The rain had passed by morning, leaving the forest washed clean. Droplets clung to every branch, sparkling when the sun broke through the canopy. Rowan woke first, curled against the stone wall, his cloak damp but no longer dripping. The fire was little more than gray ash, but a faint warmth still lingered.
Kaelen was already awake, crouched near the treeline, turning over a handful of nuts he’d gathered. He cracked one against the flat of his blade, handed the kernel to Rowan without ceremony, then ate one himself.
Breakfast became a quiet ritual of forest goods. Rowan gnawed on pine nuts, sour sorrel leaves, and a handful of berries Kaelen had deemed safe - small, dark, not too sweet. He asked how Kaelen knew which were edible, and the man explained with the same dry precision as always.
When the meal was done, Kaelen stamped out the last trace of the fire, scattering the ash and brushing away prints with the branch of a pine. Rowan noticed again how deliberate each step was, how nothing of their stay was left behind. Even here, in the middle of nowhere, Kaelen moved as though eyes could be watching.
By the time they set out, the morning sun had burned most of the mist from the ground. The forest was quieter now, calmer, though still full of whispers - water dripping, wings fluttering, the crack of twigs underfoot. Kaelen led with his usual silence, Rowan trailing close, staff slung across his shoulders.
They walked for hours, weaving between oaks and pines, following deer paths and dry creeks. Kaelen pointed out signs along the way - a broken branch that showed where animals had passed, a ridge of moss that marked the northern slope. Rowan asked questions when he didn’t understand, and Kaelen answered them with clipped but steady patience.
At midday the trees began to thin. Light grew stronger, less filtered, and the air lost its heavy scent of rot and resin. Rowan felt it before he saw it - the forest was ending.
When they finally stepped out from under the last great branches, Rowan stopped short. Before them stretched rolling ground, patchwork fields and scrub dotted with huts and crooked fences. Beyond, far in the haze, he thought he glimpsed smoke curling above what might be a settlement.
After days under shadow, the openness was strange. Rowan squinted against the brightness, clutching his staff tighter.
Kaelen scanned the horizon, eyes narrowing, shoulders taut.
They stood a moment longer at the tree line, letting the forest fall away behind them. Wind tugged the smell of wet bark from their cloaks and traded it for the scents of tilled dirt, smoke, and old straw. The ground rolled out in lazy humps, stitched with hedges and dry stone walls that had been mended and re-mended for generations. No ruin here, not like Brennor - just weariness. Fences leaned. Roofs held, but only just. People moved with that particular gait of those who are not starving yet have forgotten the shape of satisfaction.
They walked into Mirefield by the road that split the village green in two. It was a green in the loosest sense: more brown than grass, the ruts holding last night’s rain in long, shallow mirrors. A bleached notice board leaned near a warped wellhead. On it, fresh proclamations were nailed in tidy rows, the ink still proud and black:
Below, a second hand had made the script loftier, flourished - almost elegant to the point of self-adoration:
The words felt like banners trying to wave on a windless day.
Mirefield wore its loyalty openly and absently: little tokens pinned to lapels, cheap enamel brooches the color of old bone, a painted crest flaking from the tavern shutter. Not joyous, not fanatical - just worn, like a uniform you neither love nor argue with. At the bakehouse door, a woman with flour to her elbows glanced at the brooch on her bodice as if to remind herself it was still there. Across the lane, an old man tugged his cap and spat into the mud before turning his face toward the new posters and nodding with a practiced humility that did not reach his eyes.
Not everyone played the part so neatly. Rowan began to notice the absences - the shutters closed in daylight along a side row, the house with a sprig of black spruce tied to its lintel, the boy chalking a straight line across a doorstep then wiping it away with his sleeve when a constable strolled by. A woman washing turnips in a basin kept looking at the road and not the water. Three men shared a bench under the eave of the cooper’s shed, speaking without moving their mouths - throats tight, words pressed flat. The minority had learned the art of silence, like birds that freeze at the shadow of a hawk.
Kaelen bought a heel of bread and two cups of thin stew from The Bent Yoke without asking the price aloud, putting down coin and receiving change in a curl of the innkeeper’s palm, both men looking at neither money nor eyes. He ate standing, and when Rowan whispered,
They ate and walked on because the road itself was the loudest thing in Mirefield, bearing wagons toward a place where the air changed. Even before they saw it, they felt it: a thickness of trammeled earth, the metallic bite that clings to iron left out in the rain, tar pitched on raw timber, lime burned quick and sour. When the road crested a low rise, the project revealed itself in the shallow, bruised valley beyond.
The new place was not a building yet so much as a wound:
Men with overseer’s rods paced the lines. Their coats were too clean for work, their boots too new for mud; their mouths, however, were slick with the right words. A herald in a lacquered cap read from a scroll in a voice that carried:
They walked the edge, as if merely travelers curious about a busy site. A wain rattled past with bundled iron - rings and cuffs clinking, lengths of chain looped like dead snakes. Lime kilns smoked at the far edge, three low domes coughing pale breath into the damp. A pit had been sunk beside them, half filled with black water, a sheen skimming the top where oils had married the rain. The air above it had a taste that stuck to the tongue.
Along the inner ring, a trench deeper than the rest snaked toward a rectangle of stakes recently set - latrine ditch, its runoff cut to trickle toward the sump. Efficiency meant the filth would always have somewhere to go. Efficiency meant you could keep men a long time.
Kaelen kept his answer low.
They stood near a temporary fence - the kind that pretends to be a boundary until a real one arrives. Beyond it, a line of conscripts drove wheelbarrows in stunted loops. Not all wore irons. Compulsion dresses itself in many clothes: some had wages in chalk on a board, others had families waiting at home under a constable’s eye. A thin lad stumbled, upending his load into the muck. An overseer rapped his barrow with the rod - not hard enough to bruise, just enough to remind. The lad righted it, face empty, and pushed on.
They skirted the far flank, where the land rose into scrub and hawthorn. From here the plan laid itself bare: inner yard, outer yard, a causeway where the drawbridge would fall, a killing ground between palisade and wall, watch platforms set at intervals so every step could be seen by someone who would later swear he hadn’t been looking. Piles of stone lay tarped against the weather - ashlar for the keepers’ house, dressed smooth so the officers would feel important while measuring other men’s days.
On a mound of spoil, two village boys watched, their feet mud-to-ankle, eyes bright with the kind of fascination that grows where you are told not to stare. One mimed unlocking a cuff with a flourish, the other laughed too loudly, then both flinched when a foreman glanced their way. They dropped to their haunches like pheasants in stubble.
Kaelen’s eyes tracked without seeming to.
A woman trudged past with a crate of boiled eggs and dark bread to sell to the crews. Her face held the blank courtesy Mirefield had perfected. She had the look of someone who had made peace with counting coins that did not smell clean. Behind her, a tinker set up a tray of tin cups near a barrel of thin ale, his patter cheerful in a practiced way:
The herald’s voice rose again by the gate ribs, carrying smugness like a flag:
Kaelen touched the boy’s elbow.
As they turned away, a constable swaggered along the verge with the self-importance of a man attached to something larger than himself. His speech to a pair of older men went shiny with rank:
Rowan and Kaelen took the lane that skirted the hedges, the Yard shrinking behind thorn and alder. The noise of mallets and saws dulled to a pulse, then to a memory that still pressed at the ear. In a ditch, rainwater had collected around a tangle of nettles and trash. A wagtail hopped along the edge, flicking its tail, untroubled by proclamations. A dog lay under a cart, chin on paws, watching the world choose sides it didn’t understand.
Only when they had the rise between themselves and the Yard did Kaelen speak again.
They walked on into the half-tidy fields of Mirefield’s outskirts. Cabbage rows sagged under yesterday’s rain; scarecrows leaned like men too tired to stand straight; laundry hung between poles, clean enough, never white. Somewhere a hammer found a nail with dull persistence. Somewhere else a child laughed, then hushed when his mother’s hand found his shoulder.
The Yard stayed behind them, but its shape remained - as if the land had learned a new way to be afraid and would practice it until it became natural. They did not hurry. They did not dawdle. They moved with the road, and the road moved as roads do in such places - forward, indifferent, carrying those who nod and those who don’t with the same muddy patience.
The lane bent them into the heart of the settlement. Not much of a heart - more like a tired muscle, still pumping because it had never learned to stop. In the square stood a warped post, its sides bristling with nailed scraps of parchment and cracked wax seals. The noticeboard. Villagers passed it with the same glance they gave clouds: habit, not curiosity.
Kaelen stepped closer, tracing the lines with his gaze, not his hand.
A passing man tugged his cap low and muttered,
Kaelen leaned down, eyes on the page.
More sheets crowded the board. A proclamation of taxes, written in the same bloated hand. A list of wanted men, names smudged but the rewards written bold. A sermon’s notes praising the King’s wisdom, swarmed with adjectives so thick they smothered sense. And among them, smaller postings, hand-scrawled: day labor, ditch digging, hauling timbers, tending oxen.
Kaelen’s gaze stayed on those longer than he meant to. His coin pouch hung light at his belt - he knew the feel well enough to weigh it without opening. Food wouldn’t stretch forever. Neither would goodwill in villages like these.
Kaelen did not deny it. He tore his eyes from the board only to scan the faces nearby. Too many ears, too many eyes pretending not to notice.
Kaelen crouched so the boy could see his face clear. His gray hair, tied at the nape, shifted in the breeze.
A bell rang from the small hall by the square. Men drifted toward it - thin men, mostly, with lines at their eyes that said they’d already measured the risk and found no choice. A herald’s voice followed, oily and sure:
Kaelen’s mouth curved, almost a smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He looked once more at the board, then tugged Rowan’s shoulder.
Kaelen scanned the crooked parchments, reading each line with the same sharp, measured tone he used when listing supplies before a march.
He paused at the bottom sheet, lips pressing thin.
Kaelen’s eyes lingered on the parchment longer than usual. The words were simple enough, though dressed up with a flourish:
He glanced at Rowan, then back at the noticeboard.
Kaelen studied him a beat longer, then nodded once.
Without ceremony, he reached up and tore the parchment from the board. The nail squealed against the wood, drawing a few sidelong looks from villagers nearby. Kaelen ignored them. He folded the sheet once, slid it into his belt, and turned toward the tavern.
The Bent Yoke squatted at the far end of the square, timber walls leaning with the same weariness as the people outside. Its sign creaked overhead, painted with an ox bent low under a heavy harness, the paint long cracked and flaking. The smell reached them before the door: sour ale, woodsmoke, sweat. Laughter rolled out in uneven bursts, the kind that carried more menace than joy.
Kaelen pushed the door open.
Inside, warmth hit them like a wall. Not pleasant warmth, but the close, stifling kind bred of too many bodies and too little air. Rushes covered the floor, damp and muddied. A fire spat in a crooked hearth, the smoke drifting more sideways than upward.
Eyes turned their way as the door shut. Not all at once, not openly - but enough. Farmers, drovers, men with scars too neat to be from plows. A pair of soldiers in half-armor lounged at a table, dice scattered before them, mugs already half-drained. Their laughter cut the room, sharp as knives.
Behind the counter, a heavyset man wiped a mug with a rag that only spread the stains thinner. His eyes, small but quick, flicked from Kaelen to Rowan and back again. He set the mug down with a dull thump.
Kaelen drew the folded parchment from his belt and set it on the counter.
The man’s eyebrows rose. He snatched the sheet, glanced at it as though to confirm it was indeed his, then looked Kaelen over from head to boots. His eyes lingered on the gray hair tied at the nape, the cloak, the quiet weight of a man who did not fidget. Then his gaze slid to Rowan - thinner, younger, with stubborn fire behind his eyes.
The tavernkeeper’s mouth tugged in a grin that did not reach his eyes.
