Late season leaned hard on Blackhorn. Wind combed the Ashmaw Barrens into low grey swells, rasping along rock ribs and the squat palisade that kept the clan’s goats in and most of the wastes out. The sun never seemed to rise cleanly anymore; it pushed through soot-tinted haze, a dull ember that set nothing warm. Dargan walked the eastern traps with a leather satchel and a cudgel tucked under his arm, boots scuffing dust that lifted in thin sheets and drifted away like old promises.

  He preferred the quiet before the settlement woke. The traps—his traps—were placed with care: staggered along the windbreak where the scrub still held seed, tucked in stone shadows where small lives paused out of habit. A steel jaw held a razor hare by one back foot; the animal had bled out cleanly, a soft warmth already leaving the body. He knelt, checked the teeth, and murmured to himself in the rhythm of inventory. “Spring tension’s still good. No grit in the hinge.” He loosened the paw from the serrations and slid the hare into his satchel. There was no point in feeling sorry. It all fed the same ledger—meat, hide, bone, gland.

  Two snare lines farther on, a pit scorpion lay twisted, its black skin slick with a pale iridescence he knew not to touch with bare fingers. He tipped the scorpion with the cudgel onto a folded strip of bark, pinched the bark’s ends, and lowered both into a clay catch-jar, kept shaded and dry. The venom would hold until he could separate it in the armory shadows. He had learned patience from the old armorer: work done quickly rarely lasted. Work done quietly was seldom questioned.

  By the time he turned toward the palisade, his satchel was heavy enough to pull at his shoulder. Blackhorn’s longhouses hunched behind the wall, their roofs built with crisscrossed timbers and tarred hides to cheat the wind. There was the armory, a squat stone shell with a timber rack out front where spears leaned like bundled reeds. He slipped around to the back—there, beside the rain barrel, was his place. The shadows felt familiar. He set out the jars and the bundle of tools: two bone spatulas, a narrow blade rubbed with tallow so nothing would bind, a bit of linen, a clay vial with a waxed stopper.

  He worked without flourish. He milked the scorpion’s stinger, teasing two clear drops of venom into the clay vial. He let the clear slickness bead along the bone spatula’s edge and drip into the waiting vial. He cleaned the tool with ash, rolled the linen over it, then scraped the resinous smear from the razor hare’s jaw hinge into a separate pot. He kept the venom undiluted in the vial, the clay and shade its only protection. Nothing showy. No scent to give it away in close quarters. He breathed through his mouth and kept his hands moving.

  “Every season you find a new way to make soft things dangerous,” Ruk said behind him.

  Dargan didn’t startle. He had heard the soft crunch in the dust, the way Ruk placed his feet in a line to keep a narrow profile in the wind. He stoppered the vial. “It’s not the season that does that.”

  Ruk stepped into the shade, a strip of leather braided into his hair to keep the shorter strands from his eyes. He carried his bow in the crook of one elbow, the unstrung bowstring coiled against the grip. He smelled of smoke and sage, the sign he had been out on the northern lookout again. He glanced at the jars without touching them. “You’re back early. The goats are ribs, and the middle brush is dead—Elder Sarn will have to send hunts north for graze and meat.”

  “The hares are running thin,” Dargan said. “They’re not breeding in the middle brush anymore, only along the rock line.”

  Ruk’s jaw tightened. “North wind’s wrong. The grasses there lie flat like they’re tired of taking root. The farther north we go, the more tracks that aren’t ours.”

  “Humans?” Dargan asked. He returned the vial to the inner slit of his satchel and wiped his hands in ash before pulling on his work gloves.

  “Boot tracks in twos and threes, small feet with longer strides. Not heavy enough to be dwarves. Elves would leave less. But there’s been ash cut with something sweet. Their cookfires aren’t our kind.” Ruk tugged the braid at his temple, an anxious habit he pretended was about comfort. “I don’t like it.”

  “None of us will,” Dargan said. “But the goats are too lean. If we push north for graze and meat, the hands on our backs will be human, elf, and dwarf the season after. There will be lines crossed and debts counted we can’t pay.”

  Ruk gave him a steady look. He was a man who spoke only when needed, and when he did, his sentences were shaped by care rather than speed. “Elder Sarn will put it to the council. He’ll want to show strong hunts in the old places first.”

  “Strong hunts need animals,” Dargan said. “Those we have left are learning our patterns.”

  “They always do.” Ruk shifted, glanced past Dargan to the armory wall. “There’s talk about Khorvak. He went out with the pit blades last night to practice before the fire circle. He’s been asking who thinks they can stand him for a bout before harvest’s end. He’s bored.”

  Dargan felt the familiar prickle at the back of his neck. Khorvak’s boredom was the settlement’s problem as often as it was Dargan’s. “Did he ask my name?” he asked, half amused at himself for caring.

  Ruk’s mouth flexed, almost a smile, almost a warning. “He asked if the armorer’s apprentice had finally learned how to hammer iron into a spine. The crowd thought it clever. They laugh when he shows them where to look.”

  “That will be his way until someone takes a blade to his kidney,” Dargan said evenly. He slid the glove from his right hand, pinched the wrist guard’s strap, and adjusted the rivet. His mind moved not toward the insult but along the ledger he kept: who owed whom, who stood where when things happened, how to tilt a moment without becoming seen doing it. “How lean were the goats in the western pens when you passed?”

  “Too much rib,” Ruk said. He hesitated, then let out a breath. “I don’t want to see you in Khorvak’s arena, Dargan. He drags people down to their worst selves just to show his best.”

  “Then stay off the training ground at dusk,” Dargan said, not unkindly. “It’s his hour. I will be there because I need distance work, and the sand is the only soft place left to fall. I’m not there for him.”

  “Then he will be there for you.” Ruk touched his arm. “When I come back tonight, we’ll talk about the northern path. I think the humans are closer than the elders want to admit.”

  Dargan nodded. Ruk slipped away the way he came, leaving the armory shadows to fill back in like nothing had moved them at all.

  He finished with the scorpion venom, sealed the clay vial, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his vest, not against his skin, insulated by a scrap of cloth. He didn’t kid himself about what it meant, carrying it. He did not collect poisons as trophies. He collected tools.

  The day stretched into dull work: scraping hides, trading a bundle of sinew for a handful of arrowheads from the fletchers’ boy, carrying a spear haft across the yard while the armorer shouted after him not to scuff the new finish. The wind picked up grit. It hissed through the yard, and by afternoon, a grey film lined the inside of his mouth. By evening, when the sun sat swollen and red against the horizon, Dargan stood on the training ground’s sand and began his drills.

  He moved in measured patterns: circles cut in the grit by his boots, a stride forward, two to the side, guard up, pivot, a short set of jabs with the padded glove against the post wrapped in old hide, then a step back to reset his breathing. The sand gave under his weight and forced his ankles to work. Sweat found the cuts and stung. The training ground gathered watchers as it always did—workers with nothing better to look at than movement and the promise of someone falling. Low talk folded around him until a ragged cheer cut it and Khorvak arrived.

  The champion wore a sleeveless jerkin that showed arms lined with old scars and fresh pride. He carried a pair of pit blades with their hooked backs turned outward, walking as if he were stepping onto a platform, not into a crowd. He had a way of filling space with ease. People leaned toward him without meaning to. Dargan kept his focus on the post, but he felt Khorvak’s shadow and then heard his laugh.

  “Dargan,” Khorvak said, easy and loud enough to claim everyone’s attention. “You move like a man pulling thread through a torn shirt. Does the armorer send you here to darn the sand?”

  “No,” Dargan said, and jabbed the post again, driving the glove into the hide with a solid smack. “I send myself.”

  “That’s brave talk from a man who fits grips for other men’s hands.” Khorvak walked a half circle until he stood between Dargan and the post. The crowd tightened. “When will you take on a grip meant for killing, not polishing?”

  “When the need is real,” Dargan said, because he could not pretend he had never killed before and because he was not going to list kills for a man who thought enumeration was the same as proof. He lowered his gloves. “Your boasting will not make the goats fatter.”

  A murmur rolled outward. Khorvak smiled, and it had only a little humor in it. “You always sour a good hour. It’s a wonder your brother hasn’t put you out with the refuse for fear you’ll curdle the barrels.”

  Dargan felt the heat climb his neck. He set the glove on the rail, smoothed the strap flat as if deciding whether it needed oil. “Leave my family in your beard, Khorvak. They aren’t on your tongue to play with.”

  “Are they not?” Khorvak stepped closer, shoulders loose, eyes bright with the love of a clang. “Everything is for play until it breaks. You should know that. You break small things—little bones, little hearts. Is that why you prefer poisons? They do the work so clean it doesn’t look like work.”

  The word slid through the crowd and held. Poison. It had no rule closely tied to it in Blackhorn. It lived in the margins—used in hunts, on darts for vermin, in traps for slash-backs and the lizards that harried goats. Not prohibited. Not celebrated. Dargan met Khorvak’s gaze. “A tool is a tool. Some are loud and some are quiet.”

  “A champion doesn’t sneak,” Khorvak said. “He stands where men can see him carry the weight.”

  “A champion who only takes on burdens harms the clan,” Dargan said, the sentence cold, clean, and ready. “You love to be heavy. All of us have to carry you, then. That is the math I hate.”

  Khorvak blinked, cocked his head as if he’d been slapped by an unexpected hand. The smile flattened. “Say it again.”

  “I won’t spend two sentences on one truth,” Dargan said. He stepped to the side to retrieve his glove, turned, and Khorvak shoved him with one open hand. Not hard. Not enough to knock him down. Just enough to mark him.

  Dargan stood very straight. There was a choice in front of him, and he felt its edges like a cool blade against his sternum. He did not like Khorvak. He did not like the crowd. He did not like performances. But men like Khorvak made use of silence as if it belonged to them. Dargan walked forward and punched Khorvak in the face.

  He did not angle for the cheek to leave dignity intact. He hit square on the mouth, the padded glove thudding against teeth and lip. Khorvak’s head rocked back. Blood came, bright and immediate. The crowd gasped, then roared, the sound rising like the wind through the rock cuts. Khorvak laughed with the blood on his teeth, eyes alight. “Good,” he said softly so only Dargan could hear as he spat pink into the sand. “Now it’s simple. Trial.”

  “Trial,” Dargan said, and with the word felt something settle in him he had been walking around for months. He knows what you are, he told himself without heat. He knows, and he wants you to make it easy for him.

  By morning, the council ring stood full, the inner circle marked with a narrow trench of ash and three low stone markers that had seen years of weather and more arguments than could count. Elder Sarn presided, standing under the carved jawbone of some long-dead beast strung between two uprights. He was a heavy-shouldered man in a plain cloak, hair pulled back so tightly it smoothed his brow. He held the settlement’s law in his posture more than in his hands.

  “Speak your terms,” he said, voice gravelly, to Khorvak first because Khorvak had demanded the trial.

  Khorvak lifted his chin. There was no more smile. “Open combat. Fight to the death. Observed.” He looked at Dargan with a flatness he usually reserved for meat.

  “And you, Dargan?” Sarn asked without favor.

  “Agree,” Dargan said. He kept his voice steady. He felt Ruk somewhere behind his right shoulder in the outer ring; he did not turn to look. “Each to use only what he carries. No weapons handed in during bout. No interruptions once begun.”

  “Agreed,” Khorvak said at once, impatience crackling around him like static.

  The elders murmured among themselves. Sarn let the noise die on its own. “This is no champion’s selection,” he said, making it plain. “This is a grievance settled. The clan will witness. The clan will accept the outcome. The clan will not carve exceptions for sore throats and later complaints.”

  “Fine,” Khorvak said.

  “Fine,” Dargan said.

  They had until the sun crossed the second marker’s shadow lengthwise. Dargan used the hour to work alone in the shadow of the armory wall the way he always did when he needed his hands to be smarter than his mouth. He drew out the clay vial. The poison inside looked like nothing a person would fear—thin and clear, with a sheen if one angled it just so in the light. He unscrewed the cap on his glove’s wrist guard and pulled the inner lining partly free. With the bone spatula, he painted the faintest smear along the inside seam where the glove met the guard, where an aggressive grip would find the edge. He rubbed a shimmer across the outer knuckle ridge; enough to carry, not enough to show. Then he resealed the glove and flexed his hand until the leather softened over the joints. He put the wrist guard on and tightened the strap. He did not touch his eyes or mouth until he burned the scrap of linen he had used in the ash pit and scrubbed his hands with grit and rough water until his skin felt raw and clean.

  There was a weight in the glove that had nothing to do with leather and everything to do with what he had decided. He set it down long enough to breathe, slow and counting, then slid it back on, pressed the wrist guard into place, and walked to the ring.

  The sand had been raked flat. The crowd found their places, voices rising and then falling to the low hum that always came before an impact. Ruk found his way to the edge and stood with his arms folded tight, eyes on Dargan’s feet rather than his face. Dargan rolled his shoulders and kept his mind narrow: distance, timing, fall lines. He had sparred with Khorvak before, in quiet corners, because some lessons are learned when no one claps. He knew the man’s rhythm. He knew he had no business standing toe-to-toe with him.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Sarn raised one hand. “Begin.”

  Khorvak came in fast with a feint to the left and then a right hook that turned at the last moment into a driving grip where he tried to get hold of Dargan’s forearm and yank him into the close, ugly space where Khorvak thrived. Dargan slipped the initial strike, felt the brush of fingers over his wrist guard, and pivoted to let Khorvak’s weight pass. Sand scuffed. The crowd hissed as if released. Dargan threw a jab toward Khorvak’s shoulder, not to hurt but to mark range and reset the tempo.

  Khorvak adjusted, stepped in again. This time he brought a knee up with a practiced catch of Dargan’s thigh. Pain shot hot and immediate along Dargan’s trapped leg. He skidded, regained his footing, and was late to bring his left guard up. Khorvak’s fist caught him square on the cheekbone. The world narrowed and flashed; heat bloomed in his eye socket. Dargan swallowed the noise that wanted to come up from his throat and drove an elbow toward Khorvak’s ribs. The hit landed, but Khorvak only grunted and smiled again that hard not-smile.

  “Distance won’t save you,” Khorvak said, catching Dargan’s right wrist with his left hand, thumb digging under the edge of the guard. The pressure bit. “I like you here.”

  Dargan twisted. The glove’s knuckle ridge scraped Khorvak’s palm as he pulled, a shallow graze along the skin that left no mark in the moment. Khorvak’s grip only tightened. He yanked, step-beat, brought his other hand up in a straight, brutal line. The punch crashed into Dargan’s jaw. Stars burst behind his eyes. He went to one knee, spat blood, and sucked in a breath that tasted like old pennies and dust.

  He rolled left, avoiding the stomp that would have broken his neck if Khorvak had been a fraction tighter with his timing. He came up and saw Khorvak already on him, steady and sure as tide. Dargan ducked another blow and countered with a quick two-knuckle flick to the cartilage under Khorvak’s ear. It stung the champion and turned his head, but not enough to change the balance. Dargan’s ribs lit as Khorvak’s knee drove in. Something gave with a muted crack that Dargan felt more than heard. He saw Ruk’s jaw tighten at the ring edge. He kept his face blank because he could not afford to show the cost.

  Khorvak reached for him again, fingers closing around his forearm exactly where the wrist guard met glove. Dargan felt nails scrape leather and then his own skin through the gap. He let the pull come, pivoted with it to avoid being wrapped, and drove a short right into Khorvak’s biceps to deaden it. He did not look at the glove. He knew exactly what it carried.

  Khorvak handled the motion like it was a rope he had been thrown. He reeled Dargan in and landed another body shot that drove the air out of him. Dargan folded, fell, and sand went into his mouth. He turned his head and spit it out, rolled to keep Khorvak’s heel from his sternum, and grabbed a handful of grit in his left hand on instinct, not to throw, just to feel something hold.

  Then something wavered in Khorvak’s eyes. It was subtle at first, so slight Dargan thought it might be his own concussed hope trying to invent a change. Khorvak blinked. He reset his feet. He pulled in a breath through his nose like a man trying to taste the air and found the flavor different. He took a step and the next landed half a line off.

  The crowd felt it before they understood. The hum tightened with uncertainty. Dargan made himself small and watchful. Khorvak’s lip twitched. A bead of sweat that had been meandering down his temple wavered as the muscles under the skin misfired, then ran a jagged path.

  “What did you—” Khorvak began, but he didn’t finish. He swallowed hard, jaw working like he had bit into something that wouldn’t soften. He reached for Dargan and missed by a hand’s width when his arm stuttered between intention and movement. He stumbled. Not a theatrical stagger—no man of his pride would make a show of it. A small hitch, then another. His thigh clenched and then failed. He set his heel and his ankle rolled.

  Dargan stood. He did not rush him. He watched.

  Khorvak sucked air through his teeth. His pupils had an odd glassiness. The hand he had used to grip Dargan’s wrist opened and closed twice as if testing a hinge. He took two uneven steps, then dropped to one knee. The drop was clean; he landed like a man accustomed to kneeling between exchanges. He tried to rise and his body failed him with a jerking shudder that drove his other knee into the sand. He made a small sound, not of pain, but of confusion. He held his chest as if to argue with it.

  The poison did its work along the edges of the nerve pathways, like frost working into fields at night—not dramatic, implacable. The scorpion venom traveled through the scrape at his palm and the soft skin at the base of his fingers where a shallow cut—the glove’s knuckle ridge—had kissed him. It climbed with the blood and argued with signals. Dargan had used enough to tip him, not enough to turn him blue and frothing. Even so, Khorvak’s breath shortened, his heart stumbling beneath his breastbone in a rhythm that presented no pattern a fighter could use. He tried to push up again. His arms said yes; his chest said no. He fell sideways.

  Dargan stood over him. They were close enough that Dargan could see the tiny white scar in Khorvak’s left eyebrow where a spear shaft had once split the skin, close enough to see the flecks of sand stuck to the blood at his mouth. Khorvak’s eyes found him. There was no plea there. Only an offended bewilderment. “You—” he started again, but the words came out thin and wrenched. Then his gaze slid. He tried to pull it back and couldn’t. His head rolled to the side. His body kicked once and then stilled.

  Silence struck the ring like a thrown stone striking a bell. No one moved for a handful of breaths. Then Sarn stepped forward, his boots scoring the sand, and crouched beside Khorvak. He pressed two fingers to the man’s neck, then moved his hand to the chest under the ribs. He waited longer than he needed to for appearance’s sake. He stood, face unreadable.

  “The champion is dead,” he said.

  The ring gave back a low noise, a thousand small breaths emptied at once. Two pit attendants came with a hide to cover Khorvak, then reconsidered and waited for Sarn’s nod. Sarn gave it and they draped the body. Dargan stood and did not raise his arms. He kept his hands at his sides. His jaw throbbed. He could feel the swelling starting around his eye, hot as if a coal had been pressed there. His rib answered with its own bright language every time he inhaled.

  Ruk’s voice came almost at his ear, though Dargan had not seen him approach. “You’re on your feet.”

  “For now,” Dargan said without turning.

  “You used what you had,” Ruk said, lower. “You warned him yesterday.”

  “I told the truth,” Dargan said, because in the middle of everything else, that mattered to him. He looked at Sarn, who was conferring with the other elders. The judge’s face had moved from neutral to carved. The longer he stood, the more corners cut into him. When he turned back to Dargan, his eyes held the thundercloud weight he brought when the settlement slid toward something he hated.

  “Come forward,” Sarn said. He didn’t have to raise his voice. The crowd fell into a brittle quiet. Dargan stepped to the line of ash and stopped.

  “The terms were set,” Sarn said. “Open combat, observed, to the death. The fight was witnessed. Each man used only what he carried. There were no outside hands.” He looked at the body under the hide. He looked at Dargan. “The clan will accept the dead.”

  A murmur rose, a small relief in the sound for some, a grief for others. Dargan held his breath and waited for the other half of the sentence.

  “The clan will not accept the manner of the victory from the one who claims it,” Sarn said. He lifted a palm to still the immediate growl from the edges. “There is no line in our law that forbids poison in a grievance duel. There is also no line that requires us to call the victor fit for the tasks reserved for our strongest. Even a grievance duel must instruct. It must make plain that we value the strength we say we do. You have used a tool that hides its work. It is not a forbidden tool, but it is not one that belongs in a contest intended to show the clan what form to follow.”

  Dargan’s mouth felt dry as ash. He chose his words the way he chose his steps on crumbly stone. “You said yourself it was a grievance settled, not a champion’s selection.”

  Sarn’s eyes didn’t soften. He had seen too many young men try to find angles. “And yet a champion is dead. When champions die, we decide what that shows others. If we praise your outcome, then we tell boys to come to the ring greased with venom and the old to whisper tricks to the young instead of teaching them to harden their hands. We make slyness a lesson when what we need are plain lessons everyone can use.”

  “Slyness did the job,” Dargan said. He knew how it sounded, but he had decided when he smeared the glove what arguments he would own. “If Khorvak lived, the clan would spend meat on him this winter and have to listen to him boast while others mended their bones in silence. He would continue to mock those who do work that saves us more trouble than his shows. He would pull eyes from things that matter. I cut off that cost.”

  “You cut away the way we teach,” Sarn said. “That has a cost I cannot accept. I am judge not because I love clean language, but because I know what it does when men begin to think we will bend rules for what seems efficient.”

  “The rules did not bend,” Dargan began, and Sarn’s hand came up, not cutting him off like a child, but holding the space in one palm.

  “No law forbids what you did,” Sarn said. “No law demands we celebrate you for it. We accept the dead man. We reject the victor. Dargan of the armory, son of no house that holds weight here, you are sentenced to exile on Copperbell Isle. One year and a winter, under work crew and watch. You will leave with the next cutter. The council pronounces this not because we hate you, but because we will not let your way be seen as a path boys can copy when they hunger for praise.”

  It was very quiet. Dargan found Ruk’s shape at the edge and held onto it with his eyes. Ruk didn’t move. His face didn’t break. But Dargan knew the man well enough to read the frown hidden in his stillness. “So be it,” Dargan said. He kept his voice even. He kept his shoulders square. He did not plead. He had spent his bargaining power already, and he refused to pretend he had coins left to jingle.

  There were no cheers. The attendants lifted Khorvak on the hide and bore him away, arms straining under his weight, pride gone because dead flesh was only mass. Sarn turned and left the ring. The crowd split, letting the judge pass through them like a blade.

  Guards came, two men Dargan knew passingly. They did not bind his hands. There was no point. He would not run. He returned to the armory and took only what he was allowed: a short knife with a bone handle, a coil of fishing line, a rolled blanket, a spare shirt, the wrist guard he had worn. The glove with the poison polish he burned in the ash pit until the leather curled and licked at itself and went to grey. He kept the knife and the thought, both sharp.

  They set out at dawn the next day, Dargan between the two guards with Ruk walking a little behind and to the side, as if he were only a hunter heading west because the wind said that was the way to go. The Ashmaw Barrens opened under a low sky. The road to Stormtooth was not a road so much as a habit marked by old cart ruts and cairns built of whatever stone men had found to stack. The dust tasted of iron. Wind carved the outcrops into shapes that had names only because someone had wanted to keep children from wandering. Dargan named them again in his head as they went to keep his mind from dwelling on the ring: Old Tooth, Goat’s Knee, the Twin Sisters. He had no room for regret. There was only the work of making the next hour not kill him.

  They passed a traveling tinker with a handcart squealing under a lopsided wheel. The man’s beard had been plaited through with copper wires, his cheeks chafed raw by the same wind that roughed everyone. He eyed the guards, eyed Dargan, and kept his head down. Later, a pair of women moved along the opposite rim, their goats picking at knee-high brush that grew as if it were hiding from something. One of the guards grunted to them, and they nodded back, their eyes sliding to Dargan and away, as if looking too long at exile might make it stick.

  Near noon, they took a short rest by a boulder that had split cleanly down the center, like a loaf torn by a hungry hand. Dargan sat with his back against the rock and pulled air through a rib that protested at any expansion. He cut a strip from his spare shirt and wrapped his torso with the slow care of someone who has done this before and knows that if he binds too tightly, he will not be able to sleep later. The older of the guards watched and finally said, “He hit you hard.”

  “He liked to teach with his hands,” Dargan said. “I’m a poor student.”

  The guard snorted. “You’re a better one than most. I’ve seen the big man put fellows into the dirt so fast their heads didn’t have time to argue with it.”

  “I’m still arguing with quite a few things,” Dargan said. He kept his voice easy. No point in hardening it. “What’s work like on Copperbell these days?”

  “Stone and salt,” the guard said. “The south quarry has a new seam that’s brittle. It breaks where you don’t tell it to. The watch is not cruel if you’re not stupid. Don’t be stupid.” He looked out at the west where the Barrens sloped toward a line that might be sea haze or just the sky changing its mind. “You’ll get through.”

  Ruk didn’t speak until they were moving again. He matched Dargan’s stride and kept his eyes on the ground. His voice was low. “Train when they let you. The island will turn every small improvement into something you can feel. That’s its only gift.”

  “I was going to ask you for something poetic to wrap my thoughts,” Dargan said, letting humor bleed into it because it kept them both from breaking. “You failed me.”

  “Good,” Ruk said, and Dargan could hear the smile even if he didn’t see it. “I am not a poet. I am a hunter who does not know how to say goodbye without making it sound like I’m not sure of my own feet. Keep your feet. That’s all.”

  “I will,” Dargan said. He believed it.

  They reached Stormtooth by late afternoon, the port crouched at the coast where dark rock shelves plunged under the waves and then rose again in jagged seams that cut the sea into uneven squares. The harbor smelled of tar, fish guts, and old kelp. A line of cutters bobbed at their moorings, the masts creaking.

  The guards walked Dargan down the dock. He scanned the faces without moving his head much. Stormtooth drew all kinds: traders bringing salt and taking hides, fishermen with their broken knuckles and stubborn sunburns, a handful of young men staring at the cutters the way boys stared at knives. They reached the end of the dock where a squat cutter bobbed, its hull patched with tar-soaked cloth in places that showed both care and a lack of options. A mate with a scar that pulled his lip, smiling too much, waved them aboard.

  “That him?” the mate asked, as if Dargan were an order of rope.

  “That’s him,” the older guard said. He shifted his feet, looked at Dargan, then away. “You’ll get a bunk near the bow. Don’t lean over the rail unless you breathe like a fish. The swells like to take what the land loses.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Dargan said. He looked past the mate. The west lay open. The first band of fog had started to draw its hem along the horizon like a curtain he would not be allowed to hold back.

  Ruk came to the edge of the dock and stood with his hands on the railing, the knuckles first white with the force he used to keep them still, then pale with the acceptance that settled in when force accomplished nothing. “I would say I’ll come see you,” he said. “But that would be a lie. They won’t let me.”

  “Don’t waste breath on what we can’t do,” Dargan said. He touched his chest and then touched the rail. It was the closest they had come to any gesture larger than a nod in years. “Train your eye. Watch the north. The tracks there will turn from chance to pattern. You’ll need to see it first.”

  “I will,” Ruk said. He swallowed. “Train your hands. Not your tricks. Your hands. The island will not change its mind for you.”

  “I never wanted it to,” Dargan said. He meant it. He had chosen to cut cleanly, and the cut had bled people who loved neat lines. There was no point in wishing it had been done with different tools. “Tell my brother I kept my promise. I did what I had to do to stay alive.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Ruk said. “He’ll say he expected nothing less. He’ll say he hates that the cost is yours alone.”

  “Costs are never alone,” Dargan said, and the mate gestured that it was time. The guards stepped back. One of them reached out without thinking, as if to clap Dargan on the shoulder, and then let his hand fall.

  Dargan stepped onto the cutter’s plank and then onto the deck. The wood gave a little, alive under his feet. He found the place the mate had indicated, a coil of rope he could sit on without getting in anyone’s way. The harbor moved around the cutter. Casks rolled, a woman shouted about the price of a bolt of woven salt cloth, a child laughed and then cried at the same shock of a gull trying to take a scrap from his hand.

  Lines were cast. The cutter eased away from the dock. Dargan kept his eyes on Ruk until the crowd swallowed him and only his braid’s leather glinted, and then even that went under. The harbor slipped past, the black shelves of the coastline stepping down into waves. The Ashmaw Barrens stretched east, grey and stubborn under a sky that had decided not to show him the sun’s face.

  The mate came by, tossed him a waterskin, and pointed to his wrapped ribs. “You’ll want to sleep on your good side,” he said. “Storm comes hard from the south at this hour. The boat will heave. Best to keep from rolling onto a hurt.”

  “How long?” Dargan asked, not to measure time but to feel the shape of what hours he had.

  “One day... if we don't sink,” said the mate. He grinned as if he said that every day. Then he walked on and yelled at a boy to watch the rope.

  Dargan took a drink, the water tasting of tar and iron and something like old wood. He leaned back against the rail and let the sea’s blunt hand thump the hull. He imagined Copperbell as a shape rather than a place—stone lifted out of the water with work scarred into it, men moving along the edges like ants along a cut. He imagined where he would stand there to see everything without being seen, where he would sleep, who would try to break him first because breaking things was some men’s only proof they had hands. He ran the ledger in his head: what he had, what he could make, what he could learn before anyone decided to file off his edges.

  He did not regret Khorvak’s death. He grimly acknowledged what it bought him: space bought with the clan’s disapproval and his own knowledge that some men could only die surprised. If he had gone into that ring with nothing but rope and pride, he would have left on a hide. He had left on his feet. He would do it again.

  The cutter pitched. The sky darkened along a line that wasn’t evening yet. Wind sheeted a chill across his bruised face and he let it numb him. On the horizon, where fog lifted like breath, a darker tip broke through—stone against grey, a wedge that would become an island as they drew close.

  Dargan set his jaw and watched the line of land solidify, the deck shuddering beneath him as the swell sharpened. Somewhere in the belly of the boat, a spar groaned. He slid his hand along the rail, found a knot to hold, and breathed out slow so his ribs learned the rhythm the sea wanted from him. Behind him, someone’s footsteps approached, hesitant, then certain, and a shadow fell across his hands as the first spray from the south slapped against the bows and blew back in a stinging veil. He did not turn. He kept his eyes on the place where the fog parted and wondered what the island would ask of him once he set foot on it.

  Episode 6 continues in Episode 15.

  Episode 6 continues in Episode 15.