The reclamation notice went up on the third day.
Someone had nailed it to the post outside the magistrate's hall in the early morning, before the market opened, before most of Ashfeld was awake. By the time Brennan crossed the square it had already gathered a small crowd — farmers mostly, men with thick hands and careful faces, reading slowly or waiting for someone else to read it aloud.
Brennan read it himself. He read quickly and moved on.
The language was imperial — formal, dense, the kind of prose designed to make inevitable things sound procedural. Three parcels of land on Ashfeld's eastern and southern borders, currently occupied by tenant farmers under informal arrangements, were hereby reclaimed under imperial land statute seventeen, by order of Lord Cassian of House Vael, acting in the Emperor's name. Occupants had fourteen days to vacate. Compensation would be assessed at the magistrate's discretion.
Assessed at the magistrate's discretion meant there would be no compensation.
Brennan walked on. He bought an apple from a stall, ate it in four bites, and went to find Edric.
He found him where they'd agreed — at the garrison wall's western gate, sitting on a low stone with his elbows on his knees and the particular expression of someone who had already heard the news and was working out how to feel about it.
"You saw the notice," Brennan said.
"My father told me last night." Edric looked at the valley below without seeing it. "It's legal. Technically the land was crown property that was never formally transferred. The families have been there for decades, but the paperwork was never—" He stopped. "That sounds like I'm defending it."
"You are defending it."
"I'm explaining it."
"Same thing from where those families are standing."
Edric was quiet for a moment. The wind came up from the valley, cold and smelling of turned earth and coming frost. Below them, three villages sat in the morning light, small and patient, the kind of settlements that had existed long enough to assume they would continue existing.
"My father does what the empire requires," Edric said finally. It came out careful, rehearsed, like something he'd been told enough times that he'd almost started believing it.
Brennan said nothing. He'd learned that silence was more honest than argument in situations like this.
Edric looked at him sideways. "You think he's wrong."
"I think those families will have nowhere to go before winter." He said it without heat, the way he said most things. "I think the magistrate will assess compensation at nothing. I think technically legal and right are not the same category." He paused. "But I'm a boy who sleeps in a deaf man's loft, so what do I know about imperial land statute seventeen."
Edric laughed despite himself — that surprised sound — then caught it and looked vaguely guilty for laughing. "You're impossible to argue with."
"I'm not arguing. I'm telling you what I see."
"That's worse."
They sat on the garrison wall while Ashfeld woke up below them and the notice stayed nailed to the post and the farmers stood in the square and talked in low voices, and Brennan watched the edges of things the way he always did — the alleys, the rooftops, the faces that moved through the crowd with purpose rather than confusion.
He noticed two of them.
They weren't farmers. Their clothes were rough enough, but they stood differently — weight forward, eyes moving in that systematic way that wasn't shopping or gossiping. They read the notice without the stunned blankness of people receiving bad news. They read it like people confirming something they already knew.
Then they left. Same direction, different timing, sixty seconds apart. Practiced.
Brennan watched them go and said nothing.
The next two days had their own rhythm.
Edric had an appetite for the town that didn't diminish — he wanted to see everything, understand everything, ask about everything. Brennan obliged with the economy of someone completing a job but found despite himself that the job had become something other than a transaction.
Edric was not like the noble-born Brennan had occasionally encountered in Ashfeld — merchants' sons and minor lords' riders passing through, who wore their status like armor and spoke to people like Brennan the way you spoke to furniture. Edric spoke to everyone the same way. The market vendors, the old woman who kept goats at the town's edge, the children who followed them for two streets hoping something interesting would happen. The same open attention, the same genuine questions.
It was, Brennan had decided, either a very sophisticated performance or a genuine character flaw.
He was beginning to suspect it was the latter.
"Your father," Brennan said on the second afternoon. They were at the river again, which had become their default location through no deliberate choice. "When does he finish his business?"
"Tomorrow, probably." Edric skipped a stone. Three hops. "Then we ride back to our estate. Three days north." He paused. "Then Valdris, eventually. My father has a presentation before the imperial court in six weeks."
"What kind of presentation?"
The careful pause again, the faint tightening. "Political. Border governance. He's been asked to speak on regional administration in Earnmere." He said it smoothly, and it was probably even true, and it was definitely not all of it.
Brennan let it go. "You've been to Valdris?"
"Many times." Something shifted in Edric's expression — complicated, not entirely comfortable. "It's extraordinary. The plateau, the walls, the citadel. There's nowhere else like it." He paused. "It's also the most dangerous place in the empire if you're not careful about who you speak to and how."
"More dangerous than rebel territory?"
Edric looked at him. "Rebels want things you can understand. Land. Food. Justice." His voice was measured, older than his face. "The people in Valdris want things you can't always see. That's worse."
Brennan considered this. It was, he thought, the most honest thing Edric had said in three days.
"You're not what I expected," Brennan said.
"What did you expect?"
"A lordling who wanted someone to carry his bags and point at things."
Edric grinned. "I carry my own bags."
"I noticed." A pause. "Why did you actually want a guide?"
The grin faded slightly, replaced by something more considered. "My father's work makes people angry. It's made people angry before, in other towns. I thought—" He stopped. "I thought having someone local beside me made me less of a target."
The honesty of it was unexpected. Brennan sat with it for a moment.
"Smart," he said finally.
"Practical," Edric said. "My father's word, not mine."
That night Brennan lay in the loft and thought about the two men he'd seen at the notice board. He thought about the angle of their shoulders and the direction they'd left and the fact that he'd seen one of them again that afternoon at the market's edge, watching the Rose and Thorn with patient, professional attention.
He thought about Edric saying I thought having someone local beside me made me less of a target.
He thought about how that calculation had just become significantly more complicated.
He could say something. Warn Edric, or tell his guards, or simply mention what he'd seen to someone whose problem it officially was. That was the sensible path. Clean, uninvolved, no obligation.
He reached under the floorboard and took out Cinder.
Held it in the dark. That settling feeling, steady and wordless.
He thought about the farmers standing in the square that morning reading the notice. Thought about assessed at the magistrate's discretion. Thought about the fact that whoever those men were, they had a legitimate grievance even if their methods weren't going to be legitimate.
He thought about Edric carrying his own bags and asking genuine questions and laughing that surprised laugh.
He put Cinder back. Lay down. Stared at the rafters.
He'd say something in the morning, he decided. Tell Edric to have his guards sweep the inn's perimeter. Simple, practical, done.
He was still telling himself this when he heard the horses in the street below — four of them, moving carefully, no torchlight — and understood immediately that morning was going to be too late.
He was already reaching for Cinder before the thought finished forming.
His body, as always, was faster than his mind.