THE BORDER WAS unsettled. For three days, riders in Corvarian blacks swarmed like armored devils up and down the banks of the Neine. By night, they rode under the lurid glare of torches, plunging into every wood and hollow they could find. Word spread that they were hunting a wild man, a savage who had robbed the Queen herself. Crofters and honest men leaned on their tools and watched soberly as the soldiers passed, keeping still as the trees.

They were canny enough not to draw attention to themselves. They had wives and daughters to mind, after all.

The River Neine was broad and flat. By late summer it was usually thinned out, but a hard winter and heavy spring had swollen its banks even into fly season, and it was only just beginning to show signs of easing out. Shallow-drafted royal ships plied the river, too, full of eyes eager to win the king’s bounty. For most, it would tally up to a year’s pay.

The bounty, the farmers knew, was not for them. Any man lucky enough to find the savage, whoever he was, would find also a shallow grave. There were too many eyes, too many interested hands, to let a common man walk away with such a sum. So they held back, and griped about the state of things, and sought shade when the sun glared too hot. The excitement was a passing thing, like water in the river, like the riders on the road. Here and gone again, but the crofters would remain, just as they had for generations.

The river was too broad for bridges, though in one spot, two hundred miles from the blue coast, there was one crossing. It was a strange-looking bridge, and not the work of men. Some said it was the work of the Eridesh, who in distant centuries spun stone with magic songs. Others claimed it was the Troichish dwarves, whose own stone lore was much inherited from the vanished Eridesh. The Troichs dwelt in their mountain fortresses another five hundred miles up the river, beyond the veil of the Gray Mountains, and were common enough passing up and down the Neine. In any case, that lonesome bridge was even more heavily guarded by the black-armored Corvairians than usual.

The border was no stranger to raids. Across the Neine lay Nuadon, the southernmost of the Celban realms, and the Nuadi folk were strange and clannish. They answered to no single lord, but had many petty kings who seemed each to rule their own hill, or wood, or sacred spring. The Land of a Hundred Halls it was called, but they were fierce fighters and ready raiders. Fragmented and bitter as they were, they united only when the Corvarian kings turned an eye toward the river. With the help of the other damnable Celban cousins in Arthon and Luathon, the Nuadi had held the Neine for generations.

But with stability came opportunity. The market that flourished at the bridge each autumn became a border outpost, though no one knew when exactly that happened. Nourim, they called it, the Corvarian word for a house of coins. Travelers and traders held up at the bridge needed a place to sleep, and so inns were built. With inns came the trappings of civilization, and within a few years, Nourim was a town in its own right, where gold flowed easily as river water, and anything could be bought under the averted eyes of well-kept Corvairian soldiers.

The bounty had withered much of that eager, shadowy trade. Where before, the guards were affable, especially if well-paid, now they went about like hornets, and Nourim went to ground like a hunted beast. Streets that were only days ago heavy with traffic were silent. The tall wooden houses were shuttered, and men walked with knives or swords fast at hips. It drove the traffic indoors, out of sight, but it also made it more desperate.

“Riders,” said a man who leaned outside Kirtin’s House. The inn was a slouching, squarish thing, with two floors of cramped, sweat-soaked rooms above a smoky common room packed with travelers, traders, and whores. The riders were coming up the south road, still a few hundred lengths off yet. He waited until he could be sure, and then added, “Soldiers.”

The watchman was a guard for the games being played inside: games of chance, with very little left to luck. Easy enough to clean the purse of a traveler or drunken merchant, but it was dangerous to press the game on the soldiers who sometimes came to drink. They were canny to the games, of course, and quick to beat the gamblers running the games if they weren’t cut in. Since rumors of the bounty had spread through Nourim, though, the soldiers had been scarce enough. No one particularly missed them, least of all the dicers and cardmen.

The man to which the watchman spoke, sitting just inside the window, made no sign of having heard the warning. He wore a dull peasant’s tunic that belied his fortune and guile, but he had wolf’s eyes that glimmered with the scent of opportunity. The fool across the table from him scowled at the dice on the table between them.

“Dunno,” the fool muttered. He went by the name Prodis, though like most of the men in Kirtin’s House, that probably wasn’t true. He glanced up, his blue eyes poorly hiding his anger. “Don’t seem fair.”

The other man spread his hands with a friendly shrug. “Prodis, you know the game.”

One of the whores passed by, and Prodis reached out to brush his hand across her backside. She cast him a venomous look, eliciting a hooted of vile laughter. Prodis squeezed his jaw with the exaggerated focus of a drunkard. His face was ruddy, his eyes bloodshot and sunken. There was a gauntness to his frame that spoke of long privation, despite his great appetites. “Maybe we switch dice,” he said. “I have a mind to win tonight, Ludin! Ten days out in the blue yonder, hunting wolves! And I found something else, too,” he said, leaning forward conspiratorially. He glanced around, pursing his lips theatrically. “I’ve got him out back. A wild man. Not like any I’ve ever seen before. I’m going to sell him at the border tomorrow. Do you want to see him, my friend?”

“Perhaps another night,” said Ludin. He gave a broad smile that did not reach his eyes. Deft hands scooped up his dice—and the small pile of coins he’d won—into a leather bag.

The watchman outside spit, signaling that the riders had stopped outside. Ludin could hear them now, of course. They were well-harnessed and sheathed in mail, and noisy as all the hells. The watchman shoved off the window and walked into the night as if he’d just remembered a pressing appointment elsewhere.

“Well, the least you can do is buy me a drink,” said Prodis. “And maybe a woman! That last bit you took from me was supposed to warm my bed tonight!”

Ludin drummed his fingers on the sticky table. The problem with fishing, he thought, is that the fish are slimy and repulsive. Yet he had no choice but to indulge the fish. Prodis was a good hunter, and a man who did not blink at sordid work when the pay was fine, but he stank to high hell. It was particularly bad in the close summer heat, but not bad enough to risk losing his next game.

“The winds are fickle,” he said amiably, “but Kirtin’s wine is always sweet. Let me fill your cup.” Ludin moved over to the bar, sweeping his eye across the common room with the practiced, apparent unfocus of any inebriate. That was the real core of the game: men didn’t play his games because they seemed fair. They played because Ludin seemed like an easy mark, and easy to beat. He was too clumsy to build, too old to fight. He had no luck with women he couldn’t buy. Ludin was just lucky, is all. Like his stitched and stained tunic, that was all part of his play, and he sold it as convincingly as any actor out of Ionossos. For a man like him, the border presented endless opportunities, so long as the Corvairian soldiery didn’t scrutinize too closely, and he cut them in when they came asking.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

And this was not a place for scrutiny. It was like a rock, nearly as old as the town itself. Kirtin’s was seldom overturned. A dozen women made their trade here by the greasy light of cheap candles, working through the strangers and nameless men who waited on the border, or worked the river. They were no beauties to sing songs of, but they were no idlers, either, for Kirtin took no meager cut of their trade.

Empty bellies, the bald man often laughed, kept legs open and wine flowing.

Between the games and the beds, it was a busy place. There were rivermen, Nuadi, and merchants out of Corvairia. Three Troichs sat in the corner, but they were closed off, huddled in some dark discussion. They’d no more part with their coin than spare a word for him, anyway. There were other fish he liked the look of more than the dour, bearded dwarves.

The warriors were another story. Eight of them, he marked, and a ninth outside to guard their horses. He leaned up against the bar where Kirtin was drawing cups for a few cow men whose name Ludin had never learned. The cowmen knew him though. They gave him a sour look.

The whole room clammed up when the soldiers entered. He saw eyes harden, and knuckles go white. These glowering newcomers were certainly a sobering sight. Kirtin drew out another two cups, giving Ludin time to observe. No mere soldiers, no country conscripts. And unless Ludin missed his mark, they were the Black Guard who served the king personally. Who hadn’t heard of them?

Each of them wore a coat of mail that must have cost a fortune, and breast plats over these, upon which were embossed the three roses of the royal family. Cloth-of-gold cloaks shimmered and swirled about their high boots.

Their leader was particularly contemptible. He wasn’t a fish, but a shark and Ludin knew it from first sight. He was a tall, broad man with dark features and a livid scar that ran from his right temple to the corner of his grizzled jaw. Some lucky bastard had taken a chunk out of the man’s nose, but the wolfish gleam in his eye, and the naked certainty of his stride, left no doubt as to the fate of the man who had scarred him.

“I am Epsanius Athos,” declared the leader. “We are searching for a man. An outlander.”

The crowd returned his glare in sullen silence.

Besides the working women, and a few fishermen like himself, the room was full of outlanders, none of whom wanted their business inspected too closely.

“Comply, and the rest of you may go about your business,” said Epsanius Athos. He took a step forward and rested his hand on the pommel of the broadsword at his hip. The scabbard was jeweled. Ludin wondered how much he might fetch for a prize like that.

“Sirs,” said Kirtin, leaning on his bar. “A cup of wine? A woman? The road has surely left you sore.”

The captain ignored the barkeep. He was surveying the crowd. The same way Ludin did before he set to fishing each night. The gaze that was nowhere, and everywhere at once. Picking out details and currents. His men began to filter through the tables. Men glanced furtively up at them, muttering prayers to whoever might listen. The whores frowned as their marks lost interest. How many of these men might be strung up by a tree limb in the morning, were they to be put to Epsanius Athos’ questioning? It was bad for business, is what it was.

But Ludin held his peace. A fisherman is patient. He reads the water without disturbing it. The carapaced soldiers worked along the walls, and Ludin noticed that Epsanius’ eye settled on a big form sitting by the hearth. His mouth drew down in a scowl, and his eyes hardened in the way the sky darkens before thunder.

The man Athos had spied was no fish. The man was impossible to miss: head and shoulders taller than most of the others, and twice as tall as those clammy Troichs. Two nights now he’d sat by the hearth, watching the fire, so quiet and still you might mistake him for a dead man. And though he was dressed as plainly as any traveler, the wore a bearskin cloak and the greatsword propped beside him told another tale. One Ludin had steered well clear of.

Not everyone had been so wise. Indeed, one of the whores, Janni, who sometimes warmed Ludin’s bed, had tried her luck with the giant. By whispered tones in the early hours, she had told Ludin of him: “His eyes are flecked with gold, Ludin.”

“So?” The gambler was busy laying kisses across her freckled shoulder. He wasn’t particularly interested in what she had to say right then.

She shoved him off, forcing Ludin to look her in the eyes. “They shine in the dark, like cat’s eyes!”

“It was the fire,” Ludin laughed.

“No.” He heard the fear in her voice. “And he didn’t smile, Ludin. He was cold as ice. He’s a killer, I tell you.”

“Sounds like he wasn’t interested in what you were selling,” the gambler said, running a hand up into her hair. “But I am. Come here!”

She slapped him then, and Ludin felt a quick surge of anger. He seized her wrists and crushed her to him.

Janni’s resistance didn’t last long. She craned her neck back, letting him bury his nose in the joint of her shoulder. “It’s him. I know it.”

“I don’t care,” Ludin had said, and that was the end of it.

Now, through the oppressive, smoky gloom, Ludin wondered if he might have done something about it sooner. There was no profit to be made as a bystander. Someone else, someone cannier and less distracted, had carried word of the big man’s brooding presence to the Corvairians. He wondered what ransom they’d been paid.

Likely a shallow grave.

Better to have held his peace and enjoyed the night with Janni, in the final measure.

The Corvairian captain turned toward the man at the fireplace. His men shifted, too, but the man by the fire didn’t move.

“Aye, Captain Athos!” Ludin stiffened. Prodis, the bum-luck hunter, was crossing the room on unsteady feet. “You’re looking for that wild-man?”

Athos held up a hand, halting his men. He looked none too pleased at this interruption, but he held his word.

Prodis cut a short bow. “I’m a hunter sir, by trade. I’ve just returned from the Grays a-wolf hunting.”

“Say your piece, man,” the captain said impatiently. Candlelight glimmered on his polished black breastplate and played softly along his golden cloak. Ludin thought he looked like a scorpion, and had to fight the instinct to edge back.

“I caught a man, my lord,” Prodis said. He smiled, and the dirty, careworn skin around his face broke into a web of wrinkles. “Your man! I had it in mind to sell him at the bridge in the morning, but since you’re here…”

“Where is he?” Athos’ gaze slid over Prodis and back towards the figure by the hearth. He hadn’t moved. Might have been asleep, for all the signs of life he showed.

“In a cage, my lord. Out back, in my wagon. His ankle is badly injured, on account of my trap, but the rest of him is intact!”

“Show me,” Espanius Athos said dangerously. “But heed me: do not waste my time. I am here on the king’s business.”

“Aye,” Prodis said, scraping a bow. He winked at Ludin and pressed through the tables toward the door. “You won’t be disappointed, sirs. No, certainly not. He’s wild as they come, and a slippery old wolf!”

Epsanius nodded at the two soldiers whose questioning had brought them closest to the hearth. He outside after Prodis in a wash of shimmering gold, taking the other five men with him. The door clattered shut behind them, but the tension in the room only wound tighter. Ludin could hardly breathe.

And then the big man stood.