Page 5 of Salt in the Wound

The man looks up. Meets his gaze.

Indrie stares back. His lips are parted. His face is burning. He is acutely, painfully aware of the rough fingertips still resting against his collarbone, warm and calloused andthere, a point of contact that his entire body seems to be organizing itself around. He should step back. He should look down. He should be terrified, heisterrified, but beneath the terror is something else. Something he has no name for, no precedent for, no framework to understand. A pull, low and insistent, deep enough to feel in his bones.

The man's eyes hold his. They're unreadable still, that same intent, searching quality, but there's something at the edges now. A slight narrowing. A tension in his jaw that might be anger, but isn't directed at Indrie. It's directed at the purple beneath his fingertips.

Then the man releases his collar. The fabric settles back into place, covering the bruise, breaking the contact. Indrie can still feel the ghost of those fingers against his skin, an afterimage of warmth.

The man turns his attention to Erlan.

He speaks. A single sentence, low, even, unhurried. His voice is deeper than Indrie expected, carrying the same rolling cadence as the red-haired warrior's language but withsomething else beneath it. Authority. The absolute, bone-deep certainty of never having had to repeat himself.

Erlan goes white. Not pale.White. The color drains from his face so completely and so rapidly that for a moment Indrie thinks the man might collapse. His mouth opens, closes, opens again. A stammered response emerges, halting and high and bearing no resemblance to the smooth condescension he'd used moments ago. His hands rise in a gesture Indrie recognizes: placation. Surrender.

The blond man doesn't wait for the response to finish. He turns back to Indrie, and the weight of his attention settles against Indrie's chest. He gives Indrie a nod, short and deliberate and somehow reassuring in its simplicity.It's all right. Come with me.

Then a hand lands on Indrie's shoulder. Warm. Heavy. Impossibly careful for its size. The man turns and guides him forward, out of the doorway, past Erlan's ashen face, and into the corridor beyond.

Indrie goes.

He goes because there is nothing else to do. Because his feet are moving and the hand on his shoulder is steady and Erlan is behind him and whoever this man is, he's taking Indrie away from Erlan, and that alone is enough.

He goes because some part of him, small and quiet and buried deep beneath five years of learned fear, believes whatever he’s being led to cannot be worse than what he’s leaving.

Chapter 2

What a fucking mess.

The word from the Jakadi scouts was that there were stores of precious metals being mined in the kingdom of Kalkoa. Gold, silver, maybe even iridium if the rumors held weight. Enough to fund another year of expansion and keep Valen's forges burning through winter. Eskil had taken those reports at face value because the Jakadi had never steered him wrong before, and he'd committed three weeks of sailing, forty of his best warriors, and a ship full of provisions to this venture on the strength of their word.

He knew from the moment they landed at the bay that this was the saddest shithole of a kingdom he'd ever stepped foot in.

The civilians in the surrounding villages are downtrodden farmers and blacksmiths trying to scrape out a living while the castle and its city prosper on their backs. The fields are fallow, half of them, untended or over-farmed until the soil turned to chalk. The livestock are thin. The people are thinner. Children watched them from doorways with the kind of hollow curiosity that comes from having nothing left to fear, because the worsthas already happened and keeps happening and no one has come to stop it.

The miners, what few remain, do pull metals from the mines, but the mines are dilapidated and in dire need of closing. The tunnel supports are rotting, the ventilation nonexistent, and the metals are few, and not precious, and come at a great cost of lives and limbs. Eskil had one of his men inspect the largest shaft and the report came back grim: iron, mostly, and low-grade copper, with veins so thin they'd barely be worth extracting even with proper equipment. Which they don't have. Which no one here has.

Normally Eskil would conquer the overseeing power and implement his own trade and reform. Install a steward, reorganize the labor, open negotiations with neighboring territories. It's what he's done in six other regions across the eastern coast and it's worked every time. But there's nothing here to work with. This kingdom is dying a slow death, with no prospects and no future, and leaving it to its demise would be a greater kindness than trying to fix it.

He stands in the courtyard of the castle, and castle is a generous word for the crumbling stone heap before him, and watches his warriors herd the last of the guards into a line along the wall. The morning sun is barely cresting the battlements and already Eskil is tired of this place. The air smells of rotting thatch and animal waste, and the stones beneath his boots are slick with something he chooses not to identify.

The castle itself holds enough wealth to help fund the journey home. The king has been stealing from his people long enough that the treasury is robust. Not spectacularly so, but enough. Gold and gems and fine fabrics that have no business being in a keep where the servants wear threadbare rags and the walls are green with damp. Eskil sends two men to clear it out while the rest put everyone else into line.

The guards, if that's what he wants to call them, are half-trained boys and old men past their fighting years, armed with blunted swords and wearing armor that doesn't fit. They don't put up much of a fight. Most throw down their weapons and surrender before Eskil's warriors even reach them, falling to their knees with their hands up and their eyes averted. Several of the younger ones practically trip over themselves to disarm. Or worse, ask to come with them. One boy, barely sixteen by the look of him, asks Bohdi in broken fragments of their language if there's room on their ship for someone willing to work. Bohdi tells him no and the boy's face crumbles.

This kingdom. These fucking people. Abandoned by their own ruler and desperate enough to beg passage with foreign invaders.

When they bring Armond before him, Eskil understands why.

The king is dressed lavishly, silks and furs that would feed his outer villages for a year, but riddled with Granger's Disease. Eskil can see it in the pallor of his skin, the slight tremor in his hands, the way his weight shifts on bones that clearly ache beneath him. The distinctive web of darkened veins visible at his wrists and throat. He knows this sickness. He's watched it take men twice Armond's size and reduce them to nothing in a year, maybe two.

And yet Armond stands before him, imperious as a man in full health, anddemandsthat Eskil identify himself and explain by what right he's entered his kingdom.

Even in defeat, the man is pompous and entitled and refuses to admit he's a tyrant choking his kingdom to its last breath. Eskil watches him bluster with something between amusement and disgust. Armond is smaller than him by a head and a half, softened by years of indulgence and inactivity, and Eskil could put him through the nearest wall without breaking stride. Butthere's no sport in it. No satisfaction in breaking a man already being broken by his own body.

His advisor speaks enough of Eskil's language to be useful, a gaunt, sharp-faced man called Erlan who positions himself at Armond's elbow with the practiced precision of a shadow with ambitions. His pronunciation is atrocious, his grammar worse, but he's functional, and Eskil has dealt with worse translators in better kingdoms.

Eskil turns to Erlan and keeps his voice flat. "Tell your king his kingdom is now under Rengaran authority. His treasury is being seized as compensation for a wasted journey. If he has complaints, he can take them up with his gods."

Erlan translates, haltingly, and Armond turns an impressive shade of purple. He begins screaming, the words pouring out of him in his own tongue, and Eskil doesn't need a translation to catch the gist. Divine right. Ancestral claims. A dozen other things Eskil does not have the patience to entertain. He lets him wear himself out. Men who bluster the loudest are always the first to run dry.