The keep of Adlecrest castle stood at the top of the hill’s peak. It was a great grey pillar that cast its shadow over the town. Built long before the six Great Houses of Essica had risen to power and united the realm, it had watched over the entrance to the Finger for hundreds of years. Before House Kintran’s peace, strife had plagued the realm. Provinces fought their neighbours bitterly, especially up here in the north. Whenever harvests failed, communities would fall upon one another for their very survival.

The castle was built to protect the Finger, the most fertile region in the North, and a prize desired by many. It had fallen into disrepair during the centuries long Kintran peace, and only once the war had turned against them did House Verini begin to invest in restoring it. Ten years of half hearted efforts was insufficient to undo centuries of neglect, and parts of the castle were still a crumbling ruin. Several of the walls on the upper levels had large holes in them, and the roof of the castle’s west wing had collapsed years ago rendering that portion of the castle uninhabitable.

Despite all this, the castle was still formidable and would not fall easily. The people of the surrounding town were reassured by its indomitable presence. Guards patrolled the fourth of the keep’s six levels. Despite the Mason’s Guild’s best efforts, the two highest levels were not deemed safe enough to use. The four guards patrolled the single corridor of the fourth level in pairs, guarding against intruders, and using their vantage point to see if anything was amiss out in the peatlands.

One level above them, padding across the rafters was a black clad figure. Rats skittered around his feet and the castle walls creaked the stones contracted in the cold night air. The figure moved silently until he arrived at the Lord General’s personal chambers. Candlelight flickered up through the ceiling boards, and voices could be heard from below. Though it was late, he was still up and accompanied by a guest. Perched on a beam, the figure crouched down, slowed his breathing, and began to listen.

“Scouts report that the Balith vanguard has crossed the Torinth, so we can assume that their scouts are at least twenty miles in advance of them, if not further,” Randal said wearily. “That puts them about two weeks from our walls.”

“That Olin Balith is a cautious bastard,” Vick said, his voice brimming with admiration.

He was referring to Count Gordon’s second son, who had been entrusted with the Norrow campaign. The Lord General of the defence consulted his papers one last time and stifled a yawn. “I shall order Sir Gavin to sally forth at dawn with two hundred light cavalry. That should be a large enough force to give them pause.”

Randal stretched on an easy chair before raising an eyebrow. “Is that wise?”

“Every day we delay them is a day closer to winter,” Vick replied. “Let us just hope that our enemies have forgotten just how harsh the winters east of the White Mountains are.”

Randal made a face. “I’m more worried about the numbers of deserters we’d suffer if we sent men out into the moors.”

“They’re light horsemen,” Vick shrugged. “Not of much use in a siege. It’s worth a punt.”

“If you say so,” Randal said dubiously.

“I’m also going to recall the eighth and twelfth skirmishers from the moors,” Vick added.

Randal sat bolt upright and let out a low whistle. “That’s a lot of men.”

“We need the numbers here,” Vick said. “Desertions have hit harder than I’d feared.”

Outside, the church bells began to chime the changing of the hour. Once they ceased, Randal looked up at the ceiling and frowned.

“What’s the matter?” Vick asked.

“It appears that our uninvited guest has left early tonight,” the younger man replied.

Vick followed his gaze and frowned. “Well, we did give him some juicy scraps. Let’s hope he’s gone to report to his superiors instead of finding anything amiss.”

“I find it troubling that he has still been able to get in despite our increased security,” Randal sighed.

“He’s skilled at infiltration,” Vick allowed. “Signal the guards.”

Randal rose and gave the older man a look. “Are you sure you don’t want to follow him? He might lead us to the rest of his cell.”

Vick shook his head. “He’s proven himself to be a wily one, so let’s minimize our risks. Spring the trap. Worst case is he escapes and whispers our misinformation into Lord Olin’s ear.”

Gav wavered for a moment as he padded towards the fifth floor window. This was his sixth day in Adlecrest, and his fourth day prowling through the castle. He had spent the first two nights determining Arden’s routine. Once he was satisfied the old blacksmith wasn’t secretly checking on him as he slept in the workshop’s storeroom, he began leaving at night to probe the castle.

Blacksmithing was hard work and Arden kept a brutal pace, which was unsurprising given his backlog. As a result, Gav’s body ached all over, which was part of the reason he had ended the night’s surveillance early. He had learned nothing new. Lord Vick only worked on the fourth floor but slept in the barracks with the common guards on the keep’s ground floor, and he hadn’t been alone for a moment since Gav had begun his surveillance.

His fatigue was one of the reasons he had called tonight’s surveillance off early. The other was that something smelled fishy. The guards appeared to be jumpy about something, though they attempted to hide it. At first, Gav had dismissed it as worry about the enemy army sweeping through their lands, but tonight, they were even more nervous than usual, and he had the sinking feeling it was something else.

As he observed the castle courtyard from his vantage point, his heart began to pound. There was no doubt about it. He could tell the men patrolling the courtyard below were watching the keep’s upper levels, though they tried to hide it. He looked around and noticed the lights were snuffed out in the nearby buildings. That hadn’t been the case over the past two nights. Looking carefully, he the silhouettes of men through some of the windows, looking as though they were about to spring out when given a signal.

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A gasp escaped Gav’s lips. They knew he was here. Had they known for the past two nights as well? But how? He had never been discovered before he had made his kill. He was sure he hadn’t been seen or heard on his past intrusions. The hackles on his neck began to rise as a possibility crossed his mind. He had been careless. Then, he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Three men, trying to be quiet, but failing miserably to his ears. The trap had been sprung and he hadn’t a moment to waste.

He skirted around to the west end of the keep before slowly climbing out of a window. The windows of the keep were aligned one above the other and as he dropped from the fifth floor window to the fourth, he heard hurried steps from the courtyard below indicating that he had been seen. Moments later, there was a shout of alarm from the window above as he hung from the ledge. Without wasting a moment, he dropped to the third floor, landing with catlike grace on the roof of the castle’s abandoned west wing.

He then dropped through one of the larger holes in the roof and sparked a fire on a pile of oil soaked rags he had prepared on the first night before doubling back towards the keep. He quickly found the hole in the wall that he had discovered on the first day that led to a storeroom in the keep and wriggled through. Outside the storeroom’s door, he heard men running for the stairs and hurriedly put on a hauberk and helmet. Now that he looked like a castle guard, he waited at the door until the coast was clear before stepping out into the corridor.

This was the riskiest part of his prepared escape route and why he hated disguising himself as a soldier. In garrisons this well drilled, everyone would be familiar with the people in their section, and he would be discovered as a stranger the moment someone gave him a second look. Keeping his head low, he joined the flow of men rushing towards the ground floor as they converged onto the west wing.

Gav felt queasy as he realized he was the last soldier clattering down the stairs. That was a blessing and a curse. It made it easier for him to slip away unseen, but it also made him the most conspicuous man to any officer who might be waiting below.

Once they reached the ground floor, Gav ducked into an empty room before rushing for the window. Outside, soldiers were converging on the castle’s west wing. However, flares had now been lit in the courtyard, making it difficult for him to see the sentries stationed on top of the castle walls that ringed the castle complex. They, however, would have no problem spotting him. Then, he heard more men coming down the corridor outside. They were searching the keep room by room and would soon arrive at his.

Taking a deep breath to calm his heaving stomach, Gav adjusted the sword he had strapped across his back so that its hilt was in easy reach. He then touched the roof of his mouth his tongue, a technique his master had taught him to change his mindset. It enabled him to kill any who stood in his way without hesitation.

He waited by the window until he heard cries of alarm. The fire he had set in the west wing had grown quickly. Knowing he had little time to spare, he opened the window and climbed out before closing it behind him. Mouthing a prayer to the gods that the sentry’s eyes were on the fire at the west wing, he ran towards the wall.

Miraculously, he made it to the top of the wall unchallenged. He watched the conflagration that had engulfed the castle’s west wing and felt a shaft of regret. The night had been a disaster. His target was well and truly alerted now, and the meticulously prepared escape route for when he killed the Lord General had been rendered unusable, but it couldn’t be helped. In exchange, he had discovered something important. Something that would have probably resulted in his failure if he hadn’t realized it before he made the actual assassination attempt.

He looked both ways down the wall and saw that the sentries were watching with their mouths agape at the burning roof before climbing over the parapet and dropping himself into town. Moments later, he had reached the alleys and allowed himself to relax a little.

Sir Lucen Drath was sweating profusely despite the frigid temperature as he watched the castle’s west wing burn. He had been captain of the castle guard before Great Traitor murdered his king and had been forced to watch as his master led his glorious forces through the city walls on his doomed conquest of Cumbar. Tonight had been his first real test since the War of the Four Counts began, and it was difficult for him to see it as being anything but an abject failure.

As soon as he saw the fire on the upper level of the west wing, he organized his men to form a human chain to ferry buckets of water from the nearby well. Despite their best efforts, the fire was quickly growing out of control.

“We haven’t enough buckets,” he heard Lord Vick say from behind him. “Have your men concentrate on preventing the fire from spreading to the keep.”

His face turned ashen, and he barked out the orders before dropping to a knee. “My Lord, I regret to report that we have found no sign of the intruder. I have no excuse.”

Vick looked at the fire for a little longer before shaking his head. “It can’t be helped, Captain. In a way, we were fortunate that the spy revealed this weakness to us. It would have been a lot worse if they started this fire while we were in the midst of a siege.”

“It appears we overlooked the number of buckets we need to fight a serious fire,” Randal grunted from next to Vick. “A seemingly innocuous oversight that could have cost us greatly.”

Vick nodded in agreement. “In a way, this spy has been most helpful to us.”

“It’s almost as though he wasn’t a Balith spy at all,” Randal remarked. “I can’t imagine one would be competent enough to slip in despite our heightened security and then reveal so many of our weaknesses, knowing we have plenty of time to remedy them, in order to escape.”

“Unless we have more glaring weaknesses in our defences that we aren’t aware of,” Vick remarked.

A sudden thought occurred to Sir Lucen that turned his blood cold. “Or perhaps this spy was actually an assassin who values the Lord General’s head over the taking of Adlecrest,” he blurted.

“Then he is a poor judge of worth,” Vick scoffed.

“I’m afraid you are selling yourself short, my friend,” Randal remarked. “You are probably the single most important man to House Verini north of Dramouth.”

“My Lord, if you let me keep my head, I swear on my honour that this carrion will be found,” Lucen swore.

Vick gave the old soldier a blank look. “Why would I take your head? You weren’t responsible for what happened tonight. Our intruder decided to leave before everything was in place.”

“If anything, the fault is mine,” Randal said as he rubbed the back of his head ruefully. “I was the one who set tonight’s trap up, and it has failed quite spectacularly.”

“If nothing else we now know that a dangerous agent of the enemy is loose in our town,” Vick said. “That is worth something.”

“I’m afraid you won’t be able to go on your walkabouts in town until the assassin is found,” Randal warned.

“You raise a good point, Sir Randal,” Vick said as he turned to his friend.

The younger man blinked. “You think so? I was expecting some pushback on this. I had a big speech about your importance to our cause.”

“Not about that,” Vick said with a wave of his hand. “We have been outside the castle almost every day since you first discovered the intruder. It would have been far easier to strike at us out there, so why didn’t he?”

Randal shrugged before raising an eyebrow. “Us?”

Vick nodded. “I feel you are far more important to the cause than I, and our intruder started making his visits just after you arrived.”

“I was the one who discovered his presence,” Randal pointed out. “For all we know, he could have been coming by for months. As for why he didn’t strike outside, perhaps he couldn’t for reasons we don’t yet know.”

“Us being seen outside is important for morale,” Vick said. “For both the people and the soldiers.”

“Then at least take a dozen men with you when you perform your rounds,” Lucen pleaded.

Vick nodded. “That would be wise. And I think it’s time we started sending the civilians off.”

“I wonder what our little intruder is doing now,” Randal sighed as he turned his attention to beyond the castle walls.

“He’s probably out there laughing at our incompetence,” Lucen spat bitterly.