The mountain keep smelled like iron and boiled stew, with a hard under-note of oiled leather. Lord Jorund Arland's hall was less a room and more a rule: thick timbers, heavy doors, benches that had seen more winters than any lord at court. Men who came to Jorund did not come to flatter; they came to be told what was true and leave with the shape of a plan.
Jorund sat at the head of the table, a block of a man in a patched cloak. His hair was more gray than not, and his hands looked like hands that had once hurled boulders for sport. Bria stood near him, cloak off, sleeves rolled, looking every inch the soldier she'd trained to be. Around the table were captains from the southern highlands, a dour engineer who built siege ramps for a living, and a handful of envoys from merchant houses — men who smelled of coin and worry.
"We don't have the manpower to chase shadows all over the countryside," the engineer said. He spoke like someone who measured everything in timber and math. "If Morvannis tries to press south and we bleed men hunting raiders, we are inviting disaster."
"You mean let him come," Bria snapped. "Let the wolves run free and hope the shepherds remember old songs."
"Not wolves," Jorund said. He kept his voice even because even when he wanted to roar he had learned that even roars could be misread as temper. "Bandits. Rebels. Men who look for soft bellies and pick at the edges when there's no watch. We hold the pass and the road. We keep the food moving. That's how people don't starve."
Kaelen listened from a bench near the hearth, hands wrapped around a cup that steamed. He had come to Arland on purpose to talk strategy and to be seen doing it. He knew the optics mattered: a prince who rode into a keep to argue with commanders had more credibility than one who waved declarations and expected obedience.
"You need to be seen in the villages," Bria told him bluntly. "Talk to the farmers. Hear what they complain about. Men don't rise because they love the crown; they rise because they have empty bellies and think the men with banners took what was theirs."
"Which is to say," the engineer interjected, "we should spend coin on patrols."
"Coin we don't have," Jorund said. He tapped the table with a knuckle and the sound was like a gavel. "We will not fight the entire north at once and the peasants. We'll be eaten if we try to be everywhere."
A captain leaned forward, the leather of his face crinkling as if he had been mapped harshly by sun. "We could make an example of the bandits if we take a small force and strike fast. Kill their leaders, hang the rest. Show the country what happens when you pick the Valtra's pocket."
Bria's eyes were knives. "And what if those leaders are men who once fought for the empire and were left to rot on half-pay? What if you hang the wrong man and his brother takes up a spear out of spite? Violence breeds violence. You know that."
Jorund let the argument hang. Outside, a rain slanted at the windows and blurred the mountains into smudges. The keep felt like a last clearing against a forest that wanted to move.
Kaelen cleared his throat. The table turned. For a moment he felt like an intruder in a world of seasoned cynicism. "I want talks," he said. It was not the boldest plan the room had ever heard, but it was honest. "Not forever. A parley. I'll go myself to the Wolf's fold and see if there's a way to stop them without killing every breath in the borderlands."
A dozen people immediately told him he was naive. Bria did not; she only narrowed her eyes. "You'll go poorly guarded," she said. "If you go yourself you put the line at risk. If they take you, the country will think the Valtra is a prize to be wrestled for."
"Which is why I'll go low," Kaelen said. "A prince with fifty guards is an army. A prince with three is a man who might be heard. I'll ride quiet. I will not announce myself to the folk before I know what they want. If I must ask for a truce, I will do it without banners."
Silence followed. The engineer rubbed his beard. "You expect a rabble to listen to words when their bellies are empty."
"We'll bring coin," Kaelen said. He meant it. The treasury had little, but there were always smaller purses and the promise of reform: lighter levies, adjusted tithes, local commissions. Words were cheap, but action could buy breathing room. "We'll promise to raise patrols, to lower some taxes, to open the grain stores if the households are honest."
Bria's mouth stayed tight. "You mean to bribe them."
"Call it a temporary relief," Kaelen said. "Not a bargain with blood but practical steps. It's not perfect, but neither is burning men to make law."
Jorund watched him for a long time, as if weighing him in a pair of hands. "You want to speak with wolves," he said finally. "Then go. But you take Bria. You take Caden. You take three others. You travel with honor enough that if the worst happens there is someone to avenge you."
Bria did not smile but she said, "If I go, I go to make sure you don't come home with a knife in your back and a parade of excuses."
Kaelen agreed. He needed familiar faces. He needed someone who knew how to read the land and the habits of men who'd lived by hiding and quick strikes. He also needed to be sure the man who represented the crown didn't look like a gilded boy and not a man.
---
They left at dawn. The road narrowed the further south they rode; the trees grew closer and the towns thinner. The air changed too — soil richer, smells heavier with dairy and smoke. Kaelen's retinue moved slow, eyes on the hedgerows. The plan was to meet Harlan at a neutral clearing near the Wolf's Wood, where rumor said the rebel leader held court. The names in the court were fewer than the truth; rumors often left out the women and the old men who kept a band together by tending wounds, baking bread, and whispering plans at night.
Harlan the Wolf was not a lord on a map. He was a man who had once had a rank and been given less than he thought he deserved. Veterans like him could make men into soldiers, and his eyes had the tiredness of someone who had watched friends die for reasons no one explained well.
Before they reached the forest, they found the aftermath of a raid. A supply wagon — one of the imperial convoys — lay on its side. Its cargo of barley spilled into the mud, an ugly, golden stain. Wheels were broken. Two of the convoy men lay in the ditch, groaning. Near them, a string of tracks led into the trees: prints of many feet, some shod, some bare.
A woman watched from behind a tree, small and gray and lean with worry. Her apron was stained. When Kaelen dismounted to help, she did not look at him as a prince; she looked as a man who had come to offer or to take help.
"My son rode on that," she said without preface. "He's taken by the Wolf's men."
"How many?" Bria asked, checking the bodies like a surgeon. One man still breathed shallowly; the other would not wake.
"Two boys. One older than the other." Her voice was flat. "They took them and the barley and burned the spare cart. Said to give the king his due. Said the king hadn't given them a thing." She spit on the dirt as if the ground had betrayed her.
Kaelen swallowed. The sight had a simple cruelty to it: grain destroyed to keep others from having it, children taken to make a point. He wanted, for a moment, to say the right words, the ones he had rehearsed for spinners and ministers, but those words did not fit a woman whose son might be a slave now.
"I will find them," he said, and he meant it. There was no game in promising what you could not deliver — he felt his youth like an exposed nerve — but he also had something the woman did not: a voice that could issue orders.
"Find them and don't take time," Bria said, voice low. "Harlan takes hostages first and tells you how clever he was. He's a man who knows how to pull at what hurts."
They followed the tracks into the trees. The forest swallowed sound and light in equal measure. Birds stopped singing as if they had been told to be respectful. The tracks grew fresher, prints in the mud with the shape of bare heels and the irregular tread of mismatched boots. Men who lived by stealing were not careful about their music, only their routes and signals.
They found the Wolf's camp at dusk — a ring of tarps and lean-tos that smelled of smoke and bread and the sharp tang of people who had been sleeping under open skies for a long time. Harlan sat on a log near a small fire, not wearing the wolf-skin cloak the stories said he would, but a ragged coat patched a dozen ways. His hair was long but braided tight, and his teeth showed when he smiled: a grin that suggested he had broken a lot of rules and liked the taste of it.
"Prince," he said, nodding as if the word were just another name. "You brought friends. Good. I prefer to meet with a prince who doesn't bring a hundred heralds. Makes the talking easier."
Kaelen got down from his horse with a knot of wariness. The Wolf's men watched them with a curious mix of anger and hunger. The oldest among them — a woman with a scar across her eyebrow — scowled and spat. A boy, the sort who had been in many fights already, prodded the barley sack with a stick and laughed.
"Why are you here?" Harlan asked without ceremony. His voice was plain and not cruel, only blunt the way a hammer is blunt. "To tell us pretty lies? To bring wine while our children go hungry?"
"No," Kaelen said. He looked at Harlan, not at his men. "I came because killing each other makes us all poorer. I'm here to listen. If your men took grain, it's because they thought they had no other way. Tell me what you want."
Harlan's smile was a slow thing. "What do I want? To have enough grain for my people. To stop young men joining the band because they have no work. To stop the knights taking what they like under the cover of the kingdom. Is that a lot to ask?"
Bria's hand curled on the hilt of her sword. "You steal and you take hostages."
"And I cut a purse or two," Harlan said. "I make men look. You want to crucify the messenger and say the message is false."
Kaelen folded his hands, feeling the cold slip of uncertainty. Listening was harder than being given a list to recite. "If we promise relief — a temporary lowering of levies, credit for farms, patrols that will stop marauders — would you stop taking people?"
Harlan looked at him as if measuring wood for a build. "Promises are wind. I've traded for promises before. Give me something I can see. Bring me guards who will stand between a knight and a farmer when he tries to take more than is his. Put coin in the hands of the bakers and not a lord's purse. Show me you mean it and I'll sit down and feed you the truth."
The Wolf's men muttered at this like men tasting a good idea. The woman with the scar stepped forward and spat again, cleaned her hands on her skirt, and looked at Kaelen. "If you do it, prove it. If you do not, then the next wagon is ours."
Kaelen looked at Bria. She nodded once, the kind of small motion that said she believed him enough to back him. "I will speak to my council," Kaelen said carefully. "I will bring you proof. One wagon of grain for the next moon. Two patrols. And a delegate from our side to oversee the distribution."
Harlan shrugged as if he had been offered less or more and did not care. "You have a month. If I see no change, we take what must be taken. And Prince —" he leaned in, voice soft for a man in the wild. "Don't come again if you bring a parade. People with banners are easy to cut."
Kaelen felt the words settle like dust. The meeting had not solved everything, but it had changed the tone. He had met the man who might have become a symbol of rebellion and found someone who wanted sensible things — food, fairness, oversight — not the throne for the sake of it. That in itself was a narrow, unexpected blessing.
When they rode back through the trees, Kaelen felt the hide of youth on him, thinner somehow. He had been to the edge and shaken hands with a man who had nothing to lose and everything to gain by war. If he failed the promises, there would be more than banditry to fear. If he kept them, he might buy the country the breath it needed.
Bria rode beside him, quiet. "You did not bring a parade," she said.
"No," Kaelen answered. "And he told me to go home and prove myself."
She snorted. "Proof is a dangerous thing. Men die for proof."
They rode in under the muffled stars, the keep a silhouette against a darker sky. Kaelen knew the council would argue when he returned: some would call him soft, some would call him wise. He had chosen to gamble on human patience and an honest man's behavior rather than on a blade. Only time would tell whether those bets paid in grain or in blood.