They made camp deeper in the forest that night, fires kept low and shielded, and it was well past midnight before anyone raised the question that had been sitting, unspoken, at the edge of every conversation since the tunnel.
"We need a way to stop them from following us at all," Pompey said, finally, pacing a tight, worried circle around the fire. "A barrier. One that can't be crossed without its creator's own permission, and turns to ash anyone who tries anyway."
"How do we build something like that," King Belsarius asked.
"Only an Artificer can raise it," Pompey said, "which we have, thank the Drowned Faith. The materials are the difficulty. Three relics, all forged by the last Artificer this kingdom ever produced before Remus. A crown. A blade called the Lion of the North. And something called the Raven's Claw."
King Belsarius's hand went, instinctively, to the crown still sitting on his own head. "This is a symbol of my authority," he said, quiet. "Without it, what am I, exactly?"
"Alive," Annabelle said, gently. "Which is worth considerably more right now than a symbol is."
The King held the crown's weight in both hands a long moment, then set it, without further argument, into Pompey's careful grip. "Take it," he said. "I trust you both to know what it's actually for."
"And the blade?" Annabelle asked. "Does anyone even know where to start looking for something called the Lion of the North?"
Rhaeya, quiet until now at the edge of the fire's light, spoke before Remus could. "I already know where it is," she said. "I tried to steal it back once, from an armory vault in Newtown. Remus took it off me before I could get clear."
Every face in the clearing turned toward Remus at once.
"The Lion's Claw and the Lion of the North are the same weapon," Remus said, before anyone had to ask it outright. "Rhaeya's own people forged it, generations ago, before it ended up stolen and mounted on a wall for nobles who never once asked what it was actually called. I took it off her during the armory job that cost Tacitus his rank, kept it in a drawer at Autumnshade ever since, and never once told anyone what I'd done with it, because I genuinely didn't think it would ever matter to anyone but me."
He drew the blade from his inventory, dark along its curved length, the same cold weight settling into his palm that it always had.
"Item retrieved from inventory: Lion of the North."
Pompey exhaled something that sounded almost like relief. "One relic down," he said. "The Raven's Claw?"
Remus hesitated for exactly one breath longer than he meant to, and the hesitation itself told everyone watching considerably more than he wanted it to.
"I have that as well," he said, drawing the small, dark claw from his inventory. "I can't tell you how I came to have it."
"Item retrieved from inventory: Raven's Claw."
The silence that followed lasted only a moment, but Rhaeya, sharp-eyed as ever, was the one who broke it.
"You can't, or you won't," she said, not unkindly, but with the flat, professional suspicion of a woman who'd spent her entire life reading exactly this kind of careful phrasing for a living. "Because from where I'm standing, that's a relic no living outsider should have any legitimate way of owning, and you're the only person in this clearing with a documented habit of walking off with things that aren't yours."
"It wasn't stolen," Remus said.
"Then say where it came from," Rhaeya pressed. "Because if I'm about to hand a royal crown and a Northlands blade over to a barrier built partly from an item you won't account for, I want considerably more than your word that it's fine."
"Rhaeya," Pompey said, warning in it, "we don't have time for this."
"We don't have time for it precisely because he's made it a mystery when it didn't have to be one," Rhaeya said, not backing down. "Every minute we spend arguing about whether this claw is safe to use is a minute the Nightforged spend closing the distance behind us."
She wasn't wrong, and the argument dragged on regardless, Pompey trying twice to redirect the conversation back to the barrier's construction, King Belsarius watching with the helpless, practiced anxiety of a boy who'd learned, the hard way, exactly how fast an argument among the people protecting him could turn into a genuine danger of its own. By the time Remus finally spoke again, precious minutes had bled away, and somewhere beyond the treeline a low, distant hum had begun to build that hadn't been there when the argument started.
"I received it as a gift," Remus said, finally, quiet enough that the whole circle had to lean in to catch it. "From a blind sage, at a temple on an island most of you have never heard the name of. He told me, when he handed it to me, that not everyone I met from that point forward deserved to know how I'd come by it. I took that as permission to keep it to myself indefinitely. I understand now that permission from a stranger a continent away doesn't actually cover the people standing in front of me who've bled to keep me alive."
"That's the whole truth," Andrea said, and it wasn't quite a question, since her own gift for reading intent had already told her the answer before he finished speaking.
"That's the whole truth," Remus confirmed.
Annabelle, who'd stayed quiet through the whole exchange, finally spoke, and her voice carried none of Rhaeya's sharp suspicion, only a tired, familiar disappointment that landed considerably harder for it. "You didn't have to let her guess like that," she said. "You never have to. That's exactly the problem, Remus. It costs you nothing to just tell people the truth up front, and you choose the harder, slower version every single time anyway, and then we all pay for the minutes it takes you to finally say the easy thing."
Remus opened his mouth to answer that, and found, for once, that he didn't have a smooth reply ready, only the plain, uncomfortable truth of her being right.
"You're right," he said. "I don't have a good excuse for it this time. I have an old habit, and I let the habit run instead of stopping it."
The distant hum resolved, a moment later, into the unmistakable drone of wings, and Search confirmed what every set of straining ears in the clearing had already half guessed.
Skill Activated: Detection.
Nightforged Patrol Craft Detected. Bearing: Southwest. Closing.
"They're not past us yet," Tacitus's own hard-won tunnel plan had bought them exactly that much, "but they will be soon," Pompey said, already moving. "Whatever this cost us, we don't have the minutes left to spend on it twice."
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