Dawn came pale and thin, like it was afraid to touch the world.
The road wound through low, frost-silvered fields, a dark line between stubbled earth and hardy scrub. Breath steamed from the horses' nostrils, from the mouths of the men. From Eryk's, too. Every exhale tasted of old smoke.
His wrists were bound.
Rope wrapped them in rough loops, the end knotted to a longer line that linked him to two other captives and then to a saddle ring on one of the horses. Every jolt of the animal's gait tugged at his arms, sending dull ache up his forearms into his shoulders. His hands had long since passed from throbbing into a heavy, distant numb. Each step pressed grit into the blisters blooming on his heels.
Behind them, the sky was stained faintly darker where smoke still smeared the horizon.
Hollowford. Or what was left of it.
He kept his eyes forward.
Hooves clopped on frozen earth. Leather creaked. Somewhere ahead, a crow barked a harsh cry and flapped away from something in the ditch.
The men around him were quieter than they had been in the square. No shouting now, no roaring laughter. Morning stole voices and left only the tired ones.
"Road's worse every year," a man grumbled somewhere behind. "Been sayin' they should lay stone on this stretch."
"And who's paying for that?" another snorted. "You? Blackstone's barely keeping its own walls up."
"The Lord's coffers, then."
"The Lord's coffers are why you've got steel on your back at all, Tern. You want him filling in ruts for you now too, coddled like a babe?"
A few men laughed, low and brief.
The words slid over Eryk, strange and ordinary all at once. Blackstone. Lord. Walls. They spoke as if the world still ran on rails, even while Hollowford cooled behind them.
A watchtower stood on a low rise to the right, squat timber and stone, its banner hanging limp in the cold air. He had seen it once before, when his father had taken him down the far road in harvest season to help a neighbor thresh.
Back then it had been a reassuring sight. The Lord's tower, his father had said. Bandits think twice with that in view.
Now the tower's guards leaned on the railing, cloaks drawn tight, watching the small column pass. One lifted a hand in a lazy gesture, half wave, half salute. Garren raised two fingers from his reins in reply. No one stopped them. No one asked what village lay burning behind.
The tower shrank away, as useless as a scarecrow once the crows had already fed.
His foot scuffed a stone. He stumbled. The rope jerked his arms forward. The captive ahead, an older man with thinning hair and a hunched back, grunted as he was pulled half around.
"Watch your step," the man muttered without turning.
"Sorry," Eryk rasped.
He was not sure the man heard.
Garren rode near the front, cloak drawn close against the chill. From the back of the line Eryk could see his shoulders, the back of his head, the plain iron ring on his thumb when he lifted a hand to adjust the reins.
Each time the sword at Garren's hip caught the light, something heavy inside Eryk twisted.
They walked.
After a while the road became a rhythm. Step. Rope-tug. Step. Breath. Ache. Step.
A cart rattled past them going the other way, its driver steering wide. He did not look at the captives. Eryk watched the man's profile, waiting for a flicker of revulsion, or pity, anything.
The driver spat into the ditch and urged his mule on.
Wind rose as the morning brightened, slicing through Eryk's tattered shirt. It carried no scent of ash now. Only cold. And distant woodsmoke from places not yet burned.
He wondered, dimly, if those people knew what might one day come down their road, men with ledgers in their saddlebags and smoke in their clothes.
When the land dipped and the road curved, the faint dark smear on the horizon slipped from view.
This time he did not stumble.
He only felt the loss, dull and deep, and kept walking.
They stopped when the sun was a pale coin just past its height, hanging weak in a washed-out sky.
The road dipped through a shallow hollow, sheltered on one side by bare-branched trees bent by the wind. Brown water trickled along the ditch, half-frozen in shallow skins of ice. Garren lifted a hand and the column slowed, then broke into practiced motion: men loosening girths, clapping steaming flanks, stamping warmth back into their feet. Snow and leaves were kicked aside to clear space for a fire.
"Get the livestock down," a broad-shouldered man called. "Let 'em sit before their scrawny legs give out."
Droth.
Eryk knew his voice now. It always carried the smear of a joke, even when there was none. His eye was an ugly bruise of blue and yellow, the rest of his face mottled from where the club had caught him.
Two men dragged the rope and hauled the captives off the road toward a scrubby tree. A stake was driven into the ground. The line was slipped over it.
"Sit."
He dropped with shaking legs. The ground was cold and wet, but it did not move, and that was enough.
His wrists burned where the rope had eaten the skin. He shifted them, testing the give. Not much. The older captive eased down beside him with a low groan, one hand pressed briefly into his back.
"Move your toes when you can," the man murmured. "Keeps the blood moving."
Eryk did. They tingled painfully.
"You from Hollowford?" he asked.
The man shook his head once. "No. Year back. East of here. Name don't matter."
"They burned it?"
A flicker of something crossed the man's face. Then it vanished.
"They took what they wanted. Left the rest."
"Didn't the Lord's—"
"Boy." The man's exhausted eyes met his. "These are the Lord's men."
Droth sauntered over with two tin cups, his smile stretched crooked across his bruised face.
"Still got both hands," he announced to the others. "Even after tryin' to brain me."
A crust of bread landed in the dirt between Eryk's boots.
Droth squatted, ale and sweat thick on him.
"Drink. Can't have you dyin' on us for lack of ditch water."
The liquid tasted of rust and mud. It still helped. Droth snatched the cup away and let the last of it spill into the dirt.
"Easy, rat. You ain't at your mam's table."
Near the horses, Garren stood with a narrow-faced man whose fingers were blackened with ink. A scrap of parchment lay across the saddle.
"Three sound," the man said. "Two older. One with the leg. Call him half."
"Grain?" Garren asked.
"Short."
"Always is."
The quill scratched.
They spoke of numbers. Of grain. Of heads.
Not names.
Not places.
To them, Hollowford was already a mark rubbed out.
"Eat," the older man murmured.
Eryk chewed gritty bread and stared at the dirt.
"We could've just taken the coin," a younger bandit muttered near the fire.
"Coin don't scream," someone replied.
"Coin warns the next village," Garren said without looking up. "Then the Sheriff looks up from his cup."
The boy fell silent.
Crows watched from the branches overhead, black shapes against the pale sky.
"How long to Blackstone?" Eryk asked.
"Two days on a mule. On your feet? Depends how much Garren thinks he's owed along the way."
A faint smile tugged at the man's mouth. "World's bigger than that hill of yours."
Eryk thought of the alder tree.
He had not imagined it this big.
The second day blurred into sore feet and the taste of old smoke. Blisters burst inside his boots. Rope flayed his wrists raw. His thoughts drifted in and out of Hollowford, of firelight and cellar-dark, of his mother's voice becoming something else.
Late in the day they passed a lone farmhouse. A woman watched from the door. A child hid behind her skirts. Droth tipped his hand in mock salute.
"Lucky they made their tithe," someone said.
"Means we'll be back when the Lord wants more."
When Garren finally called another halt, Eryk's legs no longer felt like his own. They made camp in a shallow dip among scrub. No stream now. Only cold earth and firelight.
The fire burned bright. Faces flickered gold and shadow. Droth laughed through bruises. Garren ate apart, turning his ring.
They fed the captives thin stew.
Bound to the stake, Eryk tested the rope.
The stake had not been driven deep.
He pulled.
Pain flared. Blood ran warm beneath the rope.
Desperation sharpened.
Heat bloomed beneath his ribs.
The buried vibration stirred.
The sound was not sound at all, it moved through teeth and bone. The stake pulsed once, grinding in its hole. The iron hook shuddered. The rope slipped a finger's width along it.
Then the thrum tore loose.
White pain knifed up his arms. His hands spasmed uselessly. The world narrowed to the fire's glare and the taste of iron in his mouth.
A boot struck the ground beside him.
Droth tightened the rope until his wrists screamed.
"Try that again," Droth said softly, "and I take your fingers."
Across the fire, Garren saw.
He only turned his ring.
Later, bound tighter than before, Eryk lay shaking.
Whatever lived beneath his skin gave pain and almost-mercy in equal measure.
By dawn, they were moving again.
Toward Blackstone.
They reached Blackstone the next day.
The town clung to the side of a low, dark hill, perched above a wide scar in the earth where stone had been bitten away in rough, stepped ledges. From a distance, it looked like the stump of a tooth gnawed by something larger. A wall circled it, built of the same gray rock as the hill and patched with timber where stone had crumbled. The gate was a heavy wooden affair banded in iron, standing half open.
Smoke climbed from squat chimneys inside, hanging low beneath a lid of cloud.
As they drew closer, the stink of men and animals washed over Eryk, sweat, manure, coal smoke, something sour drifting up from the quarry pits.
Two guards stood by the gate, spears in hand. Their cloaks were thicker than the bandits', their mail cleaner. One shaded his eyes as Garren's party approached and then snorted.
"Roads treat you kindly, Garren?" he called.
"Kind as ever, Jarek," Garren replied without warmth. "Which is to say not at all."
The guard huffed a laugh. "You're late this season."
"Fields were dry," Garren said. "Had to ride farther to find folk with grain worth taking."
The other guard's mouth twitched. His gaze slid over the captives for a heartbeat, passing over Eryk the way it might have passed over sacks of flour.
"Steward'll want your numbers. He's in a worse mood than usual."
"When is he not?" Garren said. "Open the rest of the way."
The gate groaned wider. Iron shoes struck sparks from stone as the company passed through. The wall swallowed the wind. Inside, the air felt thicker, packed with smoke and the noise of too many lives in too tight a space.
Blackstone's streets were more like corridors between buildings than roads. Houses leaned toward one another, upper floors jutting out until the roofs nearly touched. Narrow alleys sliced between them like knife-cuts. The main street sloped gently upward toward a squat stone building near the hill's center, where a faded banner hung, a black shape on a muted field.
People watched.
A woman carrying a basket of laundry paused, cloth limp over her arm. Children clustered by a doorway, bare feet pale against cold stone, eyes wide. One boy lifted a hand as if to wave, then caught his mother's sharp look and dropped it.
A man in a brown robe with a simple cord at his waist stood near what might have been a shrine, a carved wooden symbol in his hand. His gaze brushed the captives for a moment and then slid away. He turned and began speaking to a knot of townsfolk as if nothing had passed.
No one shouted. No one spat. No one asked what village had paid for the numbers in Garren's line.
They reached a yard halfway up the slope, enclosed on three sides by stone buildings and on the fourth by a stout wooden fence. A couple of sheds crouched beneath sagging roofs. A covered pen hunched near the far wall.
A man waited there.
He was not armored. He wore a thick wool coat, a heavy belt, and a cap pulled low over thinning hair. Ink stained his fingers and the cuffs of his sleeves. A leather ledger hung at his side like a weapon.
"Garren," he said. "You're late."
"And yet still in time to keep your Lord's stores from running dry," Garren replied, swinging from the saddle. "You can mark that as thanks, if your hand remembers how."
The steward snorted and flipped open his ledger. "My hand remembers the shortfall last autumn. What have you brought me?"
"Grain. Some salted meat. Three heads sound enough for work. Two older. One with a bad leg. Call that half if you must."
The steward walked the line, eyes flicking from face to face. He stopped in front of Eryk.
"Teeth."
Eryk stared at him.
"Open."
Ink-stained fingers seized his chin and forced his jaw down. The steward peered in, breath faintly of ink and onions.
"Good," he said. "How old?"
"Twelve," Garren answered.
The steward's brows lifted slightly. "He speaks?"
"Enough to shout insults," Garren said. "And swing a plank."
"I don't like any of them," the steward replied. "I like numbers that add up."
He moved on, prodding the older man's leg and making a displeased noise when the man hissed.
"Three and a half, then." The quill scratched softly. "Grain is light again."
"Fields were thin across the valley."
"I'll take it up with the collectors."
"They'll tell you to squeeze harder."
"They always do," the steward said. "Seems everyone has their role."
He closed the ledger.
"I'll take them. Boys to the lower yard. The older one to the quarry, if his leg holds. If it doesn't, you'll pay me back out of your next stipend."
Garren's lips twitched. "You'll be old and buried before my Lord pays back what he thinks he's owed."
The steward ignored him. "Bran. Lysa."
Two figures stepped from the shade of a side building. A girl a few years older than Eryk, sleeves rolled to her elbows. A broad-shouldered youth with a nose broken more than once.
"Take this one and the other boy down. Put them where the kitchen mistress can see them."
Lysa cut the rope from Eryk's wrists with a small knife, leaving short, raw loops still knotted around his skin.
"This way," she said.
Garren stepped into Eryk's path once more.
He stopped.
Garren's eyes took him in again as if committing him to memory the way Eryk had once memorized his back on the road.
"Do what you're told, boy," Garren said calmly. His thumb turned the iron ring in a familiar circle. "The world's kinder to tools than to loose stones."
He stepped aside.
The words stayed.
Lysa pulled Eryk down a short flight of worn steps. Stone walls sweated damp on either side. Somewhere, a bucket banged against stone. For a heartbeat it sounded like the well at home and his breath stuttered, then an unfamiliar voice barked sharply and the echo broke.
They came out into a lower yard that smelled of scrub water, trampled earth, and cooking smoke.
Chickens scratched in the mud. A woman with arms like bundled rope stirred a pot larger than any Eryk had ever seen, shouting orders at boys hauling buckets. Lean dogs watched from a kennel with sharp, unblinking eyes.
"This one?" the woman asked.
"Kitchen or yard," Lysa said.
The woman's gaze raked Eryk. "Thin. We can fix that. If he works."
She jabbed a ladle toward a stack of baskets. "Name?"
"Eryk."
"You'll carry. Chop. Clean. Drop anything and I drop you in the midden."
He nodded.
Bran fetched a cloak. Lysa led him to a low shed at the yard's edge.
Inside, straw pallets lined the wall. Someone had scratched tally marks into the timber.
"This one's free," Lysa said. "You wake when the bell goes. You don't steal. You don't run. You don't talk back."
She hesitated, studying the bruises on his face and the raw grooves on his wrists.
"Where from?"
"Hollowford."
Her expression flickered. "That was you, then. Smoke smelled wrong yesterday." She shrugged. "Places burn."
"Why doesn't anyone stop them?" Eryk asked before he could stop himself. "Your guards. The priest."
Lysa paused in the doorway. "Gate men who're paid by the same Lord? Priests who bless bread bought with his tithe?" She shook her head. "You're still thinking like a hill boy staring at one field. Down here the plow's already moving. Step in front of it and you don't stop it. You just get churned into dirt."
She closed the door halfway.
He sank onto the straw.
Sounds drifted in: dogs barking, curses, bells.
The weight in his chest settled deep and heavy.
Far beneath it, the faint echo of that inner vibration remained, quiet, dormant, buried beneath Blackstone and his ribs alike.
Somewhere above him, today was already turning into ink: a village reduced to a smudge in a ledger's margin, a thin new stroke where his life had been added to a count.
Killing one man would not stop that hand.
He lay staring at the rafters. His wrists ached. His body felt wrung dry.
But he knew what waited at the bottom of him.
He knew the name carved there.
Garren.
He turned the name slowly in his mind.
Let them think him a tool.
Stones waited. Stones endured.
And when the ground shifted,
Stones were what broke the blade.