2026-09-01 00:01:00The guild hall's interior was louder than anything Garrick had experienced since the market square, dozens of conversations layered over each other, boots scuffing worn floorboards, a notice board along one wall thick with parchment offering everything from monster commissions to escort work.
A registration desk sat near the entrance, a harried-looking clerk working through a line of hopeful adventurers with the brisk efficiency of someone who had done this a thousand times before.
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Chapter 126: The Empty Shed
The reeds closed over the punts within a hundred paces of the ford, and Ronan lost the sky. It narrowed to a ragged blue strip overhead, then to nothing, and he sat in the second boat with his hands on his knees while green walls slid past on either side and the only sound was the pole going in and out of the water.Wat poled the lead punt. He stood in the stern with his bare feet braced on the planks and his raw hands moving in a steady rhythm, and Corla crouched in the bow with her eyes on the water ahead. She had said nothing for an hour. Every few minutes she raised two fingers, and Wat turned the nose left or right without a word.“He knows it well,” Reeve said from the stern pole of Ronan’s boat. He kept his voice low. “I wouldn’t have found a way out of here in a month.”“That’s why we brought him.” Ronan watched the back of the boy’s head. The thin shoulders had not eased once since they pushed off. “Where do you put your hands when you’re sick of poling, Wa
Chapter 125: Quillow Decides
Nobody on the platform spoke. Somewhere below, water slapped against a stilt, and a child asked in a whisper whether the strangers were going to be hanged and was hushed by three people at once. Garrick stood with the bundle against his chest and tried to remember how to breathe.“What is your name, boy, and why is the crown after you?” The headwoman asked out loud.A murmur ran through the crowd, and several of the men nodded. Garrick felt his stomach drop. He looked at Osric, who gave a small, tired movement of his head.“Tell it plainly,” Osric said, very low. “All of it.”Garrick stood. His legs were not steady, and he put one hand on the doorframe. The faces below him were wary and weathered and not at all unkind, and that made it harder.“My name is Garrick Arundel,” he said. “There’s a paper that says I murdered two royal guardsmen, and a huntsman, and tried to kill a lord’s son. I didn’t. The huntsman hunted me for weeks and he loosed monsters on a t
Chapter 124: Ketta's Word
Widow Sarn stood at the end of the walkway with both hands pressed over her mouth, and nobody else moved. Garrick could hear the marsh breathing around them, reeds hissing, water knocking against the stilts. Out past the last house a punt pole splashed twice and went quiet. Then it was only the wind. “How long until he reaches the ford?” Osric asked. He was already pulling his boot straight over his bandaged thigh. “Two hours. Maybe a little less.” Sarn took her hands down. They were shaking, and she pushed them into her apron to hide it. “He knows the short lanes. I taught him them.” “And how long will the knights need to come back?” “They’ll bring the boy in front, so he can show them the way. Four hours? Five, with the punts.” She swallowed. “I should have watched him. He heard me say there was a reward, and I told him it was nothing, and he looked at me as if I’d hit him.” “It isn’t your fault,” Yselle said. She had come out behind Garrick, one hand braced on the doorf
Chapter 123: A Boy in a Punt
Ronan had been awake since the small hours. He had spent them at the water’s edge with a lantern and a borrowed pole, probing the mud where the tracks went in, and he had learned only that the marsh did not care about his rank. By dawn his boots were soaked through to the toes, and he understood in a plain, uncomfortable way that the old swordsman had chosen this ground because it favored no one. Dawn came gray and wet. Corla was at the water’s edge before the sun cleared the willows, working her way along the reed line with her nose almost in the mud. Ronan spent the morning organizing what he could, which was little, because a marsh was not a thing that could be searched on horseback. Reeve had found three punts at a farm upstream, and the drovers swore there were reed-cutters somewhere in that wet maze, though none of them could say where. “Quillow,” the toll keeper said grumpily, when Ronan questioned him over breakfast. The old man had been cut loose the night before and was s
Chapter 122: The Drying Shed
Near dawn, when the stars had begun to fade and a pale mist crept low across the water, Osric stopped. He stood with his hand against a tall post set into the mud, a gray, rotted stump with a notch cut into one side. His shoulders sagged, and for a moment Garrick feared he would fall.“That’s the marker,” Osric said. His voice was raw. “The village is a quarter mile on. It’s called Quillow.”Quillow was not a village that anyone would have found by accident. It stood on a scatter of low mud islands in the heart of the marsh, a dozen houses built on stilts and linked by narrow plank walkways, with drying racks of cut reed stacked high on every side. Smoke rose from one chimney. A punt was tied up beneath the nearest house, and a fishing net hung dripping from a post.A woman met them at the end of the first walkway. She was perhaps forty, lean and brown, and she wore a wet-weather cloak. Her face was hard and tired. She stood with her arms folded across her chest and her feet planted,
Chapter 121: Two Roads
Tarrow’s horn reached Ronan on a hillside with the sun going down. He had spent the day on the pilgrim road, following a lead that Corla swore was good and Reeve privately doubted. The note was thin and ragged, repeated three times, and he knew it at once, and every muscle in his body tightened. A second horn answered from the east, and he was already riding.“The ford,” he said. “Ride!”They covered the last four miles at a gallop. Ronan’s ribs screamed at every stride, and the split in his lip reopened and filled his mouth with blood, and he ignored both. Corla’s horse kept pace on his left, and Reeve and eight knights thundered behind. By the time they reached the water, the light was almost gone, and the river had turned the color of pewter.The scene on the bank made him pull up hard. Cattle were scattered across a half mile of mud and willow, some standing in the shallows, some wandering aimlessly with their ropes trailing. Three drovers were running after them, cursing at full
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