"Please," he said, voice cracking on the single word. "Don't run. I've been waiting since before first light for someone to come back down this path, and I don't have anywhere else left to take this."
Savage's blade was half drawn before he'd finished the sentence, and I caught her wrist, gentle, my eyes still on the man's face, on the specific desperate stillness of someone who'd already decided the risk of being wrong about us was smaller than the risk of doing nothing at all.
"You're Josef Croft," I said.
Something in his shoulders sagged, relief and terror arriving in the same breath. "You know my name. Then you know what I'm about to ask you, and I'm asking anyway, because I've run out of anyone else in this whole valley I trust to ask it of." His hands were shaking, and he didn't try to hide it. "They took my son last night. Milo. Sixteen years old. They're moving him to the depot at Cinder Ford this morning, and I know exactly what happens to the ones who go through that depot, because I've spent fifteen years watching the paperwork walk out one door and never once watching the person walk out the other."
We brought him the rest of the way up to the lean-to at a near run, and Namey had his knife half out before he registered who we were dragging along with us, lowering it slow once Savage got a hand up and a fast, low explanation out in the same breath.
"Croft," Namey repeated, and something in his face changed, quick, the particular focus of a man whose memory had just handed him something useful before he'd finished asking for it. He was already digging through the papers spread across his lap, flipping fast past pages he'd clearly already read once, until he found the one he wanted and held it up, hand not quite steady. "I read this name at four in the morning and didn't think anything of it beyond one more entry on a very long list. Sublevel roster, dependent clause. M. Croft, minor, reassignment pending, flagged for retention leverage against site personnel J. Croft."
"They're not moving him because they suspect Josef," I said, understanding landing cold and sudden. "They're moving him because they've decided they don't need the leverage subtle anymore. They want him to see plainly what they're capable of doing to make sure he stays quiet."
"That tracks with everything else this operation's ever done," Namey said. "Ashe doesn't hide the machinery. He shows it to you plainly and trusts the fear to do the rest of the work for him."
Josef had gone very still, listening, and something in his face had the specific ruin of a man hearing his worst private fear confirmed out loud by strangers who had no reason to be gentle about it and weren't trying to be.
"Where's the depot," Savage asked him. "How far, and how do they move a prisoner there. Cart, escort, what."
"Cinder Ford, half a day's walk east along the low road," Josef said. "They'll move him by wagon, three, maybe four guards, a sergeant named Marsh riding point. I've seen the same convoy make that run a dozen times over the years for other reasons. It leaves at the mine's own dawn shift change, which means," he looked up at the sky, doing some private, desperate arithmetic, "which means it's already left. We've maybe two hours before it reaches the ford crossing, less if the road's dry enough to make good time."
"Then we don't chase it to the depot," I said. "We meet it before it gets there."
"That road runs along open scrub for most of its length," Josef said. "There's one stretch, maybe forty minutes out from the ford, where it cuts through a narrow defile between two rock shoulders. Wagon has to slow there regardless of who's driving it. It's the only place along that whole route I'd even consider trying something, if I were the sort of man who knew how."
"You are now," Savage said, not unkindly. "Whether you meant to become one or not."
Namey was already sorting through what little we'd carried up from the mine two nights before, mind clearly working three steps ahead of the rest of us. "Marsh's men aren't Ashe's own people," he said. "I'd bet everything I've got left on that. Valley boys, most of them, same as the merchant told us on the road in, pressed into Threnody's service because there's no other coin left in this whole valley to feed a family on. Half of Ilse's own neighbors are probably walking that escort right now, hating every step of it."
"You think they'll break rather than fight," I said.
"I think a man who's only wearing that uniform because the alternative is watching his own family starve doesn't actually want to die defending a wagon full of someone else's misery," Namey said. "I think if we give them a reason to believe there's a way out of that job that doesn't end with them bleeding in a defile for Threnody's sake, most of them take it. Marsh, though. Marsh I'd bet is a different animal. A man doesn't get handed sergeant's rank on an operation like this one without having already proven he'll do whatever's asked of him, and men like that don't break easy. They break specific."
"Merit," I said, slow, the shape of it arriving whole in my head almost before I'd finished thinking it through. "We show them Merit. Not as a threat. As proof. Every man in that escort already knows what walks out of that depot eventually, even if none of them's ever said it out loud to each other. Let them see it up close, once, with their own eyes, before they decide whether today's the day they die for Threnody's sake."
Savage looked at me a long beat, something moving behind her eyes that wasn't quite approval and wasn't quite worry either, some third thing sitting closer to both at once.