The vestry smelled of oil, wool, and rain-wet stone. Lamps hissed. Buckles clicked. A psalm murmured under breath became the pulse beneath every sound, and Charlotte Read, coat buckled high, hair braided tight with a strip of oiled leather, checked her kit as if she were measuring the edges of a promise.
No parade gleam on her today; only a shaper's plainness: canvas satchel slung cross-body, palm-stones wrapped in linen, a carpenter's hammer with the haft worn to her hand, and a long pistol holstered left for the draw she'd taught herself when grief first made her ambidextrous. On the bench were three jars capped with wax: clay, soot, lime, ingredients she could coax, combine, and compel. Not grand powers. Not the kind that turned night to noon. But enough to harden mud, quiet hinges, thicken river water for a dozen heartbeats at a time. Enough for the bishop's niece who'd once painted stage scenery and learned how to make a world hold still.
"Coat," Sister Mercy said behind her, and dropped a heavy riding cape over Charlotte's shoulders without waiting for permission. Mercy's habit was hitched and pinned for speed, boots oiled, rosary looped thrice so it wouldn't clack. Her eyes looked like rain does just before it decides whether to fall.
Merril arrived in a gust of cold air and apology. "Ran the Close twice to find any soul who'd seen a wagon. Nothing. Tracks say legs only, big ones. Hooves round the mill; not ours."
"Orcs," Charlotte said. She said the word without theater, like a carpenter saying oak. In Salisbury they were rumor and border-song. In the wet places east of the river, less rumor.
"Not a war band," Merril added. "Six, maybe eight. One small, carried."
"Nathaniel," Sister Mercy said softly. Then, as if remembering the boy's mother, she squared her shoulders. "And we go get him."
The rest filed in: Crowsley with his drummer's satchel stuffed with cartridges instead of songs; Piers with his crossbow and a scar that made a question mark of his left cheek; two parish watchmen who'd volunteered and regretted it immediately but had not left; and a wiry woman from the laundries called Peg, who could run longer than any soldier Charlotte had ever seen. At the door, Captain Luxford waiting with Father Ransome. The Father, sleeves rolled to elbow, stepped close and pressed a corked bottle into Sister Mercy's palm. "Laudanum for the hurt. Or yourself if the Lord's timing disagrees with your own."
"Father," Mercy said warningly.
"I've grown practical in my old age," he replied, with a look to Charlotte that said be faster than my prayers.
Charlotte sealed down the flap on her satchel and exhaled. The Temper of Faith, she'd never have called it that aloud, settled into the bones of her hands. Not fire. Not that lark of cadets and poets. A tempering, like clay brought to leather-hard, like a scaffold checked twice before a man steps out. Verse by verse. Breath by breath.
"Maps?" she asked.
Merril chalked the vestry table: Close and meadow, the Avon like a dull blade, the willow gully, the gravel road to Harnham, the eastward rise to the Breaking Stone. "Sign splits south of the mill," he said, tapping. "Road stink. Horse and tar goes one way. Scrub, old blood, new fear, goes the other. Peg?"
Peg nodded. "Scrub is truth. Road's for ghosts and fools."
"Then scrub," Charlotte said. "We keep low in the willow. Peg, you run point until the gully; Merril takes over at water. Sister, you're center. Crowsley, Piers, watchmen, you're with her. I'll swing the right. No shots unless you taste iron in your mouth and God Himself is shouting. We need their ears dull as long as possible."
"Captain Luxford says he can be our hammer," Merril said, glancing toward the lawn. "He'll follow formed when they're dressed."
"Good," Charlotte said. "But we don't wait for the hammer to find the nail." She buckled her pistol down a notch, feeling the old ache at her hip flare and fade. "We go."
They left through the vestry's eastern door into a rain that made a lace of every edge. On the lawn the Grenadiers stood, bearskins cased, scarlet muted by the gray, white cross-belts bright as scraped bone. Luxford sat a black mare and handed out hymnals like bread rolls at a wake. A rough voice lifted:
Strong Deliverer, be our shield,
While the hosts of night are mustered
Charlotte didn't smile, didn't cry; she just held the sound in her chest like a steadying hand. "Keep your heads down," she said. "No heroics without a witness."
"Then why am I here?" Crowsley muttered, but he moved when she did.
They ran the Close at an easy soldier's pace. Gargoyles watched them turn the Canonry rail and slip the wicket gate. Within twenty lengths the cathedral fell behind, spire drifting into its own breath like a mountain learning to be cloud. Ahead: hummock, rush, sheep-bitten grass. The mill's wheel turned west, water beading on its paddles like armor scales.
Peg took point, small as a thought, feet choosing the low lines without thinking. Merril slid behind her, eyes pulling sign into human measures: how the grass leaned, how nettles broke, where a heel dug because a body carried more than walking should. Sister Mercy kept the center moving like a pulse; when a watchman's strap bit too high, she shifted it while running without breaking pace.
They slid into the willow gully and let the wind go over them. Knees went wet. Charlotte tasted clay and iron and a sweet undervote of pennyroyal crushed where something too heavy had blundered, masking the musk. She stopped and palmed a pinch of clay from her jar, breathed on it, and pressed it into her sleeve seam where it would hold tight and dry warm. Not for now. For the river.
"Contact sign," Merril said at the bend where the gully should turn right but the grass said left. He crouched. "Three big. One lighter. Drag, small. Orc boots—hobnails wide as my thumb. They went fast here. Someone stumbled."
"Boy," Sister Mercy said.
"Boy," Charlotte agreed. "Up."
They were not the first eyes on the gully lip. Charlotte saw the ripple in grass, the way rain ran off a shape it shouldn't, and signed: hold. Piers's crossbow line thrummed soft as a moth's wing as he took in slack. Crowsley thumbed his drummer's satchel and came up with a pistol instead of a stick. Sister Mercy's rosary went still.
A figure rose, no orc. A mill boy, mud to the eyebrows, shaking like a lantern in wind. He lifted both hands and nearly fell. "Don't shoot me," he said, which was reasonable.
Merril had him by the collar in a breath and eased him into the grass. "Name."
"Kitson," the boy stammered. "They ran four, four with armor like the dark, and two big as doors, and one … one" His teeth chattered. "They took a small one over the Breaking Stone. I ran. I fell. I … there's a dead sheep by the elder stump if you need proof …"
"We don't," Sister Mercy said, pressing a bit of sugared ginger into his mouth as if she'd conjured it. "Go to Father Ransome. Tell him to open the north transept for the hurt and the scared. Tell him the Grenadiers march."
Kitson nodded hard, tears and rain making no difference, and vanished the way frightened boys can when given an order that fits their size.
"Breaking Stone," Merril said, jaw tightening. "They'll put watchers on the rise."
"And something uglier by the fires," Peg muttered. She had gone gray around the mouth, not from fear so much as recognition.
Charlotte drew the long pistol half out of its holster and let it slide back. The world made its small narrowing sound, the one it makes when a leader's two choices both look bad and one must be taken anyway. "We leave the gully. Peg left in the hedgerow. Merril right with Piers. Sister, you own the middle. Crowsley, you stay with her unless she orders you otherwise, and then you cry about it later. Watchmen! Eyes ahead, feet quiet."
They climbed. Rain combed their coats. The grass became a tunnel and then a green blur. The first watcher didn't die because he was clumsy; he died because Topsy wasn't there and Charlotte was. She didn't have Topsy's ghosting, but she had a shaper's eye and a stagehand's patience. She timed the man's breath, came in at the turn, and took him with the hammer's claw where skull meets spine. He went down as if the earth had suggested it.
On the right, Merril and Piers made a quiet miracle of the second watcher. Piers kept the piss-break man laughing with a whispered joke and a lifted bottle; Merril cut his throat with the gentleness of a father trimming a boy's hair. Sister Mercy closed the eyes and thumbed a quick cross on the brow because habit had edges you could cut on.
They reached the river where the Breaking Stone showed itself, a gray rib arcing out of the water, slick with weed and history. The current kissed its flanks and snarled, making a trench that would draw a careless foot down and away. But there were stepping stones, set by flood and time, each small as a prayer, and if one knew them and ran them and did not think about drowning until later, one could cross.
"Rope?" Piers asked.
"Clay," Charlotte said, and took the wax from the small jar with her teeth. She smeared a line along the toe of each boot, then pressed both palms to the river and whispered, "Hold," the way she might tell a child to stop at the curb. The water thickened along the stepping line, only a lace thicker, only for a little while, but enough to make ankle feel like knee and knee like courage.
"Go," she said, and stepped.
The river grabbed. The clay answered. She put heel on the second stone, toe on the third, nothing in her head but breath and the line. Peg came behind as if she'd been born here. Merril and Piers followed with the steady clatter of men who had agreed with their feet before their brains caught up. Sister Mercy came last of the core with Crowsley's big hand at her belt and the watchmen doing sums in their mouths about weight and will. They reached the rib and swung up, mud swallowing shins, and the east bank changed the smell of the world: older willows, taller hedges, marsh-rot underpinned by mint and something like metal left in rain.
"Close," Peg whispered. "Hush-close."
"How close?" Merril asked.
"Close enough that if you curse, someone who hates your mother will agree with you by name."
Merril shut his mouth.
They angled into a thorn copse and saw the bowl beyond: low fires under oilcloth, figures in black leather and iron that made shapes Charlotte's painter's eye disliked. Orcs: shoulders like beams, fists like knots, tusk-tips catching the ember-light. Two moved on a casual loop, fires, notch, back … minding the idea of a watch more than the work. The rest crouched with backs to wicker shields. Off to the left, the drag of a small heel in damp earth. Nathaniel had passed here, bound.
"Ambush," Merril said.
"And a commander," Peg breathed. "Smell that? Cold-metal and old smoke. Rank like a shrine to the wrong god."
Charlotte looked where the space told her to. Not at a man. At the absence of one. Near the nearest fire, the smoke bent like a river around a gap. The gap had the height of a soldier and the width of a sin and the stillness of a lie.
"That isn't a person," she murmured. "It's a veil."
Piers sighted through a leaf notch, crossbow steady. "Want me to make them mad?"
"Not yet," Charlotte said. "We need their head first or we'll be chewing bone by noon." She shifted, palmed soot, pressed it to her throat, and listened. Not with ears, those would do, too but with the small animal in the spine that knows which way the hawk is.
There. Not by the fire at all. Back near the notch where the bowl tried to be a path, a figure sat too still, not because he was carvings but because everything else chose to move around him. His helm had a ridge like a frozen wave. His gauntlets were lined with something that didn't catch light. He wasn't beautiful; he was expensive.
"That one," Charlotte whispered. "Merril, you're my knife. Peg, count to sixty and make a lamb noise west. Sister, if I say run, you run the long way east and take everyone who still breathes. Piers, you hold for my hand. Crowsley, if it goes loud, you are thunder."
Crowsley's fingers drummed his satchel once as if greeting an old friend.
They waited while the rain reconsidered its job. Peg breathed, "Thirty." The bowl breathed back. One orc watcher scratched his ear and leaned to speak to a mate. Sister Mercy's rosary went still as stone.
"Count," Charlotte mouthed.
"Forty," Peg breathed. "Fifty. Sixty."
Peg made a sound any ewe would answer, lifted from a childhood none of them knew. It rolled along the bowl's lip and went skittering like a dare. Half the orcs turned to it with the bovine scorn of soldiers who've seen decoys before. The veil by the fire didn't move. The commander by the notch didn't either.
Charlotte shifted a thumb-length to get angle, raised two fingers to Piers, then clenched them to a fist.
Nothing. No shot. She felt it before she saw it: the hairline wrongness of a sprung hinge. The veil swayed a fraction in wind that didn't exist. On the lip behind them, to the right and left, something metal met something metal once - just a kiss.
"Trap," Sister Mercy whispered, and then, almost indulgently, "Of course."
Piers's aim dipped. Merril swore without breath. The bowl swelled with bodies rising: not just the eight they'd counted but twice that, three times, from hollows and from behind shields that had been men all along. On the lip, new shapes showed against rain, low, wide, carrying hooks and nets.
"Charlotte?" Merril asked, already hating both choices.
"Forward," Charlotte said, because quiet was done and the only way out of a cup was to break the rim. "We take the head. If it goes foul, we make our mess on their flank and run east. Luxford will not fail. Mercy holds the cup. We make them hit it."
"God grant it," Sister Mercy said, and there was iron in it.
They rose as one, thorns combing coats, and slid toward the bowl as the far side of the world began to shout. Piers's first bolt took the watcher who'd leaned too long. Crowsley's pistol barked once, clean, measured, no panic and a net-carrier on the lip went backward with a new hole in his temple. Peg was gone, and then she wasn't. Suddenly five paces ahead, knife in the meat behind a knee.
Charlotte felt the Temper settle like a held breath. She scooped lime and soot with the same hand, spat in it, rubbed to paste, and slapped it on the nearest wicker shield. "Sleep," she told it, and the weave sagged to slack under her palm as if the idea of holding had just become too heavy. An orc cursed, tusks flashing, and Merril was already there to spill him.
The commander turned his helm at last. Even at thirty paces, Charlotte felt his attention like a cold finger along her cheek. Not sorcery but the old, ugly geometry of will. He stood. He did not hurry. He lifted one gauntlet and snapped his fingers once.
Hooks flew from the lip and barbed, rope-leashed, singing the air. Sister Mercy shouted one name, Charlotte's, and knocked a watchman's head down with her open palm as a hook took his hat instead of his face. Piers cut a line with his bolt mid-flight, an archer's mercy trick, and Merril's blade rang on iron as he batted another aside.
Charlotte didn't look at any of it. She had painted light for a decade and learned that spectacle is the enemy of the work. She moved at an angle that turned distance into mistake and slid through the gap Peg had made. The commander lifted a short glaive with the casualness of a butcher choosing the right knife. She threw her hammer.
Not for his face. For his feet. The hammer struck the ground beside his lead boot and the clay leapt to her whisper as if happy to be useful. It seized his ankle like a tired old friend. He tore free with a snarl and half a boot, and that was enough time for Merril to arrive insanely and do the unteachable thing: take the first cut on the flat of his blade and drive the second at a seam.
It should have worked. It worked on men. On orcs. On nearly anything that wore armor. The commander's gauntlet turned and ate the strike, and Merril's face changed from courage to calculation in a blink.
"Down!" Charlotte shouted, and shoved him with both hands. The glaive shaved hair where Merril's head had been and rang on the rock behind with a sound like a bell that had decided to fight back.
Crowsley's second shot cracked somewhere to her left. Someone screamed in a voice that meant to sound braver than it felt. Sister Mercy dragged a hooker by his rope like a bad dog and kneed him in a place that made him rethink war. Peg slashed a net and then herself free of it because she'd misjudged the swing and grinned about it with blood on her teeth.
The commander came on with patient anger. Charlotte back-stepped, palmed more clay, and told it to climb. It obeyed her like a polite child, slowly, with questions. She felt the limit of what she could ask without cost and didn't cross it. Not today. Not with Nathaniel maybe ten paces beyond the man who smelled like winter.
"Piers!" she shouted. "Eyes!"
Piers fired, not at the commander, but at the oilcloth that kept the near fire dry. It snapped back and flame took new breath, flaring tall, and the light did what light does: told the truth rude and bright. In the deeper glow Charlotte saw the boy: bound, gagged, eyes open wide, tucked under a shield like loot.
She saw something else: the way the commander held his left shoulder slightly high, not like injury but like pride. The way one tusk had a nick. The way the glaive dipped a hair right before he lifted it to guard.
Painter's eye. Stagehand's timing. Widow's willingness. She stepped wrong on purpose, inviting the kind of slash a smug duelist loved, then shoved paste across her own boots and whispered, "Light." The lime sparked dull where the fire kissed it, nothing showy, just enough to make a new brightness at her feet at the exact moment his gaze cut down to watch, and Merril, bless his dangerous heart, didn't think … he moved. His knife went left when any sane man would go right, and the commander's gauntlet turned just a degree too far to meet it.
The cut wasn't killing. It wasn't meant to be. It was an insult, shallow and fast under the ridge of the gauntlet, catching tendon or pride or both. The commander roared … an ugly sound like coal raked wrong and for the first time his patience cracked.
"Now!" Charlotte shouted. "Flank and run!"
Crowsley became thunder properly then three shots in a rhythm like a drum pattern he'd practiced for a parade he'd never march. Sister Mercy blew her whistle, a one hard, flat note and the center moved as one, not back but sidewise, slashing the bowl's lip into a new line. Peg grabbed the boy and cut the gag in the same motion and put his small hands on the back of her belt. "Hold," she told him, and he did, because children are geniuses at that when the voice is right.
Hooks screamed again. One found Crowsley's shoulder and he cursed a saint no one else believed in. Sister Mercy tore it free with a sound like laundry in winter. Piers clubbed an orc with his empty bow and grinned with some private relief. Merril kept himself between Charlotte and the commander without making a production of it.
Charlotte took the last of her jar and flung it in a long arc at the shallow where the stepping stones waited. She didn't harden the water this time. She thickened it at the edges and thinned it in the line, painting a path the way a conservator lifts a figure out of smoke. "Run the light," she told Peg, and Peg ran it like a wire.
They hit the stones hot and wrong and exactly enough. The river tried to sip them and was told no. The commander came to the rib and did not cross; not from fear, Charlotte saw, but because his job wasn't to drown for a boy. He pointed with the glaive instead, and nets flew again from the lip, and one took Piers's leg and he went down into black water with an oath that had all the vowels in it.
Charlotte didn't think. She dropped to a knee on the rib, jammed her arm into the trench, found cloth, not man, and made a fist in it. The current tried to take both. She told it to wait in a voice she had once used on a stage hand about to pull a backdrop too soon. It waited. Piers came up coughing and called her a name men only use when they love you enough to say it.
They gained the west bank in a tangle. Luxford's hymn faint across the meadow grew teeth and time. Behind them, the orcs howled, not with loss but with the arithmetic of new orders. The commander did not shout. He lifted his hand once, and the sound changed. Less chase, more shape. The kind of sound armies make when they agree about something ugly.
"East," Charlotte panted. "We draw them. Sister … "
"Already done," Mercy said, and shoved Crowsley ahead like a sack of flour with opinions. Peg kept the boy adhered to her belt with a magic older than any church. Merril ran backward for twenty paces, face calm, blade low, looking at the whole field like a man counting windows in a burning house.
"Charlotte," he said, as they cut into the willow gully and the Close rose on the far side like a promise that might be kept, "if you're planning brilliance, now would be a handsome time."
"I've got competence," she said. "We'll borrow brilliance from the Grenadiers."
And as if the world appreciated the gall, the west lawn answered—a line of scarlet stepping from gray, drums thudding time, voices lifting a psalm that made the rain think better of itself. The hammer had found the nail. Charlotte felt the Temper in her hands ease a fraction and knew the work wasn't done. The hunt did not so much begin as become itself, and every mile between the Breaking Stone and the cathedral tightened into a single necessary hour.
"Hold the cup," she told Sister Mercy.
"Make them hit it," Sister Mercy said back.
"On me," Charlotte said, and ran.