Planning - Evening

Victor - POV

The cottage sounded wrong without Mama.

No humming from the stove.
No soft voice drifting in from the garden.
No Naelira breathing in her cradle.

Just Papa and me at the table, maps spread between us, supper untouched long enough to go cold.

My ribs still hurt from the fight in the square. Every breath reminded me I had earned the pain. That part, at least, I did not mind.

Papa traced a route along the map with one blunt finger. “Blackhaven sits on the Shadowmere coast. Cliffs on three sides. Harbor on the fourth. Easy to defend. Hard to approach cleanly.”

I stared at the inked coastline. “How long?”

“Too long on foot.” He tapped a crossroads town. “Millhaven first. Horses. Supplies. People I know.”

“What kind of people?”

“The kind who know how to kill men like the ones who came here.”

That answer settled in my stomach like a stone.

Outside, somewhere in the dark, people were still working. Repairing. Digging. Rebuilding walls that had not been there before because no one had thought they would ever need them.

“They’ll sell them,” I said quietly.

Papa did not pretend not to understand who I meant.

His mouth flattened. “Not if we get there first.”

The words sat between us.

Not hope.
Not comfort.

A plan.

I looked down at the map again. “How many people live there?”

“In Blackhaven? A few thousand, depending on the season. Smugglers. Pirates. Slavers. Men who move goods other towns would hang them for touching.”

“Mama and Naelira aren’t goods.”

“No.” His voice dropped lower. Harder. “They are not.”

I pressed my hands flat on the table to stop them from curling. “When we get there, we take everyone, right? Not just ours.”

Papa looked up at that.

For a moment I thought he might tell me not to think beyond family. Not to widen the mission before we had even started.

Instead he nodded once.

“If we can break the place open, we bring out everyone we can.”

That mattered.

Because I could not stop thinking of the women and children they had taken from our village, and if they had taken ours, then they had taken others too.

Papa folded one side of the map in with careful precision. “Listen to me, Victor. This is not a ride to the next town. We are not going to scare a few men and come home before supper. If we go to Blackhaven, we are stepping into a place built by people who profit from pain.”

“I know.”

“You know some of it.”

That was fair.

I held his gaze anyway. “I still want to go.”

He leaned back in the chair and studied me in the low light. The cut at his jaw had stiffened dark with dried blood. His left sleeve hung empty and pinned, and every time I looked at it my throat closed a little.

At last he said, “Then we do it right.”

Something in me eased.

Not because the fear was gone.
Because shape had been given to it.

Morning in the Square

Victor - POV

By dawn the village already knew.

Not the details.
Details travel slower than emotion.

But everybody knew Gregor Ironforge was leaving, and everybody knew why.

People gathered in the square among broken stone, smoke, and stacked salvage. Some came with packs already on their backs. Others came to watch. A few came because they had nowhere else to stand now that half their houses were gone.

I heard the whispers.

Not all of them quiet enough.

“Boy brought them here.”
“They were asking for him.”
“Would’ve happened to any village eventually.”
“No, not like this.”
“He’s only a child.”
“He’s not only a child.”

I kept walking.

Papa stood near the well speaking with Henrik. The village captain looked like he had not slept and did not plan to start now.

Henrik raised his voice before the whispering could grow teeth.

“If anyone wants to blame a seven-year-old for what armed slavers chose to do, say it louder and say it to me.”

That shut the square up.

Good.

Sarah stepped forward next, face thin with grief and fury both. “They took my father,” she said. “And Widow Cora’s daughter. And Elena. If Gregor is going after them, he won’t go alone.”

One by one, men began stepping out of the crowd.

Not a flood.
A line.

Master Willem, one arm in a sling but a hammer hanging from the good side.
Thomas from the mill, pale and young and trying not to look frightened.
Two farmers who had lost wives.
A carpenter whose sister had been taken.
Henrik himself, of course.

Each step changed the shape of the square.

Not survivors watching.
A war party forming.

Papa counted with his eyes. “How many can still ride or march?”

“Eight who can fight,” Henrik said. “Not well-rested. Not whole. But able.”

“Eight plus us,” Papa said.

Thomas swallowed. “Ten against Blackhaven.”

Papa looked at him. “Not ten against all of Blackhaven. Ten to get to Millhaven and find the people who make the odds less stupid.”

That helped a little.

Not much.

Henrik’s gaze came to me then, not unkind. Measuring. “And the boy?”

“I’m coming,” I said.

A few heads turned again.

This time the whispers were different.

Not blame.
Calculation.

Papa let them have a second of silence before he spoke. “He’s coming.”

Henrik frowned. “Gregor.”

“He proved what he is.”

“He’s still seven.”

Papa’s face changed at that, something iron settling over the grief. “He’s old enough for men to chain him and drag him to market. That means the world has already made its decision about whether he counts.”

No one answered that.

Because there was no answer.

Henrik looked at me a long time, then said quietly, “Then if he rides with us, he rides under my watch too.”

Papa nodded once.

That was acceptance.

Not comfort.
Not certainty.

Enough.

Leaving Hearthvale

Victor - POV

We left after the sun cleared the eastern hill.

Ten of us on the road, carrying packs, weapons, and the kind of silence that comes when people are trying not to look back too often.

I looked back anyway.

Hearthvale already looked smaller from the road. Smaller and stranger. Half-repaired walls. Fresh trenches. Smoke rising from too many places at once. People moving where they should have still been sleeping.

A wounded village trying to harden before night came again.

For the first stretch no one said much.

Boots on dirt.
Leather creaking.
Birds disturbed from brush ahead of us.

Then Thomas dropped back into step beside me.

“That thing in the square,” he said. “With the water. And the fire.”

I knew what he meant.

“You moved like you knew what you were doing.”

“I didn’t.”

He looked at me sideways. “That’s worse.”

A few of the others heard that and turned an ear without pretending not to.

Willem, farther ahead, said, “How old were you when it started?”

I could have lied.

There did not seem much point now.

“I don’t remember not doing little things,” I said. “Water first, I think.”

Thomas gave a low whistle. “You mean before five?”

I nodded.

That changed the air around me.

Not fear exactly. Not yet.

The kind of attention people give a loaded weapon when they have just been told it can go off on its own.

Henrik eased back into the conversation from farther ahead. "I've worked air and earth for over a century," he said. "Started in earnest at fifteen. Still learning. I'm a hundred and twelve years old, and we can live past five hundred if we're careful. Most folk don't get consistency before ten if they're lucky. Later if they're not."

Willem grunted agreement. “My nephew’s fifteen. Still throws dirt farther than he shapes it.”

Thomas said nothing for a moment. Then, too honest to stop himself, “Must be nice.”

Papa answered before I could.

“No,” he said.

Thomas flushed red at once. “I didn’t mean.”

“I know what you meant.” Papa did not slow. “And no. Power that draws slavers to your door is not nice. Power that makes a child a target is not nice. Power that takes away his chance to be ordinary before he’s even old enough to miss it is not nice.”

The road went quiet again.

That was better.

Because the truth sat cleanly between us now.

Not envy.
Not awe.

Cost.

After a while, Henrik said, almost to himself, “Once in a generation, maybe.”

Papa shot him a look sharp enough to cut rope.

Henrik lifted a hand. “Not praise. Observation.”

I walked with my eyes on the road after that.

The stone Elira had given me was in my pocket. I kept touching it through the cloth as if I might wear it smooth by worry.

After another mile, Papa slowed just enough for me to draw level with him.

“Nervous?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

I glanced up. He wasn’t smiling.

“Only fools walk into war feeling nothing,” he said.

That made sense.

I thought about Mama. Naelira. The women and children from the wagons. Blackhaven sitting somewhere ahead in the world like a wound waiting to be opened.

“What if I’m not enough?”

Papa stopped walking.

The others kept going a few paces before Henrik looked back and motioned them on.

Papa crouched until we were eye to eye. Morning light caught the tiredness in him, the blood he had not managed to wash entirely from one ear, the hollow where sleep should have been.

“Your magic is not the reason I’m bringing you,” he said.

I stared at him.

“It’s part of the reason,” he corrected. “But not the reason.”

“Then what is?”

He put one hand on my shoulder, solid and warm and scarred. “Because you would come anyway. Because I’d rather have you beside me where I can see you than behind me where I can only imagine the ways this world might try to reach for you next. Because those people took your family and you still chose to walk toward them instead of away.”

His hand tightened once.

“That matters more than power.”

The fear in my chest loosened. Not gone. Never that easy.

Just given a place to stand.

We rose and kept walking.

Behind us, Hearthvale was already disappearing into distance and heat-haze.

Ahead was Millhaven.

And beyond that, Blackhaven.

No one said it aloud, but all of us were thinking the same thing:

The road had already changed us.
We just had not yet reached the place where it would show.