CHAPTER 898: PLANS IN THE FINAL HOURS OF DAYLIGHT (PART TWO)

"Yes, High One," Lusia said, too excited to be in the presence of her idol to be bothered by the prickly aura emanating from her armor. "The first group came early, an hour ahead of the second one. They were a smaller, shabbier group with light armor and only a few men on horses. Less than thirty men in all."

"Banners are important to humans," Heila said as she frowned at the slips of parchment on the map, wishing they contained more information about the heraldry humans used to divide themselves up. "Did you see any banners with this group? Any symbols on their shields?" Heila asked as she glanced at the dark-haired figure in the corner of the tent who looked like he wished he was as small as Captain Lusia.

Hugo Hanrahan occupied an awkward position in the army. He had offered his services to Lady Ashlynn but she had yet to take him on. Moreover, everyone knew that his life belonged to Dame Sybyll who had yet to decide whether or not she would execute him for his family’s crimes against hers.

At the same time, he had clearly made the decision to prove his worth, and he’d offered up invaluable information about the city and its defenses as they planned their assault, which was why he had been summoned to the command tent along with the other leaders while Liam Dunn was still under guard as a captive and ’observer’ of the battle to come.

Now, Heila wasn’t just asking for information that would help her understand the map. She was also asking for information that they would need Hugo Hanrahan to interpret.

"Um, here it is, I have it, I know," Lusia said quickly as she fished in the discrete pockets sewn into her tunic, pulling out several additional slips of parchment containing the individual reports from each of her scouts. "The banner was green with a stag’s head and an arrow, or a spear or something like that. A lance?"

"It’s my brother," Hugo said with a heavy sigh. "Half-brother. It’s Bastian and his guard," he explained, quickly putting layers of distance between himself and Ian Hanrahan’s ’legitimate’ heir. "He probably rode ahead of Loman’s forces in order to tell my father to prepare a reception. If Liam is right and Marquis Bors is favoring Loman as his heir, my father wouldn’t want to miss a chance to curry favor with the next lord of the march and Bastian knows it."

"So that makes this group Loman’s?" Heila asked, pointing to another slip of paper and looking between Hugo and Captain Lusia.

"This group had three banners," she said as she examined the sketches provided by the scout who had seen them. "A circle surrounded by wavy lines in red and gold, a sword with white lines radiating out from it, and... and one that looks like this," she said, hopping off her stool to hand a sketch over to the hawk-nosed human who seemed strangely intent on betraying his kind.

"It’s a sun rising over a castle’s walls," Hugo explained as he examined the sketch. "It’s meant to be the castle gatehouse. It’s lord Loman’s personal sigil," he added with a complicated look on his face. If Loman was traveling under his own sigil instead of the radiant sun and stars of the Church while the rest of the soldiers flew that banners of the Inquisition and the Templars, then he really had broken with the Church in order to become the next lord of Lothian March.

It shouldn’t matter to the man who had briefly been Owain Lothian’s Steward, but somehow, it still hurt to see confirmation that his former liege lord had fallen from grace. All of the plotting, the scheming, the trip to Blackwell County and everything that had happened afterwards... and for what?

For a moment, Hugo felt closer to Owain than he had ever been before. Bors Lothian was treating his eldest son like a placeholder, a seat warmer who could occupy the position of heir until he was ready to place his favored child on the throne. It wasn’t much different than the way Ian Hanrahan had treated Hugo, lifting him up and acknowledging him publicly when he needed to produce a ’spare heir’ and then washing his hands of the unfavored child once his usefulness had come to an end.

"If Loman has arrived with the Templar and the Inquisitor," Heila said as she searched the map for another marker. "Then we’ll be attacking the city tonight. We need to move our soldiers as close to Hanrahan Town as we can before the sun sets so we don’t waste any of Dame Sybyll’s time tonight."

The winter knight would be long, especially for the humans who found themselves fighting a pitched battle to defend their homes, but whether it was long enough to breach the town’s outer defenses and seize Ian Hanrahan’s fortified keep at the heart of the town remained to be seen. If they wasted too much time marching their army into position, it might mean they lost their most powerful fighter right when they needed her the most.

"There’s a sentry post in the way of a direct march," one of the Golden Eyed captains, a man with dull brown fur and several small rings of victory in his left ear said as he forced himself to ignore the Willow Witch’s prickly aura and approached the map, pointing to a collection of markings and a small slip of parchment. "We’ll lose an hour of daylight if we have to sneak around it."

"Isn’t it just a dozen men in a pile of rocks?" One of the Iron Tusked captains asked, wrinkling his stubby snout at the notion that it would be any kind of obstacle to their advance. "Let me take the boys out for a stroll, we’ll knock it right down so the rest of you don’t need to waste time going around."

"Hugo, do you know this sentry tower?" Heila asked, looking at the source of much of their information about the Hanrahans. "Yesterday, you said that some of the towers light signal fires if they see enemies and some ring bells. Which kind is this?"

The presence of those warning towers had forced Dame Sybyll to place her camp farther away from Hanrahan town than she wanted, but she hadn’t been willing to risk detection by toppling a tower or killing its watchers.

According to the Crimson Knight, without knowing the schedule that guards used to rotate in and out of manning the towers, the risk was too great that whoever they killed in the night would have their relief show up in the morning and raise the alarm before the army was ready to fight.

"That’s an old tower," Hugo said as he looked at the map. "Dame Sybyll’s father ordered it to be built, along with each of these," he said, tapping several other marked sentry stations on the map. "It’s a solid tower with a good bell," he said, delivering the news that no one wanted to hear.

Bells were expensive and bells that were big enough and loud enough to be heard from leagues across the valley were even more expensive. But it was also much, much faster to ring a warning bell than to light a signal fire, which was why Baron Brighton Hanrahan had spent so much money when he constructed them. In his mind, every second of warning was priceless.

Baron Ian Hanrahan, by contrast, hoarded every gold sovereign as though they were more precious than the lives of his farmers and townsfolk who lived outside the city’s walls, and the towers he ordered to be constructed were both shorter and served as little more than platforms to light a large signal fire.

Now, however, if Hugo Hanrahan was correct, they would have to find a way to silence the best early warning system the Hanrahans had at their disposal if they wanted to have any hope of marching on the town unopposed... and short of going to deal with it herself, Heila had no idea how to solve that problem.