Chapter Thirteen

Oberwinter

It would only take another day, thankfully, before arriving at Kreuzhain, and the road had not given me other troubles that would have threatened my travel. By nightfall, the roadsides were filled with more and more fields of wheat and humble stone hovels. In the distance, at one point, I saw a clear path leading up to what I assumed to be a mine.

As Quixada had instructed, it seemed that I had arrived at the small mining town just a half day’s hike before arriving at Kreuzhain. I had arrived at the colliery village of Oberwinter.

The town itself was humble. It had no walls protecting it from the outside, nor paved paths for carriages or caravans to follow. Oberwinter was a small town that couldn’t possibly have had more than a few hundred residents.

That’s the reason why I found myself rather surprised as I saw rows and rows of tents and makeshift shelters surrounding the village’s sturdy stone houses and brick workshops. The people dwelling in them were neither highlander dwarves nor erdvolker men. They looked more slender, more lithe. Based off the stray lines of conversation I could catch, their accents told me that they had come from the east, probably from Fleur d’Lain, or perhaps from the City of Roses.

It was a familiar sight to me. It was a refugee camp, and these Lainians were seeking protection. It was reasonable to assume that Kreuzhain, then, had rejected them from shelter within their own walls and relegated them to seeking shelter in Oberwinter…similar to how Fleur d’Lain had rejected asylum for my own family.

The Oberwinter residents themselves, from within the ring of their warm homes, seemed colder than the chilled evening air. Wrinkles had set into the parts of their faces they used to scowl and frown, and funnily enough, the only smiles I saw were from the tired and unwashed faces from the tents.

I approached one of them for information, a young mother who held a sleeping infant with the help of a soothing shawl tied around her shoulder. She couldn’t have been much more than thirty years of age, and she sang a low song in a language I couldn’t understand to her child.

“Valainn th’leen, oonai sevalai toi harrin,” I greeted her, in the simple Lainian that I had picked up from my short stopover in Fleur d’Lain. She smiled in return, and replied in a long string of flowing, singsong Lainian that I could no longer keep pace with.

“I’m sorry, my Lainian isn’t that good,” I admitted, and she nodded.

“I was just saying, I did not expect any Kreuzhainer to know even any Lainian at all, not even a bit,” she said with a slight accent.

“Kreuzhainer?” I echoed, confused. Oh, she had assumed I was one because of the cloak I wore. “Ah, yes, of course. I had learned some from…a Lainian tutor I had, when I was younger. It’s a beautiful language,” I lied.

She nodded and gave me a polite smile in response.

“I’m not from Oberwinter, however. I’m from the House of Heimat, an engineering clan from the main city. It’s been a while since I’ve been outside the walls. Tell me, how long have you been here?”

Her smile faded. “Two, maybe three months? Too long. We left Roses almost a half year ago now, and still no work. Still no roof over our heads.”

“And what was Roses like before you had left?”

She gave me a stern look now, any goodwill I earned from the Lainian greeting earlier expired. “It was hell. And I do not understand how it is that anyone would think that it will stop at Fleur d’Lain.”

“Is that where the front is, last you heard? At Fleur?”

“Yes, and may the Lady of Light protect its walls.”

When she mentioned the Lady of Light, I had the gut reaction to rebuke her in some way, but instead, I thanked her for the information and headed into what seemed to be the center of Oberwinter. I chose not to ask her for if the village had a tavern or inn deliberately; I did not want to push a discussion on the Kreuzhainers’ sense of hospitality further.

Having been raised in the Isles of Dalintaya and having been penniless from our flight across continental Jatta, I had never actually been inside of a tavern before. I had seen them from their outside across three different cities, and they always seemed to have a few things similar, regardless of the architecture around that city. There was always a simple painted sign on the outside, a corner on its yard for barrels, and an attempt at frosting on their glass windows. Oberwinter, it seemed, was no different.

I entered The Forge’s Hearth, and inside, seventy or so dwarves and erdvolkers seemed were sitting in neat rows of chairs, while a stern middle-aged man with a large belly and greying beard held a conversation with the crowd.

A young woman, standing now from her chair, said, “In a month’s time, winter will be upon us, and their tents won’t hold the heat. They have no hearths to keep them warm.”

“They’ll manage with the blankets and linens we’ve lent them,” the old man said. “Those were gifts that we allowed for them out of the sweat and toil of our own brow. Do they think that we can keep paying, and paying, and paying for their bread? For their shelter?”

“But Roses is occupied by war!” the young woman argued, before being drown out by sentiments of dissent and dissatisfaction by the crowd.

“We’re at war as well!” the man said, and the crowd agreed. “And the Ironlords are doing their part in keeping this war machine soldiering on, and so should we. The bread we’re feeding them could be going to our men in the mines so that they can go on for longer. Coalborn, we all do our part.”

“We all do our part,” the crowd said back to the man, as if they had said it a thousand times before.

“Now, we must decide what it is we do with the Lainian girl,” the man continued. “The one that stole from the backerei. A very grave offence.”

“Send him back to Roses on the next caravan! In shackles!”

Her parents must pay for what she did!”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Does she even have parents?”

The crowd’s voices overlapped and fought amongst themselves to be heard, rattling on and on in an attempt to be heard by the middle aged man leading them. Only few stayed quiet, one among them was the young woman who had already shown her dissent. It seemed she knew when she had no hope in being heard, as if it were a learned behaviour that she had already grown familiar with.

“We already have her in shackles,” the old man said with a hint of pride and a pause, as if he were expecting the crowd to applaud him and make their contentment heard. The man stroked his grey beard, putting on a show that he had put a great deal of thought into his words. “She does not deny that he stole the baked goods. Shee admits her crime, and this, we have in a signed affidavit.”

The crowd murmured amongst themselves now, seemingly pleased in the procedures that had been undertaken.

“One idea I heard from many of you was that we should send her back to Roses on the next caravan,” the old man continued. “But that would mean that we are coming then to the problem that there are no more caravans on the direction to Roses. And it would be very costly for our taxes if we were to charter a caravan to Roses for nobody else but the girl. And this will be a problem that we will be having many times with the new migrants finding their refuge in our town.”

The old man paused to let the thought simmer in, and the crowd stayed silent to do the same.

Then, the old man concluded, “So I’ve sent a letter to our Ironlord in Kreuzhain asking if they would allow us to simply draft our own spearmen and laborers for the war effort. It is a winning solution, yes, we solve the crime and the crowds here in our village, and more get to defend the Free Cities with their hands.”

To my shock, this was met not with discontent, but applause. Around The Forge’s Hearth tavern, tankards of beer were being clinked together, and the old man with the beard may as well have been patting himself on the back for his brilliant solution of solving the refugee problem with wartime policies.

Once the crowd had celebrated together enough and the old man spoke more hateful words about the war, they settled down, and the tavern broke off into groups and into tables, as if they hadn’t just sentenced dozens of people to a violent death that they had been running from. I took this opportunity to the approach the young erdvolker woman who seemed to be perhaps the only resident in this village with a conscience.

“Excuse me, I heard what you said earlier,” I approached her, sitting alone, nursing her own tankard of beer. She looked deep in thought, as if she were contemplating the exchange she had with that old man in front of everyone else. I couldn’t help but feel that she were wondering if there were something she could have done different, something she could have said.

She wore a look of surprise on her face when she realized that I was talking to her. Her eyes flitted down to my cloak. “Oh my, a Heimat Houseman. I apologize that I hadn’t noticed you. Please, let me introduce you to the Burgermeister at once so that he can have you settled in the Gasthaus.”

I gave her a perturbed look before I remembered that I was wearing the cloak that I had stolen. I had totally forgotten about the need to keep up appearances.

“Right, no, yes, of course, I…I’ll be speaking to the Burgermeister about that this evening. But first, I wanted to talk to you about something else. About what you had said earlier, during the discussions.”

The woman blushed with a hue of rosy red on her cheeks. It was difficult to read the expression on her face, but it seemed to be something in between embarrassment and perhaps even fear, as if I would chastise or punish her for what she had said. “It was just a few thoughts I was having,” she said with a rough, stilted accent. “Please, nothing that needs to be shared with the House of Heimat.”

She was definitely wary, then, of the cloak that I had on my back then. Interesting. “What do you know of the House of Heimat? What reputation do we have here in the village of Oberwinter?”

She looked me in the eyes, trying to assess whether or not this was some sort of test her. “Oberwinter owes a great deal to your house. Much of the coal we mine here goes to the forges that your Forgelords control. For that, of course, we’re very grateful.” She chose her words carefully and deliberately.

“You have our thanks as well,” I said, playing along. “I’d like to know more about this Lainian girl you all discussed earlier. The old man, the Burgermeister, he said she was being held in shackles, is that correct? Do you have a dungeon of sorts, a place where you keep criminals?”

Now, she grew more and more suspicious of my intentions, as if she were protective for the girl. “No dungeon. We didn’t have many criminals, at least, before the Lainians had arrived. She’s being kept…she’s being kept in the cellar below here, in the tavern. But please, what are you going to do with her? She only stole some bread and some grain, you know, nothing too heinous.”

“I understand. I just want to make sure she’s being taken care of. Same as you.”

She frowned now, her forehead creasing, not finding my words comforting nor worthy of her trust. “Excuse me, Houseman, but may I ask which district of Kreuzhain you are from? Your complexion is very strange, and not something I’ve seen from the House of Heimat previously…”

“It’s a long story,” I dismissed her. “And unfortunately, I need to go now, to go see your Burgermeister. Have a beautiful evening.” Before she could ask anything further, I inquired with the tavernkeeper about the Lainian girl, and after a small flourish of the crest on my cloak, he led me down to the cellar.

The stairs leading and spiraling downwards into the earth were narrow and cramped even for me, which meant that this must have been extremely difficult for the taller, wider erdvolkers to use. The cellar itself was windowless, filled with cobwebs, and the air was old, stagnant, and chilled, like a seacave beneath the shore.

There were only two lit lamps in the cellar. Both of them were by the corner, where there sat a frail Lainian girl, shackled to a wooden pillar. Her face and hair were both grimy, almost as dirty as the frilly clothes she wore which looked like they, at a time, may have once held a semblance of the color cream or white. On the floor, a few feet away from her, a Lainian lyre was propped up against the wall.

The tavernkeeper made a motion as if he were about to ask me something, but after a moment, thought better of it. Perhaps he was concerned about what a ranking Kreuzhainer Houseman would want to do with a Lainian girl-thief in shackles…but he was not concerned enough, it seemed, as he made his way back upstairs to the tavern, leaving me with her.

“You’ve come all the way here to deliver me to die on the front, then?” the girl asked, mockingly in a singsong Lainian accent. “I didn’t even know the Legion of Free Cities took spearwomen. I heard you from down here, you know, these floorboards aren’t made of stone.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“Oh yes, I’ve heard this one! It wasn’t you, it was your officer, or one of your Ironlords, or some directive from Duar D’aldin. And that’s why you couldn’t take more Lainians into the walls of Kreuzhain, or why you suddenly have the right to decide who can stay with their family and who has to fight for whoever else.” She spat on the floor.

It stung. Her words were all too familiar. Isidora, my parents and I had been rejected from the protection of a city’s walls once as well. During times of struggle, borders could feel more like a siegemarshall’s palisades.

“I’m not a Kreuzhainer. Valainn th’leen, oonai sevalai toi harrin.” I pulled down the hood from my cloak, showing off my dark, Dalintayan hair. “I’m not even from the mainland,” I explained, referring to continental Jatta. “I’m a refugee, same as you. A foreigner, same as you. My name’s…well, you can call me Scipio. Or Scip.”

Her eyes widened, and her lips curled into an amused smile. “And I’m Vaelora. Did you slit a Kreuzhainer’s neck for that cloak, or what?”

“It’s a long story. But no, nothing like that.”

“I don’t know if you understand how the world works around this region of Jatta, but that cloak you have on, with that crest…it’s not a small thing you’ve stolen.”

“I know.”

“And trust me, I’m somewhat of an authority here when it comes to understanding what can and can’t be stolen.”

That one coaxed a laugh out of me, unexpectedly. The girl - Vaelora - obviously had a sharp tongue on her. It couldn’t have possibly helped her in the predicament she found herself in, especially with the famously humourless Kreuzhainers.

“So, Scipio, refugee, foreigner, just like me,” she rhymed in a makeshift melody, “are you going to help me escape a violent death as the Free Cities’ first spearwoman, or did you just come all the way here to Oberwinter to gloat about your new clothes?”

I fished a metal wire from my satchel, similar to the one I had used to break into Kazador’s personal chest. “Lucky for you, I just happen to know a thing or two about locks.”