Chương 222: 35. Enemy at the Gates 2

The moment I stepped outside the command room, I understood exactly what "a commercial port entering wartime footing" actually meant. Chaos, obviously. But not the formless kind—the kind you get when everyone knows disaster has arrived and still hasn't quite finished letting go of their ordinary habits. The courtyard, the streets, the harbor lanes—people everywhere. Soldiers running, messengers shouting, porters pushing carts, clerks hugging scrolls.

Even the merchant guild officers, who normally walked sideways like crabs, had finally learned to move in a straight line today. Cart after cart rolled into the command post's side yard for logging, the registrars writing so fast their quills practically smoked. Someone hauled crates. Someone carried the wounded. Someone dragged a crying child in circles, looking for her mother. Most fascinating of all: the first people to recover their basic instincts amid the chaos were, once again, the ones in business.

"This crate's Eastern Sea Pearls! Don't crush it! Don't crush it!"

"Your ancestral tablets can get crushed, but not these?" Jessi shoved the man bodily aside, pointing at the wounded-transport wagon behind him.

"Make way! People first here, not cargo!" Nearby, a madam with half her hair undone dragged three girls along by the sleeve, still cursing at full volume.

"Locked down last night, evacuating today—do you officials have some kind of personal grudge against our trade?!" The soldier escorting them, face black as a storm cloud, shot back: "You didn't ask my fortune when you were counting last night's silver." She had enough breath left to spit at him.

"If you'd had the nerve to show up last night, I might not have minded asking!" He nearly choked on that. Walking past, I couldn't help thinking: this really is Iscapubla Harbor. Any other city facing an imperial fleet in the bay would be one long note of wailing and prayer. Here, it was like someone had thrown a fish market, a gambling den, a songhouse, a warehouse, and a barracks into one pot and boiled them together—and the first bowl of soup that came out still had profanity floating in it.

Alvira pushed straight through, picking the least pleasant and most efficient jobs available. She planted herself at a crossroads, wand held crosswise, carving two clear lanes out of the crowd—directing clerks and staff toward the north gate with one hand while shoving wealthy merchants and their servants, still trying to smuggle out extra crates, off to the side with the other. Today, more than ever, she looked like a tree that could kill you.

Yozora moved with a small escort, guarding the witnesses and evidence chests recovered last night. Her hood was pulled low, showing only a strip of pale jaw, a cold shadow cutting through the crowd. As we passed each other, she said quietly: "I've counted all the Vixenfolk. If one's missing, I'll know."

"Perfect," I said.

"Now I just need someone to count how many lives I have left." She didn't smile. She only looked at me.

"Given the nerve you just showed stopping Her Highness, probably not many to begin with." …This woman's tongue was more economical than a blade and twice as sharp. I was heading to check on the first convoy's readiness when a young sailor nearly collided with my chest.

"Lord Cedric!" he gasped. The title made my skin crawl.

"Don't. Please, don't ever call me that. I'd like a few more years. What's wrong?"

"M-Maro won't evacuate!" I knew it. Wartime surprises generally fall into two categories: the enemy doing something, and your own people suddenly becoming the most themselves they've ever been. Maro, clearly, fell into the second. I followed the sailor at a run down to the docks, and spotted the Tidebreaker from a distance, holding at an outer berth, her black hull lying in the sunlight like a big fish resting just under the surface.

The pier around her was packed with people, but very little cargo was actually moving, because everyone had been bottled up at the gangplank by the man standing at its head. Maro stood there, hands on his hips, every inch a shark preparing to fight the entire world.

"Anyone touches my helm, I feed them to the fish first!" he bellowed, with lung capacity entirely unsuited to a harbor on the verge of falling. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Maro," I called up from below. He looked down, spotted me, and lit up like he'd just found a sympathetic relative to complain to.

"Perfect timing! Tell them—Tidebreaker can leave without passengers, fine. Strip the sails, fine. Move the berth, fine. But if anyone thinks they're leaving my ship whole for those Yanxia bastards, I'll string them up the mast myself!" I pressed two fingers to my temple.

"This is not the time for a tearful farewell to a boat."

"What would you know?" he snapped.

"This ship's run the open sea with me. Threaded reefs. Shaken off three separate pirate crews. Even carried a broke freeloader like you for free—""That part can be omitted!"

"It cannot. That's ship history." At that moment, Ignicia arrived with Lei Lian and a handful of guards. She took in the scene with no surprise whatsoever—only the tired, cold expression of someone thinking, of course this is happening. The instant Maro saw her, he redirected his entire argument.

"Your Highness! If you force me off today, I'm going down with the Tidebreaker!" Ignicia looked at him for two beats.

"You sinking is acceptable," she said.

"The ship is not." Maro stared. Then exploded.

"How are you crueler than I am?!" I nearly lost it and had to fake a cough to cover the laugh. Ignicia had no intention of matching his volume.

"All non-combatants evacuate first. If you stay, you're wasting time that should go toward moving people and cargo."

"That's my ship!"

"And?"

"So I can't just leave her for the Empire!"

"Who said I intend to leave her intact for them?" Maro froze. I saw the opening and stepped in—not to argue, to persuade.

"Come down. Take what can be stripped—nav instruments, charts, helm components. If we do end up scuttling her, the Tidebreaker won't fall into their hands whole. Stay up there, and you're just decoration burning alongside her."

"You're the decoration," Maro shot back, glaring.

"At best, I'm a charred footnote." He opened his mouth for another round, but Ignicia cut through it, patience clearly rationed.

"Get down," she said.

"I'll buy you a new one afterward." The dock went silent for half a beat. Something lit in Maro's eye—then he smothered it fast, as if afraid someone might notice he'd been tempted for a whole second.

"…The newest model?" he asked, suspicious. I very nearly put my forehead through the railing. The city was about to fall, and this man was genuinely opening ship-procurement negotiations. Ignicia, expressionless: "The newest."

"Faster than Tidebreaker."

"Agreed."

"Handling can't be worse."

"Agreed."

"Bow can't be ugly."

"…Agreed." Standing there, I suddenly felt like the Second Fleet wasn't the scariest thing happening today. The truly frightening thing was that a man could stand on the edge of a city's fall and still conduct a completely serious negotiation over a ship's bow aesthetics with a princess—proof that his mental fortitude had reached something close to mythological. Maro finally gave a grudging nod, but jabbed one finger out fiercely.

"I'm watching them strip her myself. Tidebreaker doesn't go cheap to outsiders."

"Granted," Ignicia said. Her answer came clean and immediate, and Maro actually quieted down. In that moment I understood: he hadn't been refusing to leave because he didn't grasp the stakes, or out of some reflexive need to defy orders. He'd just needed someone to tell him, out loud, that the thing he loved wasn't being carelessly thrown away—that it would be treated as something that mattered. Some people accept the inevitable through reason. Some through tears.

Maro accepted his through the promise of a new ship. Fair enough. Very on-brand for him. By the time we made it back to the road outside the north gate, the first evacuation convoy had finally assembled. It wasn't a pretty sight. Carts crammed with clerks, staff, wounded soldiers, children, and crate after crate of things there hadn't been time to sort into valuable or not—all filed under the working category of "better it doesn't fall into enemy hands."

The merchant guild people were still trying to wedge one more chest in. The girls from the brothels were crying, cursing, or sitting in a silence that looked like they'd aged three years in one night. Several old officials clutching ledgers wore expressions solemn enough for carrying ancestral tablets, feet still forced into a half-jog to avoid being run over by the carts behind them. The gate guards shouted the road clear. The line began pushing outward, column by column.

I stood at the roadside and watched the first cart finally move. Wooden wheels grinding over stone—a sound both heavy and unpleasantly sharp. Then the second cart. The third. The crowd truly began to flow. From this moment, it stopped being "preparing to evacuate." It wasn't an order anymore, or words, or an arrow on a map.

It was living people—carrying wounds, carrying money, carrying children, carrying the things they couldn't bear to leave behind and the things they couldn't bear to leave but had no room for—actually going. Ignicia stood beside me and said nothing. She only watched that stream of people leaving the harbor district behind, morning light caught in the gold-red of her eyes, alongside something colder than the light itself.

I thought back, belatedly, to the moment I'd stopped her, and the delayed fear of it finally caught up with me. If she'd flown out then, there might have been a spectacular battle in the sky. But the people moving through this gate right now probably wouldn't have made it out this cleanly. I glanced sideways at her. Said nothing. She noticed, and looked back, mild.

"What?"

"Nothing," I said.

"Just realizing we're probably all going to work ourselves to death today." She made a small sound, half scoff, half laugh.

"You're only realizing that now?"

"I was hoping to realize it a little later." She let it go, turning to give the next round of orders to the garrison. I stood where I was, watching the first wave of non-combatants clear the north gate, and understood, with sudden and complete clarity— The harbor still stood. The flag still flew. Wyvern Tower hadn't fallen.

But from the moment that first cart rolled out through the gate, Iscapubla Harbor had stopped being the port that did business by day, dreamed by night, and seasoned other people's secrets with wine. It had begun becoming something else. A wound. Vast, and not yet closed. And every last one of us was standing inside it.