Smoldering flames licked at the blackened bones of houses, painting the night in dull orange and choking gray. The air tasted of iron and soot. Somewhere, a beam gave way with a low groan, sending a spray of sparks into the dark like a dying star's last breath.
Eryk woke to the sound of that groan.
For a heartbeat he thought it was his father's voice, low, rough with sleep, calling him for the dawn milking.
Then the heat pressed in.
He coughed, his throat raw. The illusion shattered.
Smoke clawed at his eyes as he blinked. Charred splinters dug into his palms when he pushed himself up. The world lurched: fire, darkness, a swollen orange glow that did not belong.
He was lying beside the well.
The stone rim dug into his ribs as he rolled and forced himself upright. His legs trembled, refused, then finally obeyed in jerky movements. Each breath rasped like sandpaper.
Not a dream.This is not a dream.
He blinked the tears away.
The square of Hollowford, his whole world, was a smear of ruin. The tavern's sign, the painted fox his uncle used to tap and call a "drunken mutt," lay split and black on the ground. The baker's roof had fallen inward, timbers glowing dull red, sagging like ribs around a heart of coals. A door hung from a single hinge, creaking whenever the wind shifted.
Bodies lay in the street.
For a moment he could pretend they were only sleeping. Curled on their sides, sprawled on their backs, some half-hidden by fallen beams. Then his gaze caught the wrong angles: an arm bent where no joint should be, bare feet charred to bone, a woman's hair still burning, feeding the flames.
By the tavern steps, an old man lay half-covered in ash. One stiff hand still clutched a warped tankard.
Old Ostin, the same hand that had wagged at him for climbing the fence, then slipped him an apple slice when no one was looking.
Eryk's stomach clenched. He turned and vomited over the well's rim, bile splattering the hot stone. The heat dried it almost at once.
He wiped his mouth. His sleeve came away black.
His ears rang, a high, thin whistle. Beneath it lay the crackle of fire, the low groan of dying houses and, faint beneath all that, the retreating thunder of hooves.
They are leaving.
He did not remember when they had come.
Memory was shattered glass. Shouting. A horn. Torches moving like angry stars along the ridge road. Dogs barking. His mother's hand clamping his shoulder hard enough to hurt.
"Into the root-cellar. Don't argue, Eryk. Go."
He had, because her voice had never sounded like that, tight, frayed, as if something were already tearing. He had climbed down into the cool dark beneath the house and crouched among baskets of turnips and potatoes as the lantern above shrank to a thin line when she pulled the door almost shut.
"Stay quiet," she whispered through the crack. "No matter what you hear. Do you understand?"
He had nodded. His throat would not work.
Then the noises came. Men shouting. Harsh laughter. Wood bursting. A scream that might have been Ostin's or Father's or some stranger's. His fingers dug furrows into the hard-packed dirt, nails tearing. He waited for his mother's voice.
He heard it once.
Just once.
It did not sound like her.
Smoke seeped between the floorboards. Heat pressed down. Something heavy crashed overhead. Dust filled his eyes and mouth. He had pushed up, shoulder braced against the cellar door.
And stopped.
If he opened it, he would have to see. See what that scream meant. His body locked, shuddering in the dark. He stayed like that until something slammed into the ceiling above and the world went out.
Now he stood by the well with no memory of how he had come.
He pressed his palm to his chest. His heart hammered.
"Ma," he croaked.
The word came out thin and broken.
He forced his legs to straighten. The square tilted, steadied.
"Ma!" he tried again, louder.
His voice slapped off ruined walls and disappeared. No answering call. No familiar curse from his father about waking the whole damned valley.
Find them.
He stepped forward, boots crunching over charred debris. A melted doll stared up at him with a soft, featureless face. He looked away.
The closer he got to his house, the hotter the air. The old alder tree out front was a half-burned stump, smoke curling from its hollow. Once, his father had hoisted him into that tree's branches.
"World looks bigger from up here," he had said, laughing. "Remember that."
Now the world felt very small.
One wall of the house had fallen outward. The roof was a blackened skeleton.
The door was gone. Only the scorched threshold remained.
"Ma?" His voice cracked.
He stepped through.
Inside was a maze of shadows and embers. Floorboards had split and fallen in, revealing the black mouth of the cellar below. A heavy beam lay at an angle, half-buried in ash. He knew where the table should be, his mother's rug, his father's boots by the hearth.
None of them were there.
There should have been a chipped clay cup on the table, hers for him, always half-filled with water. There should have been her low humming under the creak of the house.
Only the soft ticking of cooling wood.
There.
Beneath a collapsed section of ceiling, just beyond the blackened hearth, he saw cloth. Charred and torn, yet pale where it had not burned through.
His mother's apron had been pale.
Eryk's chest cinched tight.
He stumbled over a broken bench, slid in ash, and gripped the beam. Splinters bit into his palms. He heaved.
Nothing.
He planted his feet and leaned his weight into the wood. It creaked but held.
"No," he whispered. "No, no…"
He tried again. And again. Splinters burrowed under his nails, skin tearing. His shoulders burned. Smoke clawed his lungs.
He did not stop.
The cellar. The door. Standing frozen in the dark while everything broke above him. That had already happened.
He would not stand still again.
Something joined the ringing in his ears, a slow, stone-deep thrum, as if the hill itself were drawing breath.
He pushed harder. His vision narrowed until there was only the beam and that strip of pale cloth.
The wood shifted.
Barely. The ash beneath it stirred.
But it moved.
Eryk sucked in a searing breath and let out a raw, wordless sound. The stone-deep thrum rose, matching the pounding in his chest.
The beam lifted another inch. Then another.
A thin, burned hand appeared beneath it. Fingers blackened and cracked, reaching for something that was not there.
The thrum snapped off.
Pain knifed up his arms. His strength vanished as if someone had cut it away. The beam slammed down with a dull thud, ash puffing into the air.
Eryk staggered back. For a moment his ribs refused to move.
Then the pain hit fully.
He folded, clutching his forearms. Muscles screamed. Tendons felt strung too tight. The absence of the thrum left a hollow, cold ache behind it.
He stared at the unmoved beam.
At the hand beneath it.
It could be anyone, he told himself.
His mind filled in the rest anyway: rough hands warm on his hair, fingers stained with berry juice, the last shove between his shoulder blades toward the cellar stairs.
"Ma," he whispered.
The house creaked.
That was all.
The pain ebbed to a deep throb, leaving his arms heavy and clumsy. The ceiling groaned above him.
He backed out, each step feeling like leaving something behind that he had no right to abandon.
Outside, smoke rolled low across the square, blurring edges and swallowing details. The sky was a dirty smear where stars should have been.
Eryk sat on the stone step.
For a little while he did not cry, think, or move. The world shrank to the scrape of his breath and the hiss of far-off fire. His mind felt scraped clean.
Then the thoughts pushed back in around the edges.
His hands shook in his lap. Ash and blood streaked his fingers. The skin still tingled, like after gripping the plow handles too long.
The beam had moved.
For a single breath he had believed the world might bend for him.
It had not.
Those were tavern tales. Old men talking about saint-blooded warriors who called iron to their hands and witches whose words folded men in on themselves. Eryk had listened wide-eyed once, imagining himself in those stories, high above everything, looking down from alder branches.
He let out a short, broken laugh that scraped his throat.
He was no saint-blood. No witch. Just a boy in the ashes with shaking arms and a hand under a beam he could not lift.
Hooves sounded again, closer.
His head snapped up.
Shapes emerged from the smoke at the far end of the square, horses, dark against the dull glow. Men in leather and mismatched steel, outlined by embers.
The bandits had not all gone.
His breath caught.
He counted four clearly, maybe more behind the gray curtain. One rode ahead, a long cloak trailing, sword at his hip reflecting the firelight in dull flashes. The others spread out, spears and axes hanging easy in their hands. One laughed, a thin, harsh sound.
They had not seen him.
Move.
The thought came clean and cold.
Eryk slid off the step into a crouch. The well lay too far. The center of the square was bare stone and bodies.
The alley.
A narrow gap between the baker's house and Old Ostin's. He had raced through it a hundred times as a child, a stick in hand, shouting orders to boys who followed no one but still humored him.
Now it was a strip of darkness just wide enough to disappear into.
He hunched low and slipped toward it, boots crunching softly. A roof tile snapped under his heel like breaking bone. He flinched, but did not stop.
His body wanted to curl in on itself and vanish. To find another cellar, another door. There was nowhere left to hide under a roof.
Hooves clopped on stone behind him.
"Place still smolderin'," a man said, voice rough with satisfaction. "Good work tonight."
"Could have been better," another replied. "Boss says half the coin was hidden. We will search again when it cools."
Eryk pressed himself into the alley's shadow, chest heaving. He clamped his hand over his mouth.
The stink of old piss and smoke mixed in his nose.
From there, he watched.
The horses moved into the square. The leader reined in beside the well, cloak settling around him. He pushed his hood back.
Eryk froze.
The man had close-cropped hair shot through with gray. A face cut from old scars and hard angles. Eyes the color of wet stone, flat and unhurried. A plain iron ring gleamed on his thumb. He rubbed it once with his forefinger as if checking it was still there.
Not a wild raider. Someone who had done this before. Many times.
"Messy," the leader said, looking over the dead. His tone was mild annoyance. "Told them keep it cleaner."
"You said 'no witnesses,' Garren," one of the others said with a shrug. "Hard to do that gentle."
Garren.
The name fell into Eryk like a pebble into deep water.
Garren snorted. "I said I wanted hands left. Fields do not till themselves. Lords do not care how the grain shows up, just that it does. Now half our winter labor is smoke." He clicked his tongue once. "Idiots."
He swung down from his horse. Ash whispered under his boots.
This was not madness. It was work to them. Numbers. Grain. Labor. His village, his parents, Old Ostin's stupid tankard, just marks on some invisible tally.
Heat that was not from the fires wound under Eryk's ribs.
"Check for stragglers," Garren said. "Kids, old ones. If they are breathing, they are worth coin."
Cold slid into Eryk's belly.
The nearest bandit, broad shoulders, patchy beard, a front tooth broken to a jagged stump, headed for the tavern. Another trudged toward the far houses, humming tunelessly.
A third turned toward Eryk's home.
Toward the alley.
Move, move.
But there was nowhere to run. The alley dead-ended in the tanner's yard and a wall too high to climb quietly. If he bolted now, they would see him. If he stayed.
His fingers brushed wood.
He looked down.
A broken length of plank lay there, one end charred. Maybe part of a barrel once. Now, a crude club.
The bandit's shadow slid across the alley mouth, stretching over Eryk's boots.
Eryk picked up the wood.
It was a stupid choice. A boy against leather and steel. The sensible thing would be to stay very still, be bound, hope to live.
His hand tightened anyway. Splinters dug into his palm.
Not enough to lift a house. Maybe enough for one swing.
He thought of the hand under the beam. Of his father's laugh in the fields. Of the alder and the way the road had looked small from its branches. All of it flattened because men like this had ridden in and Garren had said no witnesses like he was ordering bread.
"Any rats hiding in here?" the man called, voice bored. He squinted into the gloom. His breath carried a sour reek of ale and onions.
Eryk's heart hammered.
He pressed himself flatter against the wall.
The man took another step, hand resting on his sword. "Come on out. Make it easy, boy. Maybe you see the morning."
For a heartbeat Eryk felt his muscles lock, the way they had under the cellar door.
He moved anyway.
He lunged from the shadow and swung the club with everything he had left.
The wood crunched into the man's cheekbone.
The crack was wet and ugly.
The bandit cried out, stumbling. His hand fumbled at his sword; the blade snagged. Blood and spit flew from his mouth.
Eryk swung again.
This time the man threw an arm up. The club slammed into leather and flesh, sending a numb shock through Eryk's hands. Pain sparked up his arms. He clung on out of sheer stubbornness.
"Little shit!" the bandit snarled.
His backhand smashed into Eryk's face. White burst behind Eryk's eyes. He hit the ground hard, ash puffing around him.
Boots thudded closer.
He tried to push himself up. His arms shook and slid out from under him. His cheek throbbed; warmth trickled down his jaw.
The bandit loomed above, blocking the orange light. One eye was already swelling, his jaw slick with blood, breath hot and sour.
"You will regret that," he hissed.
His boot came down on Eryk's hand.
Pain screamed up his arm. The club snapped free of his grip. Eryk yelled, twisting, but the man's weight nailed his wrist to the ground.
"Got a live one!" the bandit shouted.
Garren's head turned toward the alley.
No.
The heat in Eryk's chest surged. The stone-deep thrum roared back to life, sharper now, like metal grinding against rock. The world tightened around the boot crushing his hand, the bandit's weight, the ash in his mouth.
He had never wanted someone dead as much as he did in that moment, and the fierceness of it frightened him.
"Do not touch me," he gasped.
The bandit snorted. "You are in no."
The air shivered.
It was subtle, like the quiver underfoot when a wagon passes, but there were no wagons. No storm. Only fire, smoke, and this man's weight.
The thrum snapped outward.
Iron hoops stacked behind the bandit, bent barrel rings from the cooper's yard, jerked. They sprang from the ash and spun through the air.
One hammered into the bandit's shoulder with a dull clang. Another clipped his ear. He flinched and ducked with a curse.
"The fuck?" he spat, glaring back at the empty shadows.
Eryk stared.
He had not moved. His free hand clawed at ash, useless. The hoops lay scattered now where they had not been.
The stone-deep thrum tore away, leaving his chest aching and empty.
"Who is there?" the bandit barked. He sounded angry more than afraid.
Garren's voice cut in, flat and irritated. "What are you doing, Droth? I said bind him, not scream at ghosts."
So that was his name.
Droth cast one last suspicious look at the deeper dark, then grabbed Eryk by the hair and wrenched his head back.
Eryk cried out, fingers scraping trenches in the ash.
"I will bind him," Droth muttered. "After I teach him some."
"Enough."
Bootsteps approached, steady. Garren's face appeared above him, framed by drifting smoke. Up close, Eryk saw the healed cut through one eyebrow, the uneven scrape of old stubble, eyes like stones in river-mud. The iron ring on his thumb caught a glint of firelight as he absently turned it.
He took Eryk in with one brief glance, ash, blood, thin arms pinned under a boot.
"How old?" Garren asked.
Droth shrugged, still holding his hair. "Ten? Eleven?"
"Twelve," Eryk spat. Pain flared in his cheek.
One of Garren's brows twitched. "Twelve, then."
His gaze flicked to the broken club, to the scattered hoops.
"Bold for twelve," he said. "And stupid. But bold."
He crouched, cloak settling, until their faces were level. Eryk could smell leather, sweat, horse, smoke ground deep into cloth.
"Know who we are, boy?" Garren asked.
Eryk forced himself to meet that gaze. "Murderers."
A couple of the men laughed once, short and sharp.
Garren's expression barely shifted. "That is one word." He tilted his head, thumb rubbing the iron ring again. "Another is 'the ones the Lords pay.'"
The words landed like a blow.
"They pay you for this?" Eryk rasped. "For all of this?"
Garren glanced around, taking in the wreckage as if he were looking over a field after harvest. "You see home," he said. "I see grain that should have been on the road and was not. Coin buried instead of handed over. Sheriff too lazy or too scared to keep the roads clear." His eyes returned to Eryk. "Leave that long enough, worse men come. Or my lot comes starving. Either way, something burns. This time it was you."
He spoke like someone reciting a truth he had long stopped questioning.
Eryk's fingers curled into fists. His trapped wrist throbbed under Droth's boot.
"What did you find, Garren?" one of the bandits called.
"A mouth that still works," Garren replied.
He studied Eryk for a heartbeat longer. "Hate me all you want," he said quietly. "Does not change anything. You are alive because you are small and might sell. That is all." He straightened. "Droth. Bind him. We move when the fires settle."
Droth finally stepped off Eryk's hand. Blood rushed back in a hot, needling wave. Rough hands yanked his wrists behind his back. Rope bit into scraped skin, grinding against the raw places.
The iron hoops lay scattered in the ash, dull and ordinary now.
Garren turned away. "Take what is worth taking," he called. "Leave the rest for the crows."
Eryk stared at the ground as the knots tightened. His cheek pulsed with each heartbeat. Beneath that pain lay a deeper weight: the hand under the beam, his mother's apron, Old Ostin's tankard, the alder stump.
The heat under his ribs cooled and settled, turning into something heavier.
A stone dropped into a deep well.
He did not know what had moved the iron. He did not understand the thrum or why it hurt when it left. The part that frightened him most was how much he had wanted Droth's skull between those hoops.
Droth hauled him upright by the rope, nearly tearing his shoulder. Eryk stumbled, then found his feet.
Garren walked toward his horse, cloak dragging through the ash. The sword at his hip caught the firelight in brief, dull flashes. His thumb brushed the iron ring again as he reached for the reins.
Eryk fixed his gaze on that back and did not look away. He carved every line of the man into memory, the set of his shoulders, the way his cloak hung, the battered scabbard, the twist of iron on his hand.
Garren.
The name sank in him like iron in deep water.
He would remember it when the smoke was gone and the cuts had scarred. He would remember it when dreams dragged him back to burning beams and cellar dark. Whether he woke in chains or in some stranger's yard, he would remember.
And one day, when the stone-deep thrum in his bones was no longer just a strange, fleeting pain, when he was no longer a boy who froze behind cellar doors and swung broken planks at armored men, he would say that name again.
Not as prey.Not as a child.
As something that could make a man like Garren turn and look afraid.
They led him across the square. Hollowford smoldered quietly behind them. Roofs caved in with tired sighs. Sparks drifted up into the dirty sky and vanished.
Eryk did not look back.
He kept his eyes on the line of Garren's shoulders, on the sword at his hip, on the hand with the iron ring, on the road that led away.
Every step away from the ruins was a step toward the day he would come back to them.
Not as someone to be bound and sold.
As something else.