Read Chapter 20: The Night Thief

The night air carried the smoke of dying cookfires and the distant snore of the camp. Callum moved between tents like a shadow cast by nothing, barefoot to muffle his steps, his boots slung over his shoulder. The decoy map—a forgery good enough to fool a quartermaster's clerk at a glance—was pressed flat against his ribs inside his shirt.

Thorne's tent stood apart from the others, a single lantern burning low within its canvas walls. Two guards flanked the entrance, their muskets shouldered but their eyes heavy-lidded. The hour was late enough that even the most disciplined among them were dreaming of home.

Callum had watched the pattern for three nights. The guards changed at the midnight bell. There was a gap of perhaps ten heartbeats between the old pair stumbling off and the new pair taking their post. Ten heartbeats to get inside. Ten more to pray that Thorne slept deeply.

He heard the bell. The guards traded words, yawned, moved. Callum slipped around the back of the tent, found the seam he'd cut earlier with his dirk, and pressed through into the dim warmth within.

Thorne lay on a cot against the far wall, his face turned toward the canvas, breath slow and even. A writing desk stood near the tent's center, its surface neat but not empty—a stack of dispatches, an inkwell, a compass, and beneath a brass paperweight shaped like a stag, a folded sheet of heavy vellum.

The map.

Callum's heart hammered against his ribs. He crossed the space in three careful steps, his bare feet silent on the packed earth. His fingers found the paperweight, lifted it with agonizing slowness, and slid the true map free. The decoy went in its place, weighted down exactly as before. He hadn't looked at the original. He couldn't risk the time.

He turned.

The tent flap opened.

A soldier stepped inside—young, broad-shouldered, his red coat unbuttoned. He was carrying a small bottle of what might have been whiskey, probably a bribe for Thorne's orderly. His eyes went wide. His mouth opened.

Callum didn't think. He lunged, catching the man across the jaw with the heel of his palm. The soldier staggered back, the bottle dropping to the ground with a muffled thud against soil. He was still conscious, still reaching for the bayonet at his hip, and Callum hit him again, harder this time, a blow driven by a lifetime of rock and river and hard necessity. The man crumpled, his skull striking the tent's center pole on the way down.

A sound. The cot creaked.

Callum froze.

Thorne shifted in his sleep, muttered something that might have been a name, settled back into stillness.

Callum didn't breathe for what felt like an hour. Then he moved, hauling the unconscious soldier out through the same slit in the canvas, dragging him into the shadow of a supply cart two rows over. He left the man there, breathing but out cold, and circled wide around the tent before retrieving his boots.

The tree was an old oak near the eastern palisade, its branches thick enough to conceal a full-grown man. Callum climbed it in the dark with the map folded small against his teeth, found the hollow he'd marked earlier that day, and tucked the vellum inside. He stuffed the cavity with leaves, descended, and walked back to his own tent as calmly as any man returning from a late call of nature.

His blanket was still warm when he lay down. His heart was not.

---

Morning came too quickly, grey and damp, the bugle call carving through the fog. Callum had slept no more than an hour—he'd spent the rest staring at the canvas above him, listening for the inevitable discovery.

It came at the second bell.

Shouting from the direction of Thorne's tent. Orders barked. The sound of a man being struck, a cry of protest cut short.

Callum dressed slowly, laced his boots, and stepped out into the camp's sudden frenzy. Soldiers converged from all directions, their faces taut. A corporal ran past Callum without seeing him.

"What's happened?" Callum asked a man standing near a tethered horse.

"The captain's tent was breached," the soldier said, his eyes darting. "His map is falsified. A decoy. Someone took the original and left a copy."

Callum let his jaw drop, let the shock play across his face. "The rebel map? The supply routes?"

"Aye. Thorne's in a fury. He has the night guard on the post." The soldier lowered his voice. "Poor bastard won't survive the whipping."

Callum walked toward the commotion, not to see, but to be seen. To be part of the crowd of faces that watched Captain Thorne stand before the camp, his voice rising, his fist gripping the forged map like it might bite him. The night guard—the older man, grey at the temples—knelt in the mud before him. His hands were already bound.

"One of you did this," Thorne said, his voice carrying across the assembled men. "One of you is a rebel sympathizer, and that man's treachery has cost this regiment its advantage. But the map is meaningless without the code that accompanies it. You've stolen nothing but paper."

Callum's stomach turned cold.

"The code," Thorne continued, pacing before the ranks. "I am not fool enough to leave such a key in plain sight. The map is inked in numbers and symbols that only I can read. Whoever took it has taken nothing of value. And when the rebels make their move"—he smiled, thin and cruel—"I will be waiting for them. With the code intact."

Cries from the crowd. Men shifting, muttering. The guard was dragged to a post and lashed, his screams tearing through the morning air.

Callum watched, his hands at his sides, his face carefully blank.

Three days until the rebels marched. Thorne had known they were coming. He didn't need the map to know where—he had already planned for it. And Duncan's trial, now only four days away, seemed to shift like sand beneath Callum's feet.

He still had the map. But he had lost the meaning of it.

He turned from the whipping, walked out past the edges of the crowd, and stopped beneath the oak tree where the map lay hidden. He looked up at it, then away. The code was in Thorne's head—and Callum had no blade sharp enough to cut it out.

He had one card left. His brother. Duncan, who had been sentenced to hang, but who had also, Callum now suspected, been playing a deeper game than either of them had admitted. It was time to go to the prison.

It was time to learn what Duncan knew before the noose tightened around them both.