reaching for a blank piece of paper. “Here’s the palisade. It only admits stranglers, but that’s still a vulnerability. Then here, northeast, is the gap between the palisade and the wall, and the gap between the north and south sections of the wall.” The quill slashed briskly between his large brown fingers. “There are barricades here, mostly for the wolves…”

In a few minutes he had sketched out the defenses for the town, then showed her how it folded inward, and how the masons would be evacuated to the unfinished barracks while the people in town would be moved to the cookhouse and storehouse. As Yvain and Dol had said, she herself would go to the storehouse, but in Ophele’s mind it had been a chaos of screaming men and devils running in all directions, not this well-ordered retreat.

“It wouldn’t be fun,” he said, looking down at the finished diagram, with its many arrows and dotted lines. “And we could likely tighten this up, there’s a hill here that would slow down the retreat, another barricade would buy them more time…anyway,” he said, returning his attention to her. “We can’t prepare for everything, but we have prepared for this. You’re not likely to wake up one night with a mob of devils surrounding the cottage.”

“I was more worried about the storehouse,” she confessed. “I thought—it sounds silly, but I thought of Yvain and Dol taking me there and locking me inside, and then in the morning I would come out and find I was the only person left.”

Her voice faded as she spoke her worst fear, and the duke’s stern face softened.

“I guess that would scare anyone,” he said, and hesitated only a second before he covered both her hands with his. “But I’d say that’s very, very unlikely, wife.”

It wasn’t magic. Her heart didn’t pound any less frantically later that night, when he went out to guard the road and she heard a strangler cackling in the distance. But when she went to sit by the fire, thinking she would read, she found that he had left the plans for retreat in the center of the table, with all the buildings in town neatly labeled and the path from the cottage to the storehouse marked. And in the storehouse, he had added two figures, labeled in his slashing, jagged script:Ophele. Remin.

She didn’t hear him come in that night. She was already asleep.

A few days later, she plucked up her courage to ask him whether or not a decision had been made about the caravan.

“Well,Iwon’t be going,” he said. His face was as austere as ever, but she was learning to see the humor in his eyes. “Remember how I told you they were trying to figure out how to keep the size of the caravan down, to compensate for the palisade?”

She nodded.

“They succeeded.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “I won’t be going, and neither will Jinmin. Can you guess why?”

She thought about it, and it actually startled a laugh out of her.

“Nooo…” she said, looking up at him with wide eyes. “You can’t fit?”

“They’d have to grease me up to get me in there,” he said, and gave her something very close to a smile as she burst into giggles.

* * *

With the caravan finished, and the gaps between the city walls being whittled down daily, Remin judged that it was time to take another chance.

Or rather, to send someoneelseto take a chance.

It was the lot of a lord to send other men to die, but even after years of experience, Remin still could not reconcile himself to it. Tomorrow, Huber would be leaving for Ferrede to see if anyone had survived this cruel summer, along with a small group of soldiers and young Sir Ortaire, who had been willing to fight every other man in Tresingale for the dubious honor.

There had been no slackening in the devils. Every night they came in waves against the small town, and Remin was counting every man in the defenses. The loss of two knights and six soldiers was no small matter. Nor could he easily spare the four horses needed to pull the metal caravan. But that was why it must be Huber. If anyone could persuade horses to go into the teeth of the devils, it was Huber, and Huber had always been something of a dark horse himself: a wild card, appearing unlooked-for at the moment he was most desperately needed. And as the former master of Remin’s scouts, he knew the valley better than any man alive.

No doubt Huber would also have preferred to goquietly.But nerves were stretched thin from hard work and relentless heat, and Miche and Juste thought a leavetaking was an excellent time for a feast. Which was how Remin found himself in the same position he had been on the first night in the valley: down on one knee beside Ophele, squinting at something called eyelets as he helped her dress.

At least this time he hadn’t made her cry first.

“Why does it have so many ribbons?” he grumbled, rummaging through the ridiculously tiny box.

“Maybe so we don’t have to sew it together,” Ophele said, examining the pieces of the gown with an absorbed expression. She was dressed only in a chemise and still rosy from her bath, having spent hours happily wallowing in her new basin. The scent of her filled his senses like a drug, so sweet and heady that he wanted nothing more than to bury his face in her.

“Oh, I see, it laces up the sides,” she said, holding out a slender arm to demonstrate where the bodice laced together, with trailing golden ribbons meant to dangle in streamers alongside the red silk skirt of the gown. Remin tied first one side and the other, tightening them together so silk and velvet hugged her slim waist and cupped her breasts. The colors suited her. The deep red made her skin glow and her eyes looked more golden than ever, as if the metallic leaf-and-flower embroidery had flecked color onto her irises.

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