Chapter 16: Drevka's Ultimatum and the Elder's Second Betrayal

The runner was twelve years old and trying to look like he was simply walking.

Arthur noticed him because of the way his arms were moving — held slightly too close to his sides, a child's attempt at the neutral, purposeful gait of someone with legitimate business. He was crossing the market square on a diagonal that led toward neither the well nor the bread stall nor the tannery, but toward the eastern road, which led, if you followed it for half a mile through bare-limbed birch and frozen rut, to the place where six Hunters' Compact enforcers had made their camp two nights ago.

Arthur had been coming from the opposite direction. He had not been coming quickly. He had been coming from the chapel, where he had left Serafka dismantling her ritual preparations with the same systematic care she brought to everything — cataloguing each component, wrapping each piece, moving through the space like a woman closing a room she does not plan to re-enter. Gerolt had already gone. The night watch was over. The ritual had worked, or it had done what rituals do before they fully work, which is to rearrange all the pieces into a configuration that will either resolve or detonate.