Due’s letter came up with the morning bread, folded into the wax paper the baker used for everything.

It had taken eleven days to cross a distance a fast rider could close in four.

That was the price of the slow channel.

Nothing sent through it could ever be urgent, because by the time it arrived, the urgent thing was already over.

Alistair read it standing at the window.

Due never wrote the way he talked.

On paper, he was clean and ordered, almost severe, and only here and there a word slipped through that gave him away, picked because it amused him rather than because it was correct.

The letter began plainly enough.

I am going to tell you the worst of it first, so you do not have to wade through three paragraphs of charm to reach it, the way you usually make people wade through to reach you.

Alistair’s mouth twitched, and he decided against it.

Multiple factions are coordinating against us. Two probes hit the eastern edge in one week, and Sable confirmed both.

The Ashen Chain ran the first, the Brindle Crown ran the second, and those two would sooner gut each other than share a campfire, which is exactly why it matters.

They timed the probes to land in the same week on purpose.

Not to break us, because we are not worth breaking yet, and I say that with great personal offense.

They did it to learn whether anyone over here is awake enough to notice that the timing itself was a message.

We are awake, and I would much prefer they keep believing we are not.

A man who thinks he is watching a blind man keeps showing you his whole hand, and I have grown very fond of seeing hands.

You will be pleased to hear I have been behaving.

I have not threatened a single soul in nearly a month, and Sable has decided I must be ill.

I have let her think so, since it is good for a man’s reputation to be occasionally believed dying.

The granaries are full, which is the only good news I have, and even that worries me. Full granaries are a reason to come visiting.

I have started counting the roads in, and I do not like the number, and I dislike even more that I am counting at all, since counting roads is the sort of thing you do, not me.

Then came the line that stopped him cold.

Tell me when to act.

I will not move one man until your word reaches me.

I am aware of how that sounds, coming from me, and I have decided to let it sound that way. You taught me the waiting, you cold eastern miser, and I find I hate it the way you said I would.

Alistair read it again, because the first reading had not seemed possible.

Due did not ask permission.

In the entire length of their acquaintance, Due had never once asked permission for anything, least of all the things he most certainly should have.

He informed people, and then he apologized afterward, beautifully, when there was no road left around it.

A Due who waited on a word eleven days away was a Due who had looked at the board and seen a shape he did not like.

’He is frightened,’ Alistair thought, and the thought sat wrong in him, since until this morning he had not been certain Due could be.

He pressed the letter flat into the lining of his case and smoothed the seam shut with his thumb. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

There was a second sheet behind it, thinner, written in a hand that was not Due’s.

It was a single coded line in Elara’s running cipher, the one she had built off a child’s counting song, so that any man who cracked it would only think he had found a nursery rhyme and put it down again.

Alistair read it through twice before the sense settled.

Two doors open now. Marish sat with me, and he gave me an hour and his own name in trade for nothing yet, which from a man like him is a great deal.

Building it slowly. Velden holds.

Tell Due to stop sending me lectures about my cipher, since it is better than his and he knows it. – E.

Seeing this, Alistair stood at the window a long while.

Elara was prying open the exiled houses one stubborn lord at a time, down in the south, with nothing behind her but her name and the nerve to spend it.

Due was sitting on his hands in the Oasis of Grain, waiting on a man a continent away to tell him whether he might defend his own people.

Silas was three lanes from being caught.

And all of it ran through this one cold room, through him, through a man who could not answer any of the three in less than a fortnight without giving away the very thing that kept the three of them breathing.

He had wanted to see the whole board. He had it now.

’Seeing all of it and being unable to touch one square of it,’ he thought. ’That is its own kind of cruelty, and I walked into it with my eyes open.’

He read Elara’s line again, because there was something under it she had not quite said.

Marish had given his name in trade for nothing yet. She had written nothing yet, two small words, and the two words were the whole letter.

A man like Marish did not hand his name to a stranger out of courtesy. He gave it because he had already decided to spend it on her and was only waiting to learn the price.

Elara knew that, and she had written nothing yet so that Alistair would know it too, and would not waste a fortnight of the slow channel asking her whether the south was going well.

The south was going well, and that was the part that unsettled him.

Things go well, in his experience, right up until a careful man decides they have gone well enough to be worth taking.

Alistair was honestly unsettled by how clean all of it looked from the outside.

Following that, he sat at the small table, took out paper, and began a reply, because writing it at least felt like doing something.

He stopped after one line, since the line was already a lie.

Hold, he had written. Wait for me.

By the time the word reached the Oasis, the week Due was describing would be a month gone, and whatever was true here on the page would be a fairy story there.

He set the pen down, and for a moment, he simply listened to the street waking up below the window.

Eleven days out, and eleven days back. He had done the arithmetic a hundred times and got the same hateful answer, and underneath it ran the question he could not put down.

By the time his word reached Due, what would the answer already be too late to change?

And would Due, for the first time in his life, actually have waited to hear it?