Chapter Seventy-One

Dawn spilled a lucid amber across Eldridge, gilding puddles left by the night’s rain and glancing off the rows of lanterns that still smoldered along King’s Way. Volunteers, bleary-eyed yet proud, doused the wicks one by one, trading weary smiles with uniformed guards. The improvised patrols had passed without violence, but fresh serpent sigils had appeared on three alley walls, daubed in tar so black it seemed to drink the light.

Inside the palace, King Nikolas convened a dawn council in the small solar rather than the echoing throne room, hoping proximity would sharpen minds. Steam lifted from untouched tea as Olivia unraveled overnight dispatches. General Bennett leaned over her shoulder, jaw set like quarried granite.

“Taldrin refuses an audit,” Olivia reported, tapping a margin. “Their guildmaster claims commercial sovereignty and hints that halting their caravans would be an act of war.”

Nikolas felt the room tighten. Taldrin’s silos fed half the eastern marches; strangling the flow too abruptly could starve loyal villages as readily as rebels.

He folded his arms. “No blades, no embargo,” he decided. “We send grain inspectors under royal warrant, escorted by three clerks and one poet.” The council looked puzzled until he added, “Because where swords raise suspicion, verse opens doors.”

Bennett suppressed a reluctant grin. “I will find a poet with sturdy boots, sire.”

Nikolas turned to the general’s ledger. The search for The Shade now spanned four counties, every gatehouse interrogating travelers under torchlight. Yet the king sensed a different battlefield forming—one of letters, codes, and veiled patronage.

“We can’t chase smoke,” he said. “We must learn what feeds the fire.” He ordered Olivia to draft pardons for minor conspirators in exchange for testimonies about financiers and scribes. Mercy, he hoped, would buy the truth faster than shackles.

In the city’s lower arcade, market stalls reopened beneath banners still scented with fresh dye. A baker whose brother had marched with the rebels offered soldiers honey-coated loaves free of charge. The gesture drew cheers, then quiet tears, for the brother now hammered stones in royal custody.

Watching unseen from a colonnade, Bishop Theron exhaled. He had opposed Nikolas’s clemency decree, yet here, forgiveness looked suspiciously like healing. Perhaps sermons should follow policy, not precede it.

Far to the south, clouds crawled over the boglands of Haverfell as The Shade hobbled toward an abandoned watchtower. He rapped a coded rhythm on the iron door; it opened to reveal a cloaked apothecary and a small printing press already rumbling.

“Your blood stains half the marsh,” the apothecary scolded, binding his ribs with linen steeped in willow bark. “Was the spectacle worth the wound?”

The Shade’s eyes blazed. “I lost a battle of stone and square. I will win the war of ink.” He gestured to the press, where broadsheets already bore the serpent-crown seal and the headline, THE KING’S NEW CHAINS.

“Distribute them along the river routes,” he ordered. “And send a packet to Taldrin; fear travels fastest on familiar wagons.”

The noon sun found Nikolas in the royal stables, saddling a chestnut courser. He intended to ride for the village of Greyhaven by dusk, the first stop on a listening tour through the provinces. Against Olivia’s protest that a monarch on dusty roads invited ambush, he answered, “Visibility is my armor.”

Bennett accompanied him to the gate, pressing a slender whistle into his hand. “Carved from mountain pine,” the general said. “If trouble nears, blow thrice. Every ranger within five leagues will hear.”

Nikolas tucked the gift beside his dagger. “Let us hope the song stays silent.” He spurred the courser, hooves drumming out of the capital as bells tolled the hour.

In Taldrin’s gilded counting house, Guildmaster Marius reread Nikolas’s letter beneath a chandelier of crystal tears. The ultimatum’s ink still glistened. Around him, investors argued that compliance would bleed profits; bankers feared seizure of ships. But Marius remembered his granddaughter’s face as news of yesterday’s bloodless victory reached the ports—how her eyes had brightened with childish relief.

He dipped his quill and signed an order opening every ledger to the crown auditors. “Better silver lost,” he whispered, “than children.”

He travelled along hedge-lined lanes where mossy milestones marked distances in fading chisels. At each croft, children ran beside the horses, scattering crows. When Nikolas stopped to water the mounts, an old woman pressed a pouch of dried apples into his hand and asked only that he keep the roads safe for her granddaughter’s first market day.

Such exchanges fanned his resolve more than any triumph in marble halls. For every serpent emblem slashed on a wall, twenty honest palms were willing to erase it, provided the crown offered reason. He realized that hope was not abstract; it tasted of tart fruit shared beside a creek, of calloused fingers trusting a promise.

Night settled over Greyhaven in violet hush. The village green became a bivouac of lanterns where Nikolas’s escort cooked barley stew with local farmers. Beneath a sycamore scarred by lightning, the king pitched no pavilion, choosing instead a plain bedroll. He spent an hour copying names of wounded rebels into a pocket ledger, resolving to track their restitution.

Far away, the Shade’s printed manifestos were bundled into oilskin and smuggled onto a moonlit barge crewed by river smugglers. Their captain, a one-eyed woman called Fisk, demanded double coin after hearing of Taldrin’s frozen accounts. The Shade paid, adding a ruby signet he had cut from a noble’s hand years ago. “Spread the words,” he rasped, “let them bloom like rot beneath the throne.”

Mist swallowed the vow and carried it north swiftly.