A settlement faced consequences for sheltering Sun Harvest.
Not immediately. Not with soldiers or official notices, or the kind of response that would have given Alistair something to fight for.
Commerce was restricted first, and supply caravans were rerouted around the settlement without explanation.
Then, access was cut off; the bridge to the eastern market was declared unsafe by an inspector nobody in the settlement had sent for.
The repair timeline was indefinite. The alternative route added four hours to a journey that used to take one.
Therasia governing through subtraction. Removing alternatives one at a time until the only choice remaining is the one Caldren intended.
Alistair went to the settlement on the third day.
He stood at the market and watched. The vendor who used to call out to customers was serving quietly, eyes down.
A family was loading a cart with more belongings than a day trip warranted. A man was repairing a wall that didn't need repairing, because the work gave him a reason to stay near his front door and watch the road.
These weren't soldiers. These were ordinary people who happened to be near Sun Harvest.
'I caused this,' Alistair thought. 'Not Caldren. It's my fault for being here.'
Due didn't say he told him so. He stood beside Alistair in the market square and asked what he wanted to do about it.
Which was worse. Telling him so would have been something Alistair could push back against, argue with, convert into disagreement. The quiet question demanded a real answer.
Alistair didn't have one yet.
He watched the family loading their cart. A family with children was packing, because they lived nearby.
That was not complex or planned. It was just a child's things being loaded into a cart on a normal morning.
He stood in the market for twenty minutes without moving, his scan running passively. Not looking for threats, but standing in the middle of what he'd caused.
A child ran by him, chasing another child. They both laughed. The sound was so normal that it made everything else feel worse.
Due stood nearby and let Alistair have the time. He knew the difference between processing and brooding.
Elara watched him do this.
She'd been watching him since the corridor in Therasia. Absorbing the consequence rather than deflecting it.
Every powerful person she'd known had a way of converting guilt into purpose, turning cost into fuel.
Her father had been the best at it. Caldren could see both collateral damage and a strategic advantage at a glance.
Alistair didn't do that. He looked at the family, the vendor, and the man repairing an intact wall, and he sat with it until it finished settling.
'That's not what I expected,' she thought. 'Not from someone with his reputation.'
The man who held off a thousand soldiers. The man who opened Domain Mode against an army.
He should have been harder than this; he should have weighed civilian consequences and considered acceptable costs.
She was quiet for a long time. She didn't say what she was thinking, but Alistair could tell it involved her father. Her composure changed whenever Caldren came up, a different kind of holding, older than the diplomatic mask she wore for everything else.
She remembered something. A particular evening, years ago. Something went wrong in Therasia's outer settlements, and her father came home late. He sat at the table for a long time before he spoke to anyone.
She was eight. She thought he looked tired.
Now she understands he looked guilty. He was capable of it, then.
Later, at the camp, Due proposed the trap.
He laid it out methodically, his hands moving while he spoke, not in the settling rhythm but sharper gestures, marking points in the air that only he could see.
The accumulated debt from the battlefield where Arphus died.
The weight of everyone who had fallen on that ground, Therasia soldiers, Sunborne, the dead from a battle that happened because Alistair stood on a gate and told an army to stop.
Every obligation is uncollected. Every thread is unresolved.
Due could feel it the way other people felt gravity. He'd been feeling it since they surfaced from the underground palace. A constant low pull toward the battlefield.
"The dead owe things," Due said. "And they're owed things. That doesn't stop because they stopped breathing. It accumulates."
Alistair furrowed his brows. "You're saying you can use that."
"I'm saying it's already there. I'm saying I can call it in," Due adjusted his collar. "It would be the most aggressive use of my Characteristic I've ever attempted."
His Expression would activate. He explained what that cost plainly, the way Due said everything that mattered.
"Expression activation costs permanent capacity," he said. "A portion of what I can manage simultaneously. Approximately a fifteen percent reduction in maximum concurrent threads." He adjusted his collar again. "Permanently."
The word sat in the air.
Alistair's eyes widened slightly. Fifteen percent didn't sound like a large number until you thought about what Due did with his threads every day, every hour, the constant management that made his life functional.
"That's not a small number," Alistair said.
"No," Due replied. "It isn't."
Alistair looked at him. "Why are you willing to risk that much?"
Due was quiet for a moment. The settling gestures stopped entirely. He looked at his hands, then at Alistair.
"The obligation between us is bound to death. If Sun Harvest fails, I fail. I've been as invested as you since the cave." He paused. "I'd prefer to pretend otherwise, but the math doesn't support it."
Alistair held his look. Then nodded once.
Due nodded back. Neither of them said anything else about it.
Hearing this, Elara asked where she should be during the trap.
Alistair told her far back.
She didn't argue. But her expression said she had an objection she hadn't withdrawn. She wanted to be closer. She wanted to be present for the thing that would determine whether Sun Harvest survived.
Alistair understood it. He wasn't going to change the order.
The camp went quiet. Settlement lights on the horizon burned steady and ordinary. Due's hands worked their settling gestures in the dark, slower than usual.
Nobody slept. Nobody pretended to.
Elara sat with her back against a supply crate, looking at the night sky. Due managed threads with the careful slowness of a man who was doing it to have something to do rather than because the threads needed management.
Alistair ran his scan once more.
The territory was quiet. The battlefield where everything would happen tomorrow was empty, ordinary ground that only one person in the world could feel its weight.
Due was gone in the morning. Left without waking either of them.
His cloak was still folded on the chair where he'd set it the night before. He didn't take it. The morning was cold.
Alistair picked it up and stood there for a moment, holding it, looking at the empty space where Due had been working all night.
The cloak was heavier than it looked. Due had left it behind because he'd decided the battlefield didn't need it, or because leaving it behind guaranteed he'd have to come back for it.
Knowing Due, both.