The Iron Orphan

The Marsh Road

Sela moved faster than Bran expected from a woman her age, sweeping the wooden box and its contents back into the locked drawer before grabbing a walking staff from beside the door.

"Back exit," she said, already moving. "There's a skiff hidden in the reeds south of the cottage. Small, fast, built for the shallows where horses can't follow."

"How many riders?" Mirelle asked, already at the window, peering through a gap in the shutters.

"Enough that I'm not waiting to count them properly." Sela was pulling a second cloak from a hook, tossing it toward Bran without looking. "Move, boy. Your mother's ring won't do either of us any good if you're caught wearing it."

Bran shoved the ring deep into an inner pocket, wardiron already in hand beneath the borrowed cloak, and followed Sela through a low back door into the marsh proper. The ground here was soft, treacherous, thick reeds rising well past his waist in places, and he understood immediately why Sela had chosen to live somewhere so deliberately difficult to reach.

The skiff sat exactly where she'd said, half-hidden beneath reeds and drooping willow branches, built for speed rather than comfort.

"In," Sela said, already pushing it toward open water. "Both of you. I'll pole us out I know this marsh better than any rider chasing us does."

Bran climbed in first, offering a hand to Mirelle, who accepted it with a brief, grim nod. Sela shoved off from the bank with practiced strength that belied her bent spine, and the skiff slid into the winding channels just as the first shout reached them from the direction of the cottage.

"They're at the house," Mirelle murmured.

"Let them search it," Sela said, poling steadily, guiding the skiff through a channel so narrow the reeds brushed both sides at once. "There's nothing left inside worth finding. I made sure of that the moment I heard hoofbeats."

They moved in tense silence for several minutes, the cottage and its searchers falling behind, swallowed by reeds and mist. Bran kept the wardiron drawn, though he had no clear idea what good it would do against mounted riders in open water — his skill was forging, not fighting, and every instinct he had told him that whatever confrontation came next wouldn't be solved with a hammer.

The wardiron pulsed once against his palm, faint and insistent, and Bran's head snapped up just as a shape broke from the reeds ahead of them.

Not a rider. A Conclave scout on foot, someone who'd apparently anticipated the route and gotten ahead of the search on the road. He raised a crossbow before Sela could react, aim leveled squarely at Bran.

Bran didn't think. He dropped low in the skiff on instinct, the bolt cutting through the air where his chest had been a heartbeat before, thudding hard into the willow trunk behind them, and the sudden shift in weight sent the small boat rocking violently, water slapping cold over the side.

"Down!" Sela barked, already swinging the pole in a wide arc, catching the scout's crossbow and knocking it from his grip before he could reload. The man staggered back into the shallows with a heavy splash, cursing, reaching for a blade at his hip instead.

Mirelle moved fastest of the three of them, drawing a short knife Bran hadn't known she carried and closing the distance with a speed that suggested her "retired" status had never fully stuck. She didn't kill him — a hard strike to the temple with the knife's pommel dropped the scout into the shallow water, unconscious rather than dead, the wet reeds closing over him with barely a ripple.

"There'll be more," Mirelle said, breathing hard, climbing back into the skiff as Sela shoved them onward through the channel. "That one was alone, which means he was meant to slow us down, not stop us."

"Slow us down for what?" Bran asked.

"For the ones who can actually catch us," Sela said grimly, poling harder now, urgency replacing her earlier calm. "Hold on, boy. This next stretch gets rough."

The channel widened ahead into open river, the trees thinning out on either side, and Bran caught sight of movement along the distant bank riders, several of them, cutting across open ground to intercept where the marsh met open water.

"They know where the channel opens," Sela said, reading Bran's expression. "Of course they do. Darrow doesn't send men into unfamiliar ground without mapping it first."

Bran's chest tightened at the name — a name he hadn't heard before, spoken with the particular weight of someone naming an old, known danger rather than a stranger. "Who's Darrow?"

"The Conclave's problem to explain, not mine," Sela said, poling harder still, muscles straining with effort that belied her age. "Right now, your problem is staying alive long enough to reach the next bend, where this channel splits and only one branch actually leads anywhere useful."

The riders on the bank were closing fast, close enough now that Bran could make out individual shapes — armored, disciplined, moving with the same unmarked gray efficiency he remembered from the clearing where Cole had fallen.

"There," Mirelle said, pointing toward a gap in the reeds ahead where the channel forked exactly as Sela had promised. "Left or right?"

"Left," Sela said without hesitation. "Right leads back toward open river where they can run us down on horseback. Left goes somewhere they won't follow easily."

"Where?"

Sela's expression, for just a moment, flickered with something that wasn't quite fear but sat close to it.

"Somewhere I swore I'd never take anyone again," she said, poling them hard toward the left channel as the riders' shouts grew louder behind them. "But desperate times, boy. Desperate times."

The skiff cut left, into darker, narrower water, reeds closing overhead like a canopy, the riders' voices fading behind them into the marsh's thick, indifferent silence.