They rebuilt the second attempt from confirmed ground only.
The faction was locked, so there was no Baldwin conversation to have. They would arrive on the same northern road, meet the same convoy, reach Dunadd the same way, and receive the same three-fort mission from Raymond — unless something they changed earlier rippled forward, in which case they would adapt.
The stale intelligence problem came first, because it was the trap hiding inside their advantage.
"We can't tell Raymond his Greybridge patrol report is three days old," Maeve said. "There's no version of that sentence that doesn't end with him asking how five foreigners know his enemy's stable schedule better than his scouts do. So we don't tell him anything. When he hands us the maps, we ask him when each report was last verified — it's a question any careful commander respects, and if he admits the patrol information is old, then our interest in the eastern ridge sounds like caution instead of prophecy."
