📜 NEW CHAPTER 10 — THE WAR COUNCIL
By dawn, the salt yard was quiet.
The blood was gone — brine and sand buried it before sunrise. The villagers moved like ghosts through the courtyard, fetching water, feeding the tired oxen, mending torn cloaks. They spoke in hushed voices, as if the yard itself might still hear the screams from the night before.
Soha stood by the brine trench, spear grounded in the mud. She watched as three bodies — their own dead, not Baek’s — lay on rough planks, shrouded in coarse linen.
Jin stepped up beside her, arm stiff in its bandage. He didn’t look at the bodies yet. He looked at the faces behind them — the families, the salt men and their sons, the widows clutching children to their skirts.
One old man shuffled forward, hunched under a threadbare cloak.
“My boy died for your salt,” the old man rasped.
Jin met his eyes. No flinching.
“My salt,” Jin said. “Your blood. Baek’s knives.”
He bent down, pressed a coin into the old man’s palm. The silver was cold as brine.
“No one here buries their dead with empty pockets again.”
They buried them at the yard’s edge — where salt met scrub grass.
No priests came. No chants. Just Soha, blade resting across her knees, and Tae standing guard with eyes hard and tired.
When the last grave was filled, Jin knelt alone at the fresh mounds.
He scraped a handful of salt into each grave’s dirt — a promise the land would remember the blood spilled.
Salt remembers, he thought. And so will I.
That night, the ruined hall filled for the first council in a generation.
Tae posted men at the broken doors, torches burning in iron brackets nailed to cracked pillars.
Inside, Jin sat where his father once had — the high-backed founder’s chair, the dragon crest looming overhead like an iron shadow.
Around him, a ring of old salt men, brine workers, stewards, two battered traders from the low village. Soha stood at his right hand, Tae at his left.
No Baek loyalists. They’d either fled, bled out, or bent the knee.
Gil, eyes red from sleepless nights, spoke first.
“House Baek will come with blades. Not knives in the dark — real blades, hired swords.”
Jin nodded. “Then we match steel with steel.”
A ripple of unease — some scoffed, some looked away.
“Match them?” one old steward croaked. “You’ll empty the coffers buying mercenaries we can’t feed.”
Jin leaned forward. His bandaged arm throbbed as he set his elbow on the dragon crest carved into the chair arm.
“I’m not hiring sellswords,” Jin said. “I’m buying families.”
He held up a slip of parchment — wax-sealed, the red mark of the Iron Hook Clan pressed into it.
Gasps and mutters rippled through the hall.
Soha’s spear butt thudded against the floor. “The Iron Hooks are blood feud with Baek,” she said.
“Were,” Jin corrected. “Now they’re starving on Baek’s tariffs. He cut their copper trade. He bled them dry.”
He tossed the parchment to Gil — who fumbled it, stared at the seal as if it might bite.
“They want salt. We want steel. Simple trade.”
Tae barked a laugh.
“Simple, he says. The Hooks will gut us the second Baek opens his purse wider.”
“Then we bleed them first,” Jin said. His voice cut the muttering like salt in a wound. “We pay them in salt. They guard our brine. They take their cut after Baek chokes on ours.”
He looked around the circle — eyes catching every flicker of doubt, every lip bitten raw.
“You all want House Ryu to stand?” he said. “You want your children to dig salt and not graves? Then we open the old roads. We trade with our enemies’ enemies. We put a knife to Baek’s throat while he’s still licking his own.”
A hush settled over the ruined hall.
Gil cleared his throat. “If this fails—?”
Jin didn’t blink.
“If it fails,” he said, “then Baek buries me with the last grain of salt. But you — all of you — will watch this ruin turn to dust anyway if we do nothing.”
Soha’s voice rang in the beams overhead. “A ghost that does not fight is just dirt and bone.”
Tae slammed his palm on the table. “I’d rather sell my soul to a Hook than dig my own grave.”
A moment of silence — then nods.
One by one, the salt men laid their hands on the table — rough fingers stained white with brine. The battered traders followed. Gil last of all.
Jin rose from the founder’s chair. His shadow swallowed the cracked crest behind him.
“Then we ride tomorrow,” he said.
He raised the iron dragon ring, let the torchlight catch its battered scales.
“Salt and ruin.”
Outside the hall, Soha caught him by the sleeve.
“You trust the Hooks?”
“I trust hunger,” Jin said. “And they’re hungrier than we are.”
Soha’s eyes flickered to the slip of parchment in his hand. “And Baek?”
Jin smiled — teeth sharp in the torchlight.
“Baek will sleep less than I do.”
At dawn, a single slip of paper was pinned to Baek’s outer gate in the city.
A message scrawled in ink the color of dried blood:
Salt remembers.
So does House Ryu.
When Baek’s steward ripped it down, the ink stained his palms red.
Back at the salt yard, the battered banner snapped under the new wind.
Ox carts rattled down the old salt road. The brine pools steamed. Old debts stirred like bones beneath the brine.
And Jin Ryu — exiled blood, ruined heir, ghost in a boy’s skin — stood watch at the broken tower, the founder’s ring cold on his finger.
Salt remembers.
To be continued.
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