Chapter 97 Reading the Land

  The morning mist still clung to the water as Pit led his small band toward the river. Six men followed—two dwarves among them—hauling ropes, poles, and a day’s determination. Pit, of course, carried nothing heavier than a grin.

  “Lovely day for hard labor,” he said brightly, earning a groan from the nearest man. “If Caelen keeps this up, we’ll all be so productive the Veils themselves will come down for a look.”

  At the river bend, they uncovered the small boat. It was half-swallowed by reeds and river-silt, its hull beaded with moisture, but still sound. Pit crouched, slapped the side, and announced, “See? Good bones! A bit of a wash and she’ll remember what she’s for.”

  One of the dwarves, Durrek, muttered, “Aye, sinking.”

  Pit ignored him and set about freeing the craft. They pried it loose from the muck, pushed it into the current, and began loading their poles and gear. The boat rocked under their weight but held steady. As the current caught, Pit gave a lazy salute toward the Hollow’s mist-veiled cliffs.

  “Off we go then! To salvage history—or drown trying!”

  The river snaked south, hugging the banks. Willows and ash trees leaned in, their roots trailing in the water like fingers reaching for something lost. For a while, it was just the splash of the oars and Pit, pointing out every patch of shadow. According to him, they all looked like pigs or bill collectors.

  By midday, they reached the remnants of the old dock—a sagging skeleton of timber jutting out from the river’s edge, warped but still holding form. The coopery rose behind it, half hidden in vine and shadow. Its roof leaned like a weary old man, but its frame endured.

  “Now there’s a sight,” Pit said, hopping ashore. “She’s uglier than I thought. Perfectly our sort of place.”

  The others quickly followed ashore, pushing through the tall grass and nettles. Inside, the coopery felt like a tomb, dead, dry, and quiet; just dust, oak, and stillness. Racks and racks of staves clung to the walls, ribs in some giant’s chest. Iron hoops lay in messy piles. Old pitch pots, black with age, sat next to forges long gone cold. The lingering scent of tar and smoke still haunted the place, tangled up with the damp, cold smell of river water.

  They worked in pairs, calling out discoveries.

  “Tools here—half rust, half ready!”

  “Pitch still good if you boil it!”

  “These staves are as sound as the day they were cut!”

  The debate began soon after.

  “We can’t haul it all,” one man said. “Best take the tools first.”

  “The hoops are lighter,” said another. “You can’t make barrels without ‘em.”

  Durrek shook his head. “Tools you can forge. Staves take time and the right wood. We take them.”

  “And pitch,” Pit added, “because nothing says progress like a sticky disaster.”

  The argument rolled on until Pit finally raised both hands. “All right! We take a bit of everything—staves for barrels, hoops to bind ‘em, pitch to seal ‘em, and tools to make the rest. Equal suffering for all.”

  Grumbling, they set to work. Together they loaded the small boat—stacking staves carefully along the hull’s curve, tying hoops and tools into bundles. The dwarves handled the pitch pots with care, muttering in their tongue about fools and flammable deaths.

  When at last the sun began to slant through the rafters, Pit stood back, hands on hips, surveying the boat heavy with salvage. “See? Not a single thing caught fire or exploded. I call that divine favor.”

  Durrek gave him a sidelong look. “Trip’s not over yet.”

  “Optimism, my stout friend,” Pit chirped, stepping into the boat. “That’s what keeps us afloat.”

  The others followed, and as the oars dipped once more into the water, the coopery faded behind them—its shadow long upon the river, its promise carried home in the weight of their cargo.

  As the boat drifted out into the main current, the river carrying them north toward Gloamhollow, the men finally relaxed. The tension of hours spent prying, lifting, binding, and loading slipped into tired laughter. The coopery was now a distant smudge behind them, half-swallowed by the reeds again—its bounty of tools and timber only a fraction of what waited there still.

  Pit leaned back against the side of the boat, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist. “You know,” he said, “I just realized something terrible.”

  Durrek grunted, not looking up from the oar. “Aye? That your mouth never closes?”

  Pit grinned. “No. Worse. We’re going to have to do this again. And again. And again. Until that cursed building’s emptier than a priest’s wine jug.”

  A chorus of groans rose from the men. One of the dwarves muttered something in Khazrik that sounded very much like a prayer for patience.

  Pit nodded solemnly. “Mark my words—Caelen’s got a bit of the devil in him. A clever, hard-working, salt-boiling devil who smiles when we’re too tired to stand.”

  Even Durrek snorted at that, though he tried to hide it behind his beard.

  Pit spread his hands wide. “But hey, it could be worse. At least the devil feeds us before he works us to death.”

  That earned him laughter at last—rough and weary but real. The boat rocked with it as it drove upstream, sunlight breaking through the clouds in pale gold, the river glinting like molten glass.

  And as the sound faded into the hush of oars and water, every man knew Pit was right.

  They would be back. Again and again—until every stave, every hoop, and every heartbeat of that forgotten coopery found its way home.

  …

  The river bent gently south there, the morning light glinting off its surface like hammered bronze. Tib raised a hand to the others as they continued toward the city.

  “I’ll take the long way,” he called. “See what’s growing, and what’s dying.”

  The land shouldn’t have been this soft, this green—not here. On the eastern bank, the river spread out into a mess of meadows and groves, with patches left wild and empty. Nature and neglect had called a truce, but just barely. He followed what was left of a road—more like two old ruts swallowed up by grass.

  First, he headed for the abandoned farmstead. That was where they found the captives left behind by pirates a few weeks back. The house still looked like it might fall over any second, the thatched roof almost gone, the well smothered by moss and weeds. In the mud, he spotted some boot prints—fresh enough to make him stop and crouch down, fingertips pressed into the damp earth. Maybe farmers. Maybe scavengers. Whoever it was, someone still remembered this place.

  Tib stood a moment, breathing in the scent of dry clay and waterweed. Then he turned south.

  The fields grew broader there, the trees pushing close, vines creeping from the forest edge as though testing how far they might reclaim. He found people again—a scattered handful of families working the villas and crofts that dotted the hills. Smoke rose thinly from cookfires. He saw the shimmer of olives on silver-green branches, the heavy droop of late grapes in dusty vineyards, and children herding goats along the slope.

  When he drew near, the first family regarded him with wary eyes. He smiled his most disarming smile and called out, “Peace, friends! I’ve walked farther than sense allows, and your well looks friendlier than the road.”

  They hesitated, but at the sound of his Avalon accent, the tension eased. They let him share water and a heel of bread, though conversation stayed cautious.

  At the next farm, he was welcomed more openly. At the third, less so—an older man with a pitchfork barked at him until he raised both hands and backed off, laughing.

  By noon, Tiberan had gathered more from the farmers’ words and silences than they likely meant to share. The land was a patchwork of promise and quiet decay—green, yes, fertile even, but stretched thin. The people were weary in the way that comes not from famine, but from the long ache of plenty that cannot be held.

  Everywhere he walked, Tib saw what should have been triumph. Wheat heads bent heavy with grain; beans curled around their poles; the orchards shimmered with the silver leaves of olive trees fat with fruit. Yet the farmers’ smiles were tight, their eyes elsewhere. They spoke of weather and blessings, but their tone was that of men already counting losses. Tib wondered why the harvest had not been taken in yet.

  One woman, stirring laundry in a steaming pot, had said it best without meaning to.

  “A good year, sir. A fine year. We’ll eat well through Frostmoon.”

  Through Frostmoon, Tib noted the word. Not after.

  He heard the same refrain at each villa: full harvests, empty hearts. They would reap the fields, feast for a time, and then wither through lean months when the stored harvest would fail. Tib began to look deeper into the land, and soon noticed the villas’ old granaries were gone—either collapsed or ransacked long ago. A few makeshift sheds stood where great storehouses once held a year’s plenty, and when he approached the ones he could, each smelled faintly of mildew and regret.

  The olive groves told a subtler story. The branches bowed with fruit, but the people had no presses to draw the oil. Two, maybe three, remained in working order across all the farms he passed, and even those were patched with rope and prayer. “Enough for the temple lamps and long nights,” one old farmer said with a weary laugh, “and a bit for bread, if the veils are kind.”

  The rest would spoil before it could be pressed. The fruit too ripe, the flies too many, the vats too few. Yet they still called it a good year.

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  Still, underneath all this slow decline, Tib started picking up on something different—little sparks of creativity, a kind of quiet pushback against scarcity. Every farm he passed, just beyond the neat rows and tangled vines, he saw these big open barrels. Not for wine, not for oil. Something stronger. The air around them carried a sharp, living tang—the unmistakable smell of something fermenting.

  He saw children carrying buckets of the discarded squeezings from the wineries, sticky with grape pulp, mixing it with water hauled from springs or rain-cisterns. He saw housewives bent over their barrels, tending a soft film that floated on the surface—nurturing it like a hearth fire. Mothers of vinegar, he realized.

  Each home was husbanding its own.

  It was curious—vinegar-making had always been done centrally, near the great wine presses, watched over by the guild’s men. But now, with the presses broken and the storehouses fallen, every family had become its own keeper of sourness, patching the gap left by a ruined system. They were keeping life from rotting, one barrel at a time.

  It struck him how the large storehouses lay in ruin, their doors splintered, their floors sunken to damp clay, but smaller cellars—cleverly built, tucked into shaded hillsides or beneath kitchens—remained. Hidden, modest, alive.

  The people no longer stored wealth; they preserved survival.

  Tib walked on, his boots dusted and tunic stained with sweat and soil. The people here were holding on—barely—but with a strange, stubborn wisdom. They could not rebuild the empire’s grandeur, but they had learned to keep what mattered.

  By late afternoon, he turned back toward the river. The land itself seemed to sigh beneath them, waiting for something to stir it awake again. He paused on a low ridge overlooking the plain, watching sunlight drift across the water toward the sea.

  “Arable,” he murmured, “but half asleep. The bones of plenty, missing the marrow of keeping.”

  Then came the vineyards by the coast, rows of green and purple life stretching to the horizon. Here, at least, Tib found laughter—farmhands singing at their work, barrels half-full already, presses creaking under the crush of fruit. The joy was honest, but it felt thin to him, stretched too tight over worry.

  “They’ll fetch good coin this year,” one vintner said, wiping his hands on a stained apron. “A fair yield. The merchants will be pleased.”

  “Enough for winter, then?” Tib asked lightly.

  The man hesitated, glancing toward his neighbor, a woman stirring the first press of juice in a clay vat. “Oh, aye,” she said after a moment. “Wine aplenty. The cellars will fill, and the merchants will take their share. All will be well.”

  All will be well. The words sat wrong.

  Further on, another farmer—older, gray-bearded, his hands sticky with pulp—spoke while peering into the dusk. “Wine feeds the purse, not the belly,” he muttered. “But there’s no coin in vinegar, and no time for both.”

  “Still,” his son added quietly, “There’s no keeping the garden. Come Frostmoon, the greens’ll spoil before they’re pickled.”

  They both fell silent then, returning to their work.

  Tib walked on, understanding threading through his mind like a blade drawn from its sheath. They could make wine. They would sell wine. The merchants demanded it; the nobles toasted it. But the vinegar, the quiet craft that turned bounty into endurance—that was dying—no large vats, no barrels, no one left to tend the slower alchemy of keeping.

  The land would give its blessings freely, but without the means to preserve them, its gifts would sour as surely as untended fruit.

  Tib turned to look back across the great expanse of rich coastal farmland. The vines shimmered in the afternoon sun, the color of promise and ruin both. “A rich land,” he murmured. “Starving behind its smile.”

  And after 4 days, he set off toward the river, and he found his mind already turning—not to the harvest, but to what was between plenty and survival. The soil was not cursed; the people were not lazy. It was the bones beneath—the presses, the vats, the keeping places—that had been allowed to crumble.

  The veil's blessings of the land were still there.

  But no one had the hands—or the will—to hold them.

  By late afternoon, he turned back toward the river, boots dusted, tunic stained with sweat and soil. The people here were holding on—stubbornly, the Avalon way. And the land itself seemed to sigh beneath them, waiting for something to stir it to bounty again.

  He paused on a low hill overlooking the plain, watching sunlight drift across the land toward the sea. “Arable, but half asleep,” he murmured to himself. “Storage lacking, fields shrinking, focus only on coin and trade.” He caught Caelen's voice in his head ‘Broken but can be fixed.’

  He smiled faintly, imagining Caelen’s expression when he brought this news back. “The devil boy will love this.”

  With that, Tiberan turned his feet back to the city and past it to the western lands to learn what they would tell.

  …

  The river expanded its flow as the tide and sweet water mixed, the waters running slow and slack against the weeds, old trees, and stones. By midmorning, Tib had crossed the shallows near the old ferry piles, boots soaked and mood lighter for the coolness. He climbed the western bank, shaking out his sleeves, when he saw movement along the ridge road—steel glinting dull in the sun. When he saw it, he quickly pulled his old badge beneath his tunic.

  A patrol of six soldiers came into view, their banner stubbed and frayed from the weather. They were Litus men—he could tell that from the cut of their cloaks and the brass badges on their shoulders—but they bore the stance of trained fighters, not rabble. The lead man, a sergeant, was broad and sunburnt, the little metal in his armor polished only in the places that saw use.

  When they spotted Tib, they slowed. One of them muttered, “Soldier’s gear, but not our make,” and the sergeant stepped forward with the easy suspicion of a man long used to trouble.

  “Morning,” the sergeant called, hand resting lightly on his sword hilt. “You from the city?”

  Tib shook his head. “North of it. Scouting the riverland.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “That's your badge—Avalon?”

  Tib smiled. “Old service, maybe. Depends who’s asking.”

  The sergeant chuckled at that, the edge of suspicion easing into curiosity. “Sergeant Kellin Harrow, the city guard. We’re headed west, checking the shore. You look like you’re walking the same way. No sense traveling alone if the tide’s align, eh?”

  Tib nodded. “Aye. Company’s better than boredom."

  That earned him a few grins, and they fell into step together.

  The soldiers were talkative—too tired to keep secrets, too proud to sound afraid. Kellin did most of the speaking, as men like him often did when they finally found someone who wasn’t under their command.

  “Used to be the western bank was a jewel,” he said, kicking a stone down the track. “Just sand and villas, fat with olives, great fish, and the best beer in the whole of Avalon. Now the waters have gone bad, the people suffer, and recently the pirates have come right up the beaches. Bold as wolves, they are. Hit a villa last week—burned half the roof, took everything that’d float. The lord’s bailiff hanged two men for sleeping through it.”

  Tib raised an eyebrow. “And how many pirates were caught?”

  Kellin spat into the dust. “None, of course. They’re ghosts once they hit the sand. Slip back to their boats faster than we can ride. You’d think the sea itself swallows them.”

  He sighed, glancing toward the dark horizon where gulls circled. “Two watchtowers gone now—east of the city. Burned clean. We’ve got no ships to chase them, and the lords inland care more for levies than the coast. So now we tramp back and forth, waiting for smoke to tell us where to run next.”

  Tib let him talk, only adding a quiet, “Hard work for little pay,” which drew a rough laugh from the whole line.

  After a while, they paused to drink from their flasks. Kellin leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Truth is, the city’s slipping into chaos. The captains don’t just rob ships out at sea anymore—they’ve started coming inland for grain and salt. The merchants pay them quiet coin to leave their ships and stores alone, and the rest of us... well, we look the other way when we can.”

  “Why look the other way?” Tib asked softly.

  Kellin’s expression hardened. “Because we’ve families in that city. Because when the pirates get angry, it’s the docks and houses that burn, not the lord’s manor.”

  They started walking again. The path dipped and opened onto a long stretch of sand, white and glinting in the sun. In the distance, the faint outline of charred wood marked where one of the towers had stood.

  Kellin pointed with a gloved hand. “That’s why we’re out here—longest run of beach this side of the river. Easy landing. Hard to guard. If you see ships come ashore, don’t play hero. Run for the trees and pray they want plunder, not blood.”

  Tib nodded solemnly, though a wry smile tugged at his mouth. “I’ve no wish to play hero. But I’ll remember where they land.”

  Kellin studied him for a moment—this stranger with the quiet eyes and fine Avalon armor—and nodded slowly. “Good. You’ve the look of someone who sees more than he says.”

  Tib only shrugged, glancing westward where the waves broke hard against the shore. The wind smelled of salt and danger.

  “The mouth of the river,” Kellin went on, almost to himself, “it’s gone bad—smugglers, wreckers, worse. Used to be fishermen’s shacks down there—now it’s a graveyard of hulls. You’ll not find peace south of here.”

  “Then I’ll walk north,” Tib said lightly, though his eyes lingered on the horizon where smoke faintly marked another ruin. “Peace, maybe, is overrated anyway.”

  The sergeant barked a laugh, and the patrol moved on.

  Tib stayed behind a moment, looking out over the empty beaches, where the wind drew shifting lines in the sand—patterns like tide maps or warning signs.

  The patrol had thinned out a little now, two men ahead scanning the dunes, one trailing behind with a bow across his back.

  Tib and Sergeant Kellin walked side by side, boots crunching on gravel. The talk had turned quieter, heavier.

  “Truth be told,” Kellin said after a while, “it’s not the pirates that’ll kill us—it’s the rot inside the walls.”

  He spat into the dust and shook his head. “You ever serve under two laws, lad? One says you hang a thief, the other says you pay him off. That’s what we’ve got. Avalon’s law says a pirate’s a criminal. The sea-law says he’s a free trader. And us poor bastards in between? We’re the ones burying the bodies and cleaning the docks when the deals go bad.”

  Tib nodded slowly. “And no one above cares to change it?”

  “Oh, they care,” Kellin said bitterly. “They care about their coin, their ledgers, their wine. The lords argue who owns which stretch of coast, while the pirates own it all. You try to arrest one of ‘em, and some sea noble shows up with a royal writ saying the man’s under ‘maritime privilege.’”

  He gave a hollow laugh. “Maritime privilege, my arse. It means gold changed hands, that’s all. Half the pirate captains have kin in the Eastwatch or the capital. Some wear rings worth more than my whole barracks.”

  They came upon a bend where the shore dipped and the surf grew louder, wind carrying the smell of brine and pitch. The sergeant paused, scanning the distant silhouettes of ships anchored too close to shore.

  “And it’ll get worse soon,” he said, lowering his voice. “The kingdom’s sending its officials. Some ‘white priest’ among ‘em—come to hold grievance court. Every year they do it. Sounds fine, doesn’t it? Justice, order, all that.” He snorted. “You know what it means to us? Means the pirates line up with gifts and silver tongues, and the priest nods along while we get told to stand down. Always the same—‘Mercy of the Crown,’ they call it.”

  Tib kept quiet, listening. The man’s voice wasn’t angry anymore—just tired.

  “We can’t touch ‘em,” Kellin went on. “You catch one raiding, next week he’s walking the market square like a lord, buying fruit for his mistress. We lose men in the alleys, and the city rings the bells for peace. Peace!” He spat again. “If that’s peace, I’d rather have war. At least war tells you who your enemy is.”

  Tib looked at him sidelong. “And yet you keep walking the line.”

  Kellin gave a rough shrug. “Someone has to. The folk in the low quarter still need guarding. The fishers still need someone to count their dead. We’ve all got our reasons.” He squinted toward the surf again, jaw working. “But I’ll tell you this, stranger—if the sea keeps taking and the crown keeps giving, there won’t be much left to guard before long.”

  They walked in silence for a time after that, the waves breaking and receding like slow applause for the dying courage of men who still tried to hold the line. The wind turned colder now with the beginning of winter.

  And Tib thought—not for the first time—that when a place begins to rot, it is rarely from the outside in. It starts at the heart, where law and greed shake hands and call it mercy.

  He was starting to see the shape of the problem now.

  The pirates were not merely raiding.

  They were reclaiming the coast, one forgotten mile at a time, replacing laws and removing the foundations of order.